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You made your way into this world,
Cried your new baby tears,
Your first moment of human vulnerability.
The first person to set eyes on you
Was not your mother,
It was the nurse who helped her.
She smiled as she handed you over,
Happy to see another new life.
Where is she?

Holding your breath with sincerity,
You hide adorably under the bed,
Your friend discovers you anyway.
A pair of carefree six-year old giggles
Pierces through the playful air.
You played, you laughed, you screamed,
He was your first companion.
And now you miss the beautiful friendship,
You don't remember his last name.
He would have grown up too.

Your first heart-crushing infatuation,
The feeling of glowing eternal triumph,
After asking her out with a brave face
With that pounding heart beneath.
And subsequent earth-shattering dejection,
when she left you for another.
You'd felt she was the only one.
Another scene unfolds outside the window
The beauty and novelty dazzles you.
You smile at the past.

Feeling that pinching sense of loss,
As your co-passenger's station arrived
It had all felt so real and grounded,
While exchanging life stories emphatically.
And now as he bids you good bye
Dragging his luggage as the whistle sounds
You wonder if your paths will cross again.
He fades gradually from your sight.
Maybe you will.

Serendipity plays cute tricks of its own.
Makes you run into someone familiar,
At a predetermined random time and place.
Gleeful conversations of old times follow.
The physical differences that time conferred,
The accents and the weight gained and lost
 Forgotten in the thrill of reunion.
As the world shrinks in your mind,
You feel light.

You stumble with words of apology
As you elbow that astonishingly pretty girl,
In the maddening sea of people.
Eyes meet for a fleeting second,
She breaks the tension and goes her way.
You replay it in your own head.
Viewing it in slow motion, infusing sensation.
Moving too fast when it shouldn't,
Time is the ultimate betrayer.

As the story of our lives silently unfolds,
The characters share many moments.
Some endure through the entire play.
Others come as powerful cameos.
Juxtaposing their lives with ours
For one tacit moment,
They sing a refreshing song for us,
They teach us an unforgettable lesson,
They show us something extraordinary,
And then they leave us, forever.

But, maybe not.
Maybe, whoever we encounter in life,
For however ephemeral a moment
Remains connected to us.
With invisible, unbreakable cords
of true, untainted human relationship.
And life goes on.

Fantasy

A deviation in life's trajectory
Entered like a thunderstorm
On a calm sunny day.
A fantasy so painfully intense,
It exhilarates and disheartens,
All in one impassioned moment
Of exploration and reflection.
I desire you, not to own you.
You kindled in me a burning curiosity
For you , myself and the world.
We had been there all along,
Living our parallel existences.
We still are.

The Spell of Superstitions

                                           
        Some days back, during my boring old routine of buying weekly groceries, I felt a tiny lurch in my stomach as I saw the total amount on the bill . Yes, apart from the fact that it was grossly disproportionate to the actual physical weight of the bag I had received in exchange, an amount of an exact Rs 666 made me stop in my tracks and think about what that meant.

          '666'- The number of the beast, of Satan. Melancholic thoughts about what impending doom awaited me crossed my mind. That's when I realised this deep dark secret I had been keeping in the dark for years- I was a non-self-confessed believer in superstitions. I thought I didn't believe in them, but when the situation arose, a part of me did rise to the surface and douse my own self in uneasiness. I am sure I am not alone in this little act of guilt. So when was the last time you felt conscious about your day when a black cat crossed your tracks,or you avoided cutting your nails at night, fearing something calamitous would be triggered by the tiny act of self-hygiene?

       Superstitions and their origins are fascinating and make for interesting tales, mocking human credulity. However smart we think we are, there are always moments when we stoop before our primitive selves and feel nauseous when certain incidents occur. Or when something unfortunate happens, we co-relate it to something else which had happened earlier, attributing a completely random occurrence to the disaster. It is amusing to hear of the origins of these beliefs and how much they have been distorted and unduly protracted  in daily usage.

