Am I a philistine?

The other day, a friend, a long-haired dude who has since shaved his head, a chap with a collection of hard drives full of movies and music, played a song on his laptop.

"You'll love it," he said.

Or maybe he didn't say anything, but that doesn't matter.

So he played this song. It was, I can now tell you, having asked this other friend who was around at the same time, and googled the line he remembered, Beautiful World by Colin Hay.

I like to go out beyond the white breakers
where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one)
I like swimming in the sea

The tune was pleasant enough, the dude singing it had a nice voice, but my enthusiasm for it was only tepid. I said as much to my two friends.

"Listen to the lyrics properly da. It's awesome," one or both of them said.

And there in essence was my problem. More accurately the problem with me.

I'm incapable of appreciating songs whose appeal is primarily lyric-based. This I think is connected to my inability to really get poetry. I get funny stuff, like Ogden Nash, but that's about it. Unless you count something like this, the only lines of poetry I've ever stuck on a status message:

Like rattle of dry seeds in pods the warm crowd gently clapped,
The boys who came to watch their gods, the tired old men who napped.

And I surmise that I appreciate this poem (Cricket at Worcester, John Arlott) purely because it describes a cricket scene, i.e., something that's likely to strike an emotional chord anyway. And heck, it tells me clearly what it's talking about.

Unlike, say, this:

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without no seams nor needlework, then she'll be a true love of mine

I heard this (Scarborough Fair, Simon and Garfunkel) thanks to another friend, a colleague at work who did crazy things with the internet settings to enable access to streaming video, found the song on YouTube and handed me a pair of headphones.

"The lyrics are awesome, right?" he asked me.

I nodded with a beatific smile, not because I thought the lyrics awesome (Honestly, I have no idea what the two dudes are going on about) but because I loved the song for the tune, and how the two voices, one high, one low, in perfect harmony, made me bask in some un-nameable emotion.

Beautiful World somehow didn't manage it, which perhaps isn't the song's failure but mine.

Read here what Mike Marqusee wrote rather more eloquently on a not entirely dissimilar theme. 

Pilfered tennis balls

Perusing pilfered tennis balls should, you would imagine, induce in the peruser a wave of complex emotions, ranging from the urge to perform a celebratory jig to a desire to confess in a flood of tears and repentance. Not so in my case, however. All I feel now as I stare at the furry sphere on my floor is resentment.

I pilfered this ball about two months ago, from the cubicle of a reporter who works in the same newspaper as I, but a different department. "You're sure I can steal it?" I asked my friend, who works in the tennis ball dude's department. "Sure," she replied. The tennis ball dude, as you might imagine, wasn't around.

But all the conspiratorial thrill I felt when I dropped the ball in my bag evaporated when I lobbed it at the wall back in my room. For instead of zipping past the outside edge of my hesitantly thrusting bat upon bouncing on the floor, it (the ball) dribbled under its (the bat's) worn oil-hole.

For two months now, it has mocked me with its yellow leer and obstinate refusal to rise above my ankle, even when I've attempted to fling it out of my sight.

It's the very definition of irony, for the first, and only other, tennis ball I pilfered, back when I was in school, was tennis ball perfection, and remained in my possession about forty seven seconds, before my second backfoot punch sent it bouncing out of my balcony grille and bounding enthusiastically in a north-easterly direction, towards a happier place and, I'm sure, a better batsperson.

Transience

This world, and all the intriguing little thingies it contains, could do with a little more permanence.

Take for instance these things, which look in this picture like the most unremarkable kind of plasticky loopy objects imaginable - which is precisely what they are. 

It wasn't always so, however.

At a party I went to a few weeks ago, I was handed something out of a cylindrical box, a thing that to my eyes looked like a straw.

"Bend it," I was told.

I bent it. 

And suddenly, the thing, having lost its straightness, now gained glowiness. Upon fastening its ends to a little flexible plastic tube, I had on my wrist a glow-in-the-dark bangle! Very soon, I had two!

You can imagine all the childlike wrist-wriggling that ensued - not just mine, but of all the others at the party similarly entranced. Especially enthusiastic, and even triumphant, I thought, was the wriggling of wrists circled in blue light. I admit now that I coveted the blue bangles. Mine, perfect in every other way, weren't blue, but green and orange.

The next day, the bangles glowed only feebly; the day after, not even that. They still sit in my shelf, ignored sometimes, looked at wistfully other times. My mum asked me the other day if she could use them to keep the curtains from flapping about.

I wonder what the others did with theirs. Especially the blue ones. Do they still glow?

Why do we love sport?

