Routines are good.
I end up setting routines for the most mundane things.
The “what-next’s” keep me on track. On the straight and narrow.
Keeps me from over-thinking, is there a word for that.
Or slipping into brooding.
My voice sounds chirpy, a friend says.
A time to rest and a time to get up, a time to get set, a time to run…
Yet, for the difficult stuff there is no time
For the really life changing stuff. Orbital shifts and all that, you know?
I read through the pages, marvel at the work done.
I know it can matter, life-changing.
But I still stay off. Perhaps digging, unearthing is not comfortable.
Today I looked around blogdom, followed links and realized how inward-looking this blog has become.
So be it

last night
at the concert paying tribute to the reclusive maestro of Maihar
but I was there cause you'd have wanted it
(like I do so many things cause you'd have wanted it)
a shower of musical notes
shook up neurons, long asleep
pushed them into high drive
listening to the bihag play out, expansive
flowing,swirling, adding energy with every turn, like the ripples in a lake
the joy of knowing the words to this classical piece,
satience.
yet the ear is alert, waiting for a voice
despite.
fragile times
yet, satience.

(yday was Ustad Allauddin Khansaheb's birth anniversary. today is baba's b'day, or would have been)

MUST READ:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/print/2011/04/stephen-king-on-the-creative-process-the-state-of-fiction-and-more/237023/

Lessons

You stare at the blank screen
Watch the cursor
Pace its blink
And sigh
the story you’ve just read
is perfection, refined
like an artifact in wood some craftsman has perfected, polished, and gone his way.
The master of gore and vampires
Turned to poetry and golden light
Flawless, with a turn of his wrist
And you’re awed.
A chaotic swirl
Of respect-admiration- wistful
Permeate your brain
A golden wash, satiated
With pokey “I wish I could’s”
All you think of
How layered the story was
Crisp and quick
fine
Characterization jampacked in a few quick lines
You sigh
And push yourself to your humble four hundred.

Sometimes you view brilliance.
Three times three claps, like at school?
Sheer brilliance.
The sort that shakes up your mind.
Dhoosar, the movie, is like that.
Life through a blurred lens.
Forces you to think. Think tough. Pokes you.
Unsettles, asks difficult questions.
What if you forgot? Everything?
And never knew you were forgetting?
If memory were an swirling, dancing mist?
Unfunny joker?
What if all the frames of reference, alphabets, phone numbers, colors, mail passwords
Look like gibberish?
Who’d be there?
What if nobody were there?
When reality crumpled like a house of cards, what would you do?
Cause to “do”, you’d need to know reality from your left foot.
What if the next step was a vacuum? And the one after?
So well etched, you don’t need the subtitles. Not really.
The body language of the dementia-afflicted shouts in mute compound sentences and unspoken underlined.
For all this, the aesthetics are perfect.
And classical runs through, tying it all up like a scholar’s knowledge in palm-leaf .
Its only once you’ve rubbed the tears off your face
That the question barrage begins.
When you look at your face in the echoing mirror.



Dhoosar, which means blurred, is the title of Amol Palekar- Sandhya Gokhale’s new Marathi film.
http://dhoosarthefilm.com/

For long now, one has stayed away from the music, at times its wiser this way; but the rich notes in the deepest classical baritone dip and soar, and play on somewhere in the backdrop of one’s brain,and on and on, they play on the emotions like a master pianist running up and down and all over the scales.
And all one can do is watch.

Just back from a quick 2 day trip to Calcutta.
The before and after poems say it better.

Before :
Calcutta
Sweet siren of endless lanes
matriarch of regal arch and dome
I try aloof, but
my blood quickens at your name
(like the beat of a drummer at a puja pandal)
thirty nine years away
is long
far too long to condense
(how later I learned to push into a bus)
into one spare afternoon and a few more hours
perhaps, this is best.
This incompleteness


http://blueline.goobertree.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=22498

After:
Stern Queen Victoria
Empress of the realm
Still reigns over marble and green
Yet the memory of Mother’s eyes
tugs at me, the many homes
And many lifetimes traversed

My scale changed
Even as the light on the lake
Reflects the shimmer
of many sunsets past

http://blueline.goobertree.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=22520