Guys will be guys....

...but more importantly, girls will also just be girls. Sometimes I think I'm a nine year old trapped in a 30 year old body. It would serve men well to remember what they're dealing with.

Jazz, By the Way

I went for a jazz concert yesterday. It's part of my experiments with becoming more open minded, doing things I didn't do for the entire decade of my twenties...things I regret not being open to in the past. The whole essence of these experiments is to say Yes a lot. Even to things, I'm convinced I won't enjoy.

Last evening, I decided (against my better judgement) to attend an evening of Jazz. It's a genre of music that I've never understood. It's like a club that I know is really cool but won't admit me. It's like a Jackson Pollock that everyone seems to appreciate the genius of, except me. It's like an Orhan Pamuk book that will always be just out of reach. I feel as if I'm locked out, staring in through a dirt smeared window - the dirt is, of course, on my side of the glass.

I sat in the makeshift lobby area outside the main concert hall, watching the performance projected on the American Centre's walls, right next to the His n Hers. I had been inside for a while but the seats were limited and I didn't want to take up the space of a true jazz enthusiast. Outside seemed perfect for heathens like me. There we were - the yawning, the sleepy and the high-pitched squeakers. The cellphone addicts, the girlfriend pleasers and the 'we thought he was famous' seekers. I tried for a while to pay attention and really give this a shot. How can something so universally appealing, elude me so completely, I thought. I waited for the genius to hit me like a lightening bolt. It never really happened.

Each track seemed like it was on a collision course with the next, crashing into each other, making it difficult to tell which mangled parts belonged to which song. I felt dyslexic - jazz dyslexic. It was all a jumble of plink plink plink, boom bash, budoom-doom-doom. 'Don't think too much about it...there's nothing to 'understand', said my friend. But try as much as I could, it was no use. Jazz and me would never do the whole twain-meeting thing.

On the way back, I asked my friend if I - the self-proclaimed music addict - had actually got it wrong all these years. Had I been more in love with music for the emotional context it fit into? Does my notion of a 'good' track have to fulfil a criteria of matching with the film in my head. Does it have to fit into categories of 'sad', 'happy', 'angry', 'joyful' etc. etc. Am I the bleeding heart, country music loving fool who has no true appreciation for the beauty of music as it is?

Then I heard Saeen Zahoor performing with Noori as part of the Coke Studio project (http://www.overstream.net/view.php?oid=ikmwe5ree7t3) and I realise I have enough stuff to be insecure about without worrying how little I understand jazz. It's ok, if I delay the cooldom. The greater existential implications of my not liking jazz can wait a while. I have a bunch of stuff to illegally download first...

Aik Alif - Bulleh Shah (performed by Saeen Zahoor and Noori at the Coke Studio)

Parh parh ilm te faazil hoya
Te kaday apnay aap nu parhya ee na
You read so many books
to know it all,
yet fail to ever read your
heart at all.
Bhaj bhaj warna ay mandir maseeti
Te kaday mann apnay wich warya ee na
You rush to holy shrines to play a part,
Would you dare enter the shrine of your heart
Larna ay roz shaitaan de naal
Te kadi nafs apnay naal larya ee na

Everyday you fight Satan
But you never fight your own Ego

Bulleh Shah asmaani ud-deya pharonda ay
Te jera ghar betha unoon pharya ee na

Bulleh Shah you try grabbing that which is in the sky
But you never get hold of What sits inside you

Bas kareen o yaar, Ilm-oun
bas kareen o yaar
Ik Alif teray darkaar

Stop seeking all this knowledge my friend
Only an Alif is what you need

Allah Sayyaan Allah Sayyaan
God is All we need! God is All!
Nee main jaanaa Jogi de naal
I will follow the wandering dervish!
Jo naa jaane, Haqq ki taaqat
Rabb naa devey us ko Himmat
If you deny the power of all that’s true,
God will not grant strength to you.
Hum Mann ke darya mein doobey
Kaisi nayya? Kya manjhdhaar?

We have drowned in the river of Self
the boat and the flowing waters do not matter

Bas kareen o yaar, Ilm-oun,
bas kareen o yaar
Allah Sayyaan Allah Sayyaan

Newness

A lot has happened has happened in the last few days. The best way to describe it is to say that I've been having very realistic dreams of being pregnant. I looked it up on Google and found that it signifies the birth of a new phase; one that's full of creativity.

So, back to the week gone by. Found and then lost an incredibly important job. Lost and found an incredibly important person. Both events potentially crucial to my future. As I write, I'm fully aware of how I stand smack dab in the centre of these two happenings. Which way things go now depends in equal measure on how I steer my life and how my life steers me. Now more than ever, I have to learn to let go while gripping the reins.

Right now my soundtrack is a new discovery - Newton Faulkner. His music gets me one step closer to defining the genre of music I like best. And we all know that understanding one's music gets us one step closer to understanding ourselves. So this acoustic guitar slapping and simple lyric seems to hit home today...

Riding back home in an auto and at one point I just wanted to stick my head out the side of the three wheeler and scream and scream and scream until my throat could scream no more.

Unleashing the Beast

One of those nights where the dreams are powerful and you wake up brimming with new ideas.
I had just had the most fruitful creative sessions I've had in a long, long time and I wasn't even awake for it.

Had a dream that Parminder from Films Rajendraa (she's the one who stole my film to get a seat in the Osian's Cinefan workshop) was presenting a film somewhere. As the film started playing, I realised it was brilliant. It was a film of photographic stills and collages that came together beautifully and had this quietude to it, the kind of deep, internal calm one feels when one witnesses the sun set over the beach...I can't tell you how wonderful this film was.

