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Killing me softly with [t]his song …





The pull is inexplicably strange. 

The way music can creep inside through the crevices of your being. Where does it work on you? Does the music enliven the dormant past, which you have kept lidded so right, so tight, that you thought will never be stirred awake ?

How does it still you down when you are up and about ?  How does it let you drop the book and look skywards? How does it let you freeze your eyes on the water and turn the fish insignificant ? How does it takes the drive over from your hands and erase the scenes around ? 

When did you loosen the grip on the magazine and shift your perspective to that musicful nowhere? What was on your mind when you floated adrift on the piano notes and sailed away to the flowery hell? 

How did it soothe the fracas? Present you with a gift, a pastless future all somber? What was that feel of the unspoken which ushered you into a trance when you were walking down the hill? What tugs your guts ? How does it nullify you and recore your concerns? How does music juggle your priorities, push the black tea up and boot down the promised lunch? 

Why do you willingly suspend the madness of the outside and choose to wear your sleeve on your heart?  The liquid feel of the plucked string giggle your insides? Where does it let you drift as it unknowingly removes that garb of purpose?  How does it make you sense the guiltlessness of it all when you realize that denial was a pleasure? As the dozen bows of the violins sail downwards, to where does your spirit sore?  When seated before the keyboard, where does each squeeze of your fingers ooze the sensations out of the heart?   

Why do you simply weep for no obvious cause ? Who is Nuzrat Fateh Ali Khan to you ? You to him? That you weep for what is not? When you return after that warble driven quest, who are you? How do you creep back to the unsublimity of it all, after those incredible flights to nowhere?
How welcome are the stick and iron world around when music drops the unwilling you back? 
How intolerable is the return? How hard does one shut one’s eyes to wish off the unstomachable reality? Where does the music store its melancholy strain? The kneaded and softened air when it traverses the turns and twists of the saxophone, where exactly does it take on the might of the soul waker? How does the note embody the Sartrean and the Kafkeasque nullless ? 

How does this ‘organised sound’ disorganize you out of your depths? Why does it hush you off to an emotional death? How does Stevie Wonder blind you with his ‘ I just called to say I love you’? How do you grow ‘faith’ for George Michael? Just how did Lata Mangeshkar kill you softly with her ‘mere watan ke logo ? The deep, guttural echoes of the Yesudas brand, did it not push you in the morning to put the work ahead off and simply be?

 How does the sound urge you disregard the words, entice you to follow the wordless nuance? How do the sounds take on a meaning of their own, ditching the wordy companion ? How does one turn to instrumental music when you feel that the you have had enough of words? Why does Wagner state that, “Where music can go no further, there comes the word… the word stands higher than the tone”? Does it really? How does music create a world of its own which makes it hard for us to connect it to the real premises? How does the the ‘too meri zindagi hei’ of Ashiqui 1 still turns your heart limp but not the visuals really? 

How does a deeply felt song could be linked to its real visuals often only with heart burn? How come one can reimagine a different, non-existent locale for the song? How come the regular visuals of the backdrop of the song grow so unworthy of the music’s magic? Why do the visuals sicken you while the magic of the music continue to transport the within? How can the sounds establish its strength of its own  and shed the context? 

How sweet does the rhythm and sound dictate terms with the patriarch called words and remain sweet hence on? Have the notes held the sense of the listener prisoner? The heroes and the heroines of yesteryears grow old and fade but the notes grow young in riches of sublimity. 
Where does music produce its sense of subtle loss? How does  Gayathri Manthra hold you spell bound ? 

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