                                          

        Lets begin with the most pervasive superstition in the world- the fear of Friday the 13th. It is so well-known that it even has a phobia coined after it-  'friggatriskaidekaphobia ' . 12, the number preceding 13 is considered a number of completeness. This is reflected in 12 hours on a clock, 12 months of a year, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 Zodiac signs etc. Consequently,  the 13th number is considered an irregularity and thus, unlucky. What reinforced the fear of Friday the 13th is the fact that the 13th apostle of Jesus, Judas was the one who betrayed him, and Jesus was crucified on a Friday. A seemingly recent deduction, exemplified in Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code' was that on Friday, 13th October 1307 , thousands of members of the Knights Templar, an organisation fighting for the Christian Crusades, were arrested, tortured or executed by the then French King Philip, who viewed them as a political threat. It was so infamous that the day's credentials, Friday the 13th became a synonym for misfortune. This day is taken so seriously by some people that there has been documented proof of loss to many businesses as fewer people go about their usual activities on this day. Talk abut humans being an intelligent species.

         The one superstition, which would cause a lot of emotional trauma to the black feline species if they ever found out, seems to be our favourite. That if a black cat crosses your tracks, it would bring you bad luck for the day. The poor animal must be quite indignant with the continuous ostracism , what with once being the favourite pet of the king and then having everything taken away. Yes, that's right. In 17th century England, King Charles kept a black cat as his pet and adored it like his own child. After the cat died, he lamented about his lucky charm being gone.  Two days later,  he was arrested on charges of high treason, and since then black cats came to be feared as omens of ill fortune. In the middle ages, it was said that they were witches in disguise. How unfortunate. They continue to  face the brunt of the superstition till today, in every part of the world.

           Ever talked about something you are hopeful about in the future and then said 'Touch wood' impulsively, for good luck? Did you ever wonder why you did that? This obscure belief takes root in the Pagan belief that trees are homes to mystical creatures like fairies and dryads who bring good luck and ward away evil spirits. It was adapted by Christians and then passed on to almost the whole world. Sometimes, if at that moment, wood is unavailable, people touch their head instead. Don't ask me where THAT ridiculous one came from.

BLESS YOU!

                                           


            What about the last time you sneezed and someone said 'Bless you'. What was that? Why do you need to be blessed for sneezing, it is not really an act of human kindness, is it? So, the line of thought dates back to Italy , sixth century AD when there was a severe flu epidemic, with symptoms including severe sneezing, which often proved fatal.  Pope Gregory the Great passed orders to the public to keep prayers alive, and that responses to sneezes be 'God bless you'. He even recommended that if a person sneezed when they were alone, they say a prayer for themselves like 'God help me'. Thankfully THAT didn't catch on.


                If you have ever walked under a ladder, you would have broken the triangle formed between the ladder and the wall, which signifies the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. This would invoke the devil against you. Hope you never carried out  that monstrous act on  yourself.  Broken mirrors distort your soul because the proud Romans who invented mirrors believed that the mirror has the potential to steal part of the owner's soul. Creepy, huh?

              There are a few superstitions which are specific to India. We have our own plethora of weird beliefs which would make you scratch your head for even a slightly remote explanation. Remember your mother warning you not to pluck flowers or leaves after dark, because the plant 'went to sleep'? I remember giving due respect to the plant at its supposed 'bedtime' and saving all plundering activities till the morning. There are some superstitions which have virtually no possible reasoning behind them. If you get hiccups, it means someone is thinking about you at the moment. The person who came up with that must be smiling in his grave, having had so many gullible people hoodwinked.

Hang for good luck

             
       There would be an exhaustive list of superstitions and their explanations(or lack of it) which I can't cover here, so don't be shy,  do visit this interesting link and  check which ones you are guilty of having followed at one point or another.

