Springsteen.
Remember when the music
Came from wooden boxes
Strung with silver wires
And as we sang
The words would set our hearts on fire
To believe in things
So we’d sing
Remember when the music
Brought us all together
To stand inside the rain
And as we’d join hands
We’d meet in the refrain
With dreams to live
And hope to give
Remember when the music
Was the best that we’d dream of
For our’s children’s time
And as we’d worked we’d sing
Cause we knew time
Was just a lie
A gift to say
A gift that future gave
Remember when the music
Was a rock we could cling to
So we would not despair
And as we sang we’d knew
We’d hear an echo in the air
And if we weren’t smiling then
We’d smile again
And all the times I listened
And all the times I heard
And all the melodies I’m missing
And all the magic words
All the beautiful words
All the beautiful voices
And all the choices we had then
i hope you find you got
Those kind of choices once again
Remember when the music
Brought the night
Across the valley
And as we hum the melody
We’d be safe within the sound
So we’d sleep
To awake with dreams
And promises to keep
- Bruce Springsteen (Tribute to Harry Chapin)
Friday, halfway through to noon, when my stomach is letting itself be heard, missing the breakfast that i didnt care for , I put on borrowed headphones and the only click I can perform are on the songs in which the artists column read as Bruce Springsteen. His low runmbles seep through me and soothes the emptiness in my brain and the growls in my stomach stop because they now can hear a sound which they cannot interrupt.They pay respect.The rumbles progress to a steady voice , filled with conviction and once again I spring on to the springsteen train.
Human touch - "I just want someone to talk to and a little of that human touch." He asks for it, but he also gives. A human touch to my starved senses.Every song of his is inescapable, theyre comfortable and familiar and there by your side in the background. Great artists can also make you chuckle even while you are listening with awe. Sometimes he does that too. Listen to "Remember when the music" (Harry Chapin tribute). Listen to "Sad eyes". Listen to "Secret garden" and bring back the picture of Rene Zelweger with her pout and swollen eyes. Atleast thats what I associate it to. Listen to Glory days and feel the thumping in you, the urge to look up at the sky and think of the Glory days which you cant identify with in reality, because its another time , another place. But when you hear him, you for some reason understand. He makes rock and roll sound like what it should sound like, a sound that gets to you with its honesty and his guitar alternatively tugs at your heart strings and instills a sense of the masses around you. Even though he is talking about America, it still reaches out far and beyond and you recognize traits inherent in every body, issues that have to do with the common man. His music is fulfilling and it has fed my present hunger.I close my eyes and imagine I am at a springsteen concert, being carried away by the sound of the music filling my bottomless well.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
SULA
Today I heard the voice of Toni Morrison in my head for the first time. As she read out each line of her book “Sula” to me, a clear and flowing narration from the right distance, the exact line that divides the real from fiction, I felt the powerful connection to the world in which Sula lived and the lives she entered and destroyed through the sheer beauty of the words that Toni Morrison uses. Each word was so miraculously placed, it seemed like they were all holding hands with the right partners. Each line that she created was beautiful in so many aspects: the way in she describes a thought or a scene or an emotion. When I started reading, I was curious because something in which the way her name was written on the cover, maybe the font or maybe the name itself struck a chord. I knew she must be famous but I didn’t subject this book to the usual scanning of the fine print about the reviews and the summary at the back. I didn’t even read the note about the author. I turned to the page one and began to read as if I was in a hurry to get on with the reading.
Set in a town called Medallion, during the world war days ( first and second), the story is weaved around the lives of two black girls, Sula and Nell who became friends when they were mere girls. Both come from very different households and have personalities which doesn’t seem to be able to get along if you rip apart the personality from the person, but together the two personalities seem to make one beautiful relationship. Sula is the freebird, the wild one who stands out from the rest of the town girls with her curiosity and individuality. Nell is the typical sweet one on the exterior but with a mind of her own inside and the reason she loves Sula is because only she can bring out the real Nell who has thoughts as daring as those that shouldn’t be allowed. Nell is the person that Sula reaches out to when she wants tranquility the only person who means anything in her restless, bondless world. It starts with their lives as girls and later Sula leaves the town in search of freedom only to come back to Medallion after being unable to , find peace or that intangible substance of life that she was after. Her uncompromising, wild and seemingly evil ways make the townspeople brand her as a witch. The bond that she once shared with her best friend becomes hazy as their differences take over and soon they are left to themselves, their lives empty and ugly.
It is a typical story if you try to summarize it, but what makes the book enchanting is the compelling writing that sucks you into its depths of metaphors, wonderful moments and sadness. One moment you are free falling through Sulas mind and the next you are caught in Nells. Its like poetry came home disguised as a novel. Great writing is being able to make the reader abandon the environment she inhabits entirely to step into the book and smell the earth the walk on, be all the characters in it, lead their lives and take a while to come back to where you are. I felt that because I couldn’t bring myself to close the book and I kept hoping that I hadn’t read the last line.I couldn’t switch on the tv and expose myself to my ordinary life after such fine writing. More than Nell and Sula what I wanted was more of the words, the writing. That’s when I read about Toni Morisson on the first page. It was only right that she was a Nobel Prize winner with other awards in her bag such as the Pulitzer and the National Critics award. What I loved most about it is the irony of calling the town “The bottom” in spite of it being at the top of the hill and not the valley. That’s because it was inhabited by the blacks of the region and the whites lived in the valley. The Bottom of heaven is how she described it.
