moonstar meanderings

When once asked if how they played depended on their mood, setting, attire on stage etc. the inimitable Indian Ocean replied in the affirmitive, saying, "अगर नहा के गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं, बिना नहाके गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं |", before memorably adding, "और टट्टी के साथ गाओ तो बिलकुल अलग |". Holding onto that powerful dictum, I present to you material sublime:

Compared to making day night day night, this brewed for longer and I found it harder to grasp a narrative bassline that excited me. I started out by wanting to make it explicitly about Japan and then riffing on how it is almost impossible to understand an entire country and its complex history, before coming back to the inevitability of wanting and needing that compressed, imperfect model. But that task was both too daunting and less exciting because I had a rough idea of the complete picture and it was just about putting the pieces together. For a while I wanted to turn into a Zen-ish video but that too fell apart because I felt it was too easy to make a faux-Zen video that signalled depth without to backing it up with truth. 

A major phase transition happened thanks to Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's incredible Finding the Raga, and after spending weeks listening to new music for the film (from Japanese Jazz to Ryuichi Sakamoto and American Folk to Hamir Kalyani), I knew this was going to be Dhrupad too. That then freed me up from wanting to create a video essay, and let me go back to free associating and juxtaposing images, and instead of informing or convincing the viewer, to just prompt them into going off on their own on a slightly unusual (compared to their otherwise day-to-day concerns) path. The birds kind of came home in the last couple of weeks as I read Siddhartha Deb's astounding, brutal, magical The Beautiful and the Damned (which I hope to write about soon). I wanted to make this about the prosaic, the quitodian, the sensual, the anonymous, and I didn't really know if I found that exhilarating or limiting. Which was just as well because it was both, and having that ambiguity created enough epistemic and existential longing to get going. In the midst of this, at some point, my brain also said that I didn't have to make it the definitive Japan diary, and that freed me into pursuing and celebrating my present preoccupations and fascinations. I wanted to call it surfaces&essences to convey that gap between thinking we see and know and understand and truly seeing, knowing and understanding, but I didn't feel confident enough to make that claim not least because I wasn't sure if I was seeing things as they were or was being fooled by a deeper, more problemlatic part of my own mind that was claiming understanding without actually doing it. My eureka moment came in the shower one day when the quasi-poem i am things came to me unbidden, and I knew that the real world and its marvels excited me the most, and that was, for the most part, a genuine feeling. And all this was a way of trying to capture and convey that feeling.

So, yeah, I enjoyed making but have been very reluctant to share it widely. It is a strange, potent mix of arrogance ("I don't make it for others, I don't want to be corrupted by others' often shallow feedback"), self-loathing ("I have nothing original to say and I don't want to waste others' time by my shallow signalling"), shame ("The video clips are crap and I'm a fraud for trying to gain some validation by riding on the soaring wings of majestic artists, primarily Dagar Brothers"), and fear of rejection/ mockery ("What if I ask them to watch it, and they think its juvenile and see through its pretensions"). The few people I've sent it to have come back with comments sweet and kind as well as meh, so I know they're not all lying. 

One last thing: usually when I'm done making something, and wrestle with myself between making it more known and just letting it be out there ("గింజకి జీవశక్తి ఉంటే అది ఎక్కడ పడేసినా పోదు" and all that), I arrive, sooner or later, at the question of why is it even out there? Why don't I just save it on my computer and never tell anyone about it? Because its not really validation or attention or fame (however small it maybe) or social change is what I'm seeking. Ofcourse they all do exist but none of them are fundamental. The answer came to me in a conversation with Bhajji after I sent him the link and I was rather pleased for finally seeming to have arrived at a satisfactory, definite conclusion: 

It is that everything I write, film, say, quote, rant about and all that is to find friends, people who share my wavelength. With whom I can sit down on in a cafe on a late afternoon and get lost in expansive, spiralling conversations as the evening thickens around us. That, I find, is not a bad reason to put your rawest, most honest but also the best self out.