Sent from my blueberry

• I came in touch with Indian Ocean through a few songs before. Found Bandeh impressive, Jhini intriguing, Hille Re interesting and Des Mera straight from the soil. But these were casual exchanges - like we do when we meet someone we met a few years back suddenly in a fish market. This time I turned serious when my friend offered me Kandisa and Ma Rewa. I don't think any Indian band come close to them. I still have not finished listening to all their work. I have sufficient confidence in raising them above all other contemporary artistes in this country. Brilliant! Hope they recover from the loss of Aseem's death and keep pushing the envelope. Even if they don't, I'll be there with them.
• Close view of death leaves me frozen. At the same time, it levels me. The reality of an absurd thing called life becomes more visible during such a time. I get similar experiences while sitting in a dense forest or on a hill-top, away from crowd. Success and failures are treated alike. Disorders like excitement and depression get healed... possibly the only source of equality, the only solace for poor mortals. Nick Drake stands tall, and no one else:

I saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get you all
It's a pink moon

• My fellow born-negatives, don’t feel left alone. Accepting failure with as much grace as possible is far better than feeling low and act stupid. Find fun in mundane chores; create your own space with a right balance of occupation and laziness. There is no formula to predict an outcome in life. Being open to newer ideas does not mean being carried away with neighbour’s plans. There are proverbs/quotes/writings to justify every possible move in life. There is no rule that you will win after you lose. There is no theory to discard such a fictitious rule either! The fact that a successful and a failed person finally die and both cannot predict the date of their gala finish while they are alive is a reason enough to apply grace towards any approaching failure. A failure can never be cherished – just like a death can never be glorified. But we have to come out and deserve failures... at times. When you are able to explain a failure and why it rained on you, it becomes easy to handle. Inexplicable failures are little tougher to digest. Luck is for anything that does not give a chance to explain. It does play an important role everywhere. But nothing much can be brought out of a discussion on it. Create your own way of handling failure without troubling or disturbing others. No need to feel jittery – you will be never be interviewed to give away your story on “the making of a super-zero” nor you have to prepare for any motivational speech. Please don’t look down upon bigger failures than you and don’t chase any success tale. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst – in case you are weird enough to understand what it means.