BUS JOURNEYS AND EMOTIONS

An extremely damaged and worn-out foot board, an equally tired driver and an irritated-by-the-mundane-affairs and detached conductor. All this, plus a sitting junta, who throw these expressions ranging from pity to frustration and happiness, looking at the standing junta, for whom right then, right there, getting a seat is the sole purpose of life. All this and much more on a simple routine journey by the city bus irrespective of which part of India you live in and which place. Leaving alone the fact whether it is a village, town or a city, these experiences would be common among the entire fraction of the Indian population that have traveled, and continue to do so, by the great Indian mode of transport-Public buses. All of you will relate to this one thing, this one common race.

Now, the days when you are drained out of all the energy you embraced the day with, in the morning, traveling by the city bus can become very painful and emotionally torturing. That very day, all the unlucky stars in the cosmos, that belong to your horoscope, will look down on you and smile saying a NO to all your desires of having a comfortable seat to sit on, for the journey ahead. You stand there with all the hope (although there is an abyss down the hourglass of hope) that some one will get off soon and you can land your body there. This very magnitude of hope, which if invested in various other realms of life, wouldn’t get wasted this colossally. Anyway, you continue to stand there, sleep wades its way through your senses, and you start thinking about whom you got irritated with, in the college and which lecturer did something funny today to grant you your daily dose of mass-laughter with the rest of the class. Who said something funny, what would Mom say as soon as you enter the house, what food would be waiting for you at the dining table, how you would spend that evening, which song you’ll play and listen to and so on. First, you ran out of energy, then you ran out of hope and now it is the “thoughts’” that should possibly perish, because that is the only entity left.

Thoughts cease to run out. They are always there in abundance in your head and they continue to replenish themselves. Thoughts, nice thoughts, bitter thoughts, happy thoughts, short thoughts, endless thoughts, appalling thoughts, strange thoughts, scary thoughts, dreamy thoughts, beautiful thoughts, disgusting thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts…… And then, clinking of metal. You smell sweat, a day’s accumulated dirt, and Khakis. In a moment, you come out of the sea of thoughts and feel the ground. The conductor asks you where you are heading. End of exchange-cash and a few words. Thoughts have been interrupted. The bus stops and a stream of people rush in, not letting the ones who want to get off, get off. The conductor screams at the top of his voice, but no avail, it is just another human voice that will be killed in the sea of a hundred others. And then you see it- a seat- a short intense surge of bliss. You rush there and catch it. It feels elated.

Then comes the main part of the journey. Outside, you have a view of the other half of the world, that which does not belong to the population that is traveling with you in the bus, the world that belongs to the pedestrians, vendors, general men and women and finally movie posters that survive without purpose, on dilapidated compound walls. The objects near your sight and perish where your eyes taper, after succumbing to a blur. Everything is just the same as it was before. The semblance of the world creates the same air of nonchalance in you, every single day and the journey has to go on anyway. Some of us like to read during this time, while some prefer music, the kind of music that soothes the irregularities in emotions that you undergo over the time. Both these activities, as they will seem to you, tend to have this ability of dissolving the duration of the journey into them, so that you feel as if the entire thing was not a big ordeal at all. Nothing all that trouble-giving has happened just yet, and there is a lot more this life has in store besides insignificant bus journeys and the mood-swing-inductions entwined in them. Then your destination shows up and you feel that you had just started the travel a couple of minutes back. You pack yourself up and bid goodbye to the bus to which you are just another human being, just another one in a hundred thousand that it has carried over the years, with a plethora of ambitions, desires, dissatisfactions and woes. Home at last.

A day will come, and then some, many days. They will come endlessly. And there will be the same buses, bliss, emotions and music.

~~Random Feelings because of a random song~~

It began with the song running round and round in my brain. Green. But now, the symphony has been shattered and…it has flown into a hundred pieces in all directions. Can’t collect the pieces. Don’t want to. Brown. Started off on a beautiful, blissful note with that tune giving comfort and a feeling of peace which I could feel circulating in every part of me. And small emotions come and take their places in the most obscure, undesirable corners, in the vacant rooms of sadness, and spaces where complacence resided only minutes ago. Yellow. So many emotions and thoughts at one single time. Then, there is a point where all of them are put into one slot, confusing themselves, and us, to bits. Pink.

