Monday, July 25, 2011

TT

I'd heard "Lies lies lies" by the Thompson Twins when I was a kid. It was in one of the two cassettes titled "Disco 83" and "Disco Festival 83". The beats were catchy except the queer way in which a girl laughs some where in the beginning of the song, something that my elder sister found hideous, I didn't mind it too much. I can't recall how many times I must have heard this song after I grew up, maybe once or twice on MTV rewind or a similar program on Channel [V] and that too must have been in the early 1990s. So it was definitely a surprise when I found myself sitting down on the internet a few days ago searching of the song on youtube. I didn't remember the name of the group that sang it and found that it was the Thompson Twins. This got me interested in knowing a little more about them. Enter Wikipedia; there were no twins in the Thompson Twins, in fact to my surprise this British group was named after the Thompson and Thompson of Tintin Comics. Wiki listed a number of member of the group but the primary three were Tom Bailey, Alannah Currie, Joe Leeway. The first was the lead singer, a Briton, the second a lady from New Zealand and the third was a guy with an Irish mother and a Nigerian father. The last explained the light-skinned Afro guy in the video. I read that they shot into fame with their two songs "lies, lies, lies". The group's history made for a great read on Wikipedia, especially the way in which Tom and Allanah got to know each other.

This got me curious about their other songs but the very first I heard hence got me seriously hooked to it, I loved it from the first beat. Another catchy techno number albeit a slow one unlike 'Lies, lies lies'

The lyrics are nice as well. Following are the lyrics with the link to the song in the end.


I have a picture,
pinned to my wall.
An image of you and of me and we're laughing and loving it all.
Look at our life now, tattered and torn.
We fuss and we fight and delight in the tears that we cry until dawn

Hold me now, warm my heart
stay with me, let loving start (let loving start)

You say I'm a dreamer, we're two of a kind
Both of us searching for some perfect world we know we'll never find
So perhaps I should leave here, yeah yeah go far away
But you know that theres no where that I'd rather be than with you here today

You ask if I love you, well what can I say?
You know that I do and if this is just one of those games that we play
So I'll sing you a new song, please don't cry anymore
and then I'll ask your forgiveness, though I don't know just what I'm asking it for

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpZ9gEKBoYI

Sunday, July 24, 2011

The shot and the hot

I paused at the beautiful sound of Church choir singing while surfing the TV channels, taking a break from the usual blood and gore of Animal Planet. Funny how the church choir always sound so familiar and ‘similar’ irrespective of the language of the hymns. Then the conductor went into hyper activity but the choir’s voice raised slowly, melody that made the hair on my body stand up. It was beautiful as it was mildly haunting, I wish I could record it and listen to it. While the camera captured the view of the hall from the ceiling, the painted glass windows, the white walls, the high ceiling, the long arched windows lighting up the whole place. It was a soothing sight only if you managed to overlook some of the people in the congregation weeping and turn a blind eye to the title displayed underneath; this was the Reuters relayed “Mass for Sadness and Hope” on the CNN and the BBC 11:00am Oslo time.

The Norwegians insist that this not be referred to as a memorial service but a “mass” as there were people who were still missing at the Utoya island and maybe even alive. A solemn Bishop Kvarme spoke for a while, followed by a speech by a lady, possibly someone at a high position in the church. The twin tragedy of an otherwise peaceful Norway has shocked the world. There was an explosion in government headquarters and then the killings at the Utoya island where a government youth group had gathered. At first one wonders why someone would kill nearly a 100 odd teenagers. The answer is not difficult to understand; ideological differences. The guy was against the multi-culture favourism of the present Norway government. We’re never far away from such right-wing bigots. From what I read of it in the papers, the killer, ___ is a right-wing activist and otherwise seemed like a decent, ‘well-dressed’, ‘well-educated’ person and doesn’t have any history of violence. My faith in the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” stands reaffirmed and in the same vein, “a man by his clothes or his appearance or his charm” as they said ages ago “appearances are often deceptive”; the mind stands above all.

