Whispering Winds

My blog posts usually start with the title of a song. Sometimes its a song I’m listening to, other times its a song I like that resonates with what I’m going to write about. Whispering winds is a song by Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma and Pt Hari Prasad Chaurasia. Its a song I remember having heard when I was very little (because my parents listened to a lot of this kind of music) and I remember parts of the songs very vividly. Since the time I’ve got here, for some reason, those parts were playing in my head over and over again. So I decided to take it upon myself to find the song.

I did everything, youtubed shiv kumar sharma on youtube (the parts i remember are the santoor bits so I figured thats a good starting point) and all sorts of other things, until yesterday, I can’t remember how, I found myself listening to one of the CDs my parents owned online, on raaga.com. They have the whole set of those CDs so I decided to make my way through another one.

And just like that, I found the song. My thrill knew no bounds, because here was a song that somehow stuck with me since I was a little child, and back then with no information technology and audio cassettes and what not, I had no way of finding it but I did.

So I made my mom listen to it. Thinking that its so special to me, it must be because she heard it a lot and so she must have liked it. She heard it. But she could only faintly recollect it, and finally figured out that it wasn’t from a CD she had owned but from one of those home video cassettes you get made of birthday party recordings (and the recording studio thinks its a good idea to start the video with a few images of flowers and a background score of instrumental music). I was slightly dejected.

But this is the kind of dejection I’ve been facing a lot lately. Only yesterday, I was talking to C about things that happened back in the day, and as it turned out, we both had very different versions of “our” story. And I found this so surprising. I mean, you’d think that if you’ve lived this very important part of your life with ONE other person that at least that person would remember it exactly as you do. But I let it pass.

Then I was speaking to K, and telling him about the time we watched a movie in my room, and he seemed to have absolutely no recollection of this time. Just none what so ever.

So this has been a trend in the past few days. But I think I can’t let that take anything away from my experiences. That I loved the song has nothing to do with where it was used and that I treasure a memory to a specific degree of detail is just an indication of how special it is to me. And I am someone who is a master at eliminating things I don’t want to remember. So the fact that I remember it means its special. And I guess, its okay every so often to not have someone else validate your life experiences, as long as they have their own special place in your head.

Okay, now. There was no particular reason to write this blog post. Normally I wouldn’t have, about something like this, but RJ and I decided that we’re going to do this thing where we write something every day till the end of 2011. It could be fun to do (but you might want to unsubscribe from here to avoid spam).  So this is Day 1/32. See you tomorrow.