Ahh! Last Weekend

“There is nothing like resting your ‘Butt’ after a strenuous climb up a very steep hill on a very (very) hot day.”

Tuesday afternoon; I can’t but soak in the afterglow of the weekend past. It wasn’t an ordinary (‘regular’ would have been a better word) weekend filled with booze filled haze and a Sunday evening despair. This one was about traveling by buses furnished with cramped seats, visiting a temple town and an ashram, climbing up forts perched on steep and rocky hills, hot climatic condition that drains out the last bit of your energy, meeting new people on the road and having a cold bottle of beer while the evening sea breeze sets in.

I went on a road trip last week end... :-)

When There's so much Beauty in the World

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much; my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... You will someday."

- Lester Burnham in American Beauty (Screenplay by Alan Bell)

The Rest of Your Life

"Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life?' Well, that's true of every day except one: the day you die."
- Lester Burnham in American Beauty (Screenplay by Alan Bell)

Deep Throated Growl

Years back, when I was still in school and summers meant holidays, I remember spending a late summer afternoon with my granddad. Both of us had just woken up from our afternoon slumber and were eagerly awaiting grandma’s loving cups of tea to arrive.

It was a typical Indian summer (we were in India anyway, so what else do you expect), temperatures soared well above 45 degrees Celsius. The merciful evening sea breeze was setting in but only added to the languor of the late afternoon.

I was idling my way thru that day’s paper or could have been a Readers Digest from my granddads stash of Readers Digests, I really don’t remember. The fact was, none of us were making any conversation and granddad didn’t really like that. He wanted noise and meaningless conversations that revolved around him and his vast and extensive knowledge about everything and anything... or so he boasted, from time to time.

‘Do you know how music originated?’ he challenged me and thus breaking the silence and taking me by a bit of a surprise. My brain hadn’t responded yet and before I could even produce a murmur for an answer, he rushed forth with the answer. “Echoes! He said “Man learnt music from the echoes”.

“Echoes!” I wondered, but only for a moment, and not to eager to ponder upon his answer for to long and try to make any sense of it, I went back to reading whatever I was reading.

This morning as a sat on the great modern convenience called the potty or a western style closet (as they call here in India), and cleared my bowel, I produced a deep throated growl, a ‘catharses’ noise which I’m sure even the most sophisticated of us produce during the that private and intimate moment called ‘shitting’.

The entire room ‘kinda’ reverberated to that growl and resulted in a nice little harmonic. This harmonic ‘surprisingly’ thru some light upon my granddad’s ‘enigmatic’ answer, which I had dismissed as one of his attempts to sound clever, but still lingered in the back of my head like a tiny little tumor.

Music originated when a caveman, in his desperation to find a cool and secluded place to shit, entered a cave with the right reverberations to harmonies with that caveman’s deep throated growl.

Granddad was right after all, just got a little mixed up between the meaning of echo and reverberation.