Have you ever felt the chill of December on a sultry September night? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have your consciousness escape the boundaries of the physical world and stare down at you? When questions like Which is Which and Who is Who and Who are You appear as the biggest puzzles in life. Have you ever tried to experience music not just as a collection of notes and beats, but as a moving canvas where new landscapes keep on changing form with every rise and fall of the meter? Has the feeling that the best lines the poet inside you could ever produce is here and now, that were you to be handed a paper and pen, you could say the words that you have always wanted to, occurred to you? It sure did to me. When? On a sultry September night.
It all started with the five of us- A,G,N,D and myself getting together for a night of peaceful hallucination after having done rather dissapointedly in our respective midsem exams. Not that it was any justifiable pretext. But sometimes you have to tell yourself, “ Shit man, I need something to get over this.”
The groundwork to instill the sense of surreality to our experience was done by A,N and myself. After giving the “chumma” to the “Amma” and gorging on the Biryani and Chap from the Taj, it was time to get the sleeping beauty D up from the only rest he was having in the last 48 hours. It’s not an easy task you see. When D hits the bed, one can be pretty sure that the Sun would have set and risen again before he gets up. Cometh the moment, cometh the man. Reptile slayer N was handed the responsibility. And what a neat job he made of it. Didn’t relent kicking at D’s door until it was about to come apart. Bravo N, we love you for the nutcase that you are.
Now the scene shifts to the sanctum sanctorum of our holy worship, G’s room( pun intended). D had worked his magic with the scissors and matchstick and we were all set to ascend up the magical stairway to heaven. Lights off, music and the smell of teen spirit flooded the room, casting a halo all around. And from then onwards, it was a time travel to an alternate world where anyone could have been anything from a joker to a jockey, from a poet to a painter. Cloaked under the spell of sheer otherworldliness, we ceased to be A,N,G,D and S. It was as if we were the entire Universe and yet at the next moment we all seemed to have disintegrated into the smallest quarks. The beauty was in being able to completely dissolve our joys, sorrows, egos and superegos- our entire being into a stream unshackled by the invisible barriers that stifle us in the real world.
But none of that would have been possible without Floyd’s intoxicating sound imagery for company. I don’t call it just music because every song of theirs that day seemed to awake from the clothing of solos and harmonies we usually see it in ,painting before me a picture, real and vivid, thousands of them with each passing moment. Every chord that they played was striking a very different chord in my mind. Images hidden somewhere in the deep recesses of my psyche were turning up in front of me like visions from a past life. Echoes CD 2 got accorded Hall Of Fame Status in our music libraries. All the songs were so seamlessly blending from one into the other that we had to pinch ourselves to confirm that this was actually happening. As A so aptly remarked, “ David Gilmour seems to have dedicated his life to intoxicating me .” I couldn’t agree more.
Meanwhile G suddenly realized that he had another exam to appear for in half a day’s time. So he started going through his notes under his rather modest mobile phone light. That didn’t stop him though from mimicking the vibrations that the music was producing in his body and mind. The name of the paper he was to appear for – Vibration of Floating Structures. How weird is that? The rest of us were just too full of what all was going on around us in an altogether different world. We hardly cared! The only thing that interspersed the periods of silence was someone speaking up, “ Kuch f**** lag raha hain be. OMG!”. But G wouldn’t let us sit still for too long what with his mindblowing histrionics at play causing A to almost choke with laughter. I only wish I could remember even half of what he uttered in those unforgettable moments. But then, I was hallucinating, you see.
It was a night to remember, by far the best engagement that I have had with G(g) ever. Everything fell into place so wonderfully well to create an atmosphere of limitless surrealism when we were indeed being shone upon by the crazy diamond. Cheers to life and A,N,D &G. And even as I write this …….
Pools of sorrow,waves of joy
are drifting thorough my open mind
Possessing and caressing me
Jai guru deva om.
No comments:
Post a Comment