As I watch hundreds of people entering this office building, with boredom looming large on their faces... as if they were in the process of coming to terms with the drudgery of this life... I can't help finding a parallel to this in the faces of convicts who are taken to rocky mountains so that they can break some rocks, under the hawk eyes of jailors monitoring their every move, their every hammer-stroke... to ensure that they squeeze out all the physical and mental capacities for a definite objective unconcerned to the actual convict. And finally they are taken back to their prison cells in the evening, where they have their dinner and sleep, dreaming about the day when they would finally embrace freedom. Within the corporate highwalls, every employee seems engaged in a constant survival battle, out to ensure that some rocks are crushed, living up to the charters drawn by the establishment. And these men and women retreat into their own homes instead of prison cells, in the evening. That's some difference, although I wonder if they are really escaping any prison cell at all.

The parallel seems like a hyperbole, given that these jobs are actually the conscious choices of these people and that they wouldn't want to let go off them even in their wildest dreams, for these careers feed their needs, wants and luxuries... These machinated men and women, are needed to crank up and run the economic engines that fatten the wallets of the establishment, thereby feeding the engine in another industry... and so on...

But this whole survival mode of existence, for a good part of the day, day after day, could lead us to an obsession that can, without no exaggeration, handicap our ability to distinguish happiness from prosperity. Prosperity needs neither definition nor interpretation today.

Happiness, as I am coming to realize,... is a function of not just the wants as calculated by our burdened brains, but also of the soul, the compass of which must be calibrated everyday, consciously, by some thought... A thought unmindful of survival questions.

One of the greatest regrets I had was quitting (learning) music. In 2008, I enrolled for carnatic violin classes under a AIR artist but soon after I was bed-ridden for 2 months due to a leg injury, I discontinued the classes. I could have resumed after I recovered but I couldn't make time (or rather... I could not sustain my passion levels). But I always envied people who knew music, be it any genre. And I always wanted to learn a music instrument. I wanted to understand the context of the piece composed by the composer, the emotion behind it and of course, the technicalities. 

The years 2012 and 2013 have left a deep impact on me, in terms of life, choices, priorities and things that are beyond our control. I would not say that I came to a realization point... that moment of nirvana (if at all exists) still eludes me and I have stopped looking for it anyway. But as work-life got busier and busier, I began looking for my own space. I used to write something before. I have stopped that. I used to explore a lot of music. I have stopped that. My travels too have become too organized and sanitized that the unplanned adventures in life are now too scarce. The only endeavour through which I began exploring my own self-expression was photography. But then, a busy work-life and an effort to balance out other things like family and social lives, brings in its own limitations. Between all this, I do not know from where the desire to go back to music germinated. But it did. And one fine day, I had to say 'Enough' to myself. I went and enrolled for Piano classes. My heart still lies on violin, but since I do have a fairly expensive keyboard at home, I just wanted to put it to good use. Also, learning a music instrument and learning music is my objective. The choice of instrument is secondary. 

I have attended my 1st Piano class last saturday. Needless to say, it was an experience, to begin to learn something new. I really do not want to commit the same mistake again and this time, I want to give my all to this. I hope I will be able to sustain my passional levels this time, so that I really get to understand music... and play it to express myself. A journey into self discovery this is and I want to go to lands explored and unexplored... in this journey.