songs that soothe

Cliches sometimes drive the point home pretty effectively to a fairly large number of people who are not as bright as you are. As do paradoxes, paradoxically. Songs, really moving ones, actually move stones and tone deaf philistines like yours truly. Especially when there are moments which cannot be shared with anyone else in the universe, moments when monumental edifices fall aprt like a pack of cards. The principles and faiths with around which you you build your entire identities turn out ultimately to be fundamentally inadequate and to paraphrase Yeats, you no longer feel at ease anymore. Grounds beneath your feet shake violently and you do not quite realize whither you are headed. You lose, as it were, a sense of proportion and are at your most vulnerable, so much so that you run the risk of being buried for ever under the rubble. You must make sure that you do turn into the Rajiv Gandhian Banyan tree, one that, when it falls, also bring down a host of smaller creatures. You must, in other words, ensure that the collateral damages remain the minimum possible. That, however, is often easier said than done and mightier souls than yours truly have failed in the enterprise. It is some encouragement though that lighter souls than yours truly have emerged victorious as well. How does one do it then?

No one knows for sure how to survive an earthquake but some invariably do. There is no general method perhaps and each devises his or her own servival strategy if only because the sheer magnitude of the shock affords its victims very little chance of actually coming together and working out a common defense mechanism. Like the golden hour in an accident, the first few minutes, hours, days and months are of capital significance. Decisions demand to be made on the spot and instinct and tenacity often prove to be greater allies in this struggle that pure intellect and reasoning. Not that these things are so very different from each other after all. Long pracitices based on intellect and reasoning may in the long run turn into instinctive reactions; practice does breed mecahnisation but mechanisation need not necesarily be devoid of any reason or logic at all. It is only when we push mechanisation to its extremes that it tends to begin to give a short shrift to tender human relations and sentiments. This is akin to Tagore's dreary desert sands of dead habits evetually shallowing, irreverseibly, the clear stream of reason.

Lyrical though the sentiments may appear to the uninitiated, let's not make any song song or dance about them. Instead, let each of us play a game and try to recall a few songs the staris of which literally wake you up from a deep sleep and make you laugh or cry or perhaps laugh and cry in turn; or just make you feel great in some way or the other, cathartic perhaps but deeply moving nonetheless. There are sevaral such ditties that immediately comes to my mind. Elsewhere I have introduced myself as tone deaf and see no reason to change the description as far as my comprehension of the grammer of music goes, whether eastern classical or western, or pop or hip hop or bhatiyaali or bhawaiya or tappa or jhumur. But I normally trust my ears and go for the tonality and cadence of a particular composition, whether vocal or instrumental and I am glad to report their does occur some kind of a connect somewhere. It could be between my present state of mind and though and the sentiments expressed through the lyrics of the composition. It might as well be the general drift of the composition, reminding me of some moments of my life or my people's life, not entirely unlike what happened to the poet when he had been forced to stop on his tracks by the haunting melodies of a solitary reaper, somewhere on the hills of Scotland, and kept guessing in vein about the content or the inspiration behind the composition. Romanticism is a most noble sentiment, a very uplifting and inspring one but it does not yield most productively to reasoned analysis or crictical dissection.