...

The book is closed, the year is done,

The pages full of tasks begun.

A little joy, a little care,

Along with dreams, are written there.

This new day brings another year,

Renewing hope, dispelling fear.

And we may find before the end,

A deep content, another friend.

Of Faeries :)

[W]hen the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl. ~James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan

What a wonderful thought :)

A bit of everything ... and then some more....

Hmmm.. that’s the expression of the day! Chasing a million dreams over an undulating rainbow over time and space only to discard them as worthless pebbles of nothingness when that moment of realization twinkles at the corner of the eye? Why does it happen that wishes are endless and boundless and all I want is to endup with a little bit of everything in life?

It's work season these days! Days have warped into months and the definition of time seems to be a pedantic necessity with no real meaning. Caught in a race against time, my days are filled in chasing the deadline which dangles dangerously close now. Thoughts of this imminently approaching deadline seem to fly out of the window sometimes and I have to stretch out and snatch them back and make my wayward brain work towards it relentlessly. I have become seemingly immune to everything around me except work. Driven by a date which hangs overhead.

Sometimes, I guess it's just best to enjoy the the 'here and now' and savor it till it lasts. For, during that weariest part of the day, that teeny weeny dreamer in me still longs for those deliciously gloden sunshine moments of life like idyllic musings, carefree conversations and that warming glow of pals and books. The time for roses will come, all in a moment!

The StoneCutter

No matter how Useful we may be, sometimes it takes us a while to recognize our own value. This can be illustrated by the Chinese story of The Stonecutter:

There was once a stonecutter, who was dissatisfied with himself and with his position in life.

One day, he passed a wealthy merchant's house, and through the open gateway, saw many fine possessions and important visitors. "How powerful that merchant must be!" thought the stonecutter. He became very envious, and wished that he could be like the merchant. Then he would no longer have to live the life of a mere stonecutter.

To his great surprise, he suddenly became the merchant, enjoying more luxuries and power than he had ever dreamed of, envied and detested by those less wealthy than himself. But soon a high official passed by, carried in a sedan chair, accompanied by attendants, and escorted by soldiers beating gongs. Everyone, no matter how wealthy, had to bow low before the procession. "How powerful that official is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a high official!"

Then he became the high official, carried everywhere in his embroidered sedan chair, feared and hated by the people all around, who had to bow down before him as he passed. It was a hot summer day, and the official felt very uncomfortable in the sticky sedan chair. He looked up at the sun. It shone proudly in the sky, unaffected by his presence. "How powerful the sun is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be the sun!"

Then he became the sun, shining fiercely down on everyone, scorching the fields, cursed by the farmers and laborers. But a huge black cloud moved between him and the earth, so that his light could no longer shine on everything below. "How powerful that storm cloud is!" he though. "I wish that I could be a cloud!"

Then he became the cloud, flooding the fields and villages, shouted at by everyone. But soon he found that he was being pushed away by some great force, and realized that is was the wind. "How powerful it is!" he though. "I wish that I could be the wind!"

Then he became the wind, blowing tiles off the roofs of houses, uprooting trees, hated and feared by all below him. But after a while, he ran up against something that would not move, no matter how forcefully he blew against it--a huge, towering stone. "How powerful that stone is!" he thought. I wish that I could be a stone!"

Then he became the stone, more powerful than anything else on earth. But as he stood there, he heard the sound of a hammer pounding a chisel into the solid rock, and felt himself being changed. "What could be more powerful than I, the stone?" he thought. He looked down and saw far below him the figure of a stonecutter.

-From Benjamin Hoff's, The Tao of Pooh.

Tick tock

Every year is getting shorter,
never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation
is the english way
The time is gone,
....the song is over,
thought Id something more to say ...

Simple things ...

List.

I think Genuine People Personalities on gadgets are an awesome idea. I especially love the idea of lifts that go left and right when they get fed up of going up and down. Spot on!

PS: Life

Change. Spice. Variety ... Something we have evolved with, toward. Something we relish. We fear and crave it. What is it that we really fear though. I think it is the unknown. The fear of what we know naught is the most frightening and yet when we do know it, it becomes dull and boring - nothing like the exciting and heart pounding fear and excitement we once felt toward it. Time blurs the boundaries and speeds us away in a different direction in different swathes of experience. The memories never go away but the feeling itself becomes a fading, distant reflection of the emotion that held sway once. Nothing would change that distant feeling yet maybe if we try to hold on to it we can stop the colours from running and blurring into a has been. ... but then to know something, we have to have felt it and to fear it again we have to forget - but then how do we know change if we have nothing to compare it to! Maybe that's the point, change is not one thing but many things, an everchanging, undefined abstractness that we yearn to discover and when we do - it changes ...

Can you really REALLY ever know someone? Maybe, the better question to ask is whether you really ever want to...

