Unemployed

He steps out of his university after three years or so,

Filled with memories, some delight and some sorrow,

Remembering, the day walked about in glee,

On the same road, but after a long journey,
A journey whose end was yet to be seen,
Though, for his friends, the path seemed already clean,
Yes, he was passing out, with nothing but a degree,
While his peers were worry-free,
With a job, a seat or a or a family business, their hands full,
He sat sad and afraid, yes, but faithful,
A month at home, a year at home,
Filling applications, but with results none,
Sending his resume to many a stranger,
Questioned by relatives, suppressing his anger,
Attending classes, teaching kids,
Scowled at by parents,
He'd been strong, yes, but who wouldn't break,
With everyone pretending to worry for his sake,
Speaking of the same thing, letting his heart ache,
Not even concealing that their concern was fake?
He learnt the hard way that none did love,
Wisdom rammed into him with one great shove,
He wished he had his friends by his side,
So he could lean on their shoulders or just go for a ride,

Of course they loved him, and wanted to help,

But far too busy, they could only hear him sulk,

He'd been strong and steady,

And for any job, ready,

But who could talk to heartless recruiters,

Who fill their cups before a word one utters?

They repeated the same old lines,

Ones he had heard countless times,

They asked pointless questions with no possible replies,

Worrying more about his past than ever might his wife,

Advice drew to him like iron towards a magnet,

From every corner, from neighbour, shopkeeper, even a harlot,

Words of faith, of honour,

Nothing would touch him, he wore an invisible armour,

But some days were just tough,

When he'd feel he had had enough,

What was the difference between having a job and not?

Why did it seem that his life had shrunk to naught?

Did a busy look and professional clothes truly make one worthy?

Didn't such views seem silly?

Why did people want to trust a man in a tie?

Were they so naive to think he wouldn't lie?

Every single night, he cried himself to bed,

Trying hard to forget what they all said,

Every morning he awoke to a bright dawn,

He knew he would make it one day, but till then this had to go on.

Written between 24.4.2016 and 25.4.2016 at Room B001, H13, IIT Bombay
This one is sort of forced, and I'm not taking it down, since I consider it to stand as a monument to forced poetry that turns out to be a disaster. Sorry.

On Music

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn't hear the music

- Nietzche

Putting on headphones is a symbolic indication of - why, to quite an extent even literally amounts to cutting the rest of the world off - to take a dip into the emptiness of one's soul - a feat that would seem impossible to the lay man without the aid of this magical entity called music. Without it, who would have known that so much bliss can be experienced in one's self?

Be it during travel, a short nap, a break in between work - at any time, in fact, listening to music is one of the greatest activities of pleasure that man has known. The glamour of watching music being played or sung and the like is not what I wish to talk about here. In fact, for the time being, let us suspend the grandeur of lyrics as well, and concentrate merely on the tune - that magical collection of frequencies that soothe the ear, the mind and the heart. A tune that is produced from the vocal chords that we know so well, perhaps a bamboo stick with holes, a stretched skin or some complicated instrument. Whence it comes is immaterial - the output, the sweet sound is all that matters.

Unfortunately, science fails to quantify the pleasure that man experiences - perhaps pleasure is too obscene a term to describe the pure joy that fills a man when listening to music. As a listener, I am not very keen on seeing the performer; I'd rather close my eyes and hear it radiating (convecting, rather) from within. The key to truly enjoy a tune, according to me is to listen to it long enough for it to sink into your self: and then, the soul sings along. Music is the one entity that can reach the heart straight, for it s not the lips, but the heart that sings along, beating in rhythm to the beats that are heard. Perhaps that's why they're called beats in the first place. I read somewhere that music can make your heart beat in synchronisation with it. Such is the level of acceptance that accompanies music - it is so intense that an involuntary muscle beats in tune with it and the pleasure of listening to is needn't be explained.

To me, a tune is like an amusement park ride that the heart takes. It could be a nice, simple swing or a roller coaster ride - if you pick the ride you like, you'll love the experience. A field that involves just the heart and no intellect can be extremely emotional - overwhelming indeed, but that's the point of it.

In vocals I love how lyrics and tune support each other, with the tune being a springboard of sorts, catapulting lyrics into your heart, and the lyrics being a skeleton for a composer to make his tune. An aerodynamicist will agree with me when I say that with listening to instrumental music, you can have Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches: in the former case, you let your heart follow the tune, stretching and wringing itself in sync with the rhythm, while in the latter you stand by as an observer, merely drinking in all that you listen to. In any case, be it any form of music, love is occasionally at first, um, listen. A listener, and the tune he listens to, evolve relative to each other with every listen - even if one dislikes a tune in the beginning, he slowly begins accepting it. I have heard people say otherwise, but this is my experience. The tune, being insentient, cannot exactly evolve - it is the listener's heart that evolves, getting stirred at its depths by the beats at the background of the tune, and on its surface by the melody - all this makes me wonder if the heart is liquid. The acceptance phase is akin to one starting to like a book, because he tells (reads) the story to himself - or like people accepting their own point when trying to convince another because they are listening when they themselves say it. Upon listening to a tune for a sufficient number of times, one sort of 're-composes' the tune for himself, albeit in a subtle manner, not unlike a professor re-discovering a theory subtly while explaining to his students or while understanding it. This, I believe, is the crux of the process of understanding itself.