But before I could seethe with jealousy, I realised this was a dream and that it was, in fact, me who was creating the film. Unfortunately, as soon as I realised this, I woke up and promptly forgot everything about the film except the way it had made me feel.

As I sit here, upturning the junk in the garage that is my TV-addled brain, I'm struck by the fact that it is capable of extremely subtle thought that I've never given it credit for. I spend most of my time lamenting the fact that while I have good ideas (or germs for ideas), I lack the skill to develop them into whole and complete works. That I lack the ability to fill in the details with any kind of maturity. With last night's dream, I realise that I'm wrong. But for the life of me, I have no idea how to unlock the skills.

That is why I keep returning to 'The Hours' - the film more than the book. Each time I see it, I marvel at David Hare's ability to translate existential dilemmas as internal and ephemeral as a woman's struggle to reconcile her place in a world where she just doesn't fit - a feeling that even she can't articulate. Hare doesn't fall back on the luxury of long, explanatory monologues to explain what's going on inside these women. After all, if they can't explain themselves, how can the screenwriter? Yet, he does it - many times wordlessly - avoiding the typical filmmaking cliches of long silences and even longer close-up stays on the 'tortured' soul's visage. He creates the dark turmoil through moments (which is what the 'Hours' signify anyway) - when Kitty comes to visit Julianne Moore's character, when Clarissa seems to 'unravel', when Virginia and her young niece give the dead sparrow a funeral. These are gems of celluloid moments as far as I'm concerned and when they're woven together as masterfully as Hare and Daldry do, it becomes more than a movie. It becomes a song that resonates in the innermost chambers of my being.

So, well, there's no use whining about it. I don't live in my dreams (well, I do, but that's a whole other discussion) and I definitely can't summon up creative genius at will - in my dreams or otherwise.

Hat And Feet

I love the words to this Fountains of Wayne song:
I'm just a hat and feet
That's all that's left of me
A spot on the sidewalk
A mark on the street
I'm just a hat and feet
I'm just a hat and feet

I guess it's supposed to be a sad song but as with all things Fountainlike about Wayne, the imagery and sweet melody makes you smile.

...Dude...like....Michael Jackson is dead...like...

Chronic Dissatisfaction

There's a scene towards the end of Woody Allen's 'Vicky Christina Barcelona', when the Spanish artist, played by Penelope Cruz, accuses Scarlett Johanssen's American wanderer, of 'chronic dissatisfaction'. When I heard that phrase, I absolutely fell in love with it. It rolled off my tongue beautifully and seemed to describe perfectly, the ills of all mankind - and more specifically, all that bothers and depresses me.
Yesterday, while watching Allen's 'Husbands & Wives', I heard the phrase again and realised, Woody obsessed about it as much as I did.

Yes, there are legitimate concerns in my life. Yes, there are plenty of things that are far from perfect and yes, there are less than perfect traits within me that prevent me from making those things perfect. But as I lie contemplating these (and my) imperfections, I leave little to no room for the fact that I too am infected by that most deadly of spiritual viruses - chronic dissatisfaction.

For a while, I thought chronic dissatisfaction was part of the human condition. One has to be dissatisfied to move, to create, to bring change, right? But the more I thought of it, the more I disagreed with this theory. Dissatisfaction in itself is desirable at many levels. And it's definitely not a flippant feeling one develops when things are not going one's way. It's a state one reaches (according to me, of course) after passing through the phases of 'adjustment', 'compromise' and attempts at understanding. Dissatisfaction, then, necessitates the need to improve upon the present situation.

But when the word 'chronic' is attached to it, it becomes something else together. It becomes a trap that most of us seem to be falling into the older we get. It describes the state of constant disdain we exist in, hopping from one miserable event in our lives to another, forgetting that life is a mixed bag of happy and unhappy, fun and drudgery, the creative and the mundane, stability and shake-ups etc.

When I was younger, we were constantly in 'Do' mode. We didn't have the time to stop and be dissatisfied. Yes, there was the adolescent angst, but even that was something we waded through, soaked in and thoroughly enjoyed. We loved hating parents because it made us bond with friends more fiercely. We loved hating our teachers because it made us 'punk'. We revelled in our rebellion. It made life more colourful, more eventful and well, sexier.

The older we got, the more trapped some of us began to feel. Trapped by the fact that we're not half as footloose and fancy free as we'd once believed we were. Our universe has shrunk, our options have narrowed and while the world continues to be, in theory, our oyster, many of us find we've already sucked much of the saltiness out of it. And so we enter the state of chronic dissatisfaction. That bit of grey gunk sitting in the centres of our hearts that we can't trace the origins of. That regret-tinged slime that settles on every thing that we possess...things that we chose to possess. Some of us learn to live with the chronic dissatisfaction by sitting on it and pretending it doesn't affect us. Some of us can't stand its prodding and so are never still. We keep moving, never locating a home - more comfortable searching than finding.

If we're lucky, a few of us, will someday see the light. The freedom loving gypsy forced to get married, the single person who craves a partner, the broke professional missing the 9 to 5 and the overworked corporate flunky sleeping away his Sundays. Someday, we'll all locate that little bee in our bonnet. We'll confront our chronic dissatisfaction and banish it by owning up to our lives. We'll stand up straight and say - this is the only life I could've had because I made it. I made this moment I'm standing in and I take responsibility for whatever exists in this moment.

And when we're done with our confessional purge, the good news - the moment that comes after that.