Incredible India!
I read this Westerner's travel story about India on the Net. It was quite critical. In fact it was called "Trying Really Hard To Like India"!! But I loved it because it was very human. It was truthful and unbiased. It was not 'India-bashing' but it was neither 'India-loving-blindly'!! Find it here.I had read another article in the same vein sometime back. It was by an Indian in an Indian online newspaper (Business Standard - my daily read!) which was all the more surprising since Indians with a sense of healthy introspection at all the things wrong in India are as rare as snow leopards (are they extinct already?). It was called " The Taj can go to sleep" by a certain Mr. Barun Roy.
Something I wrote a long time back...
It was published in the online Poetry Magazine.Dead near ones
Far is just a memory
Of a dead near one,
Who left property,
Disputed by daughters,
Clad in shame
And cursing their mothers,
Whose wombs are furnaces
Where steel is being moulded
Into men of particular hues and shapes,
That dance perfectly and around, in circles
With displacement towards Nietzschian perfection,
In the minds of daughters and wives,
Of dead near ones, safe in the sanity
Of their dying out in the midst
Of life, bubbly and spirited,
And gushing forth from breasts,
Filled with milk of kindness
That feel for steel,
In a way that dead near ones
Do not understand as they are
Unhealthy and drunk
On borrowed whisky
And roaming around in their kitchens,
With knives to cut the vegetable into pieces
That no one would want to eat
Or even taste with their tongues,
That never waiver or hesitate
But talk in a pure sense
Politics, War, Hunger, Peace,
That eludes so many
Dead near ones.
Me and Jim Morrison...
I eventually plan to create a separate page on this. But till then...My interest in Jim Morrison started when I was around 15. Thanks to an introduction by a certain friend a couple of years older (to whom credit is due for sowing the seeds of my interest in music), I got hooked to the music of The Doors.
But initially it was very much a love affair with the music. That is the source of my tremendous respect for the other three Doors. Without them the world would not know Jim Morrison. And Jim knew that. Elaboration on this later.
Anyway as I was saying, having grown up in old world Calcutta and not having seen enough Hollywood movies by then, our comprehension of American accented English was pretty bad, to say the least! So we looked mainly for the music in music and left the words business to poetry. But of course great lyrics were always a pleasant, if somewhat painful, discovery! I remember spending hours listening to songs to figure out the lyrics and then writing them down in a notebook!
The music of The Doors was fresh, different. The opening bars of Roadhouse Blues was and will always be a great crowd-puller. The haunting organ riff of Light My Fire still gives me goosebumps. And the sheer darkness of The End or When The Music's Over was enticing.
The interest grew after I managed to see the Oliver Stone movie on The Doors. I remember renting the video from a shop near my school and watching it on a Sunday evening with the above-mentioned friend and my Baba of all people! My father knew of my interest in music and especially in Jim and was tolerant at his worst. In fact the encouragement from my parents helped to a great extent in my developing this hugely self-satisfying and life-sustaining love of music. But as it turned out, The Doors was not a movie for a fifteen year old to be watching with his father! After all Stone had to portray in his movie the high degree of sexuality that Jim emanated and enjoyed! A certain shot in the movie of an encounter in a stopped lift had me picking up the day's paper and reading aloud the headlines!
To be continued...
