T-Log

Kolkata Airport : 18:30 Hrs

Here I am again. Same place different time. I actually have a little spot at the corner of the departure area where I know I’ll plug in my laptop to write my Leaving-Kolkata-Airport-Blog-entry by now. Like Buddhists say, you can never step into the same river twice and the rearranged seats this time is a very mild ode to that thought, although the rest of this place has pretty much stood still in time.

Speaking of which. Time flew. I say that very often these days, I know. But that really has been the way my life been this pst year. Very, very fast. So fast that I honestly don’t find it easy to look back and figure out why the relativity between the numbers and the span of time they are supposed to represent feel so inappropriate sometimes.

I’m not complaining, mind you. Quite the contrary. Complaining about the way these past four weeks have been spent in the country of my birth for example, would be unfair to what the universe has offered me during the time. I got to play two exclusive concerts as a solo artiste. Met and got to hang out with some really amazing musicians. And got to produce the ‘debut’ solo-album of the man who inspired me to be a musician in the first place.

I guess the only element of surprise could stem from the fact that this probably wasn’t really the way I thought things would be at this point.

Cos’ they’re so darn similar to the way I thought things might turn out. Which is something that rarely happens in real-life isn’t it?

So I’m going to be back in Mannheim in about 24 hours. And all of this will seem to be so far away. And yet so close. So close that it never really lets me go. Ever.

My facebook status declares a big thank you to India for ‘reminding me. And hope you will remind me again when I forget’.

And I hope I won’t forget as often. Although I’m still trying to figure out what it is exactly I’m supposed to remember. And why.

Namaste.

The existence of a difference between the information my eyes provide me with and the truth is not a myth anymore. It exists.

I went for a walk in the woods today. I live in a city better known for it’s industrial and urban vibe. Mannheim is not what most Germans consider a ‘pretty’ town. Among other reasons because the access to and presence of natural, vegetative beauty is not as easy to come across within its perimeters as in certain other towns in the vicinity.

But there’s more to Mannheim than meets the eye.

Take my woods, for example. I call them mine because they feel like my ‘own’. Now that last ‘own’ is written, but not expressed in English. It’s a literal translation of the same in my mother-tongue, Bengali. Back home, (in all awareness of the relativity of that term), when we call something or someone our own, it’s not about possession. Its about family. Another relative term.

So these woods I walk in, they’re family. I discovered them by accident. Within the concrete surroundings of this city on one of my many unplanned walks.

They’re precious, my woods. And I’m secretive about them. The only person I have ever trusted enough to allow to walk with me is my best friend of 10 years. Very recently, I came close to sharing them with someone else and although I’ll admit it is with a heavy heart that I say so, in hindsight I am relieved that I decided against it just about in the nick of time.

My woods are precious because they’re good to me. Kind and quiet. They always listen and I’m always welcome. I can run to them (and occasionally, through them). They always accept me. Even pep me up a bit and send me back home feeling better sometimes. So I try to preserve this relationship. Of solitude and acceptance. I try to protect this zone. One where the only memories I take with me and often need to deal with occured somewhere else. Far away and removed.

Here I am again.

I seem to have managed to replace one gem with another. For as I sit here all I can think of is how the balcony next to my bedroom is the one where it all started.

This room is where I come back to to journal my life. I guess I should consider myself blessed to have two pairs of walls I can come back to to collect the events that take place in my life within the spaces of time I spend outside it. This is where I come back to remember.

Hello Kolkata.

Thank God for movement. What would I do without it? My thoughts would’ve taken complete control over my being by now if it wasn’t for the jolts it gets hit with, thanks to the trains I live on. The towns I move in between. The scenes that keep changing. The senselessness in that change. Which is the only thing that makes sense at a time when my brain is screaming in its utmost glory at the control it thinks it can have over me.

Thank God for movement.

