Waking up to peace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjMs_imWkFM&feature=related

Song- Vellai pookal

Composed and sung- A R Rahman

Lyrics - Vairamuthu

Translation - http://www.mail-archive.com/arrahmanfans@yahoogroups.com/msg39132.html

I don’t usually concentrate on the lyrics of songs. There seems to be a part of my brain that blocks out attempting to find out meaning in a song. But this is one song who’s lyrics hit me each time I listen to them.

It brings out the yearning those affected by war have for peace. Something that most of us absolutely take for granted. Being victimised for no justifiable reason. Whether it is our freedom fighters struggling against the British or the ‘blacks’ against the ‘whites’.

We may be waking up everyday, as the song describes, to the blooming of white flowers and the warmth of the yellow sunlight on the sand. Most of us are not directly affected by struggles such as war and genocide and denial of basic human rights. Our preoccupied minds may allow us to stop and feel a little sympathy for the victims who we read about in books and newspapers or see shedding tears to the reporter on a news channel or in a movie.

But rarely do we appreciate the very fact that we are able to live without fear. Not fear of being unsuccessful to impress a client or a boss at a meeting, or of failure to be at the top, or of losing an important upcoming match. But fear of having to fight to live as a normal human being with another human being. Being caught in the war somebody else is having with somebody else.

While we go about or daily work with all our frustrations and complaints, there are the vast number of people who live in this fear. The soldiers, their families, innocent people who just happen to live in a place witnessing weekly bomb blasts, children who still wake up to the sound of gunfire echoing in their heads even after the shooting is long gone.

We may not change after reading or writing such thoughts, we will still go about our lives laughing with the good times and complaining bitterly about the bad. We may not become great patriots or leaders. But one of those days when we begin to wallow in self pity and curse our lives, we could stop to appreciate the freedom we are blessed with, and value every minute that we are able to live without fear.

Keeping it alive.

Writing this post as I realised it'll soon be Feb 2011, and a year of keeping my blog inactive makes it worthy of being deleted...

Interesting(to me) point -Since the title of this blog is Nothing Significant, maybe the fact that I didn't write for a whole year contradictorily ( Wow, I tried that put for the first time and it didn't get a red squiggly line under it so I'm assuming its a word) means that there have been significant events transpiring, which is why nothing was worthy of coming under this blog, as what I'm currently writing is ? (Yes, that's a long sentence. )

Talking about writing- the physical act of writing is something I quite enjoy. I mean, the act of taking a pen and letting it flow on a blank paper, making long loopy 'y's and 'g's, making neat commas, making a cursive capital 'A' with a flourish. Putting a triumphant full stop after writing a sentence to satisfaction. ( Hitting the full stop key hard enough to break the keyboard doesn't amount to the same!) The only reason I sometimes write notes in class is for this, for seeing physical blank pages fill with physical writing, for having 'j's going below the line and 'h's above.

(Of course, I still prefer submitting assignments in print, but that's a different issue).

Talking about handwriting brings back memories of school, where it was a huge issue. We'd graduated from the four lined notebooks and practicing pages of Gg and Tt and progressed to writing ten line answers from English lessons, when we had a new teacher who insisted that our writing wasn't 'cursive' enough, and we were back to writing for handwriting's sake. And those were the days when we had prizes at the end of the year for things like handwriting. (And yes, i won it much to the surprise of my mother who always thought it was untidy. )

Talking about English lessons also reminds me of, well English lessons. I had one in Primary School about children in class who spilt somebody's lunch, and the questions would go- Q.Who spilt the water A.Tom spilt the water. Q. Who's water was it? A. It was Bess's water. And that was the reason my parents decided i should change schools.

Ironically, after a lot of good English lessons for the next few years, after Julius Caesar, after unforgettable poems like Strange Meeting and Ode on the Death of a Favourite cat, after analysis of short stories like The Postmaster and War, come IIPUC and we were back to 'What was the name of the cat in the poem I Forget the Name', and 'How many litres of milk did the cow give in a week.'. And if things could get worse, the year after that we had to make lists of homophones and homonyms after a wrong explanation of what both were.

Now, its come to even lesser than that, to random posts once a year, and letters to the principal for whoever requires them. Sigh.