So we learn here that we should keep a diary. It will keep us. Cryptic advice. It will keep us sane, whole, wits intact, what? But forgetting about the latter, it is indeed good advice. Over the years I've accumulated so many fancy journals, leather bound, artsy covers, cloth bound, you name it, we've owned it. Inaugurating them and filling up the first page was always a very satisfying experience. It was an experience matched in satisfaction only with finding an old diary whose pages were filled by someone else. Oh yes, few things come close to the pleasure of snooping and wondering, while snooping, if the author intended secrecy or was hoping that their journals would be discovered and that through their journals they would in turn be discovered, remembered, understood and immortalized.
I've stopped buying those journals now. These are different times and our lives are ostensibly public (ostensibly because we only share cherry-picked moments and I doubt any of our virtual friends have the desire or the inclination to wonder about that which is not being said online). We share the highlights of our days with others hoping to either stress the ways in which we are different or to find consonance.
So if we must keep a diary, so that it "keeps" us, we can keep it in a blog and drop the coy bit about storing our innermost thoughts in the pages of some journal that would then be stashed away in some drawer somewhere, begging to be found by friends, relatives, future generations, etc. A song comes to mind:
Tu aa ke mujhe pehchaan zara (Come find me)
We digress. But then again, we are so very prone to musical digressions. Every thought snags on a song.
The first advice I ever got about diaries was that at its most basic level it needed to be an accounting of the day. There are large chunks of my day that are repetitive. It's surprising when I fire up MS Excel each morning and type in "=NOW( )" and it spits out a new date and time! I guess the date does change, if nothing else. Sometimes Interstate 80 isn't a parking lot, this wasn't such a day. I wake up, I drive some thirty miles, I immerse myself in various analyses and I drive back the same distance. Those are the large repetitive chunks.
The things that do change however, and are really worth writing about, are the notes that bounce off the ostinato, so to speak. These thoughts are often unrelated and they stay unresolved like scattered fragments that could be collected and molded into something of consequence if they weren't so fleeting, and as tantalizingly out of reach as those earth-like exoplanets we discover each day.
Today this song filled the sound theater of my car on my way to work:
And I wondered about the lyrics that suggest that our voices would stand the test of time while our names are obliterated or lost in its annals and our faces change beyond recognition. I wondered if this was true. I tried to think of all the loved ones I had lost, of all the friends who were friends once but are strangers now. If it wasn't for the aid of a recording device, a constant replaying, would I remember the specific timbres of their voices, the cadences of their speech, their intonation, the sound of their laughter? I have my doubts. I think I would do better with faces and would never forget a name.
Then I heard this song:
In this lyrically and melodiously supreme song there's a thought that the moon would reflect our pasts (yeh chand beete zamanon ka aina hoga) and the floating clouds would form the likeness of a face (bhatakti abra mein chehra koi bana hoga) and this thought transported me to places I have never been and moments I've never felt.
So I moved on to my own lame recollections of the things that stay on after we've lived our short lives, the things the moon or the giant sequoias have lived through. I recollected something a friend wrote about the art of stretching and I thought of the static sequoias in their little corner of California countering my thoughts about their isolated and oblivious, though intact, state through most of recent history as they tell me they weren't "oblivious", that they heard it all through the whispering wind and the percussive branches.
Then my thoughts veered off to the idea of artistry and brushstrokes and the place where grace notes and tiny brushstrokes converge, where a little goes a long way and differences can be felt in infinitesimal degrees.
All this was yet another scattered reverie that helped me discern 12/19/11 from 12/20/11 and is now stored in this very public diary.
I get closer to ending the clattering of these keys with a final thought about the fungibility of our media. Will the history of this era be the most accurate it has ever been, untainted by biased rewriting, because of videographic or endlessly documented virtual evidence or will the lack of backward compatibility in technology leave future generations guessing about the purpose of the iPhone carcasses they find littered at future archeological digs?
