One

So many times I feel I disappear,

When love fills up the atmosphere,

Feeling light, I feel so free,

I dont understand what's wrong with me!

The music is going down into me,

From the head right into the knee.

I forget worries, I forget all pain,

Only sounds flow into my pulmonary vein,

The heartbeat is perfect percussion,

Strings of nerves complete composition.

The music is going down into me,

From the head right into the knee.

I slowly, lose my identity

Becoming the music, the music becoming me,

Every tune reminds me of someone,

That is how, you and I will be one.

The music is going down into me,

From the head right into the knee.

Chhotu

This one is a song that I wrote on child labour.

Sadak pe woh so raha,

sabse pehle uth gaya,

Chai ko chulhe pe rakhkar,

Signal pe akhbar bech raha..

To usne kaha chhotu..ek cutting le aa…

To usne kaha chhotu..ek cutting toh pila…

Uska beta school gaya..

Chhotu wahin reh gaya..

Bacchpan se kaam kar ke,

Woh tees pe boodha ho gaya..

To usne kaha chhotu…ek cutting le aa..

To usne kaha chhotu..ek cutting pila..

Chhotu ki shaadi ho gayi,

Usko beta ho gaya,

Chai banane ka kaam ko,

Ek naya chhotu mil gaya…

To usne kaha chhotu…ek cutting le aa..

To uske bête ne kaha chhotu..ek cutting le aa..

Yeh kahani hai us gareeb ki,

Jo aapke ghar ka naukar hai,

Taleem na mili usko,

Kya paisa hi sab kucch hai?

To aap na kehna chhotu..ek cutting le aa..

Par yeh kehna chhotu…tu school kyon nahi gaya!!??

Mitr-My Friend

In a family of a couple and a daughter, what does it take of a woman to be an ideal mother, of a girl to be an ideal daughter and of a man to be an ideal husband?  And besides, the woman is also a wife and the man is also a father. These are one of the most difficult set of questions in the world.  The difficulty of this question can be aptly be expressed by a quote under the Western Express Flyover in Bandra. It says, "The child gives birth to a mother." Mothers and fathers, husbands and wives and daughters can never exist in solitude. 


There is always a person required to have a relationship with because of whom the title gets bestowed to one.  Talking about these titles, the roles played by these titles and the complexities which come of it, Revathy's directorial debut "Mitr-My Friend" could not have done more justice to this subject.


The National Award winning movie has a talented cast with Shobana (playing the role of the mother and the wife) pulling off an unbelievably realistic performance, the veteran actor Nasser Abdullah (the husband and the father)  making a thought provoking impact with his simplistic style of acting and Preeti Vissa (the daughter) delivering all the facets of a rebellious child born and brought up in America.


Lakshmi (played by Shobana) is a traditional woman from Chidambaram, a small town in South India who gets married to Prithvi (played by Naseer Abdullah) who is working abroad. The two have a daughter, Divya(played by Preeti Vissa) who goes to school in America. The plot revolves around their lives in the foreign land, where moral and family values are way different from those in the small town of Chidambaram, or they appear so.  


The movie successfully throws light on the three relationships. But what is most impressive is that  it emphasizes that three relationships are actually six perspectives. The dynamics of a relationship depend on both, person A and person B.  In the case of this movie, Revathy, in her directorial debut itself, shows the directorial skills of a master by showing the subtle influences of the third family member on a relationship between any two family members. 


The movie looks at the uselessness felt by the traditional Indian woman, who is essentially a home maker. The monotony felt by her with the household work day in-day out. The lack of love and romance in her life with a busy and uncaring husband. The hurt experienced by her with every tantrum of her teen daughter. Also, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. So it was fairly expressed why the husband and the daughter behaved so. It was because the home maker had turned into a nagging, clinging and hyperactive house cop. 


Last but not the least, what touched me most in the film is Shobana's performance as the mother. The emotional input that a mother has in a relationship with her child is far superior and greater than any other relationship in this world, that we all know. But what this movie brings to the front is that with a certain smile of a child, the mother abandons any disappointment or upset regarding any heated argument with the child. That is magical and unique to the relationship of a mother with her child. 

An important facet of the film expresses the importance of a friend. No matter how happy or sad a family is, a friend is always in need.  The role of friends as saviours in grave situations is exhibited more than once by Prithvi's friend Pam and Lakshmi's friend Steve. Most importantly, the movie shows how a family ultimately needs to be woven by the relationship of friendship more than anything else.

So the next time, you think about your mother and why she is so, stop. Just know that she needs a friend. Be her friend. And you will have given her more than she ever wanted. 


A family can never be unhappy with a mother who is fulfilled as an individual and loved and cared for. 


All in all, one of the most beautiful films that I have watched in a long time. 


All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does.  That's his.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895

The Old and The New

Hello my friends, a song I sing for you now,
About life, dreams unfulfilled, and realities wow.

Yeah, life's quite a rush,
And there is no time for mush,
Those teenage days are gone,
When sleep was what we did in the morn.

Some people are gone, some still hold on,
Some have come back and some show us a new dawn.
Failiure shows us its face when we don't want it to,
Victory, acts like a pricy girl I wanna woo.

And yet life goes on, phase to phase,
Filled with surprises is this lovely maze,
Too much thought will get us into a haze,
So come on guys, let's spring up the craze.

Meet me this Sunday, when the eve is bright,
We shall laugh together till its dark and no light,
Life will seem breezy once again,
I will be ready for Monday, from heart and from brain.

