Sojourer I

Escape:

Rather than giving reasons for the mad enterprise that I undertook starting Friday night, I will begin by telling the reader how at 3 O' Clock in the night, the sneaking out part of my journey was proving to be far tougher than I imagined.

Jong had come back from DeeTee dead drunk so naturally I expected him to be be asleep in his room. But when I returned from Planet Cafe after having a few snacks with my classmates, from one of whom I was borrowing money, Jong was there in his usual position, sprawled half-naked on the couch, a beatific smile on his face and Sid's laptop on his belly, watching one of his endless Korean dramas.

Now one of the major points on which my plan depended was procuring Jong's helmet. This was difficult enough to do with him sleeping in his room...and walking out of the living room in wrongful possession of the said object in the middle of the night, without raising questions was nigh on impossible...

So I devised a plot....It was dastardly and treacherous but I would ask his forgiveness later. Right now there was time only for action. So I got the other laptop and pretended I was using it. After 5 mins, I made a face and said I was running out of battery. Jong considered my statement for a moment and then passed me the charger(we had only one). Jong might have known that Sid's laptop ran out of charge quickly but what he didn't know was that recently it had taken to shutting down without warning in two minutes. And in two minutes time that was exactly what happened.Smiling inwardly, I offered Jong the charger back, but he chose the easier alternative of sleep, as I had known he would ;)

With the coast clear and Jong asleep on the couch, I fetched the helmet from his room, put random ironed clothes inside a bag. Sid did wake up for a second and regarding my activities without surprise, rolled over and went to sleep again. I grew even bolder and opening the cupboard noisily, took out a jacket because I knew the night air would be cold. Then picking up my charger and phone, I slipped out of the front door which, by design, had been left open and down 4 flights of stairs to where my bike awaited.

Gas Giants:

At 3:30 in the night the roads are absolutely empty and there is not a shadow to be seen moving except your own. I was grateful for the jacket because the wind was chilly and even with it I was shivering uncontrollably in a while. I saw just one thing worth mentioning until I reached NH-17 and that was two cars, one a van with flashing orange lights and the other a white Qualis. I don't know why but somehow I felt that in that car could be important people, people who might feel threatened by a helmeted rider, carrying a black bag following them in the night. And if it were the police then they might feel the necessity of stopping such a person especially since near Diwali the terrorist threat always increases. But the two cars let me pass them without any incident and though I tried to peer in through the glass, I saw only the reflected street lamps, and little more.

I did not have much petrol in my bike so as soon as I reached the highway, I stopped near a bus stop where I saw some autowallahs sleeping and and asked them where I could find the nearest 24X7 petrol pump. Luckily it was in my direction and so hardly 10 minutes into the ride I found a station where I filled up on air and petrol and then saving the time and progress in my message drafts, since I did not have anything else, I revved up my engine and soon I was talking to the wind(bad translation I know :))

Try to think of the worst, most potholed road you can imagine and multiply your imagination a 100 times to include huge pieces of rock that have no business being on the highway and you will have some idea of the road I was on. The only companions I had at that time were huge trucks carrying HP gas and in my limited solar system which revolved around myself, they were the lumbering gas giants, but on the darkest night of the year, even for their tail lights I was grateful. Further along I saw some crashes, most of them trucks, that like the failed planets between Mars and Jupiter had failed to complete the transit around the sun in one piece.It was very hard to see too far at night so I was literally riding on my luck, just locking my arms at the elbows so at least however bad the bump might be at least the bike would not fall. I was tempted to pull down my visor because of all the dust that was flying around but when I tried I could not see anything at all, so I just braced myself for whatever may come and continued onwards.

Around an hour later I came to a long white bridge where the road was much better and finally I could lean back and look up at the sky. It was a clear night and clearer still because by now I was far from any city that might conspire to hide the wonders of the night sky from my eyes. And to my left I saw a flash and I was transported into a different, much better world, that moment I felt the freedom and all the new experiences that I was rushing headlong into and upon that shooting star I placed a wish that....but I'm not supposed to tell ;) I could not see the end of the bridge and on either side there was only black void, but now I was not worried about anything...it was as if the cleansing silver starlight had purified my blighted soul and now my will had been reinforced. The bike gained a life of its own and accelerated into the nineties as it finally found its bearings on the kind of road it was designed for, and along it, with the gnarled, ageless, haunted trees bearing down on either side I sped along.

