Oh, bollocks.

'I want a conversation.', he said. 'Nothing else.'

She didn't reply immediately. She didn't flee either, though truth be said, she looked like she wanted to. She looked at him, too many expressions fighting for precedence in her eyes for him to single out any one of them. Then she gave a shrug, not the shrug of someone giving up, but of someone resigning themselves for a drawn out fight.
'Fine.'

He sighed, and plopped down on the grass, stiff and itchy. Nevermind. He wasn't particularly in the mood for this either. But he'd asked for it. He sat and looked at a line of ants on the pavement carrying a bit of a leaf back to their queen mother, linked, as they were in comics, by the hive mind. Everybody knew everything. Boy, that would be so great. These situations would never come up. He looked back at her. She was staring into the middle distance, playing with her hair, looking supremely uncomfortable.

'What d'you want to talk about?'

Awkward silence I.

'Anything, I guess. Did you know that ants communicate by... wait, you didn't seriously expect me to sit and complete that, did you? You would've let me waste this conversation too, like all the others before it?'

'I would actually like a conversation like before. When you were happy, and we would talk about all kinds of random stuff, and laugh and i would listen to you ramble on about things that i understood neither head nor tail of.'

'Like an indulgent parent towards a particularly dense child who's just managed to memorise a nursery rhyme? How considerately condescending of you.'

The fact that he had taunted her sunk in only when he noticed the change of expression on her face. He wasn't a cheery soul, but he hadn't meant to be sarcastic. Well, not so early on, anyway. Ah, well.

'Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I was just...'

'Whatever. Its okay.'

Awkward silence II.

'All right. Enough with the mushy pseudoemotional balderdash. I can indulge my endless need for self loathing and take it out on you, but i'm bored of that. We could try to thresh out our feelings, possibly fight over inconsequential differences, and feel that we've put it behind us, but that's not going to happen, and the endless cycle of disagreement, contained resentment and subsequent release is going to lead us back to this juncture at some point anyway. So lets try something different. Think about it, tell me what's going on in that mind of yours, and we'll take it from there.'

'....'

'I take it from your blank expression that you didn't really get any of what i just said, did you?'

'No, not really.'

She was smiling now. Good. At least his rant had served the intended purpose. He meant all that he had said, though he hadn't expected her to follow any of it. Reasoning, logic and other rational arguments apparently had very little to do with conversation, and it had taken him a while to understand that, and even longer to actually put it into practice. Earlier, he would've gotten frustrated and repeated the entire thing. Now, he just made a face and smiled back, and said,

'Well, crap.'

Awkward silence III.

He got up. Stretched, and then hopped around for a while flapping his arms and saying, 'Aaaaaaaaaaargh! Fuck. Fuck! Fuck!!', before banging into a lamp post and falling to the ground, twitching spasmodically.

'What are you doing?'

'I dunno. It helps.'

'Should I give it a try?'

'Sure, why not?'

And she did the same.

'You're not getting the flapping bit quite right...'

'Oh, bollocks.'

'Okay. I'll just shut up then.'

Awkward silence IV.

They sat together, huddled against each other, and watched the sun set. It was exactly like a thousand sunsets before, and a thousand sunsets after. That didn't stop it in any way from being spectacularly beautiful, though, as a giant ball of molten gases performed perspective tricks before vanishing across the horizon for the period of half a diurnal cycle. He felt something small and warm slip into his hand, further inspection of which confirmed it to be her anatomical counterpart.

He turned towards her, and saw twin suns setting in her eyes, and resisted running away, or jumping off the terrace, or picking his nose, or any of a hundred different ways to screw up the perfect moment that a hundred insistent voices whispered to him, coyly and enticingly. He turned a deaf ear to them all and drew her closer to him.

He finally understood. They didn't need words. Or actions. Or thought. They didn't need to spend time with each other, or demonstrate their feelings in socially accepted, and commercially encouraged ways. Permanence was overrated, forever was a very long time. They were what they were, at least, for the moment. Change happened, and could either be dealt with, or not. Tomorrow might bring very different reactions to the same sunset, though the sun didn't really care about that. What happened, happened, and indulging in counterfactuals and regrets just wasted the time they had now. All this, in the span of a few minutes, at the end of which he noticed she was staring at him in a rather amused fashion. 'Wajjap?', she asked. A smile played on the corners of her lips.

'I think a fly just went up my nose', he said. And sneezed.

One piece at a time #1: Far-Out Fuzz

(A series of disordered thoughts on music)

I was listening to a rather diverse collection of songs today, slightly different from the music I've been listening to of late. I swung up and caught the handhold as the train pulled into yet another station and a stream of humanity rushed past. The song was Paper Puli, by Bangalore rock band Thermal and a Quarter. The song starts off with, "Frank Zappa once said, 'Rock journalism is all about people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.' " The train pushed off again, with the stream of humanity, now a pool of humanity crowded into the half the space of a multiplex washroom, with one gentleman who was trying to facilitate the fostering acquaintance between my face and his elbow. I kindly declined, but getting back to topic, if not anything else, I could read. Couldn't I?

