INDIA'S MUSIC OF GLORY

As I woke up today when the eastern horizon was dressing up with ethereal colours to greet the rising sun,I was pleasantly enchanted by the voice of Kumar Gandharva aired by a FM radio channel,who seemed to have fully submerged into the realm of harmonic vibrations,as he subtly teased the mornig air with the notes of the Poorvi Raga.Those minutes of nature's magic unravelling its glory through the kaleidoscopic eastern sky,and offering The Eternal Prayer, in vibrant resonance with the classical notes in the early dawn gave me goose-bumps.

As I stood still,mesmerised by nature's  glorious manifestations,I couldn't help pondering over the glorious India that our country used to be once upon a time,and reflect upon her generously vast contributions in the very foundation and evolution of universal music.

 

Being an aggressively dedicated lover of Music,it shall forever remain for me(and ruefully so),a profound regret that I didn't have the opportunity to engage myself in disciplined,formal discourses in Indian classical music,and the pangs of regret hurts me doubly considering the fact that I had dabbled with the music of the occident in both its classical and popular forms,formally and informally during college days.

 

Music can be figuratively defined as the Art of Expression in sound,melody and harmony,both in composition.Structurally only 2 systems of music are possible,one in which there is progress by succession of single notes-the Melodic System,and the other in which the music progresses by groups of notes called chords,the Harmonic sysyem.

 

It is the genius of Ancient India that selflessly made the greatest contribution to the world of universal music-the 'Raga' System which is perhaps the zenith for any form,school and system that has ever pervaded the realm of music in human history,to survive or perish.It is easily the highest peak that any Melodic system could ever aspire to touch.It is the most outstanding feature of Indian music,in which each Raga is a distinct musical identity by itself and possesses well-defined characteristics which have evolved in a disciplined way with time.Music assumes consciousness in a Raga in perceptible dimensions,which possesses and evokes distinctive emotions which the Raga uses as a spirital bridge for communion between human consciousness and Nature,which exists in the purest  of personalised forms.This is not blind glorification or artistic dogmatism-this aspect of communion is one of the most significant features of this melodic system.It serves a
most basic purpose which the underlying philosophy behind the creation of the Raga specifically necessitates.The classical form did not evolve over decades,or even centuries.It has been blossoming in a continuous process of evolution over a period of five millennia ,being nurtured by progressive visions of some of the most brilliant philosophers that have ever walked across temporal epochs in the history of humankind.The Raga system is the sonic manifestation of spiritual India.

 

The history of Music is closely associated with human society and life from the very beginning of Creation.The ideal of Absolute Music is realised in the concept of the Raga. And Music is the brightest gem adorning the culture of India.
Today's morning told me so for the umpteenth time.

SELF-CENTERED:A VIRTUE

When I had read Ayn Rand's THE FOUNTAINHEAD at the age of 19,I was mesmerised with the protagonist's audaciously unique "Constructive Self-centeredness" which he seems to use as an emotional shield for survival.He fought the hard times under which his country reeled during The Great Depression,and the never-ending inner conflict that tore him apart days in and out.And he had only one friend-his own self,and the interaction gave him newer visions and refreshened hope as his years passed by.

At that age,every man tends to bask,to varying extents,in a spell of self-appreciating glory of grandiose Idealism,and questions the contemporary relevance of certain intra-social practices that brashly defy his idealistic philosophy (which is mostly branded with unintentional dogmatism).I was no exception.Even as I marvelled at the protagonist's gritty defiance,I couldn't quite support his constructive self-centerednessas confues it with Selfishness.Over the years I have realised that making friends with one's own self and keeping it amongst top most priorities cannot be qualified as a negative trait at all.

 

Being selfish is a different domain altogether.It can only pull one down,and the selfishness quantitatively increases every time one strives to stand up from the moral rot which erodes one's rationality and analytical power.Unfortunately circumstances provides the base of the ease with which man keeps on faltering again and again.

Selfcenteredness gives man a painstakingly developed proficiency with which he can function better with dynamism-a prospect which can only be good for humankind.Selfishness gives man inertness as far his responsibility towards his own fellow men is concerned.