Yesterday, I sat on a red plastic chair under a row of trees next to the tennis court at Loyola college and watched an inter-collegiate doubles final. On the far side of the court, the hockey team practiced on the hockey ground, to one side of which rose the steeple of Loyola church.
Against this backdrop, the quality of tennis wasn't great. Talent flickered intermittently, a crosscourt return winner here, a wristy half-volley there. Mostly though, the match was strewn with errors. Volleys failed to clear the tape, returns sailed beyond the baseline, one serve hit the perimeter fencing on the full.
For all that, this was a contest, and the players were deadly serious. One disputed line call took, or seemed to take, ten minutes to resolve, and the players plodded earnestly through excruciatingly drawn-out games full of misplaced first serves. Every game seemed to reach deuce. At one point in the second set, even the chirping of birds in the branches above grew restless.
When the third set began, everyone who had so far watched idly, chatting, sensed this heightened intensity and grew silent. The hockey players gathered at the far side of the court, leaving the playing of one sport behind to witness another.
This was much like periods in so much of the tennis-ball cricket I've played, on the streets, in backyards, on baking afternoons in dusty playgrounds, periods where nothing matters but bat and ball, runs and wickets. Charged particles fill the air - you don't necessarily have to pad up in an Ashes Test, or stand amidst the thousands holding up scarves or setting off flares to feel them.

Walk when you talk

Whenever I take a bite out of a burger or a submarine sandwich, I cause the stuff inside to slide out the other end. I cannot twirl spaghetti or noodles with a fork without the stuff unravelling before I raise the thing to my mouth. I'm incapable of taming mozzarella. One of my shirts has a sambhar stain on it, another a toothpaste smear.
I once saw a friend do something I could never do. He reclined on his bed and brushed his teeth slowly, with measured brush strokes, for a serious length of time, without the tiniest drop of foam dribbling down his chin.
I could have given the chap a standing ovation.
One day in the Chemistry Lab in school, I held a test tube in one hand, a filter in the other, stuck the filter into the test tube, and let go with the wrong hand.
I seldom carried stationery to school. Whatever little notes I took down, and all the doodling I did, I did with borrowed pens. A lot of people, even close friends, eventually stopped lending me their pens, because I always returned them with their clips broken. I couldn't - I still can't - help fiddling with pen clips.
I cannot paint with watercolours. I use too much water, apply too much pressure with my brush, and end up leaving a silt-like deposit of bluish-brown papier mache on the paper's top surface. I haven't tried oils or acrylic or egg tempera or whatever, so I can't say with certainty that I'll suck at those too.
During the fixed-line-phone-only era, I presciently walked when I talked. It didn't do me, or the phone, any good.

The Wimbledon final that made a poet of me (with some help from Twitter's 140-character limit)

I'm reminded of the first tennis match I ever saw - Lendl beat Becker and made me cry.

If I was 4 today, I'd have bawled my tear ducts dry.

Such is life

In a shelf not far from where I sit is a notebook. Its cover says Sketch Book 100 Pages.
In another shelf, not far from the shelf in which the notebook lies, is a box. The box contains pencils, six in total, of different graphite-to-clay ratios. A sharpener – Twin Sharpener, the box says – came free with the box of pencils. The Twin Sharpener is actually two sharpeners, of different diameters, in one.
I haven’t put the notebook, the pencils, or the sharpener to use, yet.
Someday I will.
Someday, I shall pick up a pencil, most likely the HB, and with its sharp end make a pattern, a rudimentary curve, upon a page of the Sketch Book. That curve may cause other curves to materialise, or it may not.
It may instead cause me to look around frantically for an eraser. An eraser may exist in this house, maybe in a shelf not far from the shelf the Sketch Book lies in. Or it may not.
On the day the HB pencil and the Sketch Book come in contact with each other, no eraser will be found. What will happen is this – in vain I will search for an eraser, and upon finding none attempt on a new page to create a satisfactory rudimentary curve, fail, and put the Sketch Book back in its shelf, after tearing out the pages with the unsatisfactory rudimentary curves on them, crumpling them, and tossing them in the bin.
The sharpener and the five other pencils in the box will have served no purpose.
All night the visions of a completed sketch will dance in my brain, teasing, tormenting.
The next day, I will find an eraser, in a shelf not far from the Sketch Book and the box of pencils, a shelf whose every inch I would have probed the previous day. Faber Castell, it will say, or maybe Natraj. Or it may say nothing, and look and smell like a slice of cartoon lemon instead.
By then, the visions that had swirled on the page the previous day, orbiting the unsatisfactory rudimentary curve, will have departed the retina of my mind’s eye, forever, or till the next time the eraser disappears.