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!  
😇

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! 😀

Sense vs sensational

As already obvious I am a huge movie buff and love to read books and articles on how a film is conceptualised ,written, cast ,shot ,edited ; how an actor prepares or a cinematographer visualizes ; what is the director's vision and things which are really about the craft. But such articles are really not even 1% of what media writes about cinema. Most of the promotional interviews too have the (ironically) path breaking questions like how it is to work with each other or a funny incident on sets. Lol😂  I understand paparazzi is interested in celebrities and their personal lives. All of us are curious to some extent. But how much is fine?  We find articles ranging from Salman's nephew to who is doing who, star kids participating in a school competition to even how some star kid has a hot girlfriend. Recently Kangana-Hrithik issue was blown so much that a famous daily had a full page displaying  personal mail information with important words highlighted! How ridiculous is that! As individuals we always fear being judged for what we are. But when it's about celebrities it doesn't take even a full minute to form an opinion. It's also about  media sensationalism where there is no word called 'neutrality' .I feel saddened by such humongous media attention on a frivolous issue. Forget cinema, even if there is a serious debate in Parliament, its reported as how someone gave it back to someone else or how the former shut up the latter as if its happening in a rohit shetty/prabhu deva movie where dialogue-baazi happens between the hero and villain to prove who is stronger. We absolutely fail to have a rational debate. If a celebrity gave any statement against popular opinion, time is not spent to counter what he/she said but on how he doesn't have the right to have that opinion. I just wish that so called increasing literacy rate over the years has some actual effect on how we understand democracy, or atleast on the basic etiquettes of having a meaningful debate!!

I know there exists a whole community which craves for sensible  journalism be it any field. It's visible every now and then on social media. Thanks to internet that we atleast have a space to appreciate and encourage good work. Some hope!!

When life sucks..

Few days ago I had so much to write. My thoughts were flowing incessantly and it was difficult for me to pin down a certain thing among many in my head. Then suddenly came a string of failures in my life. What was definite according to me became a fantasy in a fraction of second. It's painful to deal with failure when you know it's your fault, atleast partially. But its mind numbing when you are not even responsible for it. It is challenging  already to convince people that you deserve success but to maintain the self confidence that you are still worthy is the bigger challenge in a crisis. So with the state of mind of a tragedy movie and the melancholy feel of jagjit singh songs in my head ,my thoughts were in a never ending abyss when I saw the interview of one of the few individuals I really tremendously look up to -Anurag Kashyap !

This brilliant man at the starting of his career had made 3 films but were not releasing due to censorship for several years. But he made it through all that and gave us Black Friday, Gulaal, Dev D, Gangs of wasseypur. I am not much a fan of dark films and sometimes can't even handle his way of portraying violence, but I am a great admirer of his cinema and his undying passion for it. Last year ,he had given us Bombay velvet - his dream project for a decade with a massive budget never attempted by him before, which later happened to become a commercial flop. Well,worst part didn't end there. Along with loosing his money and a part of his confidence this man was surrounded by an industry which was sadistically happy about it. But instead of sulking in it ,he found his flaws soon, accepted it and is already prepared to showcase his next venture this year. What made this happen was that he didn't let the failure suck him up inside.

Similar phase comes in everyone's life. When you hit rock bottom you really don't ve anything to loose. All that needs to be done is that you shouldn't let those negative draining thoughts to pull you down and let them sink and drown you, but just go ahead and believe in yourself no matter what. Keep doing what you want to do. One day or the other the world will notice and applaud ! Even if not , you will be peaceful and happy!  😃

Me vs society

Remember my post about life being a quadratic equation? Well from few days my mind is going round and round finding solutions for one such complicated equation of my life.

Meanwhile it was mothers day yesterday and it made me think about my complicated but beautiful relationship with my mother. I have been the focus of her world for years now. She raised to me to be an independent person with enough freedom to create my own set of thoughts and beliefs. Often we don't agree, major reason being that we belong to different worlds and our perceptions are most times different if not opposite. I am a pure sagitarrian guarding my freedom at every occasion possible and she tries to put the free spirit I am into the frame of society. Our priorities mainly differs when it's about individual vs society. I can see her point too , since i do agree that certain rules are very much needed to bind and maintain a stability of sorts in the society. We are all social beings and societal approval is needed for a peaceful co existence. But does it guarantee inner peace ? If not then what's more important?

Coming to think of it , all our decisions are mostly directly proportional to either the importance we give to what we believe is right or what society upholds as right. We are often like pendulums dwindling between these two extremes trying to find our ground somewhere in the middle. Its a fact that we are entities of this whole and if we change, the society changes too. But this constant evolution is a very slow process. Therefore, trying to be the change we want to be in the transformation phase becomes the hardest part of being a part of the society.

The insecurity ghost!

As humans we are all a bundle of insecurities. Some of them depend on how others treats us and some on how we treat ourselves.
      Society often tries to point it out to us if we are tall enough, rich enough, successful enough according to its own barometers . Hence, one of our biggest struggles turn out to be keeping these insecurities under check and being strong enough to not believe in them. But a greater struggle is when we have to deal with our own securities ; those which emerge out of self- doubt. Although some of these are true and come with a sense of reality ; some of these are apparent and emerge because of our own comparisons with everyone around. All of these together persists in our mind deep down but tend to be invisible in a happy confident state of mind. However, when we hit a kind of rock bottom, all these negative thoughts suddenly go on in our mind like some audio cassette in auto play mode. We tend to believe in the negative things more than the positive. Likewise,I was going through a similar phase when I happened to randomly read about converting insecurities into our capabilities ; like that famous quote of building a castle out of bricks thrown at you. Better said than done , I agree. But it may not be impossible right? If we look into it, these thoughts arise because of our own denial of our flaws sometimes. Accepting them wholeheartedly for once, may be the first step. What if we are short,dark or a little extra curvy, until we are healthy we should love and accept ourselves however we are. That's how God wanted us to be and let's admire his creativity. However, when it is not about physicality let's not blame God and limit ourselves since he has given our mind infinite capabilities we are at times unaware of. No one is perfect but he has made all of us special and unique. Why judge ourselves from someone else's perception and make a flaw out of it. Instead of whining that we are different from others,let's be proud of it!  Let us find that special unique part in ourselves and celebrate it. Perhaps, that can convert our insecurities into capabilities !! :-)

The power of silence

Have you ever thought of running away from a place because everyone around suddenly fell silent in the middle of a  conversation?  Well i have. As a teenager I used to have constant chatter in my head and felt quite uneasy in situations where I had no choice but remain silent. With time,experience and a little maturity I have struck a deal with silence and often find comfort in it now. I ve realized that quieter you become , more you hear yourself and connect. Moreover , in certain circumstances silence is a far safer option because meaningful silence is always better than meaningless words. However, silence can even be fun when used to torture the one who expects you to be enraged. But astonishingly, have you ever noticed that silence can be so paradoxical. It can be beautiful or painful depending on the circumstances.
      It is love when two people are dying to speak but don't know where to start from. It is hurt when the same duo doesn't have anything left to say.
      It is solace when u want to converse with yourself ; irritating when you are running away from your truth.
      It is breathtakingly beautiful when silence is between you and nature ; numbingly painful when amidst the same nature you feel lonely.
But they say even pain is beautiful occasionally !  Not such a paradox may be ? :-/