“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no top and no bottom only circles and circles of sorrow”
Today I heard the voice of Toni Morrison in my head for the first time. As she read out each line of her book “Sula” to me, a clear and flowing narration from the right distance, the exact line that divides the real from fiction, I felt the powerful connection to the world in which Sula lived and the lives she entered and destroyed through the sheer beauty of the words that Toni Morrison uses. Each word was so miraculously placed, it seemed like they were all holding hands with the right partners. Each line that she created was beautiful in so many aspects: the way in she describes a thought or a scene or an emotion. When I started reading, I was curious because something in which the way her name was written on the cover, maybe the font or maybe the name itself struck a chord. I knew she must be famous but I didn’t subject this book to the usual scanning of the fine print about the reviews and the summary at the back. I didn’t even read the note about the author. I turned to the page one and began to read as if I was in a hurry to get on with the reading.
Set in a town called Medallion, during the world war days ( first and second), the story is weaved around the lives of two black girls, Sula and Nell who became friends when they were mere girls. Both come from very different households and have personalities which doesn’t seem to be able to get along if you rip apart the personality from the person, but together the two personalities seem to make one beautiful relationship. Sula is the freebird, the wild one who stands out from the rest of the town girls with her curiosity and individuality. Nell is the typical sweet one on the exterior but with a mind of her own inside and the reason she loves Sula is because only she can bring out the real Nell who has thoughts as daring as those that shouldn’t be allowed. Nell is the person that Sula reaches out to when she wants tranquility the only person who means anything in her restless, bondless world. It starts with their lives as girls and later Sula leaves the town in search of freedom only to come back to Medallion after being unable to , find peace or that intangible substance of life that she was after. Her uncompromising, wild and seemingly evil ways make the townspeople brand her as a witch. The bond that she once shared with her best friend becomes hazy as their differences take over and soon they are left to themselves, their lives empty and ugly.
It is a typical story if you try to summarize it, but what makes the book enchanting is the compelling writing that sucks you into its depths of metaphors, wonderful moments and sadness. One moment you are free falling through Sulas mind and the next you are caught in Nells. Its like poetry came home disguised as a novel. Great writing is being able to make the reader abandon the environment she inhabits entirely to step into the book and smell the earth the walk on, be all the characters in it, lead their lives and take a while to come back to where you are. I felt that because I couldn’t bring myself to close the book and I kept hoping that I hadn’t read the last line.I couldn’t switch on the tv and expose myself to my ordinary life after such fine writing. More than Nell and Sula what I wanted was more of the words, the writing. That’s when I read about Toni Morisson on the first page. It was only right that she was a Nobel Prize winner with other awards in her bag such as the Pulitzer and the National Critics award. What I loved most about it is the irony of calling the town “The bottom” in spite of it being at the top of the hill and not the valley. That’s because it was inhabited by the blacks of the region and the whites lived in the valley. The Bottom of heaven is how she described it.
“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no top and no bottom only circles and circles of sorrow”
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
My favorite haunt – Room No 211
The year 2000 was the year of transition in my life, when I graduated from the small space that was school and made an entry into the universe called college life.Dangling between the excitement of a new beginning and the apprehension of what was in store for me in the vast campus that I entered, I was determined I would make all the right adjustments. The hostel was a huge grey building, newly painted and the first years were put up on the first floor. The rooms smelt of fresh paint and were begging to be occupied at last.I glanced at my room – 204, musing over what kind of girls I had to share my first independent life with. There were three open shelves and three steel beds arranged in a haphazard manner across the room. I wearily sat down on one of them and pondered over how we could set up our room. Those were my first few minutes in my hostel, the place I would soon make my home. Everyone has a corner in their home that they keep going back to. A place where they settle down after a hard day or a place where they keep ending up for all that it provides. In some homes it is the TV room, in some, their own room.For me in those 2 years of hostel life, it was room no 211.
