750

Just when I was trying to make up my mind to begin blogging regularly again, I stumbled across a website that encourages one to write 750 words a day. It sounds a lot, but because I was resolved to begin writing more (and watch less TV), I signed up. The first day was difficult, then it became easier , so much so that I am now looking forward to the daily exercise. Do join up if you feel so inclined, and let us share notes! Here is the link :http://750words.com/about.

Here are my most recent 750 words, which took roughly 4 minutes to write.

I rediscovered MUSIC today ---- or to be precise, I discovered a website from which I can pay and download music. I had done that about a year ago, when I had downloaded a lot of music from Flipkart. I failed to save the music on a back up memory device so when the computer crashed, all the music vanished. I was heart broken. OK, that's hyperbole. I was a little upset because a lot of time had gone into searching for the GHAZALS I like and downloading them ----and they vanished in a trice without leaving the merest trace behind, or at least, none that I could discover, not being a very technologically savvy person. For a pretty long time after that disaster, I played bits and pieces of music on You Tube but was inhibited by the cost of downloading the song every time I wanted to hear it.

Today, Facebook threw up an advertisement of the music company SaReGaMa ----and lo and behold, they have, at last, years and years after they should have, introduced the facility of downloading music at the pretty reasonable rate of Rs 9 per song. I have downloaded about 20 songs so far because the Search function is rather tedious and not user friendly at all. I aim to download at least 20 songs every day till I have most of the Bollywood music and ghazals I like. All other music I will ask my son to transfer from his computer to mine. He is a music geek if ever there was one, with so much music that it can play non stop, without repetition, for 365 days !!

I am not so ambitious. I love to hear music from different genres, different ages, different languages, but never get so enamoured of any of it to want to memorise it, recognise it, hum it. Its enough for me to enjoy it for the moment. My logic is simply this ----there is so much music in the world that no one can ever hear all of it, not even in a lifetime so one might as well enjoy what one can momentarily and for the most, focus on more familiar music, perhaps music one has grown up with or music one has fallen in love with as one grew older.

For example, there was a time when I heard a lot of Celtic music, but I remember just one name from that time, The Corrs. I heard all their music via You Tube, I heard Celtic music on radio, I bought a CD of the instrumental music of ---- oh! I have forgotten the name, I will have to google it, but I remember the name of the album which was Divinities. Who was it? It sounded like Louis Armstrong. OK, I just remembered ---it was Ian Andersen. I don't even know whether that was Celtic music, just that it SOUNDED like Celtic music, possibly because it was played on a flute. How is Celtic pronounced, by the way? Is it Celtic as in "cell" or Celtic as in "kill"? I have probably looked up the pronounciation dozens of times but I forget every time. Let me do it one last time and say it aloud 10 times so that I don't forget again. Hmm, its Keltic ---sounds better than Celtic. Wouldn't it have been nice for English to be a logical language and spell Keltic as Keltic and not Celtic? Such difficulties never arise in Hindi or Punjabi, the only other two languages I know.

Come to think of it, I have not heard much Punjabi music. Possibly, it had to do with our middle class upbringing in which Punjabi was considered the poor or vulgar ( depending upon the circumstances) cousin of Hindi. From my youth, I only remember the song "gur naalon ishq miththa" and the Punjabi ghazals Preekshit, my brother, used to play once in a while on the tape recorder. In recent times, I have heard a bit of Shiv Batalvi and a bit of Punjabi folk music but it doesn't add to much. I think I will download some Punjabi music tomorrow, perhaps Tahira Syed whose "jhajar phabdi na " I have long loved and long wished and dreamt I could sing.