Bliss

A warm, lazy summer afternoon with nothing to do.
Lotsa sunshine dancing on green treetops swaying to the rhythm of a gentle breeze blowing outside your window, with a clear blue sky as the backdrop.
Butterflies floating around, a couple of birds chirping at the branches.

Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia touching the komal and shuddh Nishad-s with exquisite élan in a Mian ki Malhar alaap on the record.

It doesn't look like it's going to rain, but you can almost feel the dark clouds forming at the distance, and you get back the long forgotten feeling when something like that had happened some 15 years back, on your way back from school...

16 minutes of pure ecstasy. And I loved every second of it.

Life is beautiful, isn't it? :)

Dreams

When I was younger, there were some 'dreams' that I used to 'see' quite often:

I am a very rich and famous guy; I mean, really rich and famous. But I despise the unwanted fame, and hence go to chill out in the lake region (Kolkata, where else?) with a fake moustache and sit under a tree. Where I happen to meet a very beautiful girl, who doesn't recognize who I am, and falls for me; and, needless to say, I fall for her simplicity and charm. And we embark on a nice little love story, which goes through her rich father not willing to give her hand to some arbit guy she met on the lakes, only to realize one day that the arbit guy turns out to be the big boss of the company in which he works in. And everything goes off happily ever after...

I'm on a boat on some arbit river on a lovely afternoon under clear blue skies, and playing 'Amar Sonar Baanglaa' on the flute (heavily influenced by that scene from Satyajit Ray's 'Apur Sansar')...

I'm setting the fretboard on fire with some ultra-fast ultra-cool jazz licks with a jazz trio comprising of me on the guitars, some guy on the cello and one guy on the keys, in a dark, smoky pub somewhere...aah the Dark Moon Rising days...

I'm sipping tea near the window in my cosy little apartment in London, with the evening settling in and the street-lights coming up one by one; it's quite foggy, and the road's kinda quite, with just a man in a hat and a trench coat hurrying back home at the distance...

And what dream do I see these days?

I'm returning from school, bus filled with all the people I knew back then, bustling and jumping around in their dirty school uniforms, all smiling...all full of fun and frolic...on a dark, winter evening, with the darkness setting in very fast...and I reach home...and wash my hands, change my clothes, and go straight to my room upstairs, put on a cassette (usually Chandrabindu) and start learning some simple scales on my old acoustic guitar from my old computer...and Mom starts calling me for tea after a while...

I'm growing old fast, isn't it?