... A life worth living ...

A fantasy takes birth in the depths of my mind
Spun intricately into a fabric of life
Delicately perfumed; Patterned;
Moulded lovingly into airy unreal wisps of loveliness
Rising above this life, mundane
Taking a tour of bliss
Turning bliss into a life force
Beckoning, leading me on to follow
Into visions of what can be, the possibilities
Of a life beyond that which is all around
Away from the madness and rush of reality
A realm of the imagined unreal
Calm surreal and oh so beautiful
Lucious green - what enchantment is this...
Novel each time it appears before me
That which entices me to reach out .. and see what can be
And a LOT of things can, fantastic and impossible - deliciously so...

for happiness is being cared for,
.... Dreams are still dreams!

HMMmm

Life's too short. Isn't it? There is a need to grab it by the horns; squeeze every last drop of energy and opportunity and make it an exciting wondrous experience. It should be a series, rather it is a series of moments, each moment defined in itself and each an imprint on the next. Like Dominoes?

Carpe Diem - that's what we need - take back control, sieze the moment and live each one as completely as possible. None of this half hearted business. Experiences DO make the man (person, I mean)! Are experiences really good or bad or are they just that - an experience. Maybe there are those experiences we wish we'd never had - that could somehow be undone - we could pretend they never were but then aren't those experiences a part of who we are - who we become - our individuality - and is any of it as simple so as to be detachable from our selves.

I guess at the end of the day all we can really choose is to become a better person. Use what we've learnt.... Never forget. Not for an instant.

Fanciful flight

I don't know from where but the other day, out of the blue, I was really vividly reminded of the House of Usher - remember Poe?

Now, I am not a lover of the macabre or the horrible in stories and all who know me can testify to that. I watched Evil Dead in the crook of pa's elbow with a carefully positioned cushion before me and am still fanciful of peskies and ghosts. A mild horror film will give me atleast a week of sleepless nights! To be succinct, I'd rather not watch any ...

Yet I have and have always had a morbid fascination with Edgar Allan Poe. His tales of mystery and horror leave me spellbound and the eerie atmosphere pervades long after the tale is over. Poe was probably dissed in America and it took the Europeans to bring it to their notice. Yet because of the generally depraved persona ascribed to Poe, he was treated with some distaste. Yeats went as far as to call him 'vulgar' apparently.

Anyway the point is that I am trying to understand what about the stories of Poe is so fascinating. The Fall of the House of Usher is actually quite magnificient in its construction and execution. The story takes you in. The house is palpable and you can feel it come alive. The tension is so real when Madeline actually appears. The story is a story of a house - the house is the character. There are so many undercurrents to it - none explicit, yet you feel them. Incest, mental illness, death, resurrection - all find a place. The house itself, the protagonist, is displayed in very anthropomorphic terms. Its windows are likened to eyes, and in the end it dies along with the siblings. Another striking thing is that you don't know much about the narrator and even Roderik and Madeline Usher except for their quirks, paranoia and strange reflexes and yet you don't really notice because it grips you with elements that are so trivial if you think about them and yet the mainstay of the story - like the state of the garden.

Apparently also, Poe thought that it was important to depict stuff as undercurrents rather than explicitly state everything. I think he revelled in confusing all the senses - and bringing about a sense of complete overload - a kind of "totality". He absolutely loved bringing in intensely melodramatic psychological manifests of conscious and subconscious actions including dreams. He spins stories that transcend the boundary between a person's surrounding and head - like it's one environment and fair game. Besides Usher, I really find the "Telltale Heart" and "The Moth" fascinating. Poe is the master of the art of short stories. Slowly the story develops and it's magnitude dawns upon you much later on; Poe's isn't an obvious art in my opinion and I think that's what I love about his stories.

It seems that Debussy tried to write an opera on The Fall of the House of Usher. Unsurprising really ... it is a fantastic story to set to music. Still, it's an opera about a house - a morbid, decaying one at that! Debussy never completed it though. For Poe - dreams were more real than reality, he was a pre-cursor to the Symbolist movement and celebrated in France. All Debussy wanted was to focus on operas for Poe's : The Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher. Neither was completed. However, Poe’s literature, including The Raven, was inspiration for Rapsodie, that Debussy did complete. The play off between the orchestra and the saxophone make for the perfect intersection of Poe's prose and Debussy's music: apparently a reflection of the composer's own life at the time.

Anyhow, I digress. As lightning strikes the House of Usher and the narrator looks back to see the lightning, the crack through the centre and the destruction of the house, everyone leaves to draw their own conclusion. Therein I think lies the beauty of Poe's writing: he never imposes what he thinks is the story, the story is individual to each of us as we draw our own conclusions in the overactive, imaginative, fanciful corners of unreality.

