विचारकरी | मॉडर्न आर्ट | कोण, किती चिडलय?

विचारकरी | मॉडर्न आर्ट | कोण, किती चिडलय?

विचारकरी | पुण्याचं पाणी आणि हवा | कर्म आणि फळ

विचारकरी | पुण्याचं पाणी आणि हवा | कर्म आणि फळ

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चारोळी

चारोळी

असं जाता जाता तुझं
मला परत वळून बघणं
तुला जाताना बघून
तुझी वाट बघत जगणं

जाणाऱ्याने जाता जाता
पाठी वळून हसू नये
हसत हसत जाता जाता
जीव घेऊन जाऊ नये

तू गेल्यावर वाट बघत
मी जगायला लागलो
तू वळून बघण्यावरही
कविता करायला लागलो

मला ठाऊक नाही माझं
तुझ्याबरोबर काय काय येतं
इतकंच ठाऊक मला की
तू जाताना सगळंच जातं

येताना समोर बघतेस
जाताना वळून बघतेस
परत यायचं असतं तरी
मला थोडंसं छळून बघतेस

प्रेमात पडल्यावर सगळेच
शहाणे वेड्यासारखं वागतात
खरे वेडे प्रेमात न पडल्यामुळे
स्वत:ला शहाणं म्हणू लागतात

खरच प्राण जाताना
तुझं वळून बघणं आठवेल
दोघात फारसा फरक नाही
हे तेव्हाच खरं जाणवेल

आठवणीत येऊन कोणीही
कोणाला रात्री जागवू नये
प्रेमात वेडेपणा केल्यामुळे
जगाने कोणावरही रागवू नये

— मयुरेश कुलकर्णी

विचारकरी | इंजिनियरचं फ्लोचार्ट | अखंड प्रेमात खंड

विचारकरी | इंजिनियरचं फ्लोचार्ट | अखंड प्रेमात खंड

 

विचारकरी | गावाकडची हवा | चिचुली-पिचुली

विचारकरी | गावाकडची हवा | चिचुली-पिचुली

विचारकरी | प्रेम-इंजिनियर उर्फ काकूंचा कमबॅक | काहीतरी चुकतय

विचारकरी | प्रेम-इंजिनियर उर्फ काकूंचा कमबॅक | काहीतरी चुकतय

It’s not my song

It’s not my song

Recently, I watched an old song being performed by a new singer. To be honest, I did not like the way it was presented. The song is not just old enough but also good enough to be regarded as a classic. It was sung by a folk singer who became popular because of that song. I am not sure, but I think it was written by her. In its simple form, it was played using one or two unsophisticated instruments and the music was not extraordinary on its own. The ingredient that made the song famous was the lyrics and the singer. The lyrics were about a nomadic woman of the desert longing for her lover. The singer was that gypsy woman who moved from place to place depending on the time of the year. Her voice had the essence of the desert sand and her pain was expressed using those powerful words. She not only sings her sorrows in an honest way, but also makes the listener see the world through her eyes. By the end of the song, you wish that she feels better, hope that she meets her lover and they live happily. There may not even be a lover, she may not be longing for him, but such is the strength in the voice and the words that she makes you imagine, she makes you believe.

The new song is different. In my humble and musically-uneducated opinion, the new song will never be as good. The new singer has a great voice, don’t get me wrong about that. She is talented and has worked hard, and if I had heard her without knowing about the old song, I would have liked her. But I have heard the pain in the old song, I can not forget that. The new performance has the best instruments and recording technology that money can buy, but it is missing something that the old one captured. The words are the same, but somehow the new ones lack the strength that the old ones have. The musical instruments play a happy tune when the song is sad, the singer does not make the listener believe that she is sad and longing. The pain and sorrow is the heart and soul of the song, but the new singer fails to capture that.

