Music is a time machine

The ticking voice tells me it’s time to stop waiting,

The chirping birds pause to yawn and stretch their wings,

Roaring waves crash into my feet and pull away the world from beneath.

Watch this ad for Bose headphones. It says Music is a time machine, and I couldn’t agree more.

Most of the music that I listen to has come to me through someone's recommendation. I think sharing music is an act of bonding; it brings you closer. I recently read a book called Love Letter to the Dead. It is a young adult fiction where the protagonist writes letters to people who died young, mostly musicians, like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix among others. There are different people who introduce her to these artists, and a little part of these friends gets absorbed in her. She is in that impressionable age when you get swayed by others’ personality and personal style, and build your own in the process.

My taste in music is quite eclectic; thanks to all kinds of friends I have had who exposed me to different kinds of music. It is only now that I have started discovering music on my own.

Like a time machine, I can get transported to different phases of my life by listening to a particular song. So many songs have acted like soundtracks of my life and just by listening to them I realize how far I have come.

These days I am listening to Adele’s new album, 25. She is one of my most favourites. Here is the song that is on loop right now (I love doing that!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot7lw6kjr0s

I love her live performances!

P.S: I have a funny theory. So. I listen to music when I go for my walk in the evening. Same playlist every day. So as soon as the music starts, I get into the groove of working out and I feel totally pumped up. I imagine how walking is helping me lose weight and tone my butt. Now the theory is - if Pavlov could condition his dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, can't I condition my calories to start burning when these songs start playing? So I can just listen to these songs and don't actually go for the walk :P What do you think? Makes sense, no? If only I could prove that, I'd be a genius. And also lose some weight in the process. I'll get a patent on that idea so that I don't have to work a single day after some scientists validate it. What life, ah!

“I don’t want to grow up because then nobody will love me”

“I don’t want to grow up because then nobody will love me,” said the 13-year-old me while throwing tantrums about not wanting to do something. I don’t know how I came to that conclusion. I had watched enough romantic movies by then, so ideally I should have fantasized about love stories. But that never happened.

Kids are very expressive. My 4-year-old niece squeals when she sees me, gives me tight hugs and sudden kisses, throws herself in my arms and tells me about all the new things she discovers. And the ease with which she does it makes it infectious; you can’t help but feel gooey.

While I had been pampered silly while growing up, I had never seen public display of affection in adults. I have never seen my parents hold hands or say lovely things to each other. I am sure there was (is) love and understanding and trust and all those things that make a relationship strong, but never a tangible expression of that. It’s cute to see them go on phuchka dates now, and mumble ‘I love you’ on the phone, something they have picked up from us. ‘Ok, bye, take care, love you’ comes in a flow, and they don’t mind saying it to each other because it has become a habit. And habit is what defines their love for each other. There is no romance in a habit, just some comfort and security. And that is apparently enough to sustain a relationship.

A few days ago I watched a Bengali movie called Belaseshe. The literal translation of the name would be ‘At the end of the day’. It is about an elderly couple and their middle aged kids. After almost 50 years of marriage the husband wants to divorce his wife on the grounds that he has never experienced love from her. The film goes through an emotional reflection of what constitutes love and how a relationship endures the test of time. It is funny in bits and sentimental in parts.

I watched another interesting movie yesterday. The Lobster. Set in a dystopian world, it tells the story of a city where singles are given 45 days to find a romantic partner before they are turned into an animal. The movie won the Jury award in Cannes last year. It is a satire on how the society forces us to find a match. The overarching metaphor was funny. Dark humour. It says how you need to find a matching defect in each other to be able to live together for the rest of your life.

And then there are songs like ‘More than words’ and ‘Love is a verb’ that preach: It is not about the spoken but the unspoken, the actions that express love.

In one of our sessions on non-verbal communication, a teacher mentioned that there are three kinds of expression of love – spoken word, touch and acts of service. Everyone has a specific style and preference of expression. E.g. If your partner understands and seeks love through words of affirmation, no amount of holding hands will communicate your love.

What do you guys think? How do you express love? Is it really needed to profess love again and again? Or is it something to be understood?

