Sunday, March 26, 2017

Tame this beast...

 He is an upright officer administering a few villages surrounded by dense forests. The girl he loves is married to someone else. And a tribal girl is secretly in love with him but he brushes off her affections as juvenile infatuation. He has bigger battles to fight everyday. The jungle is home not just to cruel beasts but also to greedy mafia who'll stop at nothing in eliminating anyone in their way. He is in their cross-hairs but he just doesn't care, and goes on about his work with a single minded determination. So the mafia first get the tribal girl;they eliminate her...

 There's a song that roughly translates to this:
  This world...is a marketplace of happiness and sorrow
 Each one in the crowd walks a lonely path
 Everyone nurtures his own dream
 Every soul is pulled by his own destination

 Then, there's a sensation. The fan is running at full speed, and the air rushes past your face, caressing your locks.

 ***


The above three are enmeshed and entwined in a divine embrace. Trigger one, and the other two materialize! It takes the air from a fan at full speed to hit my face, and immediatly, the song arrives, its meaning explodes into my consciousness...and along with it, the story of the officer facing impossible odds, his struggles, desperation, loneliness, sorrows and triumps....all of it comes totally alive.

The officer and his struggles were a part of a TV serial I watched as a 12 year old kid. One summer night, as I lay watching an episode, the nearby fan was running at full speed, the air from it gushing against my face, and soon enough, the credits started rolling and the theme song began to play. The emotional impact of that character was still raw within me, his desperation and helplessness strongly imprinted...and soon I fell asleep. Unknown to me at any level, perhaps a strange connection might have forged between totally unrelated ideas. And this connection would come alive multiple times across the years. Without any rhyme or reason!

 Many songs trigger things. A fragrance brings alive a memory. A touch, a clasp of a hand, and I recoil. A restaurant brings alive a memory of fear and rage, of helpless frustration and sorrow. A road invokes a story. A wide sky opening up in all its vastness triggers something else.

 Where do we exist without memories? How does one get rid of them? Or...how to smile at them and move on?