Pillowmint

I think our grand re-opening should involve discussions on the language of men. Something actually real and as removed from that Cosmo crap as we can get.

Ooh we’re back! What fun. Almost a year later, but who’s counting. We shall write again and it shall be glorious.

8:30 AM – 11:30 AM – Economics lecture with Teh Most Boring Teacher Evar

11:30 AM – 1:30 PM – Group meeting for big Management Assignment

1:30 PM – 3 PM – Group meeting #2 for big Accounting Assignment

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM – Meeting # 3 for big Management Assignment (again)

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM – Reading time for class to be held in the evening and completion of assignment for said class

5:30 PM – 7:00 PM – Meeting # 4 for Advertising Club

6:30 PM – 7:00 PM – group discussion for evening class (notice the overlap, yeah, multitasking is my bitch)

7 PM – 10 PM – Arts and Media management class

12:30 AM – infinity – work on accounting assignment.

I. Need. Sleep.

I need more hours
more hours in the day
so I can do the things I want to do.

I was watching The Simpsons the other day, and it was the one where they divide up ‘Old Springfield’ and ‘New Springfield’ and The Who was involved. Anyway, they were staying at the Hotel Pillowmint. Heh.

Just thought I’d mention it, is all.

So there I was, for once rather early for work, having been dropped off at the beginning of the office lane at 8:30 AM. I had time, so I was taking it, strolling down the street, getting some early (for me anyway) people watching done at the same time.

There is a pay and park on both sides of the lane, the patrons of which are monitored by someone sitting in a ‘security booth’ at one end. For some reason, I decided to peek inside. And there they were. Not the security guards, but their trousers. Hanging out, not a care in the world. Of course, flatly refusing to ask where the guards themselves were, sans pants, I instead chose to wonder really whether they ever wore pants at all. Maybe they were assigned pants, as people usually are, but had chosen to use them as decorative wall hangings instead.

I mean, if they were sitting inside a booth all day without the chance that anyone would be able to see them below the waist, was there really any need for trousers? Bombay is a sweltering city and I assume any chance to go trouser-less would be welcomed by almost the entire population. Hell, I’d probably drop ‘em myself if I wasn’t going to get arrested or something.

Then of course I remembered that Bombay security guards aren’t the only ones who bare bottom. Or bare underpants (let’s say underpants to avoid Bad Mental Picture). The most famous faces have been known to free willy, as it were, when few were watching.

Sean Connery, it is known far and wide, never wore trousers while filming car chase/ driving scenes for his 007 movies. Apparently he found it liberating. The rest of us now get to snigger whenever we watch him drive stick.

I think some rules are in order though, for those times when you can’t help removing them breeches and you think no one’s looking.

1. Don’t tell people you’re pantless. Take it from me, they will make you embarrass yourself. Don’t even tell them after the fact, no good can come of it.

2. Do keep your trousers close at hand in case you have to jump out of wherever you’re hiding. Remember, Murphy may be a teetotalling Irishman and go against every law of nature, but he did have a point.

3. Do refrain from keeping that silly grin on your face. At some point, people are bound to notice and start to get curious. This is not a time to invite curiosity.

There probably are more rules that can be of help of course, but then again, I suppose too many would defeat the purpose.

So I shall end by encouraging everyone to lose their trousers once in a while, when no body’s looking, make use of that annoyingly dark tinting on your car windows people! It’s not just there to keep the street kids from peering in.

Then you listen to the music
and you like to sing along
you want to get the meaning out of each and every song
Then you find yourself a message
And some words to call your own
And take ‘em home

He can make you love
he can get you high
he will bring you down
and he’ll make you cry
something keeps him moving
but no one seems to know
what it is that makes him go

- Guitar Man – Bread

It’s an expression of my soul. (Sounding a little dramatic here) Yes I know it’s an art form, it’s a science and that’s all good… but to me it’s emotions. Music can take me places without me moving an inch. It’s what gets me through journeys I don’t want to be on, it calms and rattles my nerves equally.