The first few signs of life could be seen now. There was a lightness in the sky to the east, when I slowed down sufficiently, I could hear the chirping of birds which I couldn't earlier and the place I was heading into seemed like a brighter one that I had left behind. It was 6:30 when I reached a T shape in the road from which, heading left I reached Murudeshwar. The huge statue of Shiva towered above everything else as I got off the bike, lifted off my helmet and surveyed the landscape....the dozens of boats on the beach just pushing off for the sea to return only in the evening, the temple, the clean roads, the empty parking. It had not been very easy but I was at my first pit stop and though I had a long way to go yet, all I was thinking was so far...so good(...so what!).

The Lucidity of Confusion

The setting sun had painted the cloudy evening sky with golden hues. The breeze that had been blowing since the afternoon was showing no signs of letting up. Though a golden light was everywhere right now, in less than 3 quarters of an hour it would be dark.

So it was strange to see a lone figure dressed in a bright blue hawaiin shirt, bermudas, slippers and a white hat, climbing up the side of the hill, leaning forward against the descending wind. A cheerful smile/grin was on his face and the wind played with a few loose strands of his hair that had escaped from the hat that he held with one hand to keep from flying off. No good purpose suggested itself as to why he was going to the top of the hill... It was actually a natural lighthouse, the top of which had been used as a beacon back in the old days before navigation systems rendered it redundant. Yes, the view was splendid but in the evening such strong windsfrom the sea buffetted the hill that it wasnt really considered safe to go there. But that didnt seem to concern the sojourer as he kept a steady pace and was now almost at the top. If one had a morbid imagination then a purpose, incongrous with the man's cloththing and bearing did in fact suggest itself. It was a long way down from the top to the bottom, and there were more rocks than water at the bottom. There was no way one could survive a jump...

He was at the top. It was hard igneous rock, mostly barren, barring a few small shrubs and scant grass. But the view of the sun setting over the Arabian sea in a kaleidescpoe of red and golden was breathtaking. It was the most beautiful thing anyone in all of history had ever seen. He took his hat off and let it fall to the ground, where it was dragged a few metres by the wind before getting stuck in a thorny bush. His hair blew wildly around his head. He walked over to the edge......paused.....took a deep breath, and shouted "HELLO" at the top of his voice. From the distant hills, on another part of the coast came the faint but unmistakeable answering echo "A...o...". He had timed the echo on his watch, so he knew how far the nearest cliff was, assuming like a crow that he could fly. He shouted again just to confirm and again his voice came back to him, faint but his own. He laughed and he laughed and he laughed and laughed.

My Musical Education

I am part of a band that calls itself 'Zehan' which means conciousness in Urdu. We play mostly eastern but all the members love western music just as much. Well, just the end of last month we decided that after having played at several formal events such as conferences and summits last semester, it was now time to expand our horizons and enter the larger arena of Inter College events.

So it happened that on the 28th, having attended my afternoon classes, instead of being asleep in my room, I was hurriedly packing as much stuff as I could, into the smallest bag I could find. There was a lot of stuff for me to take, the bag, 2 guitars and an amp, but hanging the two guitars crossed, like swords, I managed to get to first 9th block where I was met by the similarly overloaded lead guitarist Amlan, and then to KC where we were to meet the others.

The vocalist Navendu was there but 'Bhaiii!', our synth player who was playing drums for us as our regular drummer had academic issues, was absent. This situation was soon rectified however as a pile of luggage and musical instruments made its way from 8th block to where we were standing and we took autos to TC from where we got onto the bus to Mangalore. The bus journey was uneventful other than 'Bhaii!''s synth falling down from the luggage compartment onto the seat from which I had removed myself moments ago, citing that bus accidents always happen on the right. I was right too.

The train station was not far from where our bus dropped us off so we walked, got into the ac coach, checked if our tickets were confirmed, and seeing that they were, ate some stuff and settled down for the night. But there was to be little sleep for me as Navendu had dumped all the equipment on his seat and gone to sleep on mine and as soon as I went to sleep in one place, immediately at the next station someone would come onto that exact same seat and the tt would point at the equipment and say "This is nat my prablem, it is yours prablem". After this had happened three times , I moved some guitars down from the seat and went to sleep on top of the long suffering but as yet unharmed synth.

