Thoughts of rain...

What would one say of a singer-songwriter who died at 26, having released only 3 albums which received next to none commercial success, a victim of depression all his life? We know our Dylan and our Gilmore and our Parker, but Nick Drake was not just a musician, he was a poet......a poet of words and of notes. He isn't loud, he doesn't demand your attention. His songs form images in your mind, of all that he sings and of all that he does not...of spring and autumn, of leaves and lakes, of rain and sand....of all the things we seem to forget about whilst we live our conveyor belt lives.

You don't just listen to his music, you feel it with all your senses, and at times with senses you didn't think you possessed. He looks for the profound in the mundane. His every note is filled with so much emotion it cannot fail to touch you.

Turn off the lights. Listen to pink moon, or river man, or road, or black eyed dog, or thoughts of rain...go take a walk, or sit on the terrace and gaze at the stars, soak in his music...You won't forget that feeling...ever...

Music has had better heralds, better musicians, better lyricists, better storytellers...Nick Drake might or might not be one of them...only time will tell. He is one of those rare musicians who bares his soul through six strings and his fragile voice and draws us into his world.....

You can say the sun is shining if you really want to
I can see the moon and it seems so clear
You can take the road that takes you to the stars now
I can take a road that'll see me through
I can take a road that'll see me through...

memories in motion III - Aila re

the afternoon that Aila struck, we were in college. it was a monday, and they let us off right after the break. pointless, since it was already raining heavily by then, and trains had stopped running. there was no way out of kalyani....
i was the first one to dare the 15min walk back to our outhouse. i wore my bag like a kevlar vest since the rain was lashing (yes, i mean it very literally) from behind. i managed to open my umbrella (possible for the aforesaid reason), not to protect myself from the rain, that would be impossible, but from missiles flying around in the wind. the normally 15 min walk took almost 30 mins. i was being constantly shoved from behind by the wind and the rain, and every time i would see a bike or a van approaching, i would hastily come off the road, scared that a strong gust might throw it at me. progress was excruciatingly slow. the videos i took are pretty bad, since everything around was a blur. luckily i reached my room unscathed, with more or less everything in my bag dry, including my mp3 player and my cell.

memories in motion II - the menthos experiment *shiver shudder shiver*

during my last month in pune i met vedant when he'd come on holiday. amit, ishaan and he came over at my place....we were on the terrace and decided to conduct the menthos experiment.
step 1 : take bottle of cold drinks
improvisation - since we were not sure how intense the reaction would be, we reduced the level a little from the 500ml thums up bottle we had, a sip per person.

step 2 : take menthos and literally shove it down the bottle's throat.
tidbit - ishaan, dyslexic as he is, took a lot of time in placing them on the palm of his hand properly. even then i think a couple of em fell off.

step 3: enjoy as shown below.



end result, in ishaan's words....the fizz is fucked....
cheers to that.

memories in motion I - school friends through the viewfinder

this is over a year old...sometime in june last year, probably....auto, bhupen and samya came over to play CS at my place...i had got the switch from pune (was on my last ever 'holiday' then)....we hooked up my lappy, my brother's, auto's and sam's. though i am obviously the worst player of the 4, i must have been in luck that evening. when sam teamed up with me initially, we won. when auto and i teamed up later for a GG (garia guys) vs BB(bansdroni boys) showdown, we won again....heh. this is just us setting stuff up.


we'd gone to play football at benricke, and dibya made a befitting entry...seriously, we've known him since class 4 and he still cracks us up...


this is an instructional video as to why you should wear atleast 3 levels of clothing over your undies. sorry about the quality of the video.

i keep forgetting about these.....result of an extended jammin session...sam, me and riddhe da...we played all nite and then all morning...

about a phone call (for lack of a better topic)

vandy, my friend in pune, is getting married next february. much to the surprise of some, but, somehow, not to me, it will be an arranged marriage. she'd called me up yesterday night to invite me. i've asked for an engraved invitation card before i consider going. both of us know i'm just playing around. i won't miss something like this for the world. heh.
once our 18min conversation got over, i spent the better part of the next hour reminiscing (ruminating?) over my pune days, specially the 1st 2 years which can be summed up with one word....F1. Our lives back then were totally inseparable from that house...its airy, large ceilinged rooms, quentin's comp upstairs, the room below the stairs where rahul had his den, the backyard where we played frisbee, cricket, football....
WE, in my previous sentence, comprises so many people, in and out, that its mind boggling....harsha and sarathy, quentin, aaruna and sallu, zaheer(for a little while), rahul and abhay, harsh, kavish, prerana, vandana (vandy) and vandana, kavita, geetali, rohan et al., payal, pranjal (one night), me (more nights/days than i'd care to name), sunny, manish, tanu and anu....the original pune anime people...vedant, ishaan, amit, dan, shanky, kapil, sheetal, deepti...then there was siby and aarti (one a cousin, another the sister of harsha), and kamalika and satpal (the reds maniac)....the list can go on endlessly...this is just me scratching the surface.
that was a time of high morals and carefree living...we laughed, cried, ate, slept, lived, died, played, fought, sang...all together....life seemed so simple....
classes...and bunking classes...basketball court, long walks, congress bhavan, noodles and pasta (we were frequently broke)...open space and ice golas, fc road and fc hill, dorabjee...all fragments of colourful pictures, or smells, or tastes, or just indescribable feelings...they are still so real, just beyond a closed eyelid or at my fingertips, they aren't just feelings...they are something much, much more....the world moves on, life moves on...we've moved on, gone our ways and liveing our lives, but i'm sure everybody still remembers F1 much more than i do, and probably more than me...it defined us...those years will forever be an anchor in our lives from now on, where we'll look back to at the unlikeliest moments and wish we could walk in those rooms again and hear the echo of our own laughter and live that life again....

i suddenly miss pune like i've never missed the city before....