Everyday Indian Superstitions


             At the end of the day, logical or not, whether we want them to nor not, superstitions become part of our daily life. Sportspersons and performers also  concede to being highly superstitious when it comes to their activities, be it their lucky charm or dress etc. And for the normal person, it adds to the eccentricity of life. Superstitions represent a mass trickery of humankind, but they are harmless most of the time. They are a celebration of the unexplained aspects of life, depicting the playful mood of the course of development of society.

             By the way, fear of the number 666 is known as 'Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia'. And I am a victim of that. Ah well, but who cares, I heard  Nancy and Ronald Reagan got their address changed from '666, St Cloud Road, LA' to '668, St Cloud Road, LA' . I have got company, it seems. And so have you, for whatever you believe in.  We are all in this together.


PS- If you have come across other interesting superstitions and their origins, please do share them below :)

" Have a nice day ..."

                                               



P.S Images from the internet

Love Affair with Chocolate

Mingled elusively in a bitter cocoa bean

lies one of nature's most distilled secrets.

Presenting subtly to its discoverers

A tale never to be forgotten by humanity,

An obsession which takes over the masses

Like the hypnotic spell of an enchantress.

With every bite of the smooth brown beauty,

the senses experience the blissful ecstasy

Seemingly most innocent of its kind,

Yet guileful enough to make one

Rebound again, and once again

Drawn to it, frenzied like a delirious lover. 

Chocolate, sweet temptress of humankind

grand seductress of the sweet tooth.

symbol of love, fantasy and pleasure

Make me yours, forever.

Are you camera shy? She was.

                        Lets get to the facts quick. I was exploring a  popular site which allows fellow Indians to share their blog posts with one another, and I randomly clicked on the 'Lifestyle' genre.  At that, my eyes went involuntarily to the most popular blog in the category, which had received over a thousand promotions, the equivalent of 'Like' in Facebook. As I opened it curiously, a picture of a disheveled young girl from rural India in a dirty frock stared shyly back at me. Her button like black eyes were totally oblivious that she was standing on a virtual stage in front of thousands of people, who were gawking at her like she was some exotic exhibit in a local zoo. Yes, we get it, she sure is beautiful, and her eyes are innocence at its purest, and 'your heart goes out to her' and so on and so forth, but did you wonder that maybe she did not want to be seen by so many people in the first place? 

                      She might not have ever seen a computer, she wouldn't be hearing about Google and the Internet for a long, long time to come, but did it mean that it warranted some stranger a ticket to make her an object of admiration (would you rather be her, oh, do you, really?) /pity ('I wonder what her future is going to be like?'  )/ Intrigue ('How can she possibly live that way?' Oh what a surprise, she really does!)  But there is no point being indignant about the pictorial violation of this little girl's privacy, because there are hordes and tons of other little girls, boys, men, women, old men, old women of a similar impoverished background who have made it, mostly unknowingly on the platform which fuels the growing trade of 'Poverty Porn' every year.

                        'Poverty Porn'. Sounds familiar? You may have heard it being used rampantly by critics of the 10 Oscar nominations of 'Slumdog Millionaire'. The movie which made a million bucks without doing anything to repay the place which they used as a prop to become rich and famous -Dharavi, Mumbai- In a 'Guiness Book Recordish' pompous tone - 'Asia's largest slum'. The direct evidence to point to the lack of gratitude on the part of the producers of the film is that the child actors are still continuing to live in the slums in the same condition as they had been, before Danny Boyle entered their lives. They probably just had the privilege of  being branded the 'Oscar Kids'. Not very helpful. There were stories of the father of one of the kids trying to sell her off for money. Ouch!

