How to Listen to Music

Here’s a recommendation on how to listen to music. Just before twilight, open all the windows of your room. Put on your favourite music and curl up in a comfortable chair. Slowly, purple rays will float in. The music will seep into your bones along with the darkness. Finally, when the darkness is all there is, savour the silence. When you’re ready, put the lights back on and ease yourself softly back into reality.

That’s how my dad and I listened to music when I was a kid. Out of all my memories of him, this will remain my favourite.

Laugh Like You're Mad

I find that singing along to my favourite music at the top of my voice every morning is a great way to start the day. That it is a good idea to put down a funny book every now and then during its reading and laugh out loud for five minutes. Ditto with a movie. To grin widely while experiencing anything wonderful. Not hold anything back.

In the words of Jewel (one of my favourite musicians), “We’re going to be alright as long as we laugh, laugh like we’re mad, because this crazy mixed up beauty’s all that we have.”

A Passionate Life

Most people (maybe even me) don’t have enough passion—the ability to be so deeply moved by something that it scars your very being. To feel, for that instant, that life is perfect. To be so overwhelmed that you think you’ll burst. To say that I can take anything because I have this.

Passion requires an open mind that will allow new thoughts and experiences without chaining them down by prejudices and beliefs. So I try. I can’t see how much I fail, but I do know how much I succeed. And each time I succeed, the reward is bountiful.

I Envy

People I would love to be and thereby envy:

Musicians—to sing and play an instrument, solo or part of a grand orchestra
Writers—to twist and bend words into shapes and forms to make the breath stop awhile
Astronomers—to gaze at the stars and understand a universe pure and clean
Astronaut—to take a new vantage point and realise how grand the grander scheme is
Dancers—to endow your body with deserving grace
Mountain climbers—to breathe rarefied air and know it doesn’t get any better than this
Painters—to stir the soul with a swirl of colors

Missing the Poetry

Some of my friends are preparing for their M.A. Literature exams and it’s making me nostalgic. I was never a great fan of studying like most kids in school or college aren’t. Education is wasted on the very young. I flitted through my M.A. course with my eyes half-closed. So I’ve got my degree but I didn’t learn much. I wish I had. I’ve figured out learning can provide immense pleasure.

I feel tempted at times to sign up for a course. But my life seems so busy already. I think I’ll at least buy a few books of poetry.

The Perfect Weekend

My idea of a perfect weekend is at a secluded beach not too far away spent in the company of a friend who will not impose conversation on me. We’d stock the car with music, books, and an overnight bag. We’d walk on the sand and play in the water when the air is cool. For the rest, we would lie on hammocks or lounge in wide, comfortable chairs letting the sea breeze play on our faces, while we read book after another. Then we’d drive back home, dusk sweeping its way inside the car to mingle with the music.

Catch Up

Do you ever feel like you’re playing a losing game of catch up with life? I do, all the time. I plan, and order, and rearrange so that I can feel calm and content. But sooner or later, life throws something unexpected at me. Small or big, I must find a way to accommodate the new demands life is constantly making of me.

While I’m doing that, the things I really want to do get pushed aside and I find my dreams slowly slipping away. It’s time again to give life a good shake—to plan, and order, and rearrange.

Why I Write

I don’t get up every morning with the urge to write. I don’t think I’m very good at it. But there’s this nagging voice inside my mind saying I should write that I can’t ignore.

The words don’t come easily though. Nor do the thoughts form with any clarity. Sometimes, it feels like I have something to say but when the time comes to put it all down, the thoughts cringe and recede embarrassed at their shabbiness. Yet, I plod on. In the belief that each piece that I do manage to wring out changes me somehow for the better.

Turning the Pages

A friend of mine reads books on his cell phone. I think that’s such a pity. The pleasure of reading is not just about the words that have been written. It comes from romancing the book—by caressing the cover in your hands, by turning the crisp white or yellowing pages, by remembering where the words fall on the page, by breathing in its smell. You imprint your personality on the book. That’s why you can’t replace a book with another copy of the same work.

Electronic reading takes away that romance. It’s the difference between sex and making love.

Eyes Ahead

The past looks so much better through the eyes of the future. But I can’t help thinking that that charm exists precisely because we are years and lifestyles removed from the age we sigh over. I’m sure people in the past said the same about their past.

Me, I like to look forward. I would love to live in the future, to see where humans will go, what they’ll do and how much they’ll achieve—in an age maybe, where I could watch the earthrise from the moon whenever I wanted or go on intergalactic cruises on a luxury spacecraft.

Communication Quicksand

Communication can be so hard sometimes. You can go around in circles for hours. We’re listening to the words but we don’t hear the meanings. Add positions to defend and we could be talking in languages alien to each other for all the good it does. The inability to get the point across leads to resentment and communication further deteriorates. And it spirals on.

Till somebody breaks out—pulls back to take another look at the picture, and then jumps back in to reassure everybody that nobody’s positions are being threatened. Let me try that and see if it works.

Yeah, I Can Be Dumb

Sometimes the brightest of us can make the dumbest of statements. I don’t claim to be the brightest, but I do pride myself with a favourable level of intelligence and common sense. Yet, I ask a client the other day, “Are you near a computer?” She had been checking her mail as we talked. Sigh!

Remember those tech cartoons that make fun of people who don’t plug in the network cord and then wonder why they’re not connected? Guilty!

There are numerous other such incidents that have put me to the blushes. But I promise you, I am intelligent. Really!

Black Fear

Darkness magnifies every melancholy thought and imaginary fear. Is it because we all have a tendency towards claustrophobia? We need space around us. Darkness does not allow us that. It seeps into everything and obliterates all sense of space. We feel closed in.

I wonder what it would be like to be enveloped completely by darkness without even the smallest source of light.

In one X-Files episode, Mulder and Scully are stranded on a lake without a torch. Unable to see anything, they decide to stay put till the morning, when they realize they were just five steps from land.

The Awe of Existence

In the movie Jesus of Montreal, one of the characters comments that one day the earth will be annihilated and that there will be no sign that man ever existed. I don’t think this is a pessimistic statement. On the contrary, the smaller and insignificant we are, the bigger and more magnificent the universe we are a part of.

We are of no consequence to anybody other than ourselves and rightly so. But it’s our privilege to be able to feel more awe of this universe we live in any than any other species can. That’s what makes us blessed.

Snapshots of People You Pass By

Throw two people into an alien, lonely situation with nobody else to turn to, they'll form a bond. They'll share a little something intimate yet unspoken. Once back to normalcy, they'll be mere acquaintances again, but that shared intimacy remains, to make the person and the moment memorable to each other always.

Then, there was this guy in my class. I wouldn’t recognise him if I passed him on the street. But one starlit night, on a hill, while on a study tour, he took a flashlight and spent an hour outlining the constellations for us. I'll never forget him.

Resurrections

Ancient personalities, their thoughts and language so inaccessible today, come across often as stiff and deadly dull. Until, somebody brings them alive. I’m reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, and am being mesmerized by Plato as I’ve never been before. I don’t agree with him one whit, but he’s no longer the brooding philosopher pontificating in a vacuum , but a living, breathing creature, a rich aristocrat who excelled at sports and on the battlefield, and was left so distraught by his teacher’s execution that it compelled him to shape Utopia, where men like Socrates could be hailed.