26 June 2012

A Brief Deliberation and Study of the Nothing

As ironic as it may be, that a comeback post should be about nothing, this concept, is by far, the only thing that interests me at this very moment. Perhaps it is the fact that I am currently reading Dickens, or the fact that I have grown several decades older (not wiser, mind you, just older) in the short span of a year, but this is how I sound now, and there is no apparent remedy that I know of.

Having done away with that brief and inconclusive introduction let me talk about an hour I spent doing nothing. An hour I was gifted by chance, the other day. An hour that has spurred in me the need to write.
It was smack in the middle of a normal day, and the singular task before me, that hour, was to sit and do nothing. It does not matter how I came to that juncture or the events that led to it. Only that I had an hour before me.

The phrase ‘doing nothing’ is one of the most delicious sounds to my ear. ‘Chocolate’ is a close second to it. Yes, ‘chocolate’ is second. And when I say, ‘doing nothing’, it does not mean vegetating on the couch, staring at the television at some inane sitcom that stopped being funny somewhere in the 90s. It does not mean taking a power nap that turns into a full-blown paralysis, where your dreams are more vivid and dreary than your actual life. It does not mean sitting at a coffee shop, nursing a cup of coffee, exchanging gossip with a friend, where you claim to relax, but you are actually keeping tabs on how many times you have ‘relaxed’ in the last six months. It does not mean taking a vacation, sleeping in late, ordering in room service, while, in your head, you are running conversations you will have with your friends about how you “did nothing” on your vacation. Or even worse is the same scenario, except it is a “staycation.” I never understood the purpose of that one, really.

My hour of doing nothing was spent staring.

I first stared at the everyday objects in front of me – a notebook with scribbling that reminded me of certain confrontations that meant nothing now, my phone which reminded me that I had to call several people but never got around to it, a shelf with sundry objects, the purpose of which had long been forgotten, and other symbols of mundane life that threatened to crowd out the precious minutes of this rare hour.

Soon, my eyes strayed to the window… what beauty lay there! I could see trees, swaying to the wind, stretched out as far as I could see, and over the horizon, the pale blue mountains. I did what any human would do – admired the scenery for what felt like ages, but was probably only a few minutes in mundane time. Gone were reminders of the callings outside of that window frame. These were replaced by pure admiration of the good fortune of a tree, whose obligation, at that moment, was to stand and sway against the wind. I could do that! Oh, how it would feel to do that! Stand against the wind, eyes shut, swaying… Oddly, it makes me think of sun-baked Italian streets – a place I have literally only been in my dreams. I realized my best dreams feature Italian streets! An amazing discovery about myself, right at that moment!
There-on, I sat looking out at the pale mountains, wondering how it would feel to stand on the very top of that mountain, feeling content that there was nothing higher that I wished to climb. And then, once I am there… doing nothing.

Suddenly, the clouds lifted from the grey firmament that was my mind. I felt neither my shoulders, nor the burdens that rested on them. I had no memory of all my thoughts so far. I had no clue about how I existed. Only that, with my eye fixed on the whiteness beyond, over that mountain, I could get away with doing nothing. 

And I did.

Perhaps it was the world moving again, or a bird flying by, I am not sure, but one of them brought me back to this realm of ‘doing’. And I realized, I had things to do. Somethings, many things, everythings… but I would always have the delicious memory of the hour I did nothing.

12 January 2012

When A 'Flop Song' Brought on a Kolaveri!!

Looking at the sudden craze over Dhanush's nonsense song from the movie "3", I really want to shout, "People! Why this kolaveri?!?! It's just a song!!!" 

But then, from the beginning, everything about this song has been odd to me. I just can't make up my mind on whether I like it or hate it!

First of all, I heard about this song from the most unlikely source on the planet - my husband. The man who is totally clueless about pop culture, who uses Twitter to read about world news, deleted his Facebook account because he had too many friends (more than 900!), listens to Beethovan and classical instrumental music on YouTube, and has no idea what an Internet meme is! Most importantly, I sometimes think he is oblivious to the Tamil movie industry! So imagine my surprise when he asked me "What is this new Tamil movie song that everyone is talking about? Some Dhanush song?" I would never have imagined that the words 'Tamil movie', 'Dhanush' and 'song' would come out of my husband's mouth in the same sentence, so it took me a couple of minutes to process the information. When I surfaced, he showed me a news story that NDTV was running on this new song that Dhanush had composed and sang. I saw our skinny hero, complete with headphones and nifty recording paraphernalia, belting out a 'nonsense' song. Everything made sense about the song, except that NDTV felt the need to cover this story on the morning news. Then I reasoned that it must be a really slow news day, no earthquakes, fast-unto-deaths, or pregnant celebrities. 