I know it is not her song. It was not written for her. She may not be able to relate to the situation in the song because she is a city girl and not a gypsy. The longing, lack of contact and poor communications are also a thing of the past. So it is understandable why she can not recreate that for the audience. When she sings it, she knows she will be compared to the classic. This will surely add more pressure to be better if not similar to the old performance. I can understand why she is unable to have the same effect on me, and althougth my sympathies are with her, I think she could have done better. Instead of re-singing something that everyone has heard before, she could have done something new. She could have impressed everyone with a new song, something that could not be easily compared to anything.

Art is like coffee. The ideas need to reach a certain boiling point in your brain before they extract the flavour and taste of what they try to create. The original song was as good as it was because the artist gave it freedom to happen when it wanted to happen. She did not write the song just because she wanted to write it. That would be like making coffee with lukewarm water. She waited, tried to picture the situation in the words, embodied the pain and helplessness of that woman and then sang the song with all her heart. It was a thing of beauty. The new singer tried to recreate the old magic, but it was like warming up a coffee that has gone cold. It is never the same, will never be the same. The boiling point where ideas begin to mingle, words get their depth and the songs becomes genuine was never reached again. She should have made a new cup of coffee for herself, rather than warming up someone else’s. I am over-stretching the analogy, but the new singer should have presented a new song. She should have just said “It is not my song, I can’t sing it in the same way!” It’s the same with many other things. Sing your song, play your tune and dance the way you dance. If you can try to recreate someone else’s magic, you are capable to create some of your own!

— Mayuresh

Don’t be creative

Don’t be creative

The story starts on a cold winter’s evening. I was crossing a square that I have crossed so many times, that I don’t notice anything new in it. I was trying to walk as fast as possible to avoid the cold and to make matters worse it started raining. Then I saw it.

A man was blowing what looked like a plastic pipe and creating music. There was a bowl with a few coins in front of him. His face wore an expression that said that his stomach was as empty as that bowl in front of him. I dug into my pockets, found a few coins and put them in the bowl. I felt sorry for him. He was sitting in the cold, starved and wet. The cold shivering body seemed to resonate through the tunes of the rudimentary flute. I took shelter under the roof of a closed shop and stood there listening to the music and watching the rain dampen the tunes.

There was something remarkable about him. Remarkable does not mean spectacular, but here as Seth Godin would explain it, it means something worth making a remark about. The man on the square was by no means a musician. He probably didn’t even know how to read and write music. But he was playing it. The cold did not matter, the emptiness of the square did not bother him, the coins in the bowl did not have much importance and the empty stomach actually gave his music its character. My brain argued instantly that the man was just trying to make a living by entertaining people. But my heart asked me to look beyond that. It was and is a message to all the artists out there. Don’t be creative, don’t even try to be creative. Even if you are an amateur or a professional at what you are doing, don’t try to be creative. The man was making music from a piece of plastic, and in doing so he was being very creative. But that was not his aim. His aim was to give his best to what he was doing against all odds. He was trying to tell an honest story about his hardships through music. He was telling us to do our honest best and take whatever ended up in the bowl in front of us at the end of the day.

I heard an actor say once that he wakes up, acts in his play and then goes home. He does not know how he did or what others thought of him. He just knows that he did it the way he wanted to do it. No one knows what creative is and one man’s creative is another man’s crap. That’s why its very hard to say when someone is being creative. But its easy to show and to see when someone is being honest. Instead of analyzing what everyone likes and producing it, it is a lot more satisfying to create what you like. Not everyone will like what you are doing in any case. So if you can’t please everybody, at least make sure that you please yourself with the things you do.

What is wrong with us?

Going one step further, here is what is wrong with us. The first thing I felt after seeing the man on the square was sadness. It made me reach for some coins which ended up in his bowl. This was pity, pure and simple. Then after a long time I admired the man for doing something I could not and would not do. He was extracting music from a hollow plastic pipe with holes at random places. I am sure most musicians would struggle to play that as an instrument. They had studied music with its rules and notations, whereas this man had picked up a piece of plastic and made a flute out of it. I am sure many of us would think in the same way, given enough time. This is exactly what is wrong with us. We start with sadness, then move to pity and then if we are lucky enough we progress to admiration. I just think that if someone can do something that we can’t or we have not even thought of, the first feeling that we experience should be awe. It does not matter if someone is stuck in the cold, what matters is if he is fighting to make it better or not.

