The Pen and the Musical Note

Art hurts. I wish there was a better way I could put it, but quite honestly, it hurts.  It tears your heart out and makes you listen to every terrible voice inside your head that says, not good enough. It forces you to judge, cut, alter and shape into the perfect fit when you don't even know what the mold looks like.  It hurts because it makes you feel. There is no art without emotion, and these emotions are more often than not so strong that you can't control them. All you can do, is let them flow like a torrent from a dam; and hope that they don't leave you drowned. You can hope that they let you stay afloat, but that hope is nowhere near foolproof. Art hurts because it doesn't let you rest. It's 3 am thoughts that jerk you awake and the reason you can't write that school essay. It's the fire that burns within; scorching everything else. Need to write, in my case. It doesn't let you breath because it claws its way to the top of your pri...

The theme of a wandering soul lost in the concrete jungle, stumbling and staggering, is one well documented. But what when that wandering soul finds the peace within the madness? What when they spot the light streaming through the alabaster branches of skyscrapers? What when they see a little daisy bloom in the midst of metal and glass? When night falls like a cloak of blackness, and if you're high enough, you can see the fireflies. Not ones that fly, but nevertheless ones that blink out when dawn approaches. They're all the hues and shades - easily mistaken for light pollution. And then you look closer, and all you see is their unique beauty too. Roars and snarls of the traffic. Whimpers of horns. The mumble of an endless mass of public. And in some little pockets of solitude - if you listen close - you can hear the trill of nature too. At night, the crickets still chirp. At dawn, the birds still sing. Sometimes you feel suffocated, and everything closes in, setting ...

In the advent of exams, I was prompted to visit CrashCourse; which is this YouTube channel that I swear by. A couple of binges later, I surfaced at a corner of the YouTube black hole where a Ted Talk by John Green on the nature of learning caught my eye.  (You can watch it here if you want)  He talks about learning and why it appeals to him, among other things. One of the things he emphasizes upon is the importance of being in a community of learners. To clarify, he says that being in a place or community that values learning, or values curiosity, is paramount. Why so? I like to think that the average human mindset is somewhat akin to a moth. We go where the light is on, where the collective of society and majority shine a flashlight. Where everyone looks. This is where the community of learners comes into play. You see this collective, that's working as a hive mind to shine a flashlight upon knowledge - it doesn't matter what sort - and you fly straight to it. It's ha...

memories are liquid. they tend to slip us by, they are tinged with what we feel at recall, and they take the shape we want them to. you don't realize the depth of a memory at first glance. but then you mull over it a bit, and the kaleidoscope surfaces. you turn it this way and that, just reveling in all the things it can show you from a single situation. you examine it, and time becomes your magnifying glass. every memory has more meaning as the time passes, like a bottle of old wine that can get you drunk on past, better, simpler times. they can be a storm riddled sea or a tranquil lake. either way, you sink beneath the surface and lose sight of what's real. you see turmoil or you see calm. you see the the recollection as crystal clear or as spider-webbed with the ripples of your disturbed conscience. your state of mind is your lens. a memory is a page in a journal. its reopened and opened until its old and worn and falling apart. it may have its own ink splotches a...

Hi! Let me tell you, right off the bat, this is one of the most informal posts on this thing yet. I Just sat down in front of my laptop with the intention of doing nothing but write. I don't know what direction it'll have taken by the end. But I wanna try this. We celebrated Makar Sankranti recently, and I was at one my friend's homes. It had gotten dark, and most people were now grabbing a bite or sitting and gossiping. Me, I was multitasking and doing both. Anyway, I saw this one string that was tethered to a kite that was somehow still up. Funny thing was, no one was flying it anymore. As I sat there, staring into the sky, a strange thought occurred to me. Every human being that I had ever known was a bit like that one fateful kite. See, at the beginning, we all need someone to guide us, we all need someone to...... show us the way into the sky if you will. But once you get high enough, you don't need someone to evaluate your every move. The need for guidance mo...

Let's face it, the earth isn't in a great position right now. Oil spills, pollution, global warming, extinction of biodiversity. I don't think I have time to list all the horrible things happening around here. And I find myself in the position of being distressed about it. I see everyone too preoccupied in the untangling the webs of their own lives to pay attention to the way the world is slowly burning right under their noses. You know what; this is not the world we had in mind. It’s becoming absolutely impossible to halt the human ego in its tracks. It’s becoming absolutely impossible to find some on who thinks our world is perishing. It’s a broken world. With jagged shards of the glass we scattered hurting our own survival. And the innocent, unknowing causalities doing their best to stay afloat in the sea of our mistakes. They are not collateral damage in the war of the human destruction. Every day, a little piece of us becomes richer, at the price of the death of a t...

Hullo! Everyone hold onto your reindeer, here I come with the Christmassy titles. No but really, this is is a byproduct of too much coffee and algebra at 4 am (not even kidding). It came out of me not wanting to open my mouth to practice my speech for the annual day and then somehow manifested into this little transcription. I hope you enjoy it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Silent Night Some nights call for silence. These are the nights when a hush is cast over the cosmos and the cacophony of human nature is stifled by the velvet of black sky. The times when the stars ask, nay, demand your calm. It’s like an invisible force compels you, with just a slight brush, to quieten and enjoy the peace. The stillness is so absolute that the slightest whisper, the slightest stir, is enough to send ripples through it. Times like these are hard to come by and even harder to spot. The only indicat...