Learning to paint the colours of the wind

Did you know that dogs are colour-blind? They don’t seen colour, just like we can’t see time. We can feel it passing, but we can’t see it. It’s just a blur. It’s like we’re riding in a supersonic train and the world’s just blowing by. But hearing the unfinished tracks of Kailasa’s Rangeele at the bloggers meet made me feel that I could stop that train, get out, look around and see time for what it really is – a universe, a world, a thing, as unimaginable as colour to a dog. Hearing each track made me feel like the dog who saw a rainbow!

Learning to paint the colours of the wind

Ayesha Dominica Almeida

Every once in a while there comes something that changes the way you feel or think. But that’s so easy to do. After all, a tsunami can prompt the re-charting of an entire globe. But imagine something that settles in quiet as the morning dew. And makes you feel more impassioned or more wild about life itself. Like the rediscovery of a long forgotten hobby or maybe even the learning of a new art or, as I discovered, the new Kailasa album Rangeele.

An evolved sound, a freshness seldom felt now-a-days, a better togetherness, reality and truth personified, are just some of the many things you will feel and see in the new Kailasa album Rangeele. You will step into a world of love, passion, rambunctiousness, solitude, and a better understanding of how a world, when infused with colour, changes the way we look at things. 12 songs come together seamlessly to speak of concepts often felt, yet not always expressed well in words. From start to finish Rangeele embodies the Aldous Huxley saying, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

Each person from Kailasa has come together seamlessly to create a work of art. From the notes pouring out of each instrument to the words coming out of each soul, the colour of sound comes out with passion and paints on the canvas of silences a picture so loud, that it could only be describing life itself!

Each track forces you to face a reality, as it gives you glimpses of fantasy. But it also shows how sometimes reality is just an illusion. The mechanisms of the scenes unfolding in each of the 12 tracks are but a play of light and shadow — a chimerical chiaroscuro, as the album unfolds in the sepia-toned landscape of your eyes.

Some of the tracks of Rangeele evoked feelings that I couldn’t hold back…

O Rangeele

Sometimes a word is worth a 1000 pictures. Every word in ‘O Rangeele’ paints a different picture. A phantasmagoric saga of the colours of life itself.

Albeliyah

Soothing. Soulful. Colourful. Paints a million pictures in shades of blue and red.

Tu kya jaane

The song feels like you are personally being asked the question and it’s being sung only for you.

Yaadan teriyan

It evokes pictures of flowing rivers, cascading mountains, and clouds running through your hands. It brings forth colours that soothe, yet set you on fire.

Bab-baji

Sheer tranquility. Bab-baji portrays sheer joy. It instills in your heart the kind of safety only you can give yourself.

Katha Gaan

It makes you think of a painter splashing colours around a huge canvas. You feel that it’s all one big mish-mash of colour and then you take a step back and realise that the complete picture is too stunning to even describe.

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I won’t lie. I wish that I could be your superman tonight

Wounded, hated, hurt and jaded. Emotions we go through more times than a Churchgate local visits Churchgate! They say what doesn’t break us, only makes us stronger. We all know the reality cheque on that bounced long ago. It’s more like what doesn’t break us, wasn’t strong enough to do so. Everyone needs to be broken to be made whole. Some don’t find that inner fire to weld the breaks together. Some do. Many rather live broken. In a disposable culture, it’s just easier.
Notice how we’ve stopped repairing and started replacing? It starts with ordinary things like an iron whose coil needs to be changed. We go out and buy a new one. Saves us the trouble. The sad thing about ideas is that they don’t go through a trickle down effect till it’s sometimes too late. They begin small, move higher and then finally spread everywhere. Same with the idea of a disposal age. From an iron to a marriage, to societies and cultures. If they don’t work, we don’t fight, don’t try, don’t repair. Damaged and disposed. Serve the ego. So much so, those who really fight, land up with indelible scars. But has anyone ever stopped and wondered where it’s got us or how many people suffer? And in a country low on good psychological help and high on the need for it, it’s no wonder.
Have you listened to some of the music being made today? Seen the amount of songs written on hurt and pain and someone telling you through a song, let me be there for you? ‘I want to be your superman tonight.’ I’ve heard 9 in 2 weeks. Statistics don’t always lie. And many a time a failed marriage, a dying culture, a broken relationship, a breaking heart, a dead teenager, all become just that, another statistic!
Take a look at Bon Jovi’s Superman Tonight or Armin Van Buuren’s Broken Tonight, both speak about broken people and someone promising to help them. Who’s that someone special for you? Who’s that one person you can turn to when the lights go down? Who’s the one person who turns to you? Or as Bon Jovi says, ‘Who's going to save you when the stars fall from your sky? And who's going to pull you in when the tide gets too high? Who's going to hold you when you turn out the lights?’
I particularly remember a visit to India from a female actor. If I’m not mistaken it was Ashley Judd. She spoke about something very poignant and honestly, till that moment, I never believed that there was a single other person on God’s green earth other than I, who believed in this simple act. She very simply stated about her work with abused and abandoned children and women that she always told them the same thing. When they were weak and had no faith in themselves, when they were so broken and in pain, they couldn’t even cry, she asked them simply to let her carry their burden for a while, till they were strong enough to take over. And more importantly, to allow her to cry for them till they found the strength to cry their own tears.
For me, that’s always been a way to help someone since when I was in school. I was pleasantly surprised to know that someone else did the same. It’s an exhilarating feeling, knowing that you can be there for someone. Do you know what one of the most treasured gifts in this life is? To have someone whom you know for a fact doesn’t trust anyone come up to you and tell you 3 simple words – I trust you. It opens up doors to lasting friendship and it opens you to the fact that you hold a treasure in your hand more precious than anything you can ever imagine. Remember the disposal culture I mentioned earlier? Makes it also very hard to trust. Don’t treat the gift lightly.
If you need a shoulder to lean on, ASK. If you can be a shoulder to lean on, OFFER. Remember the footprints in the sand story? For me it’s always been slightly different. Every time I walked I always saw two sets of prints in the sand. But in the rotten times, none of the two sets belonged to me. Strange? Not really. In the good times it was my friends and I. In the bad, the footprints belonged to God and the friends who have always been by my side. I was the one being carried but by two people. So whose footprints will you be today and who will be yours someday?
It’s a universal truth that you aren’t alone.
As Collin Raye said, ‘I laugh, I love, I hope, I try, I hurt, I need, I fear, I cry. And I know you do the same things too. So we're really not that different. Me and you.’


