The Living and the Dead

The recent death of a friend brought home to me the great and perhaps symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead.

Our dead crystallize our lives for us. An immediate and obvious effect is that the life and character of the departed comes into sharp focus. All the trivialities, the irrelevances and the prejudice fall away and the essence is revealed. And inevitably the essence of every human life is pure. The details are juts miasma, the universality of life is that every life, every single one has meaning, the same quintessential meaning, the same search for identity that in itself is the goal.

And then it strikes you. The essential purity that you now perceive in the friend or the loved one who has passed is the same purity that is you. And your life would be much easier and more joyful if you could, every single moment, hold that perception about yourself. Live in the moment present as if you just died in the moment past. Ah that man J. Krishnamurthy, such simple truths he told. Truths that suddenly drench you with meaning like that surprise summer shower.                   

     

From “Coming Home” to “Leaving Home”

I have come a long way.

Or so I realized as I watched “Leaving Home” this weekend.

A two hour plus documentary on the rock group Indian Ocean, “ Leaving Home” gave me the kind of high that happens when you listen to good music for an extended period along with a rich emotional sub-text.

Indian Ocean’s music is ‘sufi rock’ that does not seek that label. Earthy, very Indian and at the same time suffused with the uniquely modern humanitarian spirit of rock.

The music, the emotional connect I felt with the very middle class, the very rooted guys who make up the band Indian Ocean and my admiration for the brilliantly simple and very Indian idiom of its film-making had “Leaving Home” create an impact on me that remided me of a film that left a similar impact on me back in 1980.

“Coming Home” is a Hollywood film that tells the story of a triangle. A women, her fiancé who has come back home from the Vietnam war and a stranger who comes back from the same war, an invalid. “Coming Home” according to me uses classical American rock music from the 60s and the 70s better than any other movie that I know of.

The impact of “Coming Home” on me resulted from the same factors as in the case of “Leaving Home”. Good filmmaking, emotional connect and music that I identified with.

However there are, to my mind, crucial differences too.

The emotional connect I felt with “Coming Home” derived from that shallowest set of human emotions: the self-fancy and self-pity that results from romantic love and my musical appreciation of classical American rock is somewhat derivative to peer groupthink back in my school and undergraduate days.

On the other hand my emotional connect with Leaving Home results not from my personal confusions and miseries but a deeper corner of my being that admires the indomitable nature of the human spirit. On the same note, my connect with Indian Ocean’s music is, on first listening and with no one telling me of its virtues, almost atavistic. The rhythms and melodies of the desert where I was born and the sounds of the sea along which I have spent all of my adult life set to the yearning that is at the core of spirituality.

Am I still capable of responding to Coming Home today? Perhaps yes but on vastly different grounds. Was my 1980s self capable of enjoying and responding to Leaving Home? I don’t know.

What I know is that I have changed and despite the reflexive panegyrics all of us (especially those of us in the business of advertising or marketing) pay to youth, the older me is deeper, more anchored and capable of getting a lot more out of every moment.

Is it just me? As a youth was I exceptionally callow. Is it just a natural evolution that most of us experience? Or is it a change in the larger Indian gestalt that is giving back to us, the chattering classes, our roots.

Probably a bit of all three.