The right music can quantify my emotions. It’s an expression of every single emotion I have ever felt and some of those I haven’t discovered yet. There are times I’m going through an emotion that just doesn’t make sense. I can’t explain it to anyone because it’s a physical feeling, a knot in my stomach or a tickling sensation… I keep hitting walls inside myself. And then a single bar of music will do the job. It’ll probably still not make sense to anyone else, but I’ve discovered a little more about me.

My memories are documented through music. Magic from moments past, past loves and heartaches… It enables time travel…Events that happened years ago will come back crystal clear if the right song plays. Of course most times there are bittersweet and I wish I could forget but that’s the power of Music for me.

The possibilities are limitless; there is no end to the discovery of new music. Categorize it by genre, language, countries, time… I’m always discovering more that I missed out. The people behind it, their stories, some are just fascinating and some have changed my life.

My first connection with anyone has almost always been music. There’s always a defining moment and mine happens if they like a song that I LOVE! If someone understands my music, they are so much closer to understanding me.

Music is the only thing that keeps me sane through the day, at the same time it’s the one thing that can drive me to insanity. (Does that make sense to anyone else?)

When we decided to pick music as a topic, as a former journalist, my first instinct was to ask people around me what they defined music as. The second was to take to the internet and do some research. After asking a couple of people who now look at me funny, and skimming some articles at Wikipedia, I realized that it was probably the worst way to go about things. Music is such an intensely personal medium, probably moreso than any other art form, that no one would be able to describe what I feel about it.

I was right. No one could adequately explain what music was, at least not to any level that satisfied me. ‘Notes and melody’ was one description, ‘notes forming a tune’ was another. They’re not wrong, admittedly, but that’s just the rough mechanics of it. Music as a whole is so much more than that, and not just to me. It takes this backseat to life most of the time, but it is a traveling companion nonetheless. There isn’t a time in my life I can identify that music wasn’t a part of, consciously or otherwise.

My father has always been a hardcore Jazz fan. He has subjected my poor mother to it from the time she married him and me to it from before I was born. As a result, its always been a sort of soundtrack to my life. I could probably count the number of evenings that Jazz wasn’t playing in my living room over the past 22 years on my fingers. Sunday mornings aren’t complete without my waking up to the sound of Jazz, and to my dying day whenever I picture my father, he is pacing by the light of a table lamp, head bobbing to Miles Davis’ trumpet. Even as I write this, Coltrane and Davis are playing up a storm on my iPod.

Now don’t get me wrong, I complained long and hard about the very existence of the genre for the first 19 years or so. It was only when I went away to Canada on my own was when I realized just how much a part of my life it was. I could hardly believe myself as I sat there frantically downloading all the Jazz I could lay my hands on the first weekend I bought my laptop. Strangely enough, even though it was something I had listened to all my life, I only knew the names of a handful of musicians. Funny how it is practically a fifth member of my family and I didn’t know shitall about it- only that I needed it. For a time, it was one of the very few stable entities in my life.

If Jazz provided the background score to my life, then the other genres have provided the stuff that frames all the other important moments. Stevie Wonder jammed with the Beatles; Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, and Talat Mehmood wrestled for my attention. I had the (as I see it) advantage of spending most of my time time with adults as I grew up, each of whom had distinctly different tastes in music. Now, virtually every genre inspires a memory in my head, even more than it inspires original emotion. An old Hindi song reminds me of my grandfather putting me to sleep, Mohammed Rafi crooning in the background. Muslim devotional music takes me back to sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen, watching her cook while she sang to me. Hip-hop and love songs were for school dances and pining over cute boys that never asked me out. Hell, even Tori Amos holds a place in my heart because I gave my first ever contemporary dance performance to one of her songs.

Enough about me for a while. Let me go back to where I think music started. The very backbone of music is the beat, the source of which is of course, the human heartbeat. Pop music made a very smart move here, to include a steady beat with every song. Now, no matter how painful and ill-fated the song is, you can probably listen to it at least once without wanting to claw your eardrums out. The beat takes care of that, because even at the most basic, instinctive level, one identifies with it. Caveman Og probably felt as strong a connection to the sound of his palms hitting a hollow piece of wood that one feels to a drum beat today.