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
How it sounded over the years (1981-1988 continued...)
These years saw the return of Indira Gandhi. As a child I was proud of the fact that India had such a personable and powerful woman prime minister. She was always impressive to me despite what I heard about her tyranny and her abuse of power. She always appeared energetic and purposeful unlike the Morarji and Charan Singh crowd of the years that saw Coca Cola disappear. Who needed them running the country? A woman who radiated power was so much more desirable. It felt as though we were well-governed again.
1981 was the year of Silsila. The Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha rumors were at their peak. Every magazine that the magazine wallahs delivered at home were grabbed for the latest on this particular rumor. I refused to believe them. I was never willing to entertain any negative thoughts about the people I liked and AB was on that list, despite Shaan. But is was shocking to see a movie based on these rumors, it seemed to lend them some credence. Everyone acting in it, with the exception of Shashi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar, was an affected party. It appeared nothing short of audacious. But the songs were memorable, the yellow tulips in Amsterdam amidst which the rumored lovebirds pranced, making them even more so. Each song had to me memorized. Each one became a part of our three-home sing-off. There was Neela aasman so gaya, Dekha ek khwab to yeh silsile hue, Rang barse.
There was a sense of the nation fracturing a bit during these years. Zail Singh was the President of India and I still remember his speech calling for national integration, "Hamein rash-ter ko ek suttar mein bandhna hai". Doordarshan liked to hammer this message home whenever they could, stressing unity in diversity by playing this 1974 Films Division of India film over and over again:
Some names were often on the news, like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Some tensions were brewing, building, something was absorbing latent heat.
1981 was the year dad visited Philippines and he brought back a gorgeous embroidered, wraparound skirt and top for me. I was in love with this dress and wore it at ever special occasion. The photograph below was one of those special occasions. Mrs Gandhi was going to inaugurate the annual Science Exhibition at Teen Murti Bhavan and I was going to hold the plate with the scissors she would use to cut the ribbon. There was excitement in the air. I couldn't believe I was actually going to see her! And then I saw her, this powerhouse of a woman, so petite, so pink-cheeked and so much in awe of my Filipino dress! Good times :)
That was one unforgettable celebrity contact.
Life went on for the moment with more stellar performances from AB in Namak Halal and Shakti and catchy numbers like:
Aaj rapat jayein to hamein na uthaiyo
Jaane kaise kab kahan ikraar ho gaya
There was also the Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval starrer Saath-Saath with stellar musical performances by the late Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh:
Yeh tera ghar yeh mera ghar
Pyar mujhse jo kiya tumne to kya paogi
Yeh bata de mujhe zindagi
Tumko dekha to yeh khayal aaya
Kyun zindagi ke raah mein
I think Umrao Jaan was made around the same time - an amazing movie with an immortal songs and singing:
Dil cheez kya hai
In aankhon ki masti ke
Justaju jiski thi
Yeh kya jagah hai doston
Then came the movie Coolie. I never saw it and am not sure if it had any songs worth remembering but it was the one where AB got gravely injured on the sets of this movie and a new actor, playing the part of villain - Puneet Issar - caught a lot of heat for it.
Meanwhile things kept heating up on the political front. There were growing concerns about Sikh militancy and a separatist movement. Indira Gandhi kept toughening up her stance. Until we got to Operation Blue Star and the raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in early 1984. The news on television, the newspaper headlines, were full of shocking images of the arms and weapons that had been stockpiled at this holy shrine. Through it all there were the national integration messages still coming at us through every mass communication channel around us.
1984 was the college year and on October 31st, 1984 we were in an Economic History class with Mrs Mathur when our class was interrupted and she was called out. She came to make the tearful announcement that Indira Gandhi had been shot. Our class, stunned in disbelief, was dismissed and we were asked to go home.
The television was on all the time as we heard of the multiple rounds that her bodyguards Beant Singh and Satwant Singh had fired into her petite frame. I had seen that petite frame.