Next day we were sitting in s10, playing some songs, 10 coaches away from where our stuff was kept, when Navendu pointed outside and said 'Khatpadi'. Normally this wouldn't have meant much to us and we would have dismissed it as one of his many oddities but Khatpadi was the name of the station we were supposed to get off at and we had not been expecting it for at least an hour more. suddenly there was a mad rush, Navendu set off through the coaches, chased by a suspicious policeman, while Amlan and I jumped out with our guitars and ran along the platform till we got to out stuff. Luckily, Aseem, the 5th guy with us and 'Bhaii!' had managed and we did not have to accompany our stuff to the next station. So apart from one bad moment when we thought we had left the pickup behind (guitar thing, not truck and of course we had not, it was in one of the bags) in s10, and 'Bhaii!' had to display his skill with moving trains, we were there safe and sound.

We got to VIT, checked in at the reception and were taken to an empty mess which already had the look of a refugee camp, given a mat, and told to spread it wherever we wanted. Haha, we laughed, nice joke, but then found out they were serious....So we lied and told them the guitars were worth lakhs each and if anything happened to them it would be a problem for everyone concerned and after a brief bureaucratic squabble in the hierarchy, we were shifted to a room with three bunk beds, where we spread ourselves out and called it a day.

But I was soon awake and telling everyone that at 5 it was too early to call it a day and we should go out see the place and get something to eat and drink. Everyone concurred on hearing about the food and we set out to see the place.


Now VIT is huge, thrice the size of our college or maybe even more, so its hard work getting anywhere. The campus is beautifully landscaped, there is a great place about alternative energy where they've got an aesthetically designed solar power harnessing unit and a windmill. Parks are everywhere, with benches and the walkways are all shaded, something we should talk to Pabla about. We were all mighty impressed and maybe a little jealous. There was a Punjabi Dhaba in front of the main gate where Sanchit, a friend of Aseem's (and a batchmate of mine from DPS as I later found out) took us and we ate 'Bond' chicken to our hearts content and sucked water from little pouches.

On our way back that things started going wrong. Firstly, we were informed at the infodesk that acoustic vibes was only western and though we played with the idea of going extempore, in the end it seemed like a bad idea. So we registered for Raga Reggae and went back to the hostel. On the way we realized that it was really a loong loong way away. We also noticed the lack of girls and when someone commented on that, Sanchit informed us that all the landscaping, all the parks were for boys only....the boys' hostel area was out of bounds for girls...

This was only the beginning. The next day we attended a show by Vishal and Shekhar and guess what, boys and girls were seated separately, with barricading and ferocious guards standing along. Even Raghu Dixit who performed a few songs there commented on the segregation with dismay.

Things were looking bad and our room, which was reasonably comfortable although there was no attached toilet, was our retreat. Where we played music for hours on end, sometimes our own, sometimes covers that we were going to perform. There are some melodies we make up and then forget. At that time they are clearly in our heads, but then they depart like the memories of a dream on awakening.

Navendu is our vocalist, he has an amazing voice and some songs he just takes to a whole different level like 'Teri yaadein' and 'Dhoom Pichuk'. You know he's mastered a song when instead of filling he song up with 'harkats', he starts jumping around and singing the song perfectly with gusto, and in a voice that makes ladies swoon and go weak at the knees. Amlan is the lead guitarist and he has a knack of making up brilliant riffs in zero time, he's got a good voice too so he gives backing vocals and sung 'time of your life' at CISCON. He also has a really great sense of music, and makes up lyrics in bengali as well our main languages. The newest member of our band is our 'Bhaii!', Anirudh, drummer, guitarist and Synth player extraodinaire. He is a one man band, and he's the one who completed the band last sem, back when there were just three of us. And lastly there is me to make up the numbers.

Briefly skipping to the day of the performance, we had 11 bands before us and to our horror none played any rock or even Hindi. We'd come to the wrong event even even here. WE went up did our stuff and got huge applause from a niche, north indian crowd and vowing never to perform further south than Bangalore, we headed back. But a few memories will stay forever:

Anirudh:")^&#)$%^)$" blasting open the door with his mouth full of toothpaste when water ran out in the common bathroom.