I have often perceived that man fails to differentiate between self-centeredness and selfishness(and I have been no holy exception on that either).I guess the reason for that is a subconscious instinct of opiated ignorance that has its seeds in a social folly called Tradition when it loses its irrelevance with the changing times.

As a result the collective conscious sensitivity of any given social,ethnic or religious community degrades to worse levels,when actually it should be evolving,with time,to reach higher standards.An all-pervading confusion seems to keep man in a state of inert stupefaction,and one can see the result if he takes one good look at the global scenario around him.Stagnation and inertness continue to co-exist with meaningless bloodshed,corruption,poverty,illiteracy,inequality,hypocrisy,and exploitation of man by man.

One needs to develop,carry,practice and preach a sensitive,finely tuned Balance in his friendship with himself,as the line dividing self-centredness and selfishness is very,very thin.One of the greatest struggles of our lives is achieving this Balance.We find ourselves being torn between family,friends,workplace and our desires.The dilemma could be described as the search for balance between the head,heart,hands, or reason,emotion and action.
All three human dimensions play one of the most significant role in our lives.We need to have the right balance between them.The head asks,"What?".The heart asks,"Why?".And the hands ask,"How?"

Time is fleeting away.It's time for us to ask,"WHEN?".

Pope knocked down by woman at Christmas Mass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riOvCgpcR_w

THOSE MAGICAL LETTERS

When I was young,everyone wrote letters to each other.I have many handwritten letters that I treasure,and even though some of them have faded or got torn,the subtle memories they evoke are rich in vibrant resonance.The most treasured letters are naturally from my mother who has passed away,those which she wrote to me when I was in a foreign land for quite sometime.Not all the smses,emails and tweets that come my way these days can quite evoke the wonderous magic of those handwritten words.

I don't think we anticipated the letter's sudden demise.So,not many of us preserved the letters that we recieved.Luckily I did to some extent though I wish I had preserved some more of them.Today,when almost all communication is only verbal or virtual,one misses the tender intimacy of those handwritten words.Once in a while I stumble upon them searching for some old papers,I am amazed at the patience,the gentleness,the sincerity,the unspoken bonding of a time when people used to sit down and wrote their hearts away to their family,friends and lovers

.
Letters,unlike blogs,were never meant for the perusal of multiple pairs of eyes.They were always one on one.And the letters closest to my heart are my mother's inland letters on almost every birthday of mine,different anecdotes about my birth,the mosquito net under which I used to sleep off to Never Never Land,riding my Dreamland Express,and how she used to cozyly tuck me away at night.

 I no longer sleep under mosquito nets.There is no one to tuck me away at night.My mother's memories are fading away these days,not because I love her any less but time has put a soothening balm over the pain of her absence.I speak to her in my thoughts.

There are no letters now,no words I have to decipher meanings from,nested in a somewhat impractical romanticism.In fact,all communications today is more obvious(and more guarded)and even though I respond to smses,emails,tweets I get from acquaintainces and friends,I can sense I am missing something out there.Now all I get on my birthday are scribbles,flowers,books,chocolates,CDs,aftershaves.Among my cherished gifts are still pens even though I write so rarely with them.But I still treasure the Wing Sung pen that a very special collegemate gifted to me on my 20th.birthday.I also preserve a couple of random poems that a very famous Bengali poet,a family acquaintance,scribbled on torn sheets of paper on a sunny April morning ,drunk out of his wits,as my 22nd.birthday gift.I preserve that manuscript much more dearly than the book of poems that later appeared.

The technology of communication has vastly improved with an ever-increasing acceleration.Smses cost a paisa now.Emails and tweets are free.So are FaceBook postings and DMs.But I miss the personal touch of the hand-written letter,the poem,the manuscript,the drawings,the music notations my friends would send me,when the art of writing was still alive.No flowers,no chocolates,no CDs can quite compensate for them.And I know for sure that they never will.

