Nostalgia ?
No,that's not it.
Isn't nostalgia for the times you've lived through ?
For things you've seen,things you've felt in your own lifetime.
Yet these things are not mine.
These snippets of song,these flashes of light and dark.
I was not there when they shot Lincoln,
Or was I?
So why do I have a faint recollection;a gunshot,a scream,a bounding leap.
Sic Semper Tyrannis !!
Or when they shot Oswald,or Garfield or Wild Bill Hickock...
When they first showed Nosferatu,or Casblanca or Pyaasa.
I wasn't among the teeming crowds.
I wasn't in the art-house cinemas where Bergman The Lion roared,
While the audience smoked and tried to deconstruct his pain.
These grainy relics are not mine.
When Rafi cooed in Bombay,I wasn't there to listen,
Nor was I with Cash,or ol' Muddy,or Bob 'n Joanie.
But I was there..
I tell you I was there,right beside her,right beside them all.
But how's that possible,and why am I missing them ??
I've never been to Wooster's London,or Lake Wobegon.
Then why is it that all my friends live there.
Long gone friends,long dead friends.
But still alive,still full of elan.
If these aren't my memories,why are they mine?
Why are these foreign emotions more personal than my own ??
And why do I sit staring at them,staring at the dates,
1915,1931,1962,1865.
My own life seeming trivial before these swathes of time...
It can't be nostalgia,can it?Isn't nostalgia supposed to be personal?Well,this is personal,isn't it ??
This abstract, my friend, is the only thing that is truly personal. It is kind of ironic to find someone who sinks it in just as deeply in cyberspace.
ReplyDeleteIt was written in a deep fit of the blues,something that had wanted to be written for a long long while,but I was not in the right frame of mind to do it..
ReplyDelete