Navendu:"Aur mat khilao, vaise hi bohot kha raha hoon"
Me:"Bas kal stage pe gaali mat khana"

Me:(Pointing at the flickering giant screen for Vishal Shekar show)Kya chootiya TV hai.

Amlan(Eating chicken007): "Lekin bhai, ek baat maan lo, Hanumanji Bond hai"

Amlan(Eating Chicken007): "Yeh bond chicken hai, thoda izzat se khao"

Anirudh:"Bhaii!"

more about us later, you'll see s at Revels!!

Only a Butterfly

This is a good summer for fun. Unfortunately as one of the many poor souls who opted for EC in the counselling, I cannot indulge myself as I would like to. I have never been one for much studies but you know when something called a year back is waiting with a mallet just around the corner ready to strike you unconcious for a year, you tend to 'take care' like they say when saying goodbye on chat.

The beaches beckon to me with open stretches of sand and cool blue waters and kingfisher premium, widely known as the king of good times. The open road calls to the traveller inside of me and it is with great regret that I turn away saying maybe another day. There is a great need welling up inside me to look for escape. The world is soo soo beautiful, you want to touch every tree, pick up fish swimming in the meandering rivers and toss them back in with a laugh, ride madly through the fields of wheat and feel the stalks brushing your face...

I feel like a strong hurricane that rushes through its brief life with amazing fury, lifting things up, examining them, feeling them and then throwing them away. I wonder if my life will be brief... I'm not afraid of many things but of death I am terrified. I used to talk to a girl once who told me she didn't care if she lived or died,but I could never relate to that. For me my life is everything I am. Not being blessed by a mind that believes in the unseen, I have nothing to look forward to after death, 'only oblivion' as my father once quoted from James Thurber. As long as one is alive the sun can reflect off his eyes, he can see it rise and set, and he can feel its rays upon his skin, the life giving warmth that invigours the planet. But my dear reader, once he is dead 'he' will no longer be... only a mouldering corpse on which someday new life may grow but for the time being is but a sad remnant of what once ran, played, laughed and sang.

We are born, for sometime we are unaware of death, and aren't those the happiest years of our life? Ignorance is truly bliss when we are toddlers just learning to reach out to the huge world which we're told is round but looks flat as far as the eye can see. Just walking with a friend could make us laugh then, and the other end of the world was no further than the end of the street. Making robots, from electricity meters, robots that could catch the little red men that came out of the manholes at night, climbed the electricity pole and blinking, flew into the starry night.

Making up stories is the forte of little children. If only we could retain that ablity as young adults...there would be some fine new books in the stores. I remember when I got the glimse of the adjoining mountain covered with mists, while on my way back from school in Ranikhet I thought about the wisps that might be hiding within, with lanterns to lure travellers away. I thought about the bear that must be very warm under his fur, sitting cosily near a bush. Thought about the women collecting wood to burn at night, thought about the sky and how white it looked with black rolling down from behind the mountain, and for many moments I was lost because I felt as if I had seen it all before, or was it just because the mountanis evoke nostalgia in everyone? But I was very sure I had, and carefully I rearranged my thought, and up came the image of a brass statue. A female, with braided hair, standing on a pedestal, dressed in the manner of the old days holding a spade shaped tray. We had that statue at home and I went back and stared and stared but now the images were leaving me, receding back into the foggy, unknown depths of the unconcious and I never saw them again till today...

As I said this is a good summer for fun. A good summer for phantom thoughts. A good summer for remembering what we were like before. A good summer to get in touch with

"Good friends we have now,

good friends we've lost...

along the way..."

because you know folks we may come and go, but the sun will shine forever, and the stardust that we are made of will be used again and again for all eternity and hence we shall always be there, if not quite alive then at least part of the splendour of this world.

"I will live again...if only as a butterfly"

A bad translation of the hindi saying "Aadmi mar sakta hai par aatma amar hai"

but there is comfort in that thought....and even if I die, I will live again...if only as a wolf...Girls can come back as butterflies.

The Present and much Later

In one of the biggest modern medicine breakthroughs in recent times, a baby girl was born. Not a normal baby girl...not by a long way. For all the aeons past chance and inheritance alone decided the attributes of a new-born. This time however it was different, for a certain defect in the baby's genetic make-up was screened out by man. And where a 'jealous' God would have let the child be born with the spectre of breast cancer hovering over her head before she even became a woman...man chose mercy, and made sure she would not be subject to this blight.

