The Perfect RollerCoaster

And it comes for free. All it takes is 30KM of daily travel and some crazy intelligent minds who play with your not-so-intelligent mind. Here's the plot. We kicked off our project very late and needed to rush, and every element in the universe tried to slow us down and succeeded too. Heavily delayed at this point of time, we went to seek help from the internal guide whose name was given to us after nearly 2 months. We were even advised not to go to him for some strange reasons, but we bravely tried to put our best foot forward. And within a minute, we lost our footing. He grilled us for nearly 2 hours, and by the end of it, it all seemed like whatever we had done till now was completely useless and everything had to be restarted again. Right from the material to the design, everything looked faulty to him.

And we go back to our main project guides and they are too busy to think of alternatives. And it's us who is stuck finally. In all this, it looks like we are the brainless pawns who have to keep roaming around between 'people' to seek advice and all we get is a crazy 'no' from everyone.
Wow, we had huge plans for all this and it's come down to a point where we can't even be sure of getting anything through with hardly a few days left. With all the ups and downs (more of those nastily nauseating ninety degree downs), I would call this the perfect roller coaster ride.

Last Time was the Last Time

And I had to wait a whole year to know that. Some crazy thought entered my head while exiting the stage after the college annual day performance last year, that this could be my last time in this college. I never took that serious. After a full year of happenings, I finally realized, what I thought actually came true. I couldn’t realize it until the very last minute. Maybe it’s time I start taking my ‘6^th sense’ thoughts more serious. Certain self-made predictions are coming true in an almost frightening manner.

 

The events over the last few days happened exactly how I feared, exactly how I didn’t want them to happen, and it’s making me fear my own thoughts. Is my thinking making all this happen? I’d better stop thinking then.

 

The annual day was coming close, we were extremely edgy right from the beginning, but were growing in confidence as the days went by. But the most dominant observation was the fuss everyone was making about me. They were all talking about My last performance. I instead had my own problems to deal with. Last time or not, I wanted to play and the whole universe was acting against it. My fingers felt extremely sticky and I couldn’t play solos that I could a few months back. Srikar pulled out in the last minute and I suddenly felt lonely in spite of having friends with whom I was jamming for years. Something was happening. I kept telling everyone, “Something’s coming our way, and its not as simple as it looks”.

 

And it did come after-all. On the day of the performance, we received shock after shock, blow after blow and it reached a magnitude where we couldn’t recover. We had to buckle ultimately. We had to accept defeat against the college management. There was always a constant tug-of-war between us ‘Rock Band’ and the management. More than once, we fell for their false promises and yet never learnt the lesson. This time, the promises were extreme. It almost sounded unreal. We couldn’t believe the support we were getting. And the day when it mattered most, the whole story took a clean U-turn. Our performance which was to be placed at the very beginning was pushed backward quite a few times until it ended up at the very end. The reason? Simple. The Guests of Honour weren’t supposed to see/hear us. What a spectacular reason! They had Masters of Ceremonies who were pronouncing ‘honour’ as ‘hhhhhhonour’ and ‘dais’ as ‘die-ass’ and were preventing us from playing Rock Music in front of so-called Guests of Honor. We felt very ‘hhhonoured’ to be discriminated so badly. And finally, the 4-year long tug of war was won by those ‘hhhonourable’ people. Or rather, we allowed them to win by giving up ourselves. Clearly they were more interested in watching almost ridiculously random dancing, and girls whose clothes were sliding lower and lower below the neck (as noticed by a weirdly observant friend of mine), and there was lots of fighting as usual.

 

Overall the show was the messiest show over. The DJ who pretended to be a perfectionist was complaining about a small wrinkle on his company’s banner and couldn’t provide a proper ‘working’ DI unit for the guitars. There was lots of confusion when the event started. I heard there was a mini-fire among the over-heated cables, and a short-circuit later on. The whole thing started pretty late to start off with. And then to make up for the lost time, all kinds of crazy things were done. A man who was talking enthusiastically about his study experiences at Madras IIT with Abdul Kalam was cut short abruptly and rudely for some stupid felicitation. And moreover a few dance performances were cut in between and the embarrassed dancers had to get off stage. By this time I knew, our thing would be cancelled for sure. And it did happen when only half the show got over. We were losing hope as every minute passed by, and gave up by the time half of it was done, and the watch was already showing 10:30pm.