                           I am not saying that it is the fundamental duty of every human being to contribute to the needy. It is a personal choice and I do not want to add to the hypocrisy  as I know I may not have done my best to donate to the poor, yet.  I just think that it is wrong to pervade the privacy of any other human being for one's own entertainment, monetary profit or popularity. Imagine some stranger makes a page about you on facebook, and uses photos he/she might have captured of you in a public place. Then one fine day you happen to chance upon your own pictures, in varying degrees of uncaring casual behaviour, people you don't know passing comments of varying nature- lewd, rude, so called 'admiration' maybe. Unless one is an attention craving maniac, one will be furious and indignant at the gross violation of privacy and will immeditely, 'report abuse'. A pity that the girl in the dirty tattered frock can't do the same. An undercurrent, sick thought may have passed in the minds of people who put her picture and the people basking in their own comfort while publicly pitying her, that they are safe. She will never be able to access the picture, never access the Internet. How do you know, my friend... How do you know...?

                            Some might say that I have taken the case too far. It's just photography, you might say. Even if a compilation of a few photos of poor people of India in hardbound and slick glossy pages costs around a thousand rupees. Photographs of people who can't afford to buy their own photographs. Ethical, huh. I am sure if you are untouched by this, at least the concept of 'Slum tourism' will tug at your heartstrings, even if just a bit. The idea of going to a place just to get the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing the extent of human impoverishment and degradation is plain immoral (hasn't that crossed your mind already?). People, especially foreigners are amazed at how people can possibly live in that much filth and so less space. It makes them feel good about themselves, as an extreme form of 'schadenfreude'- a loan word from German which describes the pleasure obtained from the misfortunes of others.

                              There may be some non-evil sides to slum tourism too. Yes, it does spread more awareness about the residents of the slums and there may be some genuinely concerned people who may want to help. They may interact with the people and help uplift their conditions even if in the simplest ways- imparting some knowledge to them, maybe some financial help, maybe just to give them some attention and love. But this number of true philanthropists is embarrassingly tiny. Taking the case of Dharavi again, even though it is a slum, it is a hotbed of entrepreneurs who who want to make it big in life but have little resources and publicity. Interacting with such tourists can help spread the word about them. 

                       Only if one is truly concerned, they should venture into areas of extreme poverty. And it should never involve any behaviour which lessens the people's dignity in any way- no photographs to show off one's 'social work' later, no entering houses to get a peep (Imagine journalists barging into your house and taking a photo or two of your face and your kids in half naked state. Pleasant? ) Leave back something to give them rather than just the plain old image of one more weird curious face. They have had enough of it.  The excuse of 'Wanting to see the Real India' doesn't work here. India has a lot of beautiful things to see and experience on its other streets. Keep yourself satisfied with those and move on. No one is telling you to do a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet and donate your whole property to someone else. But don't be a thief and steal someone's dignity. It is theirs  to keep even if they have nothing else. 

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The End Of Indolence

         It has been a while since I wrote last. The cusp between college and a job really sees the laziest side of a person. But today, I have decided to shrug that evil off me. What I find weird is that the time when we have work to do, is the time we feel like doing all other productive activities. And when we don't have studies or a job, we feel like being totally idle. Something like going with the flow. Besides, what makes it worse is the fact that this 'zero month' was really memorable for me. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.. A state of total relaxation. Oh, the divine pleasure of eating and sleeping , it's uncomparable. Alas, it's the end now of this utopian period of time for me. Damn the angel in my head..has intimidated the devil into the corner ! Way to Go, myself!!! :)  Need to search for ideas for being productive and healthy now. Any help?

 I guess Garfield isn't helping, is he?? :) 

The Science Of Music

          

     

           Unless we have been locked up in a closed room all our lives, it is certain that we would have come across it at some point or another. It has the power to enthrall one to elation, subdue one's spirits to the pits, make one feel the bittersweet pinch of nostalgia and reach myriad other emotions with the help of its various hypnotic avatars. Yes, it's 'Music' .We hear it , we sing it, we learn it. But do we ever wonder about how it works, the way it does? It has been found that music is even similar in effect to a few pleasure inducing drugs on the human mind. Why does this happen? In school and college curricula, Music is always listed as a 'Fine Art'. Aren't we ignoring the 'Science' aspect of it? My curiosity whetted, I searched for a few answers and I want to share my limited understanding with you. I got a lot of answers from a book named 'This Is Your Brain on Music' by a neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin. I have discussed three of the most important questions that I had.