Genetics would be such a powerful scientific tool for the future...if only it were given a free rein. Unfortunately with the US Govt. putting a ban on transgenics and stem cell research it will be some time before results start coming through. The main opposition to scientific progress has always been religion...Those who say science and religion complement each other and can co-exist are merely ignorant. Science while not outrightly denying the existence of God doesn't accept it, it believes in evolution as opposed to intelligent design, it constantly discovers new laws to govern the behaviour of matter instead of holding on to old ones , and in science most of the things are open to question, whereas in religion everything is to be done 'by the book'. Science and religion are mutually incompatible so one day the inferior will have to go, and in an educated world people will soon realize that it is the latter.

Man steps beyond the fog of ignorance, what will he find? The pioneer emerges into a future designed and purified by science. He goes into the oxygen rich fields of transpirating fauna, with the bright rays of the sun providing the catalyst for these lower organisms to create food for all of mankind and ask himself...what could lie ahead....

There will come a time when the world will be completely tamed and man's mechanical limbs and mental slaves will have abilities far beyond his own. When the parameters needed to control his environment will be far too many for his accidently designed brain to handle, he will turn to his machines. It is evident even today...machines carry out thousands of instructions in the time it takes us to blink and of course, physically, automatons are already far superior to human workers in all but the most skilled of jobs.

However there seems to be a limitation on the thinking ability of machines. Electronic brains though well-equipped to juggle millions of bytes of data for weather analysis and directing the course of a missile or an aeroplane still seem dull...incapable of higher thought. But then at that time, mothered by machines will we ask ourselves what is higher thought...thoughts of a God who doesn't exist?Our confusion?Our strange gamut of emotions that no one can satisfactorily explain? Maybe the machines pitying man's futility will create something vast that he can ponder upon. Maybe they will fill it with capabilities of billions of supercomputers.....maybe it shall know everything....maybe it shall be everywhere.....maybe it shall be capable of anything.....maybe after many years, our automatons will make us our God.

I once read in one of my sister's old E. Nesbit books that the author that you are currently reading influences your writing style. Now this might have been true for those days but more appropriate to today's world would be that the movies or TV series you watch influence the way you write. But that's just my opinion and this is not a discourse on writing styles, just wanted to see how many would guess 'Goodfellas' just by reading the first few lines.

So now that the semester s almost gone and my exams are nearing, thought might do me some good to share my thoughts with the world. Obama got elected as president the same day I went to book my bike, an FZ16(Flaming Orange, yeah baby!) and so a mixed day for me. 3 days later we had two performances, one for Instrumentation and Control conference(CISCON) and the other Dhol Baje which was touted as the biggest event of the year(KMC girls...was the secret tagline which drew a crowd of over a thousand). Trouble was our lab exams were on, and though I was free as ever, my bandmates were all busy with some or the other organising so we couldn't get any practise and had to cancel the Dhol Baje gig.

Soo I was free and my mind drifted, thinking about Manipal, the junkies safehouse, the beachside paradise, it reminded me of a place called 'Haven' in the superman series, where all the criminals and dregs of the space society coexisted 'outside the fabric of the universe in a parallel dimension'. Anything goes in Manipal despite all the stritness and the best part is, just like Haven-Anyone is welcome as long as they don't try to disturb the status quo.

In Manipal you can be a different person everyday, you can be "A millon different people from one day to the next". You can be the library bug, who sits in the study hall all day, you can be part of a bikers gang, you can be a layabout like me who only comes out of hiding when absolutely essential( and sometimes not even then) or if nothings working out then the weed smoking, dope taking crazy who doesnt go to college and gets an ordi in everything.

Manipal is a mad place to be sure, look far enough, you'll find businessmen searching for that one great idea through which they can mint enough money to retire in comfort even without a degree , you'll find people trying to save the world, make it a better place, which as it happens is a song by Michael Jackson "Heal the World" listen to it, there is this one line that goes 'And if you want to know why, theres alove that cannot lie, love is strong, it only cares for joyful giving' wonderful words by a great artist for all his flaws.

Starry Night, a painting by Van Gogh and an amazing song on the guitar by Joe Satriani, I'v been practising it but only got the first part right so far, well prep leave is there for another week....plenty of time ;)

Chow guys if you read through all of this then please read through the next edition too.