— Mayuresh

Everybody has an audience

Everybody has an audience

It may be your mom trying to push you, or your best friend telling you that you do something well, or some random people on facebook, who you have not met before, who like what you do. It does not matter who it is, what matters is that everyone has an audience. I am not saying that you need someone to tell you that you are doing something better than others, for you to keep doing it. But it helps to keep you going and growing. If you suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect (stupid people are confident, while the intelligent are doubtful), you need a good friend to cement your faith and confidence in yourself.

If you don’t know what you have, find an audience and be vulnerable. Ask a friend if you can borrow him/her for an hour or two and show him/her what you are doing. I suggest a friend because even though they may not like what you are doing, they will be gentle with their criticism. They also have the time to patiently listen to you. We hear about friends being great support systems when things are going wrong with us, but they can also be seen as confidence givers when you lack it. Once a good friend tells you that your book or any project is great you want to show it to more people. Then expand your audience and reap the confidence that you get from them to do bigger, better things. It becomes a chain reaction that would not have started if you had not casually discussed something with a friend. I have heard a lot of times that ‘Ideas that spread, win!’. This talk-to-a-friend system can be the background of those ideas. Ideas will spread if people like them or have faith in them. People will have faith in your ideas, if you have faith in them and sometimes you need a friend to show you how much you want that idea or project to happen.

We live in a world where there are many things to do and many different ways to do them. As if that is not enough, we have other things to take care of and a limited amount of time to do all this. So playing with ideas, seeing what works and what doesn’t, what you like and dislike is essential. Also, we are not capable of doing everything. We need the exchange of thoughts and skills with other people. So next time you have a half-baked idea that you are not sure about, don’t let it go. Rather find a friend and ask if you can pick his/her brains about it. You will be surprised at the number of times your ‘not-so-good idea’ gets transformed into something thats brilliant. Such collaborations help build good friendships too, which is a bonus.

— Mayuresh

I really want to do this!

I really want to do this!

I am sure many people think about this when they want to do something new, different and (what might be viewed by others as) radical. The thought starts something like, “I really want to do this, but…

— What will people think about it?
— What will people think about me, when they know I have done this?
— Is it worth the time?
— Will I earn any money, or will I lose money out of this?
— If I am having so many ‘second thoughts’ about this, is it really what I want to do?”

There are many more questions that cloud the mind. One starts thinking about what will happen when you have done what you really want to do, and this really demotivates. Thinking about the ‘what if’ scenarios and taking precautions is one of gifts given to man, but sometimes we use it to our disadvantage.

Next time you think ‘I really want to do this’, just do it! Don’t think about the but’s and what if’s. Some answers to the questions above are ‘yes, it is worth the time, because this is what YOU want to do’, ‘who cares if you lose or make money, you are doing it because it will make you happy’ and ‘if you keep thinking about how people will judge you everyday, may be you should not get out of bed, because no matter what you do, they will judge.’

Instead of worrying about what will happen when you do it, just go ahead and do it. It is statistically improbable that everyone will dislike or disagree with what you have done. Some people will agree with it, but not like it. Others will like it, but not tell you that they have liked it (for various reasons). A few will like it, support it and share it with their friends.

Some rules
– As I was writing this, there were a few things that came to mind. These can be some personal rules to follow. The ‘I really want to do this’ statement should come from the heart. If it involves hurting someone physically or emotionally, then that does not come from the heart. That’s just anger or hatred. The thing that you decide to do should be creative, productive and something good.

– Another rule is be yourself and be true to yourself. It is easy to tweak what someone else is doing and call it your own, or to copy someone else altogether. This also does not satisfy the I-really-want-to-do-this criteria. So express yourself, be yourself and be true to yourself. People will admire the honesty, even if they don’t agree with what you are doing.

— Mayuresh