Well, till now, I've normally done a short version and a longer one for every challenge, but this time...things are different, so just one version. April has been super packed - I was travelling in the UK for a good part, meanwhile a favourite aunt passed away back in Kolkata, the West Bengal elections, sundry other big, small events. With spillover into May as well.
Firstly, this song. May is Tagore’s birthmonth, he was born on 7th May, 1861.
All
through the A-Z I felt weirdly wrongfooted for not sharing more about his
music and celebrity really, because he does impact Bengali
culture in this overarching way.
It's been buzzing around in my
head - the offspring reaches adulthood this month. Talk about a song summing up the current mood! The song has been sung by many stalwarts of Bengali music, a million others more accurate
in their pronunciation, more polished in the technicalities of rendering,
recording and production. But I
found this rendition beyond moving – non-native speakers singing
Tagore more than 1½ centuries since the songwriter’s birth. No fancypants
visuals, no drama in the arrangement, just straightforward heartfelt emotions, voices raised unpretentious. The
guy gives a translation at the beginning in Italian which I, sadly, don’t
speak. Anyways, the gist is – as mine
ends, yours begins, with you and me together, that’s how the stream goes on. Life, in other words, is a relay race. Enjoy!
Finally, my reflections on this landmark tenth A-Z Challenge. As usual, all yer who enters here, if yer gets this far, yer deserves and gets yo' choize -
The short version
I started this Challenge way less prepared than the
other years. But no complaints, no regrets. In the end things fell into place, I
survived and I had plenty of fun. A big, fat thank you to all those who read,
and a big, fat thank you to the A-Z team for creating this space, for all the hard
work to keep it going. Congrats! - on a super celebration of the decadal anniversary.
See you next year same time, same place!
The lo-o-o-o-ng version
This blog is a duck. What a visitor sees from the lakefront
is a bird gliding over water. More or less serene. Dipping her beak into the waves
from time to time and bringing up a post. Poetry or fiction, or even creative
non-fiction entries, either weekly or daily, go up here on a regular routine. The
visitor gets no whiff of the mad-paddling that is going on underwater, out of
sight.
The blog is also the lake itself. Where I come to relax and
detox, and I consciously write about things here disconnected from the fuss and fury going on elsewhere at that moment, keep it all separate and tidy. Madness below, sane
above. Simple formula. Makes me feel I’m in control. Of course, that’s also an illusion, all a
load of maya. But let’s not get into
Vedantic philosophy here. Things are complicated enough without that.
For reasons various, life has been chaos since last
December. As someone I know put it pithily – ‘hamster wheel tenterhooks combo.’ ‘Write it as it comes’ – hasn’t worked…what’s come to mind hasn’t always been worth
writing down. But fortunately,
I’ve been able to keep it from spilling over to the lake, or affect the duck, she’s
had to mad-paddle extra-hard but she’s managed somehow to keep on swimming.
Why I’m saying this now is because every cloud is pure
silver if turned inside out - my A-Z this year has been massively different
because of this, underwater if not above. For a time, I considered not
participating at all. But then it was the tenth year anni…fomo, I understand the youngsters call it…Then I toyed with the idea of the shortest possible
posts – a photo and caption, a mini-essay, but short’s not really my thing, except for poetry. It felt half-hearted, low-involvement, and I don’t like doing half-hearted, I’m so not good at low-involvement, especially with writing. The
upshot of all this stumbling around was that nothing much got decided, not much researched, even less got written.
So. I started this Challenge way less prepared than
the other years, I forgot the sign-up date, I plunged in with a fairly complex
theme without a drop of due diligence, I did not check for the ‘QX-test’ which is
my gold standard for any theme. I had just about half the posts written on 31st
March, all the tougher letters were supremely unready, unresearched even, the music was all over
the place, it was just anarchy exponential.
But no complaints, no regrets. My A-Z was more
spontaneous because of the mess, though I had moments of blind panic as I flailed
around for letters which I'd have thought wouldn’t be so hard to write to – U and Z,
for instance. But…once you’ve set your mind on something, the universe conspires
to arrange it for you. It miraculously conspired for those letters
too, I found my topics, I posted in time on the day, even if it was by the skin
of my teeth. I scraped through, I survived. The sixth time for me. The tenth anniversary of the event.
In the end things fell into place and I had plenty of fun.
Possibly more fun than if my posts had been scheduled to the gills, because I’m
really a pantzer at heart. The final takeaway? – scheduled is great, but unscheduled is not
always as hopeless as I’ve allowed myself to believe. Why have I lured myself
into this belief anyway? Why get into a mindset where only one way of doing
things, of surviving challenges, is the valid way? Not a good habit to fall
into. The brain knows it, there’s no right or wrong way of being on the lake and/or
the lakeside, yet the heart panics and flaps around, such a waste of energy and
emotion. Take it easy and be bindaas
boss, it will pan out if only you jump in. A thing half-done can also be well begun. Bas lagi raho Munnibai!
A big, fat thank you to all those who read my overlong
posts (including this one! You’d have thought not being scheduled would mean
less of the megarambles, but no, it didn’t work that way, not quite sure how it
does work, but there it is. Less time
for the ruthless big chop, I guess.)
And an equally big, fat thank you to the A-Z team for creating
this space and for all the hard work to keep it going. Congrats! - on a super
celebration of the decadal anniversary. Here’s to many more.
I shall be, as in all the other years, reverting back
to my bloghopless self forthwith, to my weekly poetry/fic business as usual. Except
WEP/IWSG of course. See you next year same time, same place! As the Bengalis
say – aschhe bochhor abar hobe! (Lit.
will happen again in the coming year). And who knows? - maybe I’ll learn to chop
and edit better meanwhile.