The Magic created by T.M.Krishna

There were about 400 people under that roof. And within an hour into the programme, all the souls were united with that of the vocalist, and resonated with Lord Shiva’s favourite ornament, Shankarabharanam.
The hall was abuzz with people and as a result of not getting an autorickshaw on time, we had the liberty of sitting on the carpets they had spread out on the floor, as they ran out of chairs, and that was all the auditorium could take. He came in Turquoise blue with the rest of the gentlemen and he showed signs of being in an extremely happy mood. The show took some time to start and we waited with every iota of patience that we could gather and finally, the wait was justified as he shot his swarams that conveyed Maya Malava Goula to our ears, and that was the first treat of that evening. Mayateetha swaroopini- The one with a form that is beyond all illusions….One of the disciples of Muthuswami Dikshitar, Ponnaiah had composed this. The ragam told us of devotion and faith.
Vaa muruga vaa in Begada came as a change from the climate left behind by Maya Malava Gaula. He sang in praise of Lord Muruga, of his power and sought his blessings, his pity.
Kalavathi arrived and brought with it a mood of strong attachment and yearning. The kalpana swaras in the beginning were sung with a beautiful demarcation from the very closely structured Chakravaham(it’s Melakartha). The immensely explorative kalpana swarams left the audience speechless.
Then came the ragam of the evening “Shankarabharanam”. T.M.Krishna is a stalwart. And his manodharmam on the ragam spoke out all the nuances of the ragam and exemplified its beauty, and his emotions. The thani aavartanam was brilliant. And as it came to an end, and he started the swarams again, the applause was deafening!
Awesome performance. T.M.Krishna and Shankarabharanam had become one single entity, during those 60 minutes.
Tyagarajaswamy’s Teliyaleru Rama bhaktimargamunu in Dhenuka and Oru dharam shiva Chidambaram in Ragamalika lifted spirits, here again the Sindu Bhairavi part was excellent.
The final song, a Thillana in Ravichandrika closed the performance with such joy, that the audience were taken into a different, heightnened level of bliss, and of course, invariably, we ended up yearning for more.
Music will continue to bond souls to each other, and to happiness.

The"RAMA" syndrome..and the Dreams!!

There I go another topic I choose which actually spells the word ABSTRACTION. Anyways for now I cannot think of anything else. Of late I haven't really thought about it as I find myself captured inside a sessile web of imaginations and inter-galactic-odyssey-sensations. I have been reading quite a lot of science fiction these days. It is a completely new sphere for me. I haven't really tried reading books of this genre ever before. And I have always been sticking to general fiction and stuff. But this result has been awesome. I mean the feeling at the end of the book is as if you look around and then blink your eyes twice and shake your head in disbelief of the fact that you are still stuck on your dirty old sofa that happens to be in your house that is, most unfortunately, stationed on this Earth(damn!!). And then some weird imaginations actually tingle your brain. For example when I was coming back from a walk with my brother, I saw these really long, thick sticks, can't really call them sticks as their diameter won't be less than 15 centimeters(there I go again) kept standing against the wall right next to the elevator and suddenly I started imagining strands of hair growing from the root stage, all over the stick and then before the sinister-old "leggies" inhabiting the Rama II actually started darting towards me I ran back home and shut the door! Gawd! I don't know what is happening. This is funny like hell.
I had a dream the other day. The night I actually started reading this series. It is not the influence of Rama alone but also that of some songs sung on a different, distant Earth. Anyways readers of Rama or rather ACC will enjoy the statement made above. Ah, yes. The dream. I am in my room with my Veena on my lap, I am strumming the strings at the set of positions on the bridge that correspond to the notes SR2M1PD2S SD2PM1R2S(Suddha Saveri). Lah! And then two leg-like structures grow out of the rounded large portion of my darling Veena nd then two more legs at the the "Yali" part and there! My veena actually starts pacing away (no I did not play that horribly in my dream!). I run behind it to catch it and then I look up at the sky and then down again. And see 3 of my cousins playing on the beach. And this beach is not a normal beach! The water in it is of course normal (thank god it was water). And the beach abruptly terminates on either sides. It is hardly a kilometer in length. And there are horn like elevations on either sides of this beach. They rise so high that they touch the sky. I can't see where they end(yes Rama-I indeed) I sit on the beach having given up hopes of finding my VEENAlien and then I play with the sand. My cousins jump into the sea and then I see they have vanished without a trace. I panic and go towards the water and then a huge wave comes in my direction and I run for my life. The wave is every letter of HUGE and I run and run and run and run and.....run. That's it. Next frame. I am home and am totally drenched. My Mom screams at me for walking across the rooms making the floor dirty and asks me to go dry my self right away. I am dumb with awe! And the next minute I wake up on my bed and my Mom is actually waking me up telling me that the "Muhurtham" was at 6:30 and that I had only 45 minutes to get ready! Whoa! What a relief to learn that I was back on Earth again! My darling planet =) . This is in complete contradiction of the day-dream I have talked about a few lines above. But either way. Anyway. The universe doesn't cease to amaze me and the humans' imagination!