The Dhol which was never noticed

Being deaf to outside world sometimes makes you feel joyful. While appreciating the amazing beats of punjabi dhol, with enhanced calrity by the sophisticated HP ear phones, I leaped into the past where I heard it first. The beats, that thousand others are appreciating like me, are actually not a new creation. They have always existed. Now they are staged, converted into video with pretty girls and made compatible to work with face book or the iPOD. This make me brood over the past where I heard it first.
We called it "Daang Chadha" back in my place. Its a form of Indian art, a gymnastic actually. with rope tied onto two bamboob pillars and perfectly balanced with all laws of mechanics satisfied, a tiny girl would walk over it, on a cycle rim, balancing herself with just a stick. With the beats of the Dhol, she would bounce at times. The same beats, I now enjoy with the luxuary of a computer and air conditioner and choose to call it "awesome". The street gymnast would make a living out of it, degree of earning depends on the generosity of the crowd. And then they move to a different locality. No one in the crowd back then appreciated this dhol though. Its the less adventurous and more riskful journey that girl fetched the fractional india currencies, now obsolete. And now when we have a "sense-of-appreciation" the art form is almost on the verge of extinction. The calibre went uncapitalized, the music went un-marketed. The street gymnasts melted away with the obsolescence of those tiny currencies which made them their living.

Now when I go home, I don't hear that dhol anymore to feel excited about and compete to be a part of the front row crowd, but I do see banners of highly paid rather mediocre artists performing. Strange country India is. And we just made ourselves a little more stranger to it.

P.S. Today India is excited about having given a symbol to the currency, but never realizing that its time to give India a symbol, thats beyond the nation emblem. The strength of India lies in the fact that its strange and every bit is different than the other. Just that we need to appreciate them, stage them, market them and give them a symbol.

Truly
Abinash

And still she was standing

She was looking straight into my eyes, motionless and wordless. The dark face, though surprisingly calm and beautiful, the tiny body naked except for the worn out small skirt, the swinging hands more like a pendulum as if the body is too weak to carry them. The hairs scattered and untidy, brown and uncombed, dry and unoiled, dead and dusty. She stood there with the distended belly emerging out of the small torso, encrusted nose. The face carried mark from all over the time speaking of their own saga. One she might have got collecting plastic in the garbage bin. The other below the right eye she might have got while running to avoid the barking mad dog. The encrusted wounds she might have got a thousand times. But she stood there with a faint smile. The marks speaks of her suffering and undefined and uncared pain. But she stands their with an innocence still intact, dreams still preserved and the unseen hope. She is too small to understand the politics of living world but surely she understands the morning sun, the evening moon and the chilly wind. may be thats why she still stands there looking straight into the eyes, with the anticipation she is ceased of.

P.S. Yesterday while returning home from office took a stop in a store to buy a Pulpy Orange beverage drink. And I found her standing near a drain and looking at me. I was confounded and and I confusingly but with conviction gave her the pulpy orange, reluctantly she accepted and stayed still looking at me. :)

Truly
Abinash