Saturday 18 June 2016

My musical life

One evening when I was 16 or so, a normal nonsensical fight with my mother made me rush into my room with a strong urge to shut the door hard. ( Only urge because if I had done in real ,it would ve dire consequences lol) I was in tears as I entered my dark room. However , just because of casual natural habit I switched on my radio before I put the lights on. And there it was.. a song playing on the radio which I had longed for months. In a fraction of second I forgot my tears and hurried to pick my writing pad and pen ; which by the way used to be always next to my radio for such emergencies. I started to pen down the lyrics of the song like some short hand expert!  😂 When the song finished I started practising the song and by then I could hardly even remember that I was crying before. Such has been my madness for music! 😃

Those days there were no internet sites or YouTube where ready lyrics or songs were available to access. Hence, I used to have books and files with lyrics of hundreds of Bollywood songs written down with utmost dedication. It's my labour of love and a  valuable treasure. Being the only child I should have felt lonely at times. But somehow a part of it was filled by few dear friends and rest by music. Music taught me to enjoy my solitude. Most of the times there is background music playing in my head for all kind of absurd situations I am forced to face.. good or bad. Like when someone is torturing me I am playing "tera emotional athyachar" or when elated I am playing "aaj me upar aasman niche" in my head. Well yes, I am pretty much self entertained. 😋 When I am low, I listen to melancholic ghazals of my favourite jagjitji and cry my heart out pushing out all the heaviness inside me finally feeling rejuvenated. It's therapy for me! I even sing myself to sleep when stressed out. If someone was to tell me I have 10 minutes left to die , I would just listen to one of my fav songs and die with peace and joy in my heart.

Not much has changed since I was 16; rather, my relationship with music has grown mature with time. Even today I collect lyrics like my 16 year old self (procedural change with technology 😁) and can't concentrate on anything until I finish learning a song which I badly want to. This madness for music makes my normal life crazily special and worth living.

Glad to have a prized possession which can never leave my side and will accompany me forever!  
😇

Friday 10 June 2016

Sairat!!

I have so many pending half written posts but this one had to come first because of the mad urge to write about it.. Sairat!! For people who dont know about it.. it's an awesome Marathi movie breaking all records ; for who know.. yes! I finally watched it.😇

For a movie buff the most thrilling experience is when you fall in love with a movie. It's like the feeling of first love all over again when you expand every moment with your beloved and live it again and again .. 😋  we mad movie buffs reminisce every bit of that 3 hour experience and relive it.

For starters I have never seen protagonists so real.. a girl who is not slim or fair but the way most of the population of that geographical area actually is. She even has a 'bold' scene where after she realizes her love for a guy, she shamelessly stares at him in the class (which normally is  considered as a man's fundamental right). Well that's what is bold in real sense and not a bikini clad heroine. Watching that scene had me in splits and left a deep urge in me to go back to college and  make a man blush like that lol 😂The director himself expressed in an interview that the "kam kapdewali" bold heroine is a man's fantasy  and women are running a wrong race..😂 True that!

The movie addresses a very prevalent social evil -honour killing. Few days back I watched a documentary where a mother who had lost her daughter said it's obvious that when a daughter marries out of her will ,the men in the family have every right to be enraged and kill her( mind you it was same caste) .That had really appalled me. We speak of women empowerment emotionally physically financially and so on. But in another part of the same society there are places where a woman is not entitled to have a will of her own, forget following it. In Sairat the girl is bold enough to ride a royal enfield and has the guts to boss over ten men at once (in a small village) ,but when she falls for a guy of lower caste her world turns upside down. Well, I fail to understand why in our society the "izzat" of a family is enclosed in a daughter's vagina and why not in the son's so called balls !!

What the film very effectively portrays is the play of power politics and caste politics in a small village of India. A boy slaps his teacher for stopping him from speaking on his phone inside the class because he is from the most powerful family in the village. His father even compliments him saying that the boy has inherited his grandfather's rage. This kind of upbringing of men happens in real and until this happens there will always be men whose ego is insatiable and who will have a compulsion to enforce it on their women. This in turn is obviously going to lead to evils like honour killing.

Altogether Sairat was an enriching cinematic but earthy experience with an insight to realities of our society accompanied with the thrill of a great love story! This one is going to be one of my favourites forever! 😀