OUR EXPENSIVE ALMIGHTY

During the anniversary of the 26/11 Pakistan's coward,audacious attack on Mumbai(and India herself),the local media went gaga over the tamasha that took place by the name of remembering and paying homage to the martyrs - the unfortunate lot who had fallen victim to the terrorist bullets and grenades.The candle-lit vigils at the Gateway of India and the passionate interviews by 'social activists' and 'humanists' - the intellectual elite(read page-3 socialites and small-screen celebrities) who seem to have taken up the holy mantle of safe-guarding moral the integrity of India,wearing sombre masks,soaked in mushy melodrama,reeked of nauseating hypocrisy.The shameless lot seemed to make an event of celebration out the anniversary and was equivocal where one short message was concerned - Something has to be done, though nobody seemed to specify who would start doing that coveted Something and when.
While all attention once again fell on Kashab and his minute-to-minute movements,there was another information which the media highlighted,this time with a bit of sarcastic criticism,that India has spent Rs.310 million on Kasab so far,through her efforts to keep him alive and well,giving him unprecedented security,state of the art medicare,and a honest,fair trial.

Justice is proving out to be very,very expensive affair and I wonder when the authorities might get tempted to send this huge money bill to the Prime Instigator Party of the 26/11 massacre.And who is the ultimate instigator of not only the Mumbai terror attack,but all the jehadi attacks,not to mention the more direct wars that India has had to fight against an implacable foe?
No,it is not Pakistan.While this country has been the approximate cause for all the bloodshed,it is not the ultimate cause.The ultimate cause of all this wasteful,mindless violence,the ultimate cause behind the very creation of Pakistan itself is Religion.In other words,God.Or rather,the human perception of this Myth of Divinity. It is not geo-politics but theo-politics which has been responsible for Indo-Pak hostilities.
Similarly,the demolition of the Babri Masjid - the anniversary of which we shall be observing tomorrow,the 6th.of December,again with all the media fanfare and remorseless remorse that we allocated for the anniversary of 26/11 - is also,and even more obviously,a manifestation of theo-politics,the lethally vengeful politics of God.

Today everybody is playing at theo-politics.And in doing so,we are all,willy-nilly,becoming pawns of the very game that we think we are playing.It is not just Kasab,and the Taliban,and the Al-Qaeda,and Pakistan's ISI,which both exploit,and are,in inevitable turn,exploited by theo-politics.We,in our own India,are also increasingly held to ransom by the politics of religion,the viciously perverted sectarianism of a God with a schizophrenic,split psyche,divided along the razor-edge fault-lines of Hinduism,Islam,Christianity,Judaism,Sikhism,Budhhism,and all the 'isms' that man has invented to hide heaven from his eyes while he creates hell on earth.
It is not just the Taliban.It's Indian qualitative reverse image,the Sangh-Parivar,is the practitioner and unwilling dupe of theo-politics,equally complicit,equally the propagator as well as the victim of the politics of the religion of a divisive God.
The Rs.310 million(or Rs.31 crore)spent on Kasab who is an infinitesimally insignificant pawn in the bloody chessboard of theo-politics,is just a drop in the ocean of the logarithmic calculus of human and social costs that human civilisation as a whole(not individual societies,communities or races)has incurred in the name of Religion and a God who encourages genocide and fratricide.

Can humankind(ah that's a ironically curious word;shouldn't it be human'cruel' ?) as a whole afford such a omni-savouring God any longer?Perhaps it's time for those who believe in God-of whatever colour,creed,stripe or nomenclature-to pray to Him(or Her)

 to turn us all into atheists,or at least agnostics.We would be no longer be required to,in the name of a God we no longer believed in,by the grace of the same God,to kill each other to complete annihilation to His greater Glory,and could get on trying to deal with mundane,down-to-earth(and not up-to-heaven)problems like poverty,illiteracy,disease and eco-destruction.