 

Blame it on faulty time-management, bad organization, or whatever. We lost the chance to perform. I lost the chance to perform. The thing that was hitting me the most though was the fact that the first years, who were singing with interest experienced the wrong side of things. What a bad first impression it would have been on them. But they are atleast lucky that they have a few more chances to showcase their skills. Though I don’t know if they can succeed in convincing the management enough for a next time. My last chance was blown and I was surprisingly happy about it. Another tension was off my head. I can now concentrate completely on my sticky project work.

 

As an overview, the response I saw from my surroundings over these four years was extremely bad. I was a school kid when I fell in love with Rock music, and I never looked back. I wanted to play like those artists that I hear all the time. I wasn’t doing it because I wanted to be uniquely skilled or anything. The whole genre had some kind of energy in it, a gravitational energy. For some reason, this energy transformed into noise for most others. I was accompanied with only 2 guys who could play music when I was in my first year. In my second year, that number increased to a few. But I wasn’t still satisfied. Many hundred people enter the college every year, and the number of music-enthusiasts add up only in 2s and 3s. Today the college might be proudly boasting of thousands of students but a very humiliating 10-12 can play music or sing. Basically the whole ‘music-as-a-hobby’ issue has taken a bullet in the head. That’s because of our weird narrow-mindedness and un-acceptance towards all forms of art. Certain things cannot be changed and certain minds cannot be altered. It’s better to leave it with in that state rather than fighting against it.

 

So last year was my last time and it’s an ‘end-of-the-story’ from my side. R.I.P.

Is this world for real ?

Things happen in phases. Sometimes we have a phase where everything is too slow and frustrating, and on the other hand we have a phase where too many things happen too quickly, all at once. It’s times like these that make me wonder if this world is for real! Doesn’t it all resemble a typical, stereotypic, sentimental Bollywood movie? Atleast the week’s happenings are nothing short of a blockbuster. There were 3-4 things on my head at once. A marriage being arranged at home which brought home 20-25 people at once, an on-and-off involvement in a technical event, jam sessions for the annual day whenever possible, and the most important of all, my sticky project work. I am suddenly forced to repent the fact that my hobbies rule my life. But I cannot imagine living without doing all the things that I do daily.

 

The marriage at home really pulled me away from everything else, and it was the reason I was lagging behind in everything else. An unavoidable hindrance. The project guide was extremely unhappy about our progress with the project and almost came to point of asking us to cancel the project. Srikar comes up with some trip to Bangalore and pulls out of the show. The technical event pretty much fails miserably in the end. To sum it all, my whole world seemed to be falling apart perpetually. I had literally no control over it. Suddenly the world turns around. Up is down. The marriage is finally over, and my brain is freed from it. My project-mate finds a very very important material on the internet which brings the smile back on the face of our guide, and on us. Srikar postpones his trip and accepts to play for the show. March 16 was like a ‘everything-is-falling-apart’ day, and 17^th is the perfect opposite. It took just 24 hours for everything to turn around like magic. That when I wondered, “Does someone script all this? Do all happenings on this Earth just happen? Or does someone make them happen? “

 

And then like a famous Bollywood twist, the world falls apart again. We take another huge break from the project work which will eventually bring us back down again. Srikar’s world falls apart with his bike mangled beyond recognition which forces him to back out of the performance for a second time and last. And at this point, everything around me looks torn to pieces. I strain my brain joining pieces of riffs to compose small songs, and the world around me relentlessly keeps tearing itself apart, just for the fun’s sake of it. A few hours and a minor bike accident what all that was required to accomplish this amazing feat. That’s what makes me wonder once again, “Does someone script all this? Do all happenings on this Earth just happen? Or does someone make them happen?”

 

“Is this world for real?

 

Or is it just a game being played by some psychotic controller who loves watching people suffer?

 

I wonder…”

Did Somebody Say 'Silence' ?