Ek Kahani, Rangon ki Zubaani

Yesterday was Holi. The festival of colour - bright hues, sweetness, a heralding of Spring ... So to bring some more colour into the day I decided I'd dig out the ol' easel and a have a bit of a jolly...

That set me thinking; while I was retrieving the tools of the trade from behind the bed, where they're stowed I was thinking about inspiration. Every painting starts with something, a need, an idea something set off like a flashbulb in the dark. At first there is nothing, or maybe something dull and passive , tunnel-like, beckoning yet not enticing ... And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, out jumps this vibrant image, luminous in its intensity ... . Then, just as quickly as it came, the vision blurs and disappears; the image recedes. It's as if the flash is a vision of foreverness - it has been forever and will be for ever after ... it was here before the Universe itself and has seen all its perturbations - the painting that I can even hope to reproduce is but a feeble shadow - a mindless corruption and yet a reflection of me in the vastness of infinities stretching beyond and more.

Anyway, regardless of that, I start trying to capture what I think is my part in the vision that was ...

Musical Tales

What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare ...

Yes indeed. I am rushing around like a headless chicken, trying to get things done, assignments finished, project ideas pinned and so is everyone else I know. However, it leads me to wonder, what about the wall staring time I need to hone the brilliance that will be my idea for the discovery of the millenium. Hmmm, maybe the world will just have to wait for me to have that kind of time ;)! Now that the self effacing being that I am is done with all the self congratulation, I can get on with spewing other stuff that's not on my mind but so wants to be on it. This blog is a self indulgent thing. All I want with it is to write something beautiful and unrelated or nonsensical by turns. Today is the day of the beautiful, I rediscovered Scheherezade.

What can I say about Scheherazade. It's such a romantic tale spun into such a beautiful symphony. The Arabian Nights - was such a tale ever told - the sultan who, after being cheated on by his wife, decided to marry a new girl every night, and execute her the next day. One fateful day he married Scheherazade, a storyteller. So magically did she weave her tales every night that he could not tear himself away from the stories she told, until dawn came and she left him in such suspense; he could not execute her for he had to know the end of the story. For a 1001 days did this saga continue until he fell in love and could not imagine life without her. The stories included some of my absolute favourites, Sinbad and Aladdin and Ali Baba were the stuff of childhood heroism, but the real hero was Scheherazade!

To this story, in the summer of 1888 did Rimsky-Korsakov, the Russian composer, write the symphony suite of Scheherazade. A strong and brawny theme is the opening of the piece's first movement, reflecting the power and ego of the Sultan, almost defying the listener to explain his presence and kneel to him in subservience. The ambience is intimidating and yet magnificient.

The response of Scheherazade, is a violin solo, a musical trance that weaves through strands of the beautiful instrument, caressing the bow so effortlessly to show the spirit of the princess and the storyteller: the passion and the beauty of this creature who was holding on to her life with all the wit and charm she could muster. The mesmerising effect is emphasised by the harp that transports one to a hypnotic trance in three chords - in the palatial decadent room where worlds were being carved and populated and the sultan was being brought under the spell of the sweet, melodic tones of the bard. I can sense the emotion, the sensuality, the sheer magnetic force of a world so far from your own and yet so alluring that even if you have everything in the world, you can't give up a good story.

The tales start with "The Sea and Sinbad's Ship." The undulating waves, rushing intensely in and then retreating to the far reaches of the ocean to form newer more powerful variants, every one of the transitions is a suspenseful twist in the tale and the symphony tries to capture and capitalise on each one to reflect how Scheherazade herself must have told the story, to capture the essence of her imagination and constantly make the listener uneasy and on edge. Like the story the music seems to go towards an important point and then step away just as I think it's going somewhere and there is something in sight.

Scheherazade's voice starts off the second movement, but this time she's more elaborate, almost more confident in the sound of her tones .. it sounds like she knows the embellishments and tweaks that he loves and is now playing him like a master ... the sultan is in her power and she knows it. The movement is known as "The Tale of the Kalender Prince" and this time the use of exotic solos from the Middle east is made extensively in the woodwind instruments. The sounds are foreign and so heartfelt. As I listen to this bit I feel poignant and thoughtful. It's as though Scheherazade was exploring her own world through the stories she was telling and living every minute of them. I can smell the bazaars in the desert with spices and bright silks and crowded, dusty streets with so much life and bustle.

The third and my favourite movement is the love theme, it's the main love story and is called "The Young Prince and the Young Princess." It is at its most beautiful when the tenderness is just hinted at and the innocence shines through. It is simple and somehow seems pure, yet sensual. And then there is the theatrical clash of cymbals: takes me by surprise and yet feels so right to end the movement: so deliciously over the top!