Some tunes, I find are natural: if the beginning of a track or song is hummed to me, my heart would want it to take it along a particular direction - a route, if you will, and I find some compositions taking the exact same route. This has happened quite often with AR Rahman, Illayaraja, Hans Zimmer, Salim-Sulaiman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar, Anirudh Ravichandran and Mani Sharma among others. Hans Zimmer has sometimes surprised me with tunes that take a route that enjoy much better than what I would have chosen to. Some tunes seem forced- a noteworthy example would be John Williams' track titled 'Buckbeak's Flight' from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban's OST. It sounded unnatural the first time I heard it, but I fell in love eventually. A lot of AR Rahman's tunes, particularly in the 90's seemed to connect to tunes that I had unconsciously hummed to myself as a child long before those tunes were released, and I have, hence, always considered him a natural composer. Pretty audacious of me indeed, I truly apologise: this is straight from my heart. There are cases when a tune I could never conceive or relate to, collides tangentially with me, subsequently becoming one with my heart - such as Noor-e-Khuda by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Augmented repetition in a tune, such as in Bommani Geesthe and Manwa Laage capture my heart. And then there is the case of the ticking clock - a trick used to indicate the critical passing of time in a film scene, by composers like John Williams in Forward to Time Past, Hans Zimmer in Mountains and AR Rahman in the background score of the upcoming Tamil film, 24. Another repetitive feature is what I like to call the pleasant scream - a tool I find, used by ARR in particular. One can find it in songs like 'Endrendrum Punnagai' (Alaipayuthey), 'Ae Sinamika' (O Kadhal Kanmani). I found another instance in 'Dil Dhadakne Do' (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) composed by Shankar Ehsaan Loy.

As a child, I remember having wondered if there were only a limited number of tunes in existence, and, if one day, all of them would get used up soon (I used to think of the limited number of swaras or notes which would impose a limit on the number of tunes that could exist) - quite like I had thought about concepts in science, and even inventions. I have felt a keen desire to have born earlier, so that I could have composed a couple of tracks to have in my name, (and made some scientific discovers too), but today's composers are proving to me time and again that beautiful tunes can always be composed.

However, I don't see myself as a composer in this life. I am, and will always be - an avid music listener.

A speck in the crowd

"That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse"

                                                                                               - N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets' Society

It doesn't take long for a man to figure out how much a part of the crowd he is. He needn't even step out of his work-home prison - all he needs is a walk to a colleague's desk or a peep into a neighbour's house to realise that he is doing nothing new.

Everyone is doing the same work, listening to the same music, making the same tax calculations, having the same conversation with his family, making similar plans for the future - buying a house, starting his own business, whatever. Each one, however, is so lost in the process of doing it that he forgets that he is nothing different. Another ant in a colony of thousands. Invisible. Lost.

Our lives have been designed by businessmen, the media, engineers, doctors and people  a thousand other professionals. The toothpaste we use, the courses available for study, the books we read, the procedure for a passport, treatment received in a hospital, a product we buy - whether we want "the best" or "something average", lives of people aren't really different. One man struggles to pay for his daily bread while another, his son's college fees, but the struggle is unanimous, why, omnipresent. It's all just one big template.

All this sprouts from the fact that one man cannot do everything for himself. Further, from an administrative point of view, it is good to have standards, but there are disadvantages. What if someone wants to be something that doesn't all into the list of things he can be? C'mon, you say? I must be crazy right? I'm the guy who says passion is a term coined by people on watching movies and reading books - a term they use to get away with doing anything they want to. But, humour me - don't you think someone has a skill that is not accommodated in the list of things that people do? Have we tied the hands of people from truly doing what they want to - perhaps what they should be doing? Of course not, right? Don't we read success stories? People who do random things and get their names into the Guinness Book, who come on TV shows, people who start companies? Are we being honest with ourselves here? Failure story numbers are exponentially larger than their success counterparts, aren't they?

But should we do something here? Something to improve this? Perhaps something we can "learn" from another country or state? I personally don't think a country can learn from another - countries, why, even cities are like wild weeds burgeon out of nowhere in an abandoned land. In fact, I am only surprised at the similarities. It is virtually impossible to incorporate something at the grassroot level - at most, we can copy points from another Constitution.

Right, so, what do we do about it? Dismiss is as a negligible shortcoming and move on, back into our stereotype, boring lives that we deem unique and important because, well, we do need to survive? Perhaps we should take a little something out of this thought and, well, "live for ourselves" for a little while? Perhaps develop a strong value system - a set of principles to abide by? Others do that as well, don't they? So what? What does it matter that our lives are similar?

Yeah, well, that would certainly close this discussion, and would even dismiss the need for this article, but I can't help but think that we are chained in this life.

I guess life will end long before we find out. Unnoticed but by a few, and long forgotten before long. Yet, I hope it will mean something. At least to me.