Ah you,all of those who believe in His Schizophrenic Holiness,can rest in peace..because this will not happen,of course.The more troubled the times(and ours are very troubled indeed,what with global terror,pandemic disease,economic meltdown,greenhouse effect et al),the greater the premium that people pay to God as insurance cover.Fear and Religion are just two sides of the same coin since prehistory.Prehistoric hominids invented the gods to appease them because storm and lightning,draught and flood,fire and ice,frightened them.And we haven't changed much.Self-invented Fear over caste,race,gender clash and exploitation still hold us to random,and provide us with spurious excuses to enable us with mutual hatred to fight and kill each other.

God be damned.He Is Expensive.

THRIVING ON FEAR:AN ADDICTION

Finally the swine flu got the better of me,and I was down in the docks for the last 3 days.While stating the fact that it is not at all a good experience to be suffering from the disease(for reasons that are non-medical),being in the thick of things earned me some well-deserved rest and a few odd insights into current affairs that I would like to share here.
The most unnerving experience was being at the receiving end of a panic button unnecessarily pressed by the hospital staff and by my spouse.Being diseased and soaking in the effects of the pandemic panic almost got the better of the professional medic inside me,but somehow I managed to hold on to the attitude of a rather amused and bemused spectator.That is when the devil must have taken control of my brain,grossly idle in convalescence.

Take this one.What would happen if the entire population of a midsize town in our country were to be stricken by swine flu?There could be any number of knee-jerk and stress reactions from the system that seems to prevail : quarantine the affected,keep the pigs out,collect blood samples for confirmation,dispense medication to anyone and everyone,clear all hospital beds for victims to this particular disease alone,contact the disease control centre,do whatever else is possible and keep the authorities informed.
Would any of these have meaning,even if achievable?Medicines will reach the nearest patient,and we don't have more than what would cover 5 percent of the population.The mortality rate being 5 percent,that looks accurate,but there is a 95 percent probability that you will not reach the 5 percent that would benefit.To do the best then would be as good or bad as to do nothing.Don't lament action.Don't celebrate inaction.

I tried the entire scenario with a variant.Suppose someone in the disease control centre maliciously reported that the entire population is infected.The human reactions would be exactly the same,even more vigorous,with a central agency supervising.People shall be told not to panic.The health minister,if he visits the town and mingles with the population,will be proclaimed a hero for risking his life.There will be deaths as per normal incidence.But panic and circumstance shall force the coroner to report these deaths as due to the disease.A month later,after fluctuating reports and various trial medications and rituals,the authorities shall victoriously declare how 99 percent of the population was saved.The health minister can now vie for the post of prime minister.The pharmaceutical industry,which knows something of what actually happened,would join the bandwagon,if only to push a new premium drug for upmarket prevention.Surely part of the proceedings will go for the minister's campaign.The press,despite its investigative arm,cannot write but favourably,if the public sentiment is overwhelming.
In an intensely interactive world,moving all the while from one transaction to another,with deals and gains decided at the microscopic level,with far too many players and stakeholders,a calculating mind can slowly start changing the rules.By the time it is noticeable,the momentum and returns are such that many more would join in gradually.It would be a folly not to;in fact,one may be duty-bound to play his role.

The uncertain times that we have created are due to collective global fear-mongering.No one nation can be blamed.Each one seems to have played its role when the ball fell in its court.If one enumerates all the human tragedies of the decade,he doesn't have a clue for a single one,because the urgency to stop them has not arisen.We are still trying to 'master' them.And that is unlikely to happen.
The human mind possesses a well-known property called 'Addiction'.It thrives on perpetuation.Are Violence,Espionage and Distrust becoming the essential instinct for our survival-our next step to evolution?Are we entering the age of ongoing weekend war converts between nations,with a global trophy every four years? Will this become the next edition for soaps and reality shows?One does not know what will take one's life-swine flu,a bullet,a new drug trial,toxic environment with our ecological balance smashed to smithereens,lack of insurance,communal clashes,or the stresses of an economic meltdown.

Anyway man never had the option of choosing his end.We,however,have all got some role in the process of making decision on how to live.Just why can't we come down to simple means?There is one compelling reason-we all have got just one life to live.And finally,we all began as human beings.