I’m sitting here in my classroom waiting for my first student to come in. People come to me to learn. I am expected to teach them something. The significance of that is sometimes a little daunting to be quite frank and I find myself asking often if I’m up to the task. And yet, I always find something to say. Mostly anyway. It’s therapeutic. And a reminder of the thing’s that are within, some of which I have started to take for granted. Knowledge I forget to be grateful for sometimes. Grateful to my experiences. Grateful to myself. For that last person is someone I find myself being very hard upon of late.

I am sitting here because I need to think through a thought I received on my way here (…thank God for movement.).

Blessings and curses.

I spend a lot of time of late thinking about the I handled a situation from my recent past. And what bothers me a lot is the fact that some of the things I did would make a lot of people think this was the first time anything like this ever happenned to me.

But it didn’t. Far from it. it didn’t happen to me for the first time and I’m wondering why I still acted the way I did.

Curse?

Until I realised how lucky I am. How lucky I am that my shameless little soul forgets. Forgets and acts as if it were a virgin.

Blessing.

I get these flashbacks I don’t know what to do with. They’re frighteningly real and senseless. Senseless not because they don’t make sense but because there’s absolutely nothing I can do with or about them. Pictures that hit me in the face like an elephants trunk, making me doubt the truth of the present. My surroundings feel foreign and it’s like the piece of paper I was just holding in my hand (I’m trying to study for an exam), with content I really need to understand, is completely meaningless all of a sudden.

I know. It’s called hanging in the past. Living in the past. The mind and the games it plays on me. I meditate since I was 16 (let’s not start trying to define what the word means) and I’m aware of the role it plays in the resolution of situations like these. But until I’m Buddha, I’m hoping these pictures will give me a fucking break cos’ they’re driving me mad.

Mad.

You want to talk about issues, ok, we’ll talk about issues.

Lets start with the arrogant bastard sitting on the other end of this computer screen. The one having slight problems typing cos’ he’s had one glass of cider too many.

That was the second time I drank cider in my life. I like cider cos it tastes like a non-alcoholic beverage but gets you drunk anyway, contrary to beer which can get you drunk but at the cost of a constant awareness of the same due to the increasing bitterness it brings with each glass.

But we want to talk about issues right?

Ok..so here are mine. I can’t show myself. Weird enough for you? I forget that the people I stand in front of only see what stands in front of them at that very moment. My past doesn’t count. I know living in the moment is the right way to go about life and all that but explain the present to me. You can’t. The closest thing I’ve heard to an explanation is that the present is the difference between the past and the future.

So if you want to tell me that my past does not play a role in my present, my middle finger sticking itself up at you is the first reaction you receive. And you turning around and walking away will not surprise me cos’ well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I’m trying. Really. I’m trying hard to control that middle finger of mine. More than you realise. But it’s easier said than done.

I’m trying. Give me a break.

I have a love-hate relationship with words. They’ve been my only solace in times when I haven’t had a lot of people around me (since I can write about things no-one wants to really listen to) and my biggest enemy because they’ve betrayed me in moments where I’ve needed them the most.

The latter is a little more complicated to explain.

It’s like playing a solo. We practise scales and arpeggios and music theory and to cut a long story short, the language so we can learn to express ourselves. So imagine being on stage naked in that moment you’ve been waiting for. Your solo. Your turn to talk. And what do you do?

On a good day, you won’t think too much about the act of communicating in itself, for it is one which has room for only complete presence of the being. And thinking about it is automatically an agent that prevents this from being a reality. So on a good day, you close your eyes and give in to the music. And it shows you the way, you say what you have to, a task so easy that it’s difficult to really explain with (and here we go), words.

On a bad day, you’ll just not want to let that solo go. You want your appreciation. You want the applause. That energy you’ve been craving for. You hunger for it so bad you’ll say anything to get it.

So you dig into your homework. All those scales, those licks, those fast runs, anything to get that appreciation, that fuel which says to you ‘you’re ok….significant, lets applaud you’. If content isn’t what you have at hand, use your skill with the language to create an illusion to the contrary.