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Moonlight Murmurs

He lies broken, awaiting the healing

The moonlight kisses his body

Softening the lines etched into his brow

His soft moans are eaten up by the quietness of the night

As his mind searches for the peace to end his body’s fight

A memory tickles his senses

Suddenly, the six are all alive

His eyes hunt for the elusive feeling

His mind starts to play truant to the sweet excesses

But long before reality can deny the source, his soul confesses

It is like post-its everywhere

The soothing gentleness of her body

That sweet smile, which spreads around him

Her kindness that cocoons him, removing all doubt

He curls up inside her, breathing within, yet without

The sheets radiate her softness

The pillows convey her warmth

Every corner bestows a whiff of her perfume

He allows himself to rest, as, into her safety he slides

As, with the darkness, his love for her, he confides


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Booked for Life - 3

(My latest journey through the leaves of time took me to Afghanistan. A stark, moving and reality-jolting journey, this book has brought with it strength, pain, a need to bring redemption to a few lives and the thought that I've had one too many books and movies on hurting, trying and road-to-redemption Father-Son relationship tales brought to my doorstep, barge in without knocking and seat themselves on my pillow; their gaze piercing, till I give them my undivided attention. This was one of those; as the Goo Goo Dolls would say, 'You can't stop the tears that ain't coming' kinda journey.)

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

Some day we shall know the truth of a circumstance, a situation, or sometimes of our very own behaviour and this truth will make us mad. But now this mad has to become constructive. No feeling or emotion is right or wrong. It is how you act upon it that is. It is human tendency to react. But it is also human responsibility to rise above and convert reaction to action.

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Exquisite Taste of Life

Ever beside the pure flame of the heat of the Indian summer, comes a drink that refreshes the fierce passion for the fiery eyed beauty of this season. Summer is here. Come, refresh your self this season with the purity of Water.

Have you ever scaled the heights of a mountain? And then when you took that pit-stop, sat yourself down on a ledge by a laughing spout of water gushing forth from the rock, transforming into a babbling brook to empty itself into a crystal clear mountain lake? And while you sat on that ledge you dangled your legs in the stream just to let the gently lapping waters have a crush on you. To let them break, just to do you with a million droplets, to watch them rise and fall and chant your name a million times. To see the waters turn away, pause and rush back to touch you again…and again.
All you hear is your breathing. All you see are the varied hues of dragon flies hovering over. All you touch is beauty. All you feel is purity. Water: crystal clear, peaceful, pure, life itself.
If there is one thing that symbolises life more than any other element, it is water. It makes up 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface, it consists of around 70 per cent of our bodily fluids, and make up and preserve the very building blocks of life.
And there is nothing more refreshing and utterly fascinating seeing water in its most natural habitat originating from a mountain and flowing down to the plains, perennially or maybe freezing up in winter into mysterious and soft snow or glistening ice to once again thaw in the spring and turn the world warm again.
And in this awe-inducing yet known hydrological cycle have you ever looked at the water in your glass and ponder how it made its way there? How does our drinking water fit into this hydrologic cycle? Where did the water we drink fall as precipitation? Did this water percolate down into the ground as part of a groundwater system, or did it remain on the surface as part of a surface water system? What path did this water follow in order to become our drinking water? Have you ever explored the hydrologic cycle and water's journey to your glass?
Water falls as precipitation to the earth. Once it falls, some water percolates into the ground, but some of it crosses fields as runoff and enters streams. These streams empty into the rivers, which cross the boundaries and eventually enter into reservoirs, which then might directly make its way to your tap or purifier and of course ultimately your glass. One long, arduous yet fulfilling journey for the free falling element.
Or maybe it might just take that in between pit-stop at a bottling plant to be stripped off its impurities. Such that, that one sip takes you back up to the mountain, locked in that time zone of your own to rediscover that life is not solely comprised of tasks but tastes. Taste not just for the good things in life, but for the little things that make life good. Water—the exquisite taste of life.

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Booked For Life - 2

(Here's another treasure I found on one of my many treasure hunts across the topography of the book world)

Labyrinth
by Kate Moss
What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we are and what we did. An imprint, no more. I have learned much. I have become wise. But have I made a difference? I cannot tell. Pas a pas, se va luènh.
I have watched the green of spring give way to the gold of summer, the copper of autumn give way to the white of winter as I have sat and waited for the fading light. Over and over again I have asked myself why? If I had known how it would feel to live with such loneliness, to stand, the sole witness to the endless cycle of birth and life and death, what would I have done?


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