Blogathon *ready steady grow*

With this new year comes a new resolution. To write more. I remember there was a time when I used to love writing about mundane things on my blog - like what I had for breakfast and who is pissing me off in college. Haha. I don't know when I decided to stop talking about such lovely trivial things. I love to talk about random things, and I have not done that here in so long. I looked back at some of my older posts, and I could sense the gloom dripping from them. I need to make this blog a happy place again. I can't lose my mojo (oh that over-used term)!

So I am going to participate in my first-ever blogathon, which means I will be posting every day all through this month. That's a big commitment. I have never done that before. But I think it will push me to think and start writing again. It will be my way back into old-school blogging.

I love how some people can remain anonymous and pour out about their lives, their thoughts, their fears, their little quirks on their blog. A chronicle of their life, instead of just a place where they opine. I think there is a strange comfort in talking to people you don't know. It is so much easier to open up to someone you are not going to meet again. I have met many such people, a conversation or two and you feel so 'connected'. In the next moment both of you are on your way, happy that your paths crossed at some point.

Here's to more blogging and more connection!

I am going to see you again tomorrow!

Give me Red

Picture of me in front of a fun grafitti, somewhere in Bombay :)

Another year draws to an end and I am back with another milestone blogpost. If there has to be a New Year resolution, it would have to be to write more often, on this blog and elsewhere. 2015 was neither a long year nor a short year, it was clearly divided into two halves. First half so different from the second. First part of the year had heartbreaks, chaos, soulful travelling and a promotion at work. Second part of the year was about cleansing my system, organizing the world around me and making some life-altering decisions. So yes, 2015 was a landmark year of my life. And 2016 is going to be another new beginning to yet another realm of life.

If I have to describe 2015 in one word it would be Clarity. As we grow older, we start becoming more skeptical. The innocence wears off and we start doubting everything around us. This year I have literally torn down my naïve self and donned the hat of a cynic. And yet I know the child in me is alive. I revel in the tiny pleasures of life but still feel so detached from the world. I hope I can take this sense of detachment with me to my old age. In a way I have become more self-centered, perhaps. I have experienced moments of truth where I have questioned my existence and why all of us exist anyway. I have mused about listening to my heart or my brain, and realized that a very different core directs my actions. It is neither my heart nor my brain. When I peek deep within me, I sense a voice – is it the gut? the subconscious? – a voice within, who is with me all the time. A witness to my life, my thoughts (brain), my feelings (heart) and all my actions (gut). Is this voice my soul? A soul preserved in a body. This year I have understood the role and place of my brain, heart, gut, soul and body in my life. These are not just concepts, these are truths that I have felt.

2015 was beyond my expectations – the highs as well as the lows. Last year I could have never imagined where I am today. Somehow, I felt more in control of things around me although they didn’t always go according to my will. Maybe because I didn’t try to take control of the things around me, but let them be. I have bawled, been depressed, felt lonely, laughed, felt ecstatic, grateful and blessed - all in one year.

The color of this year is Red. Blood red. Color of a thumping heart. Gone are the days of Yellows and Greens and Blue. For the uninitiated, every year I sum up the year gone by with a color, just like how Pantone does. Haha. But in my case, the color is about what has happened in my life in that year and how I have felt.

Hope you guys had a good year too! Wish you the best of everything you need and want.

S

Scent of a memory

Image courtesy: www.skottieyoung.com

The other day my dad mused, "If our mind had the capacity to remember everything, like a huge hard drive, our lives would be miserable and we would be dead by 50." 

Internet today has made it difficult to forget things. That song with funny lyrics you had heard when it was blaring outside your house during board exams? Go to YouTube and you might be able to find it. Remember that neighbour you had from years ago, she might be on Facebook. Oh her kids have got married. The married brother-in-law of the neighbour is present in the graduation ceremony of their third kid. Wow! They do look old. Zoom into their profile picture and you can also see their wrinkles.

Ah! Memories and Nostalgia!

Is nostalgia a bad thing? Those fading memories with a sweet aftertaste. Experiences that look sweeter because they are in the past? Memories are malleable. When you look back you only remember a figment of those moments under a veil of bittersweetness. 

Or are these reality checks of timelines memory a better deal? When you can constantly trace back your roots, and realize how foolish your hairstyle looked in your first profile picture. What about people with amnesia? Not remembering anything - good or bad - is that a better curse than remembering everything in detail?

