Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Discovery

Every moment is a discovery. It is fresh. Prior experience covers the freshness of the moment.

We read many many books from our course and from a library. Each book, its each page is a discovery. We discover that the book is boring, or its great, or its cryptic. What are these thoughts about? They are about us. We don’t discover the book, we discover ourselves.

We go to learn music. A music teacher gives us a lesson and tells us how (quality), what (the notations) and when (timings) of that lesson. We start our practice. Our effort of reproducing the quality of sound that the teacher produced initially fails. Deep in our heart we know that it’s possible for us, just that its not happening now. A few continue to create noise and not music but know that music is hidden in the same noise. A many of us just give up. Whether we take up music or give up, it’s a discovery. Its not the discovery of that instrument but discovery of the self.

Listening to music takes efforts only to reach the auditorium and occupy a chair for which we don’t have to practice unlike the musicians. There are many people who are not trained in understanding the music but the beauty is that they can appreciate it. Why? Does it touch unknown corners of our being where a thought never reached? Do we attend a concert for discovering ourselves ?

A mother loves her tiny child unconditionally. As the child grows she starts finding faults in him, in his retention, his behaviour..in comparison with other children, she still loves him. She starts correcting the child. Her attempt is to make the child discover himself. She thinks she is discovered, now its child’s turn.

I have a friend who is a die hard fan of sufi singer Late Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Every time I meet him he makes me listen to his new discovery, new juice in the music of Ustadji. Is he discovering Nusrat or discovering himself ?

An academic teacher teaches students. The moment s/he feels that there is nothing new for her to teach, the subject is same old stuff that she has been teaching, the discovery of the self had ended. Then that teacher is dead. S/he is creating more dead souls in the classroom.

We have far too many places on the earth filled with dead people, not in the graves but in the homes, educational institutes and offices. They think their discovery is over, its of the past, they are ready to help other discover. I am no different. I too help people discover themselves. The moment my discovery is over, I’ll be dead, useless and rotten. Every hero that you have in your life, it may be your father or a movie star or an idol in a temple, just ask yourself if you are watching his every action and following him or in the process discovering yourself ? Life is about you, about your discovery that is available to you every moment, even in the moments of life that we deny…

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Rhythm

Music is one of the greatest expressions of our mind! While the sur(musical notes) in a song takes flights to different heights in our hearts and minds, beats are something which express the “now” of the song. A sur is a summation of different harmonics of a frequency. In technical terms sur is an animal of frequency-domain. Shruti is defined as a smallest change in frequency that our ear can perceive, that our ear is sensitive to. There are 22 such shruti’s out of which a subset of 12 notes are used in an octave. Likewise, beats/taal is an animal of time-domain. Its measured in beats per minute. If we think what is the smallest change in beats in our day to day life it appears that the dhak-dhak of heart beat is one, daily sunrise or sunset is a slower version, the slower than that is our birthday and slower than that is our whole life, which is just one beat (Thak). On the other hand if the beats are played faster than the perception of an ear then it becomes a sur, a musical note. Interestingly, its all perceivable to the mind.

Rhythm has a certainty i.e. you know in advance when next beat is going to happen. Its like knowing the future in advance. What goes on in the mind of a percussionist when s/he plays the instrument? S/he’s playing the instrument ‘now’ and at the same time preparing for the next beat. There are 3 parts to a beat viz. what, how and when. ‘What’ expresses the syllable/bol of it e.g dhin, tak etc. ‘How’ operates on the quality of the sound of each syllable that a percussionist produces. ‘When’ is the heart of it which is the composition of a bunch of beats that s/he repeats to create a cycle of a rhythm. A slight change in bunching of beats changes the whole meaning of the rhythm. This you all have noticed when somebody tells your own mobile number in a different way. E.g. rhythm of a phone number 98860 98860 v/s 98 86 09 88 60 v/s 988 609 886 0. The number is same but if uttered in a different way sounds like an unknown number. In the cycle of one pattern the percussionists attempt is to break the pattern and present the variety to the audiences. His job is to wake up the dozing audience by breaking their pattern that they carry through in the song.

Rhythm intertwines rules and exceptions. When mind is not attached to any rule it remains alert to exceptions. With every exception it doesn’t create a new rule. Similarly life is about a beautiful rhythm. Life is about exceptions not about rules. Every moment is an exception. Just that we have to break both, the old rules and the process of creating new rules in our heads. If you see one person in a group of people who cannot clap in rhythm and you are uncomfortable about it, its not problem with him, it’s with you. S/he was blessed with no-rhythm and you were blessed with rhythm. Its not chosen by you or me. It is, it just “is”.

Are you observing your heart beat, now?