My tunes - what the world is singing

A sick day turned out to be a day of great discoveries. Tucked in bed and tired of sleeping, I turned to my trusted friend - my laptop - for company and together we found our way to the National Geographic Music homepage. So staggered was I by the treasure trove of music and music videos, that I felt like a child in a candy shop! Should I listen to the Nigerian singer, Asa's thought provoking "Fire on the mountain" ( and watch the slick music video) or put on my dancing shoes for the French/Algerian trio of Khaled, Faudel and Rachid Taha singing "Abdul Kader"....a sparkling melody that tingles the 'soul' of my feet..Or lose myself in the hauntingly beautiful numbers from the Idan Raichel Project - a collaboration between an Isreali composer and Ethiopian musicians? The choices are infinite. How could I have lived oblivious to such a great resource of music from all over the world - places as distant as Cape Verde and as familiar as Bollywood but reinvented by Brits, Andrew McKay and Gary Hughes - with a delightful music video to go with it ( "Mumtaz"). Now there is just not enough time to search, sample and savor!

http://worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com/worldmusic/view/page.basic/home

All this started with a conversation I had with my brother about our mutual disappointment in Coldplay's new album, Viva la Vida which was released in the US yesterday and which, we both agreed, for all its hype fell short of our expectations but I am hoping it will grow on me with time. This was in contrast to "Flavors of Entanglement" Alanis Morissette's new album, which has delightful new flavors - mature lyrics, superb arrangements and each song with a peek into the depths of the song writer's soul - clearly a notch above her work so far. Though "Jagged Little Pill" will always be in a class of its own, this album is also something to reckon with. As a long time fan of Alanis's powerful and gut wrenching work, I was greatly moved to see a distinct mellowness in her new songs that is rich and tempered with true ( and hard earned) insight.

However, for all the hype and attention that main stream popular artists from America and Western Europe receive, and for all the public media time that they occupy, I feel that more often than not they fail to voice the collective concerns of our planet. In startling contrast, the music I listened to on the Nat Geo website was anything but sincere. Grouped together under the extremely broad classification of "World Music", these musicians - some very well known in their respective regions and within their own distinct genres - collectively tapped into the pulse of the world today and each voice rang loud and clear to bring the message home that we are all citizens of one planet. Each un self conscious voice singing about all the things that matter to us no matter what corner of the earth we are sitting in - war, love, loss, having a good time...and revelling in this our different approaches to the very same things, some issues closer home than others, was refreshing and reassuring.

So I will end to day's blog with some prophetic lines from a song by an Indian band called Karma 6 who did a song for Nat Geo India...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN9Yngs9Tuc

Auron ki jo hai mushkilein, kal apni ho jayegi,
Pal bhar me honge fanaa, sassein bhi ruk jaengi,
Waqt ki hai awaaz, Kalko tum badlo aaj....

( The problems that others face, will be ours tomorrow..
In a moment our world could be destroyed,
This is time's prophecy for us..
Let us make better choices today to save our collective future)

Thank you Coldplay

....and then there are blues that a cup of coffee won't drown. Not even the darkest brew of Kenya Kilimandjaro - the kind that swirls of milk won't lighten even if you turn a spoon round and round in its dark roasted blackness. Bitter, brooding, knock-out high voltage caffeine that burns your tongue and sears its way down to your gut , its heavy aroma hanging like a cloud over your fogged up brain. The deepest darkest blue that ever was has taken control of your mind. As you twist and tug to pull your sanity free of its teeth, you wonder why its back to haunt you. Paper clips rattle inside your brain. Dry tracing paper rustles. You eye the wet ink smear a thick line across the goat paths of your mind twisting itself into tight little knots. The day outside is over cast, dark grey thunder cloud reach down to the tree tops. If only there was a spot of sun today.

The moments drag on and on till you've chewed the back of your pencil off into an ugly little stump. You wrestle with your inner demons. For a brief moment you begin to win. You quickly objectify, all this muddle is just electro-chemical imbalance, 'pain body' out to get you for no particular reason except for to flex its muscles perhaps or to show you that its not dead yet....Then you do the wallowing thing, dive right into it and let it wash all over you. How much blue could there be in the sky that will not fill one human heart to over flowing? You reach across and grab your earphones. If I must drown, let me at least make it pleasurable.

The slow cadence of Sparks laps at the shores of your ravaged mind in delicate ripples, the voice of Chris Martin promises to 'look out' for you. You smile your wry cynical smile in spite of yourself. He insists he won't let you down. The plaintive melody disarms and blunts the fangs of your adversary. The familiar falsetto rises and falls like a wave and washes your pain away one layer at a time. Chris is now singing I saw sparks over and over again, and you actually see little bits of light float up in front of your eyes. If music could be seen , you catch sight of it right then. As the melody fades to another beginning with a guitar strum, you tell yourself "don't panic"...The gloom begins to dispel and your mood starts lifting back again. We're sinking like stones, all that we fought for.... Not the most uplifting of thoughts yet the melody has jet-propelled wings that pulls you out of the mire of despair and straight into the sky. The dregs gather at your feet as you stand in a puddle in the middle of your thawed work day freeze-out. The coffee has gone tepid and you wonder in disbelief how you were drinking that stuff anyway. Something in you has snapped in place and you are working human again. You let the music carry you upward, through the clouds, soaring. Oh yeah, we live in a beautiful world, yeah we do, we do.... (even though all of us are done for.) You think about the four gifted musicians and the thousand other nameless techies that worked to put that little music box in your hands and made it possible for Coldplay's songs to reach you when you needed it the most. Thanks guys, you saved my day again!