I am glad there is no Google search for smells. The scent of that first kiss, scent of your mother's recipe of kosha mangsho, waft of tulsi chandan in that temple behind your grandparents' house in Varanasi. Or the stench of fish market on your way to the service apartment in a foreign country. Or the smell of strong musk worn by the uncle that pinched your cheeks for no reason.

Smell is the ideal route of nostalgia and memories. They snap you back into another world. Narrow lanes of your mind map, connecting different stories, holding milestones, scars and badges at every other corner.

Unlike thoughts, memories related to smells only come to you when you experience something similar again. It is difficult to define a smell and store it in a memory box. Unlike a memento that carries the map to revisit old memories, there are no tokens of scents that you can hold on to.

It is this transient feeling of a scent that makes it so irresistible and mysterious. Who knows what I may smell next and which lanes I may walk again. Like Alice in Wonderland you keep slipping into labyrinths as it fuzzily, gently keeps reminding you of a hazy past.

S turns 27 *zen*

I have not written here in so long that now I can’t find words to string together and make sense. The only ritual I have followed religiously on this blog for the last few years is Birthday posts. So here I am writing about my 27^th birthday. From as long ago as I can remember, I always wanted to turn 27. I thought I would be a strong, mature, independent woman by then. I think in teenage years, 27 felt very far away. And now I am just a stone’s throw away from the big O. Life here on is going to change rapidly.

I took a short weekend trip to Pondicherry after my birthday. To feel and hold my life in this moment, before my cynical grown-up self catches up with my naïve, carefree self. It was another solo travel – my first in India – after the ones in Europe and China.

At Promenade beach in Pondicherry (technically it is not a beach, don't know why they call it a beach)

In last one year, I have traveled to 6 countries. And sometimes I can’t believe I am that person who has traveled so much, absorbed so much, all on her own. I am not a typical adventurous person. People who know me from before consider me to be a shy person who lives in her own world. To step out of that comfort zone and travel, make friends and family out of strangers, is nothing less than a miracle. I surprise myself.

And that is what the year of 27 has been about. Surprising myself. I have learnt that magic does not need tricks. Sometimes it catches you off-guard, and sometimes you can make it happen.

Growing up, people tell you about letting go and moving on. They tend to imply that you must forget everything that pulls you down and start anew. But from my experience I have come to believe that you don’t have to let go to move on. All my past experiences make me who I am. If something pulls me down, I like to sit down with it, immerse myself in that void, test my tensile strength and then spring back. I don’t want to let go. I want to frame it and hang it on the wall. It is a piece of me. I just have to accept it as a part of myself and live. Not let go. But fuse it within.

I realized that so many of my blog-friends, almost all of them, who were there with me when I had just started out, don’t write anymore. I went to the blogs of some of them last week, and the last blog entries from years ago made me sad. We started out when Social Media was not as we know it today - there was no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - Blogging was more fun then. I feel old now. Haha.

Cheers to more writing, more travel and more stories.

Love,

S

Edited to add: I forgot to mention what I did on my birthday. I had a great time with the people I love :) Cut three wonderful cakes - one that my mom got, one that my colleagues got and one that my friends got. I also got a Kindle and my first diamond as birthday gifts (haha ;) notice how I call it the 'first' diamond hehe. Many more to be bought later). So a happy birthday was had.

For previous posts in Birthday series -
When S turned 23
When S turned 24
When S turned 25
When S turned 26

A trip to Bhutan, a travelogue

You guys are missing all the fun I am having on my travel blog. Come! Visit me no?

A couple of months ago, I visited Bhutan and stayed there for 2 weeks. I visited Thimphu, Wangdue, Haa and Paro. It was a beautiful experience. And you don't know anything about it, coz you have not read my travel blog ~furious~

So here, I am making it easy for you (click on the links):

Part 1 of the travelogue - I talk about my first impression of Bhutan, the highlights of the trip, and the account of the first two days in Thimphu.

Part 2 of the travelogue - I take you through Wangdue and Phobjika Valley Trail and tell you all about the Divine Madman of Bhutan.

Part 3 of the travelogue - I give you a glimpse of the annual cultural festival that takes place in Paro during spring time, called Paro Tshechu.

Come, see Bhutan through me! :) And there are loads of beautiful, breath taking, interesting pictures too!

Ok, enough hard selling, I know you'll come coz you love reading my posts, right? :D Heehee!