The true quality of Scheherazade comes through in the movement final: "The Festival at Baghdad; The Sea; Shipwreck on a Rock; Conclusion." The sultan, now at the end of his tether, the music personifying his impatience with Scheherezade, his urging Scheherazade to complete the story, his agitation and impatience to know what happens next ... Each morning the executioner turns up at the palace doors, each morning the executioner is sent away with the instruction to come the next day and yet the next day she weaves another splendid tale that leaves him wanting more .. she weaves all the strands together from all the movements before, into this glorious one: tying every bit of music thus far into glorious symphony. At this point the Sultan forgets to tell the executioner to return, the last piece is his low voice finally mellowed by Scheherazade's love.

It is such a beautiful story and it comes alive, in full colour and rich glory in the playing of the music. I don't know how I ever stopped listening to it!

A lifeline

Today I found a notebook from a lifetime ago where I used to write "poetry". With cheesy lines like "Do not read this material unless authorised to do so" on the cover and various cheesy by lines that I did think up myself (and it shows) on the inside cover. In the naively written passages, I see a person struggling to express herself to herself and trying to understand things around. A lot of the things that are written were probably hardly ever discussed. The most amazing thing, however, is how little some of my thoughts have changed in the intervening years. I could have written it yesterday :)! Of course there are some that could have been written by another person altogether! It's like looking back at yourself through a temporal mirror and to that end let me quote from the little book from a LONG time ago:

"Who is that stranger? She glares at me so ...
What is it about her that makes me cringe; run away
Vaguely she resembles someone I knew a long time ago ..
Someone I identified with
Someone I left behind in this struggle of life. Childlike. Innocent. Brave.
Qualities I knew she had but did not appreciate
I wanted her to understand. Be wise and worldly.
I taught her things she would have been better off not knowing.
I showed her things she would have been better off not seeing.
I scorned her for she was not like all the others around her.
I wanted to mould her into something she was not.
I made her canny and aware.
Pity was: I succeeded ..
For would it not have been better, had she retained the very qualities I weaned her from.
I took away a vision and replaced it with reality.
I can't look her in the eye any more,
the person I was a long time ago ...

** The poem is about replacing a childhood with the vision of adulthood, the loss of idealism and the setting in of cynicism.

**********************************************************************************

:) It's funny to read your own stuff from long back and in some places it feels weird, but it's such a joy!! :-D I'm loving reading my little book from a long time ago!

Reflections of a Meandering Maniacal Thought Ipod Playlist

So .. am in bed, with Creep from Radiohead (the Acoustic version) playing in the background, a day just gone and so much to do. Yet the inertia. I like to think I am doing some sort of arm chair thought experiment - but all i seem to be doing after 20 minutes of sitting here is drifting in and out of thought. One thought comes and almost before it arrives, it seems like it's about to be taken hostage by another entirely unrelated thread of random bearing on the contents of life.

I reflect - reflect on my identity, personality, aspiration and more ... today i wonder about what i can draw from each of these to achieve that unique idea that i want to explore further. What is the bearing of what i do today to what i will end up doing tomorrow. It's like a twinkle on a water surface - a second so beautiful, gone in a second yet infinitum en memory.

And there's Knack with Myyyy Sharona! Secretly the one i love is Killing me Softly ... hehe - miss the quotes and what can be - oh the possibilities. Meander ... meander ... forests of lushness, green and beckoning - full of promise and yet - what's the point of sitting at the sides and dipping your toes in sweet streams of enticement if you're not going to commit, eh! That's the feeling I get when I look at what I do - why can't that commitment be absolute. Now I wonder now I don't and there's the thought for the sake of having one - what the heck is wrong with that I wonder .. and yet I dont really.

As observed, I AM slow today - was it yesterday? Maybe. Age? Maybe - hehe - i have old thoughts now ;). I realised i miss dancing and just the general mucking about in fun and frolic. It feels so free. So thought free yet provoking. Remember the times when i could have a dance about without any music. For that matter a sing about without music - without even sound sometimes.

Maybe music is the answer. Not 42. The world, the universe, everything - including Optimus Prime ;)!

There's a world where i can go and tell my secrets to - in my room ;)! True - reflective - cheesy and soo right! I wonder if illusion will ever change into something real. Don't get me wrong - i am not beaten - far from it. I wonder where that elusive idea is though - tantalising and far from grasp!

Now this post is ever more random - and I cant stop - i should - i cant - should cant s c s c !! Bills Bills Bills - ipod song change ;)! I AM Destiny's child :-D!

Direction

Ok, so to hell with it. Have decided to change course and now this blog is whatever i want it to be - so there!

Confusion is not the word for what i feel - i mean there is SO much to explore, to think about that my brain sort of explodes with the possibilities within possibilities and yet I dont know where to go next. What is my dangerous idea going to be ...

The more I see of evolution, the more fascinated I get. Development, the brain, learning disorders - name it and I find it interesting - how do I narrow down scope and pin what it is that I really want to focus on. EUGH! I dont know ... I dont know!