If everyone's writing, who's reading?

I just came across a fascinating statistic that at the end of 2007, it was estimated that there were over 112 million blogs on the net. The population of the earth as of today is around 6.6 billion which means that only 1.69% of that vast body of humans are writing blogs. That kind of answers my question outright. But that leads me to ask another question. How many people in the world have access to the internet and what percentage of those netizens are active bloggers - by active bloggers I mean those that write. ( A passive blogger by definition would then be someone who reads or browses through blogs without necessarily writing one). I haven't so far managed to find an answer to my question but I am looking...

Ever since I took a decision to become a serious blogger of the active kind, I have been blog surfing wildly to find what I call the "Great Masters" of blogging, individuals who may very well be ordinary everyday people like me in real life, but who have unusual interests that have inspired them to create blogs of extraordinary dimensions to literally go where no man (or woman) has ever gone before. In other words, blogs that can qualify as 'inspiring' to a novice like me.

To take away this week's honors ( I am not sure though that this is going to be weekly exercise), is a posting on BLDGBLOG where the author (or authors, I don't know) interview a young student called Michael Cook who punches a big U-factor into his existence by being an intrepid "urban explorer" and photographer. If you are thinking Mr. Cook is just another urban explorer like you and me that likes to walk the streets of cities, big and small, think again. I bet very few would ever dream of going where his expeditions take him - into the underground storm-water drainage system of Toronto. The blog that I came across discusses his fascinating work and has some really cool pictures of the innards of a city's drainage system. Needless to say, the blog completely blew my mind. The photographs called to mind images of the human body's conduits and drainage networks and a thousand sci-fi movies as well as more recent memories of the slot canyons of Arizona.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/drains-of-canada-interview-with-michael.html

(I am going to list this blog under my favorite links when I figure out the best way to do it)

Going back to where I started from, I think this week's biggest learning for me has been the revelation that a blog doesn't necessarily have to be a personal diary. ( yes I know, whatever gave me such an idea!) The net is alive and throbbing with infinite possibilities of what a blog can end up being which has left me greatly excited and eager to embark upon some serious explorations. As to who's 'reading' blogs, I don't know if all 112 million blog-writers are, but I certainly am and enjoying every minute of it.

Dance like no one is watching...

Writing a blog is very similar to 'dancing like no one is watching'. Its like waltzing to a favorite tune on a rainy afternoon when you are alone in your house with the curtains drawn, the windows shut and have solitude as your only audience. In that moment in time, there are no adjectives like good, bad, clumsy, masterful or loony. There is just pure delight at being able to express yourself - the awkwardness of that kick in the air doesn't count nor does the silliness of your self indulgence matter! Its about overcoming your self consciousness and fear of being judged to drop a few inhibitions and having some fun. The same holds for writing a blog. Who cares if someone wanders into this space on a random jaunt across the uncharted stretches of the web? What does it matter if no one ever does? All that matters is that there is music ringing in your ears that is making your feet tap.

The question that has plagued me for a while now is how one can speak with enough honesty to make the exercise worthwhile for one's own self while not giving 'too much away', how to express one's opinions candidly without worrying someone somewhere (especially someone that knows me in the 'real' world) might read these words and wonder about kind of person the author is. The opinion of strangers doesn't matter to me as much as it once used to but I can't honestly say that an ill-tossed random comment from someone I know always fails to make a dent in my oh-so-delicate-that-it-is shameful armor. Like that runaway Frisbee that catches you unawares in a park on a windy day, you are always guarding yourself from random missiles coming your way.

I don't like attention to my person except from people closest to me ....(who doesn't?). I am one of those people who freeze when they sense that they are being 'looked' at, are never comfortable 'standing-out' and would shy away from any situation which puts them under the direct gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes. Indeed I have come a long way from the time when I wore over sized clothes so that I could reinforce my exaggerated need for self-protection or sulked for days when judged. But I still work out in the privacy of my own living room, I prefer go to the swimming pool late in the evening when I can splash around all by myself and pretend that I can actually swim, write poetry to avoid confrontations with the stream of consciousness and stop dead in my tracks if someone looks at the computer screen from behind my back... all for the fear of being judged, for appearing to be lacking in some skill or ability that's relatively commonplace in the world. This self-censorship is crippling. For surely, 'the world' doesn't have the time to stop and pick me out for any form of criticism, its just me paralysing myself with an obsession for quality. Maybe its time to break free. Maybe its time for me to realise that in the process of keeping to myself, I am losing some great learning opportunities. More than that I am missing out on some solid, new age fun. So here I am, ready to invite Muse into my Blog spot and not allowing self-consciousness or self-censorship to cork my creative juices.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae7c6JCYKyY