And then I looked up the video on YouTube. Whaa??????? The song had just been released, and on YouTube no less, and already it had hits somewhere in the six-digit area. Whoa! Where was I when all this was happening? Okay, so then I sat down to listen to the song.....

The first reaction from me was one of disgust and shock - "What the...? Is this the song that everyone is making such a big deal about? It's a simple, no-need-for-creativity Tamil gana song, with words that make no sense to any one! Worse - the song is absolutely predictable!" 

But I clicked 'Replay' and listened to it again....... and then I listened to it 5 more times.... and then I created a new YouTube playlist for it, and I had no heart to leave it all alone, and I added 50 more Tamil songs to the playlist, played the playlist and simply hit 'replay' everytime the "Kolaveri" song ended.....

I WAS HOOKED!

I shared it with a million friends, and also grabbed the headphones from someone else and listened, if I knew that they were listening to the "Kolaveri" song. I hate listening to songs on people's mobile phones, because I hate the tinny quality of the audio, and am totally disgusted with the audacity of the person who thinks that everyone will appreciate him and be grateful for forcing them to listen to his choice of bad music. But for the first time in my life, I listened to the "Kolaveri" song on a friend's mobile phone, in a public place!! I shocked myself!

So, if you follow a phenomenon so closely, you HAVE to Google it, amirite? So, yeah, I did a Google search, and I saw links to articles talking about what a big hit the song was, then I saw a couple of tangent videos - one was the original leaked audio of the 'kolaveri' raw version, another was the female version (not that impressive, by the way), and a kiddie version (absolutely adorable rendition by Sonu Nigam's little son... must watch!), an English R&B version (VOM!)and a thousand low quality uploads from fans of Dhanush!!! There was so much material on the Net, I was mind-blown!

Oh... and I forgot to mention the interviews! Switch on the television that week, and all you could see was mikes shoved in Dhanush's face, asking him "How did this happen?" (erm... people.... a song was composed. That is ALL! It was not the discovery of alien life on Mars, or the discovery that Dhanush himself  is alien life!! Sheesh! Now THAT would have been real news!) And Dhanush blushing (if that's even possible) and saying, "It is nothing, folks. Ignore it! It is just a nonsense song. I wrote it in 20 minutes. It's not that good...really... you all should just ignore me and my media-hogging wife with the superstar Dad! Really....." But the more he said it, the more people fawned over him and his super-successful family and their super-duper hit song, and the more hits the song received on YouTube, and the more it got tweeted, and the more hashtags it spawned, and the more celebrities wrote the lyrics down on a piece of paper and tried to sing it (badly) in front of a bunch of press cameras (looking at you Abhishek!) and the more people went berserk over a self-proclaimed "FLOP SONG"!!!!!!!!

Shame on you if you can't see the irony of it all!!!

Well. If you don't, let me explain....

1. The song calls itself a 'Soup Song' - meaning it's about guys who get unceremoniously dumped by girls who failed to see their usefulness. And yet, I can just picture every guy in the country singing it to his girlfriend, and making her laugh with glee!

2. It's a 'flop song' - Dude, can the song BE any more of a hit????

3. Every one from the director to the composer to the singer is asking us to ignore the song "It took us 20 minutes to compose.....we did not even have lyrics written down.... we just sang whatever came to mind... we made this song for fun... we were just fooling around.... it was no big deal! Ignore us!" - Then what the heck are you doing topping the charts in several countries and going all kinds of mad viral on the Web!!! Explain Yourself!!

4. Dhanush, singing, popularity, international appeal - everyone of those words is paradoxical to the rest. And yet..... every one of those things happened one after the other as if they were direct and predicable results of the previous.... Twist your brain around that, if you will!

Conclusion: Well, I guess the down-to-earth nature of the song is what appeals the most to people. And most definitely the customizability (is that a word?) of the song.... you can change it to suit any situation. There is one guy who rewrote it to talk about problems that Tamilians face in Jaffna, there is this IT version that laments the plight of IT guys in India working for foreign clients, there is a version by a couple of girls that is a sort of reply to all the "accusations" leveled against them in the song (probably not tasteful enough to be featured here), a flash mob version (always my favorite versions) and, well, there are so many versions, so why don't you just see for yourself!!! (scroll down in the flash mob video's page)

Anyway, we could talk about this all day, or you could decide for yourself if this song is really that big of a deal. So here you go:


And the flash mob, because I thought it was cute:

Hehe! Check out that guy in the striped blue t-shirt!!

Skinny Kids Can Be Healthy Too

My husband and I were waiting at the bus stop, and an old lady who we've never met before came up to us and said, "Don't you ...