Peace.

It is an uneasy process. There is garbage and filth all around. And then there are people, including me, who exist in this smelly backyard of this house whose owner lives now in New South Wales. Some have big noses, some have no eyeballs. Some have dirty teeth. They all speak mean things. They all wanted to go to a certain place. And only one of them would be the chosen one. So they would fight to go to the place. Every day.

No one knew how to go there. Though, they knew that there was a definite secret to do so.

Across the world, there are millions of such weird people who meet everyday across hundreds of countries in such backyards, who want to go to that place

I lie there. With my clothes torn, with a headache of a different kind. I am numb. There is no sensation. There is only noise that they all make which disturbs me. It hinders my thought process. I don't know what to do next. I want to go to that place too.

You must be thinking what this place that I am talking about really is. It is a place of peace. A place of satisfaction. A place of fulfillment. A place where all retribution ceases to exist by the power of the feat performed. At this place, nothing will matter.

I suddenly see that everything is different. I cannot see anything but a white screen. I go to touch it and realise that there is nothing there. It is not tangible. There is an endless expanse of white. There is no end. And I turn to look at where it begins and as expected, I see that there is no beginning either. I look down to see the colour of the floor. There is no floor. I seem to suspended be in the midst of white.

And all so suddenly, I am back in the filthy little backyard again. I find myself suffering from a lingering hangover which makes my mean comrades sound louder and more irritating.

I wonder what happened in that one moment. The beautiful place that I was in, only for a moment. I thought I had reached that place. Why couldn't I have stayed there and more importantly, how did I really get there?

It struck me. I had closed my eyes. It dawns on me. The process is not uneasy. It is the easiest. What really is difficult, is the decision to shut the eye.

Let Me Take You To a Different Place

To Vasundhara (the Environment Club of Symbiosis Centre for Management Studies-Undergraduate),

Let me take you to a different place,

Where no regrets come to your face,

Everyone you meet, you embrace,

Life goes on at a different pace.

There is nothing to bog you down,

When you make the best use of your crown,

Where hindrances cease to matter,

Because every obstacle you will shatter.

Let me take you to a different place,

A place, with quite a heavenly grace,

No honking, no traffic jams,

Only breezy weather and beautiful dams.

Peace and Calm enter your head,

Every night you go smiling to bed,

Every morning is when you take another birth

From the womb of your living room’s hearth.

Let me take you to a different place,

Where government problems are very scarce,

Where competition is necessarily fair,

And nothing possibly, gives you a scare.

Your eyes open and you realize,

To be in dreamland is not wise,

Your actions will be the magic broom,

That makes this planet Jannat or Jahannum.

The Fool

Another of my attempts at writing songs....

Roaming on the roads alone,
Early in the hours of wee,
I found a fool finding his clone,
Did he really know what he wanted to see?

He touched his head to the ground,
Arose and touched his face,
Yelled a bit to see how he sounds,
"An idiot", he thought, "I am a disgrace"

Why was he afraid,
Who was he scared of?
What on his mind played?
Did he play cricket or did he play golf?

I wished I could talk to him,
An interesting personality was he,
Couldn't get what was his milk,
Only saw himself skim with glee.

Madness took him over,
He started playing with the drain cover,
Thought about all that happened unnecessarily,
Would you be surprised if i told you it was me?

The Dark Lord of Quant

We all have dreams to talk about but we know that some just win that 'Best Dream' award for whatsoever reason. I had such a dream last night. It ranked highest in terms of connectivity to my life and creativity.

To give you a brief background of my life nowadays, I am preparing for CAT 2010 and all the exams that follow in the season.

Coming back to the point, why I feel "Connectivity to my life" is an important criteria for ranking a dream is because some dreams are mindblowing, but take a lifetime or more to connect to our current life, that is, we cannot make any sense of them. For example, I had a dream that air borne seeds turned into poisonous insects and crowded the ceiling of my living room. Absolute vagueness.

The Dark Lord refers to none other than Voldemort. Now Voldemort haunted yet another part of this world. The world of Quant (Quantitative Ability). I could not see him in my dream. This was because his movement was as fast as his speed at calculation. In this episode, Voldemort would move in and out of the bodies of humans without a second of delay. So that was at least what I thought, initially. His dominance and power emerged from only one virtue- his prowess at manipulating and dealing with numbers. He used numbers to calculate the fate of what lay inside of the volume of the human body- its concept and character- the soul.

I could make something of it. I understood his magic. It was Co-ordinate Geometry. It was simple. He would map various locations of the person's body (finger tips, elbows etc) on Plane x, Plane Y and Plane Z. A crucial position for his magic to work would be the coordinate points of the person's brain. With this data he would use Distance and Section Formulae to determine the obvious. Also, the normal time in which a person responds to a certain stimulus would be the normal reflex time for that person. With the distance and the speed, the Lord would then know at what speed a confusing impulse is to be sent to that part of the body not only to instruct it to do something else, but also for it to not receive the impulse from the brain in the normal reflex time.

In this way, contrary to what I thought, the Dark Lord would control human beings from the outside. Coordinate Geometry was all that it was.

I did wake up scared as hell at 2 am. This was quite similar to the experience of a certain Mr. Potter in some other world, wasn't it? But I wouldn't know if I was his counterpart. I had no scar.

So what's your best dream?

The Difficult Step

Random thought.

Sometimes, the thing that stops us from going ahead is the fear of the enormousness of the unknown.