The next several days were beyond being the darkest period in the history of Delhi. Sikh homes were burnt, there were riots, killings, carnage everywhere. We just stayed huddled inside, worrying about and praying for the safety of all our Sikh friends and acquaintances.
I wonder, as I recollect these times, if we are a scaled down representation of the Yugas from Hindu lore. We start our lives in Satya Yug, the Dharma Bull on all four legs, all is well in our worlds (some fortunate worlds), we are not the actors or the initiators in our lives at this early, perhaps five year long stretch.
Then we get to the Treta Yuga of our lives - the world takes on a bilious green hue from certain angles, we become sensitive to slights, we fear certain things, certain people, but things are still more or less rosy.
Dwapar Yuga, we are in the 12-20 period of our lives and the world has disappointed us quite a bit more. We've probably experienced every negative emotion by now, we've seen the evil in some people, we've acquired some shells to keep our innermost child safe and secure but we get a good sense of the darkness all around. This is when we learn to take things in stride, if we're strong, because not doing so could destroy us. We develop defense or offense mechanisms. The bull is on two legs by now.
In this Dwapar phase of my life I saw the violence with which Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, I saw the ensuing genocide and in December of the same year, we saw the tragedy of Bhopal, thanks to the negligence and greed of the battery maker Union Carbide.
Two years later, after years of hearing about the Cold War, the "balance of terror", the escalation in nuclear arms we heard of the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human kind at Chernobyl. This was the world we were about to inherit in all its rotting glory.
And then we arrive into the Kal Yug of our lives. This phase doesn't end in five years. We stay here for the rest of our lives, in the thick of it, riding a roller coaster of despair or euphoria on a one-legged bull. It has its moments, its bright sparks but the periods of darkness are powerful and potent when they arrive.
Speaking of Kal Yug, there was a movie of the same name, perhaps 1981, directed by Shyam Benegal. It was very well made, or so I thought at the time. Trying to track the modern story as though it was the Mahabharata was an interesting exercise.
All this time, I thought Kal Yug had one song filmed on Rekha but I was so very wrong; memory conflation at play. The song I was thinking of was actually from the film Vijeta and I remember it well now. The song was Man anand anand chayo.
1981 was the year of Silsila. The Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha rumors were at their peak. Every magazine that the magazine wallahs delivered at home were grabbed for the latest on this particular rumor. I refused to believe them. I was never willing to entertain any negative thoughts about the people I liked and AB was on that list, despite Shaan. But is was shocking to see a movie based on these rumors, it seemed to lend them some credence. Everyone acting in it, with the exception of Shashi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar, was an affected party. It appeared nothing short of audacious. But the songs were memorable, the yellow tulips in Amsterdam amidst which the rumored lovebirds pranced, making them even more so. Each song had to me memorized. Each one became a part of our three-home sing-off. There was Neela aasman so gaya, Dekha ek khwab to yeh silsile hue, Rang barse.
There was a sense of the nation fracturing a bit during these years. Zail Singh was the President of India and I still remember his speech calling for national integration, "Hamein rash-ter ko ek suttar mein bandhna hai". Doordarshan liked to hammer this message home whenever they could, stressing unity in diversity by playing this 1974 Films Division of India film over and over again:
Some names were often on the news, like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Some tensions were brewing, building, something was absorbing latent heat.
1981 was the year dad visited Philippines and he brought back a gorgeous embroidered, wraparound skirt and top for me. I was in love with this dress and wore it at ever special occasion. The photograph below was one of those special occasions. Mrs Gandhi was going to inaugurate the annual Science Exhibition at Teen Murti Bhavan and I was going to hold the plate with the scissors she would use to cut the ribbon. There was excitement in the air. I couldn't believe I was actually going to see her! And then I saw her, this powerhouse of a woman, so petite, so pink-cheeked and so much in awe of my Filipino dress! Good times :)
That was one unforgettable celebrity contact.