It takes a whole lot of awareness to really know what we want to say. And a lot of trust in oneself to admit and accept that there are times we don’t really have anything to say.

Keeping quiet is actually one of the strongest statements a human being can make. And yet so difficult sometimes. Sometimes it’s just so difficult to just shut the fuck up. Heck, I don’t want to shut up right now cos I know all I’ll be left with are my thoughts again (which I don’t want to look in the eye and accept) but wish I could. I wish I’d kept quiet tonight.

I wish I hadn’t said some of things I have in my life and wish I could erase them. I know I can’t. I even know that the next best thing to do is to try not to say the same things again. (What was that about the only mistakes being those we repeat?). And when even that doesn’t work I start blaming words. And write blog-entries about my love-hate relationship with them knowing fully well that the actual issue is something else. My love or hate is directed towards something else in reality.

And then I find myself in that corner again which leaves me with one last option.

Bang my head against the wall and keep doing it until I stop because it hurts and I’m tired.

In hushed tones. No, loud. So loud and obvious with the repetition of words and sentences that I’m not sure it’s even true. Not sure if it’s believable. Not what it’s saying, but it’s addressee, if it is indeed me, who is being spoken to. Cos’ i thought being spoken to by the universe is a privilege reserved for the attentive. I doubt my attentiveness to my environment in the recent past and can’t help but ask if the communication I think I’m receiving is one I am worthy of.

Which is ironically, exactly what I am apparently being told to stop doing.

Goodnight.

If any one of you have grown up in any way similar to the way I have you’ll all have read and learnt of fables. And thinking back now, every single one of them them have one character in common.

The winner.

No matter how the odds weigh in against him/her, no matter how bad things look, no matter what it is our hero has to fight against, he always emerges a winner of sorts. Triumphant in his struggle against the forces of evil or whatever it is he has to fight against.

These are nice fables. Ones with an important ‘moral to the story’, and I’d be ungrateful to the one or the other fable by saying that they’re crock. Cos’ they’re not. They have taught me lessons in wisdom (which is not the same as saying I have grown wiser mind you), but they have lessons in them with truths that have stood the test of time. ‘Fortune Favours The Brave’. ‘ Where There Is A Will There Is A Way’. You get the picture.

I’m sitting here wondering what happened to all the losers out there. Where did they go? Don’t they deserve a mention? What happened to those guys who kept trying and for whatever reason, didn’t succeed? Are they the people history is supposed to be ashamed of and has brushed under the carpet?

Where did all the losers go and what do they have to say? Whats the moral of their story and are they so insignificant that there’s nothing worthwhile we can learn from them?

Where did all the losers go? I’d like to know because I’m tired of listening to what winners have to say. They always seem to repeat the same sentences anyway. What do the losers have to say? Not the ones who never fought, but the ones who kept fighting and still never won? I’d like some advice from these people. Because I seem to have come across a lot of ‘winners’ in the recent past and their words fall somewhat hollow on my ears.

So all you ‘losers’ out there, please, if youre reading this, I’d be grateful if you took the time to tell me your story.

Goodnight.

How bad is it to live in the past? Or let me put it this way, define living in the past. And it’s effects on the human mind.

I spent the last hour reading old blog entries on a blog which was part of my first website that got hacked. Thankfully, the blog is still out there, only I don’t know how to get it (re)published.

I’ve gone through changes. Wow. All those words. Sound like a different person. I feel a little stunned and don’t know why.

I miss Freiburg. I miss the life I had there. Which doesn’t mean that the one I’m leading now is one I’d rather trade but I can’t help but feel very nostalgic about some really important moments of my life (of drastically varying durations) that I’ve spent there.

Life’s grown fast. It hasn’t been two years yet since I’ve moved to Mannheim and yet this town I spent seven years in seems like such a distant memory. That guy who’s written all those blog-entries sounds SO much younger, it scares me. It scares me cos’ he sounds like someone I know who died.

It feels a little weird that you could leave a home you’ve lived in for seven years and no-one would really notice.

Wonder where all of this is leading to.