Sunday, January 18, 2015

Provoked

   I have begun to realise that there is no free speech in the world. Or if you really want to speak up something thAt may be contrary to what's in fashion, you'll probably need a strong platform to say it else you'll simple get booed away.

Je suis Charlie became a fashionable post on many a friend's Facebook.

   Today while watching Al Jazeera news channel I was surprised to hear other voices and that too from non-Muslims about why the world wasn't acknowledging that the post-shoot out edition of Charlie Hebdo (CH) showing prophet Mohammed as a hooked nose Arab was actually racist. Those words from the lady journalist did challenge my thoughts. Why didn't I think of that? I'm sensitive  to these things. Well! Why didn't the CH fans think about it? Is CH also bigoted, like it's attackers were?
 
   It was quote evident that the massive gathering in Paris, aiming to show solidarity after the killing of Hebdo's cartoonists, ended more as a revelry than a somber time of introspection. What was also condemned was that some of the world leaders participating in the march would never allow freedom of expression to the likes of Charlie Hebdo and possibly even take punitive actions against such a magazine in their own country.

   Anshuman Mondal a reader at a British university has written the book, Islam and Controversy and from his interview I gathered that he possibly intends to expose that bashing Islam has become fashionable, and that if you don't do it, in the non-Muslim world, people consider you to be abnormal. So many people are being criticised for criticising CH's cartoon. Well, if you try to gag those mouths or criticise them, you stand convicted of gagging the freedom of expression yourself, don't you.

   And sorry Mr. Pope, CH has the right to make fun of Mohammed and Jesus. But then the rest of the world is also free to assess and critique CH's work. So if the world should be gag-free, it should not be gagged to reveal CH's shortcomings as well. And btw so many people were waiting for this pope to finally say something that they can criticise him about and he has obliged. But hey, wouldn't a heart, a moulvi, rabbi or pundit have done the same (don't they?)

   I love free speech, free thoughts, free world etc etc but is any of it really free? I think you have to pay for everything in some way or another. I think free speech should be practiced in a world that practices introspection and allows discussion and debate between differing ideologies, and yet has the good sense to coexist peacefully. But what the fuck, we have to entertain ourselves watching all this defecation of ideologies on TV and in our homes. Hey I'm switching over to Cartoon Network before it gets corrupted as well.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Something To Believe In

BON JOVI LYRICS

"Something To Believe In"

I lost all faith in my God, in his religion too
I told the angels they could sing their songs to someone new
I lost all trust in my friends
I watched my heart turn to stone
I thought that I was left to walk this wicked world alone

Tonight I'll dust myself off
Tonight I'll suck my gut in
I'll face the night and I'll pretend
I got something to believe in

And I had lost touch with reason
I watched life criticize the truth
Been waiting for a miracle
I know you have too

Though I know I won't win
I'll take this one on the chin
We'll raise a toast and I'll pretend
I got something to believe in

If I don't believe in Jesus, how can I believe the Pope
If I don't believe in heroin, how can I believe in dope
If there's nothing but survival, how can I believe in sin
In a world that gives you nothing
We need something to believe in

So ill-understood

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjRkDo21pZY

Aarzu humne, ki to hum paaye.. (when I wished for something, I found out...OR when my wishes began to come true, I found out that...)

Raushani saath, layi thi saaye...  (...light had brought with it, shadows...)

Saaye gehere the; raushani halki.. (...shadows were dark; the light feeble...)

Hum na samjhe the, baat itni si   (...I had never understood, such a simple thing..)

Khwaab sheeshe ke; dunia patthar ki (..dreams are made of glass; this world, of stone)

When Gardish (translates roughly to "testing times") was released in the early 1990s, I fell in love with the song "hum na samjhe the" (link given above), from which the above mentioned excerpt is taken. Of course I was a very pessimistic kid who loved being alone mostly, so I had a natural liking for sad songs. I mean c'mon man, I loved "lagi aaj saawan ki fir woh jhhadi hai" from the movie Chandani. Thinking back, I find it very strange that I actually played and rewound the song innumerable times on my small tape-recorder to write the lyrics of the song.  It was hard work but I did it for many a song, English and Hindi, since I was 8 or 9 years old.  I hated home-work and always got humiliated by my teachers but for other stuff like listening to music, writing lyrics, scraping the paint off my bicycle and messing it up by painting it myself and lots of other fun stuff, I had all the time in the world.