They say that the macabre he’s responsible for was carried out in cold-blood over a period of an hour and a half. He was dressed as a policeman and called out to the fleeing people to come to him, telling them that he was there to help them. The teenagers, confused in the panic about where the bullets were coming from, rushed to him and he calmly raised his gun and shot them down. He used this strategy again and again. There was nowhere to hide. People who tried escaping by jumping into river to swim away were also shot dead. A few that escaped after they went into hiding narrated how the killer kept roaming around calmly calling out to people who were hiding, confidently and calmly killing those he saw.

What causes people to get so possessed, we know of similar thing that happened in the holocaust in Germany, in form of atrocities on blacks in South Africa (and now on the whites there), in the form of communal violence and acts of terrorism that have and still rock our nation every now and then. We have right-wingers sitting in the parliament, some of them educated from the top universities in the world, where they arm themselves with the guns of wisdom-of-the-world and start their subliminal insinuations of hate in the mind of the common man, gradually making them pawns of their agenda. The ferocity with which the Communal Violence Act is being opposed speaks volumes of our leaders. Having taken lessons from the past, the Act is centered on “punishing officials” who do not carry out their duties of taking measures to protect the innocent amongst the minorities who are targeted in pogroms and to bring unbiased, speedy justice for the victims. No religion whatsoever has promoted the spirit of brotherhood despite false claims from all sides. We all still brew hatred for each other in the name of religion, caste and region in this modern era of a hog-wash that we call “progress”.

Meantime thought it better to switch back to watching the blood and gore of Nat-Geo Wild Channel, which is less grotesque that the filth of man.

By the way, Amy Winehouse died at 27 years of age the day before. This is about the only space I can allocate for her on this post, which is a little more in proportion than what The Tribune allocated for this news in some godforsaken middle page. I liked her and after winning 5 Grammys in one night, everyone always thought she’d go down amongst the legends of music as the decades pass. Sadly, drugs and alcohol got the better of her. No one knows yet how she died, as I type this, her body is probably being cut open and her internal organs, being removed and sampled for the cause of death. We’ll soon know why she died but then again, how does it matter anymore! But right now, the question tickling my mind is this “What the hell do these docs who carry out autopsies think when they see celebrities in all their glory on the screen?”

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Friar

Happy B'day Mendel

Click on the title to read about Mendel.

Friday, July 08, 2011

Rid(dl)er

These streetlights pass over me one by one, the light of one illuminating me for a second before shoving me into the arms of the next one while the darkness caresses me in between. The ride’s a lot like life, darkness with its ecstasies of utopia, followed by the blinding lights of reality. You pass through these intermittent phases as the wheels keep rolling and you look at your watch for the one thing that never stops, even if you do, time. It’s your will to trudge on or swiftly glide, the watch won’t stop or even if it does, you’ll just replace the batteries and twist the arms back to calibrate it with the seconds, minutes, hours or days that passed while it wasn’t ticking but that didn’t cease your locomotion towards the end, the ultimate end, from where everyone wishes to have a new beginning in the form of eternal life or rebirth, hoping they’d get to see some more of what they experience now and the way they experience it now. But now that they have it, they spend it complaining about what they don’t have while they still have the biggest thing they can have, life.
You can always turn and ride back to where you came from, you’ll find that place wasn’t the way you left it, you’ll search for the ones you left behind but you’ll find out that they turned some direction and rode-on their way and while you hang your head for a while, you slowly realize that the clock is still ticking and you need to make your journey, find your reasons and paint your rainbow in the black of the night while there’s still some rubber left on the wheels and roll back on your own road. The wind dries your eyes but the tears bring relief, sometime you take-off the helmet to feel wind on your face, to feel that speed of life but at other times the drag on your chest threatens to squeeze your breath-out so you slow down and gaze at that confounded time-machine that only tell about the present and is mute about the past or future. Then you wonder if that’s what it’s all about. You also wonder what you can do with the contraption on your wrist, maybe you can set goals by it. You never know when it’ll be buried with you, it could be in 30 years, it could be in 30 seconds but you can live by it. So while today you ride on this ground, one day you’ll be six feet under. Who'll remember? maybe it’s about the miles you traverse, the landmarks you cross and most importantly the landmarks that you create.