Alive, And Very Much So...

I was walking to the University when my eyes landed on that swathe of brightly lit mall. The thermometer read 10 degrees Celsius and after a week of sub zero cold and biting winds, it was a surreal sight. It is sunny in Minneapolis! Without any conscious thought my feet led me to the gigantic stairs of the porticoed entrance to Northrop Hall. I sat at the base of a fluted ionic column, my back resting against one of its cold concavity, the head titled back slightly and the warm wind rustling through my hair. Thus positioned, I could look the sun in its eye, I could dare it to work its magic before it disappeared beyond those tall buildings at the other end of the Mall. I drifted far away, and marveled at how I was caught up in all the irrelevant minutiae of life, at how the constant worries and pressures of day to day existence trap you into an enclosed artificiality. When you close your eyes and look at the sun, you can see the blood in your eyelids, you can see the meandering dead cells in all their splendor, you almost catch a glimpse of eternity in that blood soaked veil. Life, in all its vividness, it all its magnificence, invites you to experience the rich sensuous joy of being. I caught myself repeating over and over, muttering under my breath Leo Tolstoy's entry in his diary dated November 19, 1889, "...ALIVE, AND VERY MUCH SO..."

Freude! Freude!

There is something uplifting about Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 in D Minor. It awakens dormant feelings and emotions in me and makes me feel perfectly at peace with the world. When you hear this ode to joy, how can you but not be happy?

Freude! Freude!

Tochter aus Elysium,

Freude, schöner Götterfunken.

This symphony has the power to lift you out of the dregs of sorrow, or if you are already happy, to deliver you into even more noble bliss. After hearing it for the twentieth time in the last ten days, I still want to hear it every waking minute of the day.

I pay my humble respects to this masterpiece which has made me laugh and cry, dance and shiver. I had formulated a theory many years ago that the music you listen to, becomes indelibly associated with the circumstances and the situation in which it was heard. That song played during your school gathering brings back fond school memories, the title track of Mahabharat is associated with the whole neighborhood and family crowding in front of the TV set every Sunday morning, the national anthem is those cold foggy mornings spent standing in long lines for the school assembly, the throbbing beats of "We will rock you" morph into morphinic nights on crowded streets during the Ganesh Visarjan nights , the gently grating voice of Bob Dylan is those long hours spent ruminating in my favorite coffee shop, the throbbing rendition of Bhimsen's voice can only recreate a shivering night spent on the grounds of the New English School at the end of which a frail old man held the strings of a thousand hearts in his masterful soaring voice. All these sounds, all those places, all those people I spent them with. Sometimes I am afraid they will slip away from my memory, leaving behind a void, but once associated with a song, the memory remains till you turn into dust. What will the Choral symphony remind me of?