I met the Marscands within a day of joining the hostel. Then we hadn’t yet become the MARSCANDs. We were just random girls walking around, some hesitating to even smile, some adapting much quicker than a fish takes to water. The day I met them I knew these were the people I wanted to be with at all times in college and we have stuck since then. After college got over, we’d come back to the hostel mess, eat samosa and tea and then make our way to room 211, Ashwini, Candys and Madhus room. I would never even stop on my way to keep my bag in my room. There we would sit around and discuss the days events , going into splits over our little jokes which wouldn’t be funny to anyone else except us. It was a room that any girl would love. It had three beds arranged in between the three shelves and they were well made every morning with hardly anything in the shelf out of place except for the earring box that was taken out in the morning and put back hurriedly without closing. The top shelves in both Candys and Ashwinis shelf was filled with little boxes and bags of cosmetics and junk jewelry. There were a few photo frames of a young Candy and her parents in one of the shelves. Madhus had books and a little statue of a bronze ganapathi in her shelf sitting stoutly among the powder tin and the bangle stand. Ashwini had hung a little rope touching the two shelves, where they hung their hair clips. The room was a colourful sight and I would often smile and feel better after a bad day simply by looking at the duppattas that were hung like curtains on the shelves to cover the contents behind it , the posters on the walls and the little bandhini handkerchiefs that were stuck on the wall to give it a bright artistic feel. Ofcourse what made the room really special was the hours we spent in it, talking about life and our dreams, little things in class that seemed really important then and heated discussions on what we thought was right. There were those days when we would just gather there to whisper about some scandalous story we heard about the girls next door and then there were the days where we used to sit and study together making our own sense of the subjects that we were desperately trying to bring within our reach. We would have a bunch of us giggling over jokes that seem to multiply by exam times and end up eating a whole lot of biscuits and promising to be serious the next day.Sometimes we would step out of 211 and lean over the grey railings, hugging each other and enjoying the splendour of the the sunset sky on the moutains that we could see straight ahead of us, beyond the Kumaruguru campus, beyond Chinnavedampatti, the little town in which our college was situated. Things were not all rosy and pleasant all the time though. In this same room, we’ve had terrible arguments and walkouts, even cat fights, where Nithya almost slapped Annu for being presumptuous about her boyfriend.Ok so I was kidding bt that specifically , but other unmentionables have happened. Some of those conversations seem really silly now when I look back, but in room no 211, there was nothing that shouldn’t be talked about, nothing that shouldn’t be done. It was our very free space, to let us grow into ourselves, the people we have become.
The year 2000 was the year of transition in my life, when I graduated from the small space that was school and made an entry into the universe called college life.Dangling between the excitement of a new beginning and the apprehension of what was in store for me in the vast campus that I entered, I was determined I would make all the right adjustments. The hostel was a huge grey building, newly painted and the first years were put up on the first floor. The rooms smelt of fresh paint and were begging to be occupied at last.I glanced at my room – 204, musing over what kind of girls I had to share my first independent life with. There were three open shelves and three steel beds arranged in a haphazard manner across the room. I wearily sat down on one of them and pondered over how we could set up our room. Those were my first few minutes in my hostel, the place I would soon make my home. Everyone has a corner in their home that they keep going back to. A place where they settle down after a hard day or a place where they keep ending up for all that it provides. In some homes it is the TV room, in some, their own room.For me in those 2 years of hostel life, it was room no 211.
I met the Marscands within a day of joining the hostel. Then we hadn’t yet become the MARSCANDs. We were just random girls walking around, some hesitating to even smile, some adapting much quicker than a fish takes to water. The day I met them I knew these were the people I wanted to be with at all times in college and we have stuck since then. After college got over, we’d come back to the hostel mess, eat samosa and tea and then make our way to room 211, Ashwini, Candys and Madhus room. I would never even stop on my way to keep my bag in my room. There we would sit around and discuss the days events , going into splits over our little jokes which wouldn’t be funny to anyone else except us. It was a room that any girl would love. It had three beds arranged in between the three shelves and they were well made every morning with hardly anything in the shelf out of place except for the earring box that was taken out in the morning and put back hurriedly without closing. The top shelves in both Candys and Ashwinis shelf was filled with little boxes and bags of cosmetics and junk jewelry. There were a few photo frames of a young Candy and her parents in one of the shelves. Madhus had books and a little statue of a bronze ganapathi in her shelf sitting stoutly among the powder tin and the bangle stand. Ashwini had hung a little rope touching the two shelves, where they hung their hair clips. The room was a colourful sight and I would often smile and feel better after a bad day simply by looking at the duppattas that were hung like curtains on the shelves to cover the contents behind it , the posters on the walls and the little bandhini handkerchiefs that were stuck on the wall to give it a bright artistic feel. Ofcourse what made the room really special was the hours we spent in it, talking about life and our dreams, little things in class that seemed really important then and heated discussions on what we thought was right. There were those days when we would just gather there to whisper about some scandalous story we heard about the girls next door and then there were the days where we used to sit and study together making our own sense of the subjects that we were desperately trying to bring within our reach. We would have a bunch of us giggling over jokes that seem to multiply by exam times and end up eating a whole lot of biscuits and promising to be serious the next day.Sometimes we would step out of 211 and lean over the grey railings, hugging each other and enjoying the splendour of the the sunset sky on the moutains that we could see straight ahead of us, beyond the Kumaruguru campus, beyond Chinnavedampatti, the little town in which our college was situated. Things were not all rosy and pleasant all the time though. In this same room, we’ve had terrible arguments and walkouts, even cat fights, where Nithya almost slapped Annu for being presumptuous about her boyfriend.Ok so I was kidding bt that specifically , but other unmentionables have happened. Some of those conversations seem really silly now when I look back, but in room no 211, there was nothing that shouldn’t be talked about, nothing that shouldn’t be done. It was our very free space, to let us grow into ourselves, the people we have become.
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