Oh well, maybe I thought wrong. Yesterday I felt like I was in the Eye of the storm where everything is calm and quite. And everybody knows that doesn’t last for long. The storm will come back with greater force. And it did today. The first proper jam session was planned from morning to evening, and we had a really really bad start to it. I forgot my entire set of picks, and connectors and stuff, and we had to borrow picks from the first-years. For a while we even managed to strum with a piece of folded paper, height of foolishness. Overall today was so noisy and frustrating that the whole 8 hours took a pretty heavy toll on me. All the crowd and the noise created a kind of banging within my head, and after lunch I just couldn’t concentrate one bit. I just forced myself to somehow go through it and dragged it to 3. Another snare drum would have caused my head to burst. We wrapped the jam up with a weird fear within ourselves. Not 10 days left and the list of songs wasn’t decided yet. How in the world is anyone going to manage something like this? Moreover, there are events to organize, projects to complete, weddings to attend (organize actually), and, and, and, … I hope the list ends there.

 

As of now, my head is about to explode from within so I’d better leave it at this… I was talking about silence and calm yesterday and am facing the very opposite today, what irony.

Eye of the Storm

The speed was 20Kmph. I could see traffic till far far away. But I was too engrossed in thoughts about today. It started off like just another stupid weird day. The day for me started at 1 am. The presentation! I sat the whole night working my way through my complex procedures of making a formal presentation into a movie like experience. The animations, and colours and embedded videos, and what not! Is it all needed? Maybe it is, for my satisfaction. I cannot settle for anything less than that. So 1 am it was when I managed to finish the whole thing, when my group mates had already gone to sleep in their respective houses. I always wonder if so much of hard work is needed for trivial things such as this. But then, pat comes the answer just like before. It’s all for my satisfaction. Yeah Yeah, same old story. But the twist in the tale came in the college. We were the first to reach among our classmates and wanted to give the seminars (2 of them) as quickly as we could. All we could notice ourselves doing was Wait. We waited and waited and just when our patience began running out at around 1pm (12 hours after my completion of the presentation), our great sir gives us this magic deal !! For some reason he was to be busy for the rest of the day, and asked us to simply copy the presentation files into an appropriate folder and leave. Our joy knew no bounds. We did that more than willingly and zoomed away from the college like we never did before. The whole atmosphere of the college was just so un-inviting. Strict traffic rules of ‘keep to the left’ from the gate to the parking (a parking lot under the sun?? that’s no parking lot!), a distance of 100m. We break rules on major highways and follow them inside the college. If that’s not weird, then what came soon after this was simply weirder.

 

Sometimes we are so lazy, and sometimes so quick. Plans flowed out, and suddenly there was an urgency to watch this movie, Dev D. And the weird part that I was talking about is now! I agreed to go. What’s weird in that? Everything! I watched this movie just 6 days before and here I was driving willingly, to go through it all over again. ‘That movie blew me away’, is a bit of an understatement. Today I went through it again, and was blown away once again, with greater force. This movie hits you at just the right points, and by the time it ends, you’re like, “I don’t want to leave this place!!” It’s like an addictive song which you don’t mind hearing over and over again and still not get enough of it, something like Let it Die by Foo Fighters. Everything was raw, and yet colourful. Like throwing a piece of reality onto your face with added colours. It was the second time, and it only got better. Every scene had this strangeness in it with some dominant colour all over. And those shades ranged from the usual black, white, and stuff to contrasting green, yellow, blue, red and forget-me-never pink. I was never a movie freak so I can’t exactly know if certain colour themes are followed during the duration of the movie, but this one had a trend of changing colours. And that was the most amazing thing I noticed more than anything else. I wasn’t watching Bollywood. Maybe that’s the very reason I liked it. The soundtrack was extremely well timed, and sounded superb. It being a Soundtrack is so un-bollywood in the first place. We don’t have that usual lip-sync done by the lead actors (who otherwise magically sound like professional singers and finger-pick electric guitars without connecting cables), and dancing around trees kind of stuff. Those were minor issues. The whole theme of the movie was unusual, almost against the trends set by the rest of the movies that we see. Everyone has a lesson to learn from this. Right from the common man to filmmakers. Like I said before, Change is in. It’s what everyone wants, no wonder the movie had such high ratings. Even if I ignored the high ratings, I could’ve easily fallen in love with it.

 

The speed was 20 Kmph. I could see traffic till far far away. But I was too engrossed in thoughts about today. I was too lost. I couldn’t hear anything but my own head. There was chaos all around me. Cars were honking, bikes were whizzing, and people were crossing at random, but I was isolated from all this. I was immersed in silence. I was in the center of a hurricane where everything was calm and quiet…