cogitated thoughts

A majority of this post, in parts if not entirely, was thought about in a Volvo bus from Bangalore to Tirupathi and in a Volvo bus from Tirupathi to Bangalore; the interval between both the above mentioned acts being a time period of about 15 hours.
15 hours in Tirupathi can be spent in a limited number of ways; I trust my readers to have the fair amount of intelligence that is required for any Indian to decipher out what it is exactly, that you do in Tirupathi. The temple as such is not, strictly speaking, a very big deal. But some things have an innumerable number of bald people in all varieties in them, the species constituting even a couple of really cute bald babies, add to that delicious prasadam, laddoos priced at Rs 25 and you have something that has a certain amount of charm to it. We were fortunate enough not to experience any sort of rush that leaves one with the distinct feeling of having been a part of a maddening stampede. I had been mentally prepared for the being -stubbornly-stationary-but-woo hoo-I’m- still -about -2 kms- away -from –where- I- should’ve- been thingy that one is subjected to when one visits and is then pushed from every angle in the temple in Tirupathi. I had also been mentally prepared for losing the game that my brother and I very cleverly devised when we were standing in the queue…yeah, okay so we had to count bald people and whoever counts more wins, but we thought of a twist…we had to count bald people with parabolic namas. My brother put his foot down when I gently mentioned to him that in all probability, he had been counting the same bald-people-with-parabolic-namas over and over. We had to put an end to our brilliant game though; partly because it was driving our mother and father mad and partly because, very honestly speaking, I don’t like losing clever, self- devised games too much. What I had not been mentally prepared for though is to have been dropped by the bus at 1 a.m along with my family outside a hotel...with GREEN TUBE LIGHTS!! Bah! It felt like a scene out of one of those ‘contemporary’, ‘bold’ Hindi movies these guys keep coming up with…you know Chandini bar, Lajaa and all that. But, it wasn’t too bad after all and it was 1 am so all we needed to do was to go to bed…and anyway they switched off them tube lights when daylight came.

Personally, I think, that a really good bus is one that confuses you to no end regarding the issue so as to whether you are on a train, a plane, a car or a bus. The bus is air conditioned, clean, has huge un-jangling windows and is costly.That being said, if you haven’t already traveled by Volvo, I strongly advise you to.

The thing about parents is that they stick together in all situations. When they have two children, one of them a 17-year-old adolescent girl who keeps going into periodic reveries and another a 12-year-old hyperactive, restlessly cranky boy, they go ahead and stick together some more which, I suspect, is one of the reasons that I found myself sitting next to the boy (along with the illustrious adjectives that I just mentioned) on the bus from B to T and from T to B. When my brother doesn’t feel like talking about his teachers (You –know- what??? U.K Singh chews paan in class!>horror filled facial expression) or about his friends (Ajay has many girl friends, giggle. I’m going to remain single all my life>solemnly and in the same breath Snitch (that’s Anirudh’s dog) has a cold) or about his new computer game CD (Carmageddon is SO COOL…it has a lot of blood in it>evil grin) then he can actually be pretty interesting. For example, we had a very scintillating discussion about people’s eyes looking scary in a dark bus…

At some point, he got really bored with me and the Telugu movie that was playing on the TV so he went off to the last seat. After just a couple of moments though, he was back, and with a sense of urgency he literally dragged me along with him to the end of the bus where he pointed at the window and said “LOO-K’’. When an order is too overpowering all you can do is obey it so I ‘’LOO-KED’’ and discovered almost immediately that, what my brother wanted me to see was a lake. This lake, like all other lakes had the world in its immediate vicinity reflected on its shimmering surface. What was so special about the reflection though was that the clear, star-lit night sky seemed to be an integral part of it. I leave it to my readers who I believe are actually aesthetics in disguise and who possess the fair amount of intelligence that is vital for a person to imagine the beauty of a lake pointed out to one by one’s brother. Now that you have imagined it I’m sure you will agree with me when I tell you that the most beautiful part about the whole thing was the fact that my brother wanted me to see it, which brings me to the very heart of the matter, so to speak.

There are times when someone tells you something and it leaves you with a stupidly sporadic grin on your face, the memory of which remains with you for your entire life. It has to be someone telling it to you though. On no account can you expect the same effect even if you get an equally satisfying one, if you read it in a book or watch it in a movie or hear it in a song. You may or may not remember what the thing accurately was, but that is not important or even remotely significant. Significance makes its majestic appearance in the fact that you’ll have stored the memory of that grin in some deep corner of your mind and can vaguely if not vividly, recall the pleasure that the thing, the person and the grin all consolidated together, gave you. I had the opportunity of being subjected to one such experience very recently and I request you to allow me to mention what it was that brought the grin to my face. I henceforth quote my Seymour-esque Doctor,
“Vision is rather over-emphasized in our world, when all the really nice things are non-visual like music, and good food, and nice textures those are the things that really last in memory.’’ The beauty of these words that I see in the most surreal, lucid way possible may not be evident to you at all but that alas, is your bad luck.

For a long period of time, the first thing that I used to do whenever there was a power cut was to take out my guitar and tune it. Only those who have played any instrument will understand how essential it is for the sounds produced by it to be in harmony with each other. A guitar that is not tuned properly is nothing but chaotic disaster. The nicest pieces of music that I have played or created are the ones that I played after I tuned my guitar in the dark. You don’t have to be an exceedingly good guitar player; I’m most definitely not. But there is something about not seeing what you are playing, because the sounds come from your heart. One of the secrets that the fox tells the little prince in the book, ‘The Little Prince’ is, “it is only with one’s heart, that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’’

Most of the times, it’s only when I close my eyes that I notice a lot of things that I would never have noticed with my eyes open. This statement isn’t meant to be taken in the literal, obvious way that it seemingly demands to be taken in. All I’m saying, is that non-visual things leave a more deeply felt impact on me. Things like background vocals or vague riffs of a song I really like, things like wind chimes in my neighbor’s house on a windy, quiet night, things like the smell of wet mud when it rains, things like knowing that my mother’s made my favourite dish when I’m walking on my apartment’s corridor a couple of yards away from home, things like someone calling me up from an auto rickshaw on a terribly busy street, things like the laughter of the people I love …yeah, doc these are the things that really last in memory. What is essential is invisible to the eye.