On Kailash Kher and Love Songs

When Kailash Kher sings, I listen, and when he sings “Mil ke bhi, hum na mile, thum se na jane kyon….” My mind whips up a whirlpool. It reminds me of four of Shelley’s perhaps most famous lines,

“Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught

Our sweetest songs

Are those that tell of saddest thoughts.”

When I look around, it seems that most people have stopped falling in love. Or maybe they have stopped realizing what love is all about, or even forgot all about it. Thankfully, I remain Fairy Godmother’s favorite child in this area. I fall in love at least once in a couple of years.  In fact, my otherwise ordinary life is punctuated with the memories of wonderful women I fell in love with. Women who were always amazing human beings and quite passionate about their being women. Some loved me in return for short moments in time, some forever and some others never knew of my love for them, or maybe knew, and hence ran away from me :)

The good thing about falling in love is that it helps you feel human and fallible again, it’s a welcome break from the robotic dreariness of my professional life. It also helps the ink flow from a pen otherwise prone to rust. All my lines ever written are reflections of someone I knew sometime in my life. But the part I like best about love is its ability to elevate another human being into the centre of your universe! When you love someone, your life hovers around hers like a compass. It does not matter how big the distances between the two are, you still find yourself swinging around the same radius, dancing in a circle!

Some of my closest friends are those whom I managed to retain long since the initial wave of love subsided. I hate people going out of my life. Because, when they do, they walk away with too much of me. I hate to live with the fact that there might be several loose pieces of me walking around this earth. Thankfully, as of today, there are only two, and I am sure that they will be back in my life, as friends, sometime during this lifetime again. They are not gone; they are out on a long walk. I await their return.

When the sounds of the evening subsides

And I am one with my solitude,

I first hear it as a distant drum

Until it comes home and annihilates

Every thought that was ever mine.

Every night I go to sleep with you in my mind.

Enough on love for the day. Good day.