Poor Natasha is sick since last night. So instead of going out to our usual watering hole for Sunday date night, we decided to open up a nice wine bottle by a fire near the forest ….

The original deal, as I recollect was that I was supposed to get her a car after getting married. I never ever agreed to getting her four cars in 20 years of married life 🙁 Somebody needs to throw in the penalty flag…

In my previous post I mentioned that Sharmila told me “No” on this day 21 years back. I also mentioned that it took me of few months to turn her around.
At this point, you have to imagine me like the meerkat in that famous Lion King scene when the lioness Nala is trying to attack them and they just realized that she is a friend of their friend and protector Simba.
I am flailing my arms and legs in the air, jumping up and down, yelling “And my Facebook friends think TODAY is my anniversary day?” 🙂

Exactly twenty one years back, to the day, while taking an evening stroll near Netaji Bhavan in A-Zone, Durgapur, I had asked the girl in this picture if she would marry me.
She, unequivocally, and a tad unceremoniously, told me “No” 🙂
Months of intense negotiations later, I was able to get the deal done! As I recollect, part of the negotiations included me agreeing to buy her a landline phone and a car sometime during our married life!!
I know! Those days, our expectations from life were very simple and decidedly modest. Plus, I always had believed that every contract is re-negotiable 🙂
In a somewhat related story, last week I asked Sharmila about my traits – and she volunteered “stubborn”. How that has worked against me, I still do not understand 🙂

After the quiet evening yesterday, came the loud evening today. Really loud. At the Selena Gomez show chaperoning Nikita and her two friends.
Now, most of you know that I am as much conversant with Western music as I am with the inner workings of the Higgs Boson theory 🙂 As a result, I have no clue what they are singing or which one is Selena, for that matter. Without my red wine, I would have been a nervous wreck by now!
That said, I am amazed by a few things in Western music compared to the Indian music I practice or listen to (admittedly it is not Bollywood music).
1. The sheer amount of energy. This is not a great orator moving the crowd with brilliance of words. Most of the audience can barely see the singer. But a couple of familiar songs into the show, the crowd is on its feet breaking into dances as if in a trance!! The music that I grew up with – the audience would quietly listen and give an approving nod or a smile at the end if it was a great rendition.
2. The ability of the singers to run all over the stage, jumping, hopping and yet singing along without missing a note. How they don’t pant and lose breath, I can’t understand. I can barely say a few words after a quarter mile run! Singers that I grew up with would sit in one place for hours. Harmonium was about the only exercise they got!
3. So much else goes on with the song. The pyrotechnics, stagecraft, lights, waving of LEDs, megawatts of sound. The music I grew up with was bereft of all these.

The power of Western music, I am learning, can move a large crowd physically off its feet, at once.
The power of Eastern music that I grew up with, I know, transcends the person, one at a time.

I am absolutely fascinated by the power of both!!

Lit a fire and sat with Nikita outside as she quizzed me on her newly acquired knowledge of stars, colors of stars and the moon.
Forty years back, my dad used to sit out in the open sky in his “easy chair” (a cross between a lounge chair and a hammock) and I used to sit by him and ask him a million questions about the clear sky above.
I remember being very dissatisfied with his answer to my question “How many total stars are there”? – “Uncountable. There is no end”. I reckoned this being his tactic to shut me up. I had decided to grow up and someday actually count up all the stars!!
That never happened!!

Natasha with her BFF