Abbaji

You know sometimes when I'm writing, I think as to why I write in the first place. And no matter how much I tell myself that I write because I want to, somewhere deep within, there is a part in me which tells me that I write not just because I want to write or want to be read but because sometime very late in my life, I might want to look back to these pieces and reflect nostalgically; Though more often than not my saner self behaves and tells me that there is no such thing as looking back in time. For one, I neither believe in the linearity of time nor in the dimensions of space. And two, I believe memories are as fanciful as dreams, we do not look back and see the life we have lived as much as look back and see the life we want ourselves to believe we lived. Garcia Marquez put it succinctly at the beginning of Living to Tell the Tale when he said, Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it. Now, those are the words of a master, the sign of a great writer. Somebody who realises that more can be comprehended through silence than through sound and that words are just road maps for one's journey in search of his soul and that the real journey begins after the book has been closed shut. Time. Its an amazing idea. What would time have meant to us if there was no deadline, if we weren't always in a hurry to get things done, if we didn't quantify life into the number of breaths a man's taken. As far as I can see the world, life and everything they constitute, time is at a standstill. Neither does it move forward or backward but only as much as we want it to move. I have spent a lot of time with my grandparents, seeing their lives which has been mostly spent in the confines of this house and I see that apart from a few major events in their lives, their last ten years have basically been in a standstill. Everyday has been but a repetition of the previous one. Their world is confined to this house, their reality is the memories of lives they once lived, people they once knew and every time I see them distracted, looking into the empty skies, I understand that they are away, briefly visiting the worlds they once lived in. And art does just that for us. It shows us all life in a single instance, and here again the duration of single instance can be very relative. A painting may do that in a second, music in minutes, a movie in hours and a book in days. But art creates worlds right in front of us, uses our memories as the elixir upon which it survives and then takes away with it a part of our existence so that the next time we look back upon the same piece of art, we are looking at a very different piece. I have been telling Sravani for the past two days that I was feeling very low, restless, confused and helpless. I told her I hadn't been able to read or write. And now as I write this, I feel elated already. Words are our fingerprints we leave on the surface of time and that is what makes them so important. We have left our marks there, and now in a weird way it belongs to us. I might have had a very hectic day yesterday but unless I had something to show for it, I wouldn't remember anything of it. And whatever a man is capable of leaving to reclaim it years later, is art.

Its actually pretty funny, why this piece got started and what's in it. I think I really do believe that there is no one absolute world, the world exists how you want it, and only as long as you want it. And that erases the need for envy, greed and loathing. But I started writing this because after hearing about some people, listening to various musicians, I wondered if there is really something as prodigious talent. Again, it wasn't envy as much as disgust. Because I don't like comparing myself with others as much as I love comparing myself with somebody I could have been. If I had gone to guitar classes regularly two years ago, I'd have been a great player by now too. Now, I see that there is no point comparing and worrying about it. I didn't do it back then and that is all that that matters. And if I want to play the guitar now, I take it out and start strumming it. That's how you live life, not by wondering what life would have been but by realizing that there are no would haves. If we had a redo button in life, all we'd be doing was press it all the time because we're never really happy with our past. But that is what makes it so wonderful. The moment I am happy with my past, I'd grow into a pompous idiot and forget that present is a lot more than learning from the past. It is also about applying it. I know I'm digressing like crazy but I want all this to flow out. I want to write, not because I want to look back at it in some point in the future but because this moment in my life, right now, I don't want to do anything than write this.

Yea, that's about it then.
Later.