               1) Where did Music come from?

           Music has been around for thousands of years, even pre-dating agriculture. To understand the origin of music, let us borrow a term from architecture called as 'Spandrel'. It refers to the extra space left at the corners when an arch is made in a rectangular space. Being a by product of the arch, resourceful architects not wanting to waste it, end up making angels or other decorations in the space. 

A typical Spandrel

          This is an analogy to explain that Music is a spandrel to Language. It is a beautiful byproduct of it and was discovered, probably by prehistoric man imitating the calls of the wild. It is no secret knowledge that several animals and birds use musical mating calls to attract potential mates. Starting with coarse songs, primitive drums and flutes, music has now evolved to branch out into a plethora of different forms. Humans discovered the pleasure associated with musical sound and registered it, just as they discovered the pleasure associated with eating fats and sugars. Just as language developed, so did its sibling, Music.

            2) What makes music so appealing?

           Believe it or not, the extent of pleasure induced by music is measured by its ability to exercise the mind. Our  body's neural network is designed to improve the predictability of our actions to a set of stimuli. When we learn walking, talking, writing we are conditioning ourselves to improve our predictability. If we make proper effort, the next time we write, we write better. If a child predicts his next step wrong while learning how to walk, he will fall down. This proves to be painful for the child and consequently, he will  not end up enjoying the process of learning to walk. 

             When a person listens to a piece of music, in his mind he is essentially predicting the next beat or rhythm of the song. The beauty of this is that, it is totally harmless, and contradictory to learning to walk, there will not be any consequences if the mind predicts it wrong. In fact, when the mind does predict the next beat right, the brain awards the body with a surge of hormones which relaxes the body. It is this lack of fear and motive of reward that makes music so pleasurable. If the song is too predictable, the excitement produced is lesser than if it requires more complex prediction models. This explains the fact that when we listen to a song over and over again, a time inevitably comes when we get 'tired of it'. When we listen to it again after a long time gap we regain the original pleasure because the brain has forgotten the rhythm pattern in the meantime and has to predict is all over again. The complexity of music one enjoys increases with exposure to incremental levels of music. We hardly enjoy any rock music in kindergarten, we are content with our 'nursery rhymes'.

            3) What about the biology behind music?

           I know pairing up biology with music sounds ridiculous, but it is nevertheless, true. We all know that humans consider symmetry attractive. Faces of the other gender which have a higher degree of symmetry are considered more attractive than others. Music, depicted as a waveform is all about symmetry of the  rhythmic beats. Noise signals lack any kind of rhythm and are thus very unpleasant to hear. It has been ingrained in nature of human beings that symmetry is beauty, making music pleasing to the senses.

           When people listen to complex rhythms, various parts of the brain like left frontal cortex, left parietal     cortex and cerebellum get activated. This explains why memory is often enhanced with music. We are able to recall many experiences when we chance upon the music that had been playing in the background at that time. Music therapy is also used to treat Alzheimer's patients who are able to recall experiences when they are made to listen to music they had heard during the experience. Musical memory is more effective than learning memory and this has been testified by the fact that before written language emerged, many ancient texts were passed down through generations by song recitals. 

         So, is this satisfactory evidence to believe that 'The Mozart Effect' is not merely a myth- Can babies born to mothers who listened to Mozart's symphonies while they were pregnant, really grow up to be smarter? Maybe yes- they had been forced, by over-ambitious parents into training their brain in the comfort of the womb itself. Assuming that the sound is able to penetrate all the way into the womb, I guess we have found a way of increasing the collective IQ of the world.  

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