Part of the reason that it endured is that a human being can create music without any tools. Anyone with vocal chords can sing, whether the sounds appeal to anyone else is of course, debatable, but one can make them nonetheless. A human child makes sounds as a way of attracting attention, and can identify its mother’s voice from before it has left the womb. It’s already a part of you before you even know what it is.

Music is defense, it’s entertainment, it’s inspiration, it’s all sorts of things. For me, it’s a lot less complicated than that and a lot more at the same time. It’s a part of me, it has helped make me who I am, and somehow, deconstructing it demeans it. I don’t want to know how or why it does what it does, all I know is that as long as it’s willing to travel with me, it is more than welcome.

Music is so much to so many people. Often it is the same music that means so much to so many people; hence the existence of mega-artists like Sinatra, Elvis, Michael Jackson, U2 and the Beatles. Their craft is appreciated by people all over the world from incredibly diverse backgrounds and cultures. You have to look at that and see that the art form has very little to do with the language it is sung in. I love loads of songs sung in languages I don’t understand and I’m not the only one by a long shot.

Music is therefore, something far deeper than the environmentally driven knowledge transfer that occurs when learning a language. You don’t need to learn appreciation for music, it is innate. Admittedly your choice in music has a bit to do with environment (how else can you account for Country?), but largely music by itself is something that we as human beings are instinctively drawn to. Every single civilization has it’s own folk songs handed down through the generations. This can’t be mere chance, it has to be something we’re born with.

Music appears to be a function of high intelligence too. Dolphins and apes are known to react to music in interesting ways but lower forms of life are not gifted with the same ability. With humans, music can alter or emphasize emotion which, when you think about it, is an enormous power. In fact, not only can it control emotion to a certain degree but it usually evokes the same reaction in people irrespective of where they are from or who they are. This fact is exploited by advertising executives, movie score composers and department stores the world over. How else can the right musical score “move you to tears”?

I’ve used several pieces of software that provide a visualization of a musical note and if you look at it, you can almost see when a note is in a major or minor key. I find that fact fascinating. It means that feel good music can actually be quantified and can scientifically be linked to a cleaner vibration. Could it be that music is a universal communicator? Perhaps as we learn more about how the human brain processes music we might learn a little more about how to stimulate the right bits using music. We don’t have a whole lot of data to base this on since obviously we all come from essentially the same gene pool and yet I can’t shake the idea. Could it be developed to the point where music could convey to any intelligent being (terrestrial or extra) whole emotions? Perhaps even thoughts?

I’d like to think so. It seems like too much of a coincidence to me that like minded people like the same music.

This stinks. I officially hate the Pop music industry. They are solely responsible for turning all good musicians into shallow, soulless, blathering idiots. I mean, granted musicians aren’t probably the sharpest tools in the shed, but hell, image should at least be semi-important to them.

Let’s take Rob Thomas for example. He was my rock demi-god. I am unashamed to have danced like a crazy woman numerous times to brilliantly written and executed songs like ‘unwell’, ‘smooth’ and what not, and really felt songs like ‘3AM’ and a whole lot of their other stuff. Matchbox 20 was awesome. Rob Thomas became a star. Yes, Santana helped, but hell, the song was brilliant, and wonderfully ROCK. So our man decides to take off on his own and produce a solo album. Fine. One expects it to be angst-ridden with gloriously deep lyrics and some nice guitar riffs.

But that is not to be. What does his loyal, drooling fan following get? Thomas shaking booty (I kid you not) in Leather Pants and a tight shirt with a Justin Timberlake haircut and some sidey ass pop song. Let me tell you sir, throwing random pieces of furniture around doth not a rockstar make. The sad thing, is that even though the song wasn’t half bad by pop standards (which are dictated by lyrics like ‘baby hit me one more time’), it just totally disappointed me because it was Rob Thomas singing pop. Come on man, if Greenday and Dashboard could stick it out, you can! You had the skillz. Yes, I’m distressed enough to use the word Skillz.

I mean, honestly Rob, did you learn nothing from the fiasco that is Gwen Stefani? I want to cry.
Oh well, I guess I shall have to push Dave Matthews Band higher up on my little pedestal of good lyric writing and wait for them to sell out and fall too.

*headshake*