Paper puli wound up its act and Deep Purple started off with Highway Star, remarkable how much the starting riff resembles that of Sinbad the Sailor from Rock On, but ah, well, it must've been 'independently composed'. I wanted to sing, but knowing my voice, I'd probably have joined the railway casualties list had I done so. The song was superb, the vocals scratchy, rough, and typical of that period. What period? The 70's of course. Wasn't that when it all happened? Well, yes and no. The seventies were an amazing time to be in, if you were a music lover. There was something for everyone. Rock, pop, metal, grunge, reggae, blues, you name it. Not that these genres didn't exist before that. Hendrix was wrapping up, he passed away in 1970, John Petrucci was three years old, and there was this new band that called itself Led Zeppelin, formed in 1968, in the same year as this other band called Black Sabbath. And the people of our world seemed to have rediscovered new and extremely inventive ways of using a variety of trance-inducing substances for both recreational and inspirational purposes, and would forge ahead and produce realms and genres of music that would then proceed to blow the minds (whatever fragments remained). It was to be an amazing high, er, no, amazing journey.

After Deep Purple came Iron Maiden's Blood Brothers. And good song though it was, I was rather distracted by two strikingly beautiful ladies who were engaged in the rather un-maidenly act of striking down an unfortunate soul who happeneth to glance rather lecherously in their direction, going by their version. The poor victim, er, pervert was mutinously complaining that it had simply been something in his eye. A crowd was in its nascent stages around the spectacle, for our people are never ones to turn down wholesome free entertainment, and were gatherin' 'round with the satisfied expressions of one who's platform ticket has yielded its money's worth. Unfortunately, the train had a schedule of its own to keep up with, and with a clang of the gears that amounted to a mechanical sigh, it set off once more, bearing me with it.

What surprised me, as my playlist progressed, playing Edwin Starr's War, Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over troubled water, and Rolling Stones' You can't always get what you want, was the sheer amount of variety that emerged from that period. I thought back of how people were stereotyped now according to what kind of music they listened to, Rock artists are dumb. Satanic Metal Punks. Gay pop loving freaks. And those days, when everyone was a brother, food was cheap and music was peace, how would they have been like? (Again, I have no idea weather the seventies were really like that, and they most probably not, but what the heck, why can't people dream?) The train went on, with its assorted clangs and rattles providing background accompaniment to the subtle nuances of an ever effective Pink Floyd' Comfortably numb, which was followed by the Eagles' Tequila Sunrise.

I had almost reached, and AC/DC (visit Edocsil's wall, no, not facebook) was playing Back in Black. I waited for the song to finish, and wound up my earphones. There was so much I couldn't cover, the Who, Queen, Alice Cooper, KISS, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bruce Springsteen, The Doors, The Ramones, Presley (deserves a special mention for cult-ishness, hats and wierd hairdos off to him.), Lennon, Marley, and god-knows-how-many-more-bands-I'm-forgetting, so much more I couldn't write about, about the experimentalism, about the feckless, reckless nature of the bands, and their individual personae, the stories, world reception, styles and the emergence of the sub-genres that classify music today, (and how dare I forget them, the groupies), and of course, Hindi music from that era, and how it influenced / was influenced by its western counterparts. But I leave all that for a later date, and end with an excellent dictum from the age of psychedelia. Peace, bro'.

ps. One interesting piece of information that puzzled me, though. Deep Purple once occupied a position in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the loudest pop group". Er, pop. How?
Theories and answers are welcome at mail.ltgtr@gmail.com, on our facebook page, or at sahihaiyaar.blogspot.com.

Also, this site, whose address I happened to find on wikipedia, happens to have a wealth of information on the 1968-1976 period, do visit it if you feel like. http://musiccollectorsite.blogspot.com/

Disclaimer. All the songs mentioned are the sole property of their respective artists, this article is not part of any promotional propaganda or publicity material, and may be shamelessly copied, lifted and reproduced in any form, with the cognizance of the author. He'd feel good about it.

Trochee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,

Here's a bit of general invective, from the people whom I often tend to borrow.

A trochee or choree, choreus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. Trochee comes from the Greek τροχός, trokhós, wheel, and choree from χορός, khorós, dance; both convey the "rolling" rhythm of this metrical foot.

Uh. Uh. That maketh perfect sense, does it not? Now try this on for size.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha is written almost entirely in trochees, barring the occasional substitution (iamb, spondee, pyrrhic, etc.).

Should you ask me, whence these stories?

Whence these legends and traditions,

With the odours of the forest,

With the dew and damp of meadows,

In the second line, "and tra-" is a Pyrrhic substitution, as are "With the" in the third and fourth lines, and "of the" in the third. Even so, the dominant foot throughout the poem is the trochee.


Pyrrhic? That sounds like either a gastric condition of a chemical composite. Much WTFness, as often said by THE India Uncut writer. I'll let you figure that one out.