Anyway, I digressed as usual. I loved the song I've mentioned here. It had just the right mix of SP Balasubramanian's voice, sad lyrics/music, Jackie Shroff's and Amrish Puri's fantastic acting to get me hooked. The video of the song could've been a standalone music video, for it does seem to convey something to the listener. 

Watching it still brings a tear to my eye. Something about the unsaid relation of a father and son. A father's proud dream, a son's love and then, the big crash of it all. The son growing up, differing in his opinions, attempting to find his own path, the constant failures; a disappointed father and the lost son. Then there are a few moments when their eyes meet, saying millions of unsaid things in the silence and then...them walking away from each other wishing that the other guy would understand. The movie is also kinda on the same line, I haven't watched it but read it's story. But then again, this song is a story in itself. I still love it.

Thursday, January 08, 2015

North East west south


Biggest news is that Nunu n I saw it for the first time on a sonograph (is that a word?). What a moment it was. I could hardly believe my eyes. The first thing I felt was "stupid" because this was the reAl deal. This was no chapter in a refresher course-book for developmental biology. I felt like an alien myself. Time to pray.

Friday, January 02, 2015

Rift of the moment

Was watching this documentary on Discovery Channel about the Rift Valley. A  French scientist studying the area said this....

B
loody hell... I started writing this post while watching the program on Discovery Channel the other day but couldn't finish it. Now I don't remember what was running through my mind. That's what happens when you don't hook that ephemeral thought being experienced while you're in the moment of something. Oh it was a beautiful thought... It was like  Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment", which is fleeting and if you can't catch it in that very second of time, you need to let it be and start looking at the next one. I tell you, photography can teach one a lot about writing and life. 
Sigh! 
NEXT!

NY mean New Year

NY (NEW YEAR)

Watching Cosmos by NDT on NGC. I just learnt that NASA's voyager moves at 54,000 km per hour but even at that speed it'll take it 80,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun.

What's the big din about this New Year. After all what is a year? If I consider what it really is in terms of the scale of time, it is the time the Earth takes to complete one revolution around the sun while moving at a speed of 1,08,000 km per hour! Therefore it covers a distance of 15,00,00,000 km every year!
The Sun itself is moving in the Milky Way galaxy at a speed of 7,00,000 km/hr and Milky Way itself is moving in the universe at a speed of 25,00,000 km/hr. So you can well imagine how fast, we on Earth, are actually moving through the universe and yet nothing in our lives seem to match the scale of our movement through the universe...or does it? Think!

So why is the New Year so special to us humans? Each one of us alive has moved that bit closer to our death, while hitching this high-speed ride through the universe. What a weird way to look at life, even if that's the reality of it all. Yet there's more to it. There's happiness, sadness, success, failures, living, loving and looking forward to life, not death, which we anyway have to accept humbly. After all even the the great conqueror Alexander realized at his death bed that we were all born naked and helpless and so we die. 

Today we prayed and poured our hearts out. Prayed for us, our families, our friends. We prayed for people we love and for those that aren't so dear. While praying, their joys and pains were made clear to us effortlessly, which was surprising. We prayed for those we don't know, yet know that many live their lives in difficult deplorable conditions. For once we rested in the assurance that that, which/who drives us through this universe at such ultra-stormy speed, without us sensing it, may hear our tiny supplications about the miniscule fraction of reality, our world, that means so much to us, no matter how insignificant it may be on the cosmic scale.

And so we set out on the same cyclic path of physical travel around the Sun that we've took last year and have done since the time we were born and yet our lives are hardly cyclic, we change everyday on this path around the Sun, till the time we return to dust. And that is why it's a New Year, despite being the same road. Happy New Year