Life went on for the moment with more stellar performances from AB in Namak Halal and Shakti and catchy numbers like:
Aaj rapat jayein to hamein na uthaiyo
Jaane kaise kab kahan ikraar ho gaya
There was also the Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval starrer Saath-Saath with stellar musical performances by the late Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh:
Yeh tera ghar yeh mera ghar
Pyar mujhse jo kiya tumne to kya paogi
Yeh bata de mujhe zindagi
Tumko dekha to yeh khayal aaya
Kyun zindagi ke raah mein
I think Umrao Jaan was made around the same time - an amazing movie with an immortal songs and singing:
Dil cheez kya hai
In aankhon ki masti ke
Justaju jiski thi
Yeh kya jagah hai doston
Then came the movie Coolie. I never saw it and am not sure if it had any songs worth remembering but it was the one where AB got gravely injured on the sets of this movie and a new actor, playing the part of villain - Puneet Issar - caught a lot of heat for it.
Meanwhile things kept heating up on the political front. There were growing concerns about Sikh militancy and a separatist movement. Indira Gandhi kept toughening up her stance. Until we got to Operation Blue Star and the raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in early 1984. The news on television, the newspaper headlines, were full of shocking images of the arms and weapons that had been stockpiled at this holy shrine. Through it all there were the national integration messages still coming at us through every mass communication channel around us.
1984 was the college year and on October 31st, 1984 we were in an Economic History class with Mrs Mathur when our class was interrupted and she was called out. She came to make the tearful announcement that Indira Gandhi had been shot. Our class, stunned in disbelief, was dismissed and we were asked to go home.
The television was on all the time as we heard of the multiple rounds that her bodyguards Beant Singh and Satwant Singh had fired into her petite frame. I had seen that petite frame.
The next several days were beyond being the darkest period in the history of Delhi. Sikh homes were burnt, there were riots, killings, carnage everywhere. We just stayed huddled inside, worrying about and praying for the safety of all our Sikh friends and acquaintances.
I wonder, as I recollect these times, if we are a scaled down representation of the Yugas from Hindu lore. We start our lives in Satya Yug, the Dharma Bull on all four legs, all is well in our worlds (some fortunate worlds), we are not the actors or the initiators in our lives at this early, perhaps five year long stretch.
Then we get to the Treta Yuga of our lives - the world takes on a bilious green hue from certain angles, we become sensitive to slights, we fear certain things, certain people, but things are still more or less rosy.
Dwapar Yuga, we are in the 12-20 period of our lives and the world has disappointed us quite a bit more. We've probably experienced every negative emotion by now, we've seen the evil in some people, we've acquired some shells to keep our innermost child safe and secure but we get a good sense of the darkness all around. This is when we learn to take things in stride, if we're strong, because not doing so could destroy us. We develop defense or offense mechanisms. The bull is on two legs by now.
In this Dwapar phase of my life I saw the violence with which Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, I saw the ensuing genocide and in December of the same year, we saw the tragedy of Bhopal, thanks to the negligence and greed of the battery maker Union Carbide.
Two years later, after years of hearing about the Cold War, the "balance of terror", the escalation in nuclear arms we heard of the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human kind at Chernobyl. This was the world we were about to inherit in all its rotting glory.
And then we arrive into the Kal Yug of our lives. This phase doesn't end in five years. We stay here for the rest of our lives, in the thick of it, riding a roller coaster of despair or euphoria on a one-legged bull. It has its moments, its bright sparks but the periods of darkness are powerful and potent when they arrive.
Speaking of Kal Yug, there was a movie of the same name, perhaps 1981, directed by Shyam Benegal. It was very well made, or so I thought at the time. Trying to track the modern story as though it was the Mahabharata was an interesting exercise.
All this time, I thought Kal Yug had one song filmed on Rekha but I was so very wrong; memory conflation at play. The song I was thinking of was actually from the film Vijeta and I remember it well now. The song was Man anand anand chayo.
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