It is ages since I wrote a post. For one, I have been rather caught up. More importantly, for some time now I have been struck by the sheer futility, even meaninglessness of all this writing. So much so a few weeks ago in one Luddite rush of ennui I nearly deleted all these posts.
I have been beside myself with a strange rush of feelings and thoughts all of today, to a point where I felt I just had to write, however silly what I have to write may be.
Through most of yesterday I have been totally preoccupied with two stories in the media: The build up to the scrapping of 370 and the final decision of the cabinet before it was brought to the Parliament. A completely different story I have been shocked by is that of this young IAS officer, Sriram Venkitaraman, crashing his car into a young journalist. It is a sad story of how how two young promising lives and careers can be snuffed out in a short while by a cruel destiny that seems to be tied in a tragically surreal manner.
Most of my day has gone by keeping track of these stories in the media.
It is not those preoccupations that made me write this post though. For reasons I still dont know - an expression that you must have read me repeat ever so often now - I was reminded of this ghazal by Jgajit Singh and Chitra Singh that was a constant companion of mine in my college days in Madras of those days.
Those were also the early days of a long distance relationship that never came to be. Looking back, it was designed not to happen.
That probably is the distinguishing charm of youth. The audacity or folly of going after something without, giving a damn as to whether it makes sense or if it could ever be realised. The total absence of reason and pragmatism.
So I spent days, months and years visualising a future, in complete obsessive detail. As I lived the black and white life of Mungeri Lal of the Haseen Sapne TV serial fame, Jagjit and Chitra's ghazals provided the much needed musical backdrop to my flights of fancy that appear so crazy and even more scatter-brained than the oscillations across time and space in the Marvel movie that I watched with my wife and sons recently.
Tonight as I listened to Duniya Jise Kehte Hain memories of those days in my Dad's simple CPWD flat in Besant Nagar, rushed back into my mind. You can listen to it here if you wish to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jimfkv8MhKg
I remembered the number of times I must have rewound the old hissy magnetic tape to listen to the album of ghazals again and again and again, until I could remember exactly where the singer's breath got just a wee bit louder on the tape, where the note on the harmonium was a tad less sharp...till my poor exasperated mother would ask me if I would never tire of these replays that she could not escape from in those pre-Amazon-discounted-head-phone days. Poor woman, little did she realise that I was creating a large archive of memories, unknown to myself!
Yet that is not what made me write this post. But it is this growing feeling in me these days as I approach sixty, as I realise that there is not an awful lot that I can do in the years left in the world, that there was precious little that I did in the years that I possibly could have, that made me want to write this post. That overbearing sense of has been, sense of nothingness, a barren past portending an even more barren future in what is left of life.
Then I ask myself how would this night have been different, if I had done everything that I had wanted to back then. Would it have been any different if I had made it to the civil services which I probably did not put enough fight into? Would it have been any different if my long distance adventures had turned out differently?
Probably not I guess. The same sense of weariness, the same sense of heaviness of a past that has gone by would prevail perhaps. The same sense of resignation that somewhere in the distant future these nights shall join that collage of memories that haunt me today, until one day I sink slowly into that happy abyss of not being able to remember anything.
Nanni...Namaskaaram...
I have been beside myself with a strange rush of feelings and thoughts all of today, to a point where I felt I just had to write, however silly what I have to write may be.
Through most of yesterday I have been totally preoccupied with two stories in the media: The build up to the scrapping of 370 and the final decision of the cabinet before it was brought to the Parliament. A completely different story I have been shocked by is that of this young IAS officer, Sriram Venkitaraman, crashing his car into a young journalist. It is a sad story of how how two young promising lives and careers can be snuffed out in a short while by a cruel destiny that seems to be tied in a tragically surreal manner.
Most of my day has gone by keeping track of these stories in the media.
It is not those preoccupations that made me write this post though. For reasons I still dont know - an expression that you must have read me repeat ever so often now - I was reminded of this ghazal by Jgajit Singh and Chitra Singh that was a constant companion of mine in my college days in Madras of those days.
Those were also the early days of a long distance relationship that never came to be. Looking back, it was designed not to happen.
That probably is the distinguishing charm of youth. The audacity or folly of going after something without, giving a damn as to whether it makes sense or if it could ever be realised. The total absence of reason and pragmatism.
So I spent days, months and years visualising a future, in complete obsessive detail. As I lived the black and white life of Mungeri Lal of the Haseen Sapne TV serial fame, Jagjit and Chitra's ghazals provided the much needed musical backdrop to my flights of fancy that appear so crazy and even more scatter-brained than the oscillations across time and space in the Marvel movie that I watched with my wife and sons recently.
Tonight as I listened to Duniya Jise Kehte Hain memories of those days in my Dad's simple CPWD flat in Besant Nagar, rushed back into my mind. You can listen to it here if you wish to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jimfkv8MhKg
I remembered the number of times I must have rewound the old hissy magnetic tape to listen to the album of ghazals again and again and again, until I could remember exactly where the singer's breath got just a wee bit louder on the tape, where the note on the harmonium was a tad less sharp...till my poor exasperated mother would ask me if I would never tire of these replays that she could not escape from in those pre-Amazon-discounted-head-phone days. Poor woman, little did she realise that I was creating a large archive of memories, unknown to myself!
Yet that is not what made me write this post. But it is this growing feeling in me these days as I approach sixty, as I realise that there is not an awful lot that I can do in the years left in the world, that there was precious little that I did in the years that I possibly could have, that made me want to write this post. That overbearing sense of has been, sense of nothingness, a barren past portending an even more barren future in what is left of life.
Then I ask myself how would this night have been different, if I had done everything that I had wanted to back then. Would it have been any different if I had made it to the civil services which I probably did not put enough fight into? Would it have been any different if my long distance adventures had turned out differently?
Probably not I guess. The same sense of weariness, the same sense of heaviness of a past that has gone by would prevail perhaps. The same sense of resignation that somewhere in the distant future these nights shall join that collage of memories that haunt me today, until one day I sink slowly into that happy abyss of not being able to remember anything.
Nanni...Namaskaaram...
