Monday, April 27, 2009

The Motion Falls

I know I said I wouldn't ever again, but I did go ahead and speak for NLS at an Indian debate. A mere (though it didn't seem so during the auto rides there and back) fifteen kilometres from campus, no less.

I went with a team I didn't know too well, completely out of practice, with a team equally out of practice, encountered the very same sickening things that put me off debating a few months back, did things I wouldn't have otherwise thought necessary and did it with the assumption that it was only a matter of time before the bubble burst.

When the motion fell, however, I was far from unhappy. Yes, we could've made our point better; yes, we would've been infinitely better if I'd known I was going first a little earlier than five minutes before the debate began and yes to a million other things that I can now happily dismiss as mere details.

And though debating takes a lot out of me (quite literally at times), the last three days have led me to believe that, for a person of my (lack of) skill and poise, perhaps the default approach to debating should be one of zero expectation.

I'm certainly not changing my mind drastically about the February 7 incident--after all, the only team we knew were better than us we lost to. But I'm certain that, of the four debates we did, we would've lost three if they had happened in that cursed Delhi winter.

And it gives me belief that, with a good fourteen months still left here, there might, just might, be enough time for one last shot at it in the big time.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Nightblindness

While going through some old email today, I found this one. At 11.32 p.m. on Friday, September 19, 2008, I sent this to a really close friend of mine. Nearly seven months on, I can scarcely believe that things were ever the way they were between us. Upon roughly three seconds of reflection, reading this made me realise that Fourth Year has been about extreme happiness and extreme sadness, with very little in between.

Here goes.

***

"I write this to you on an impulse, completely unprepared about what I want to say, how I want to say it or, indeed, why I'm saying it at all.

There's a song called "Nightblindness" by David Gray, which I'm sending you. It's a song about a lot of things and is, in fact, so beautiful in its simplicity that it could really mean anything at all. It has also, in
the four years that I've listened to it, never failed to pull me through the hardest of times.

David Gray is a singer/songwriter who was practically lost to the music world for most of the 1990s because record company after record company would seem to take cruel pleasure in opening doors for him, only to slam them in his face when he got too close. His cause was ultimately championed by a few underground music journos in England and, in what can only be described as the greatest word-of-mouth success in the history of
the music business, David Gray's album "White Ladder" (which "Nightblindness" is from, actually) went on to sell five million albums worldwide. It's about as romantic a story about the will of one man against the big, bad monster of the music business as you could hope to find and ever since I've known of David Gray, I've never failed to be in
awe of the man, his life and what incredible stories he will get to tell his grandchildren one day.

Which makes it all the more remarkable how this song describes thoughts, feelings and emotions that I've felt in the aforementioned "hardest of times" and I've always been amazed at how someone could express through music exactly what is going through my head.

"Nightblindness" by David Gray

-----
A million to one
Outsiders
Nightblindness
Can't see

Your bright eyes are what
The time is
Twenty-five past eternity

Hear you listening
To the silence
Coming closer
Now further away

What we gonna do
When the money runs out
I wish that there was something left to say
Where we going to find the eyes to see
The bright of day

I'm sick of all the same romances
Lost chances
Cold storms

Propping mountains up
On matchsticks
Dragging baskets
Full of bones

Honey please don't stop
Your talking
'Cause there's a feeling
Won't leave me alone

What we gonna do
When the money runs out
I wish that there was something I could say
How we going to find the eyes to see
The bright of day?

What we gonna do
When the money runs out
I wish that there was something left to say
How we going to find the eyes to see
The bright of day?
-----

I don't particularly want you to fall in love with the song, be amazed by the sentiment it expresses or anything of the sort. I simply sent this to you because I haven't been having the happiest of times recently and I
think that you can tell. I've tried listening to the song over, but I fear that this emotional slump might be a little harder to get past than I previously thought.

I just figured that maybe if I were to tell you the story that I just have, it might be a good thing because that way, at least one person in the world will know what I'm thinking and it's been a while since I felt
that way.

Doesn't hurt to share, does it?

Love,
Eashan."

***

Your bright eyes are what the time is, twenty-five past eternity. :)

I'm not sure if there's a point to this story but I'm going to tell it again.

My photo
India
I've been wilfully caught up in the self-defeating quest to get to know myself for years. I've never expected anything beneficial to result from such a quest. I tend to evoke extremely polarised reactions from people I get to know in passing. Consequently, only those people who know me inside-out would honestly claim that I'm a person who's just "alright." It's not a coincidence that the description I've laid out above has no fewer than, title included, eleven references to me (make that twelve). I'm affectionately referred to as "Ego." I think that last statement might have given away a tad too much. Welcome Aboard.

IHTRTRS ke pichle episode mein aapne dekha...

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