Zooming In: A few learnings from two Masters

I saw the man from a distance, from the stands of the Gachibowli Stadium in Hyderabad.  The natural lenses that I was born with were not enough.  The glasses that I was wearing to sharpen my vision did not suffice either.  The zoom feature on my phone must have silently pleaded with me, as if to say, “Stop, please.  If you tax me further, I will collapse.”  Beyond a point, I had to satisfice with the moving images of him that were being flashed on the big screen in the stadium.  Even if the pictures that I captured were grainy, what was devoid of haze was the raw emotion that I felt listening to his music, live.  But after spending three hours at the concert losing myself in the wonderful mix of soulful and peppy numbers that he, his singers and his orchestra performed, I felt this strong urge to write.  But not about the music or its impact on me.  Instead, I felt that it had to be about what I learn from masters such as him on the pursuit of one’s passions, a journey replete with highs, lows, barriers and pitfalls.

I recently attended Ilayaraja’s (whom I shall refer to as Raja for the rest of this article) concert.  That night, while returning home, I happened to see a tweet on the former cricketing great, the late Bishen Singh Bedi.  The tweet reminded me of something that Bedi had mentioned on the “Breakfast with Champions” show.  He said that no matter what you pursue, you should have a bit of mad passion (“paagalpan” was the word he used) but just as important is that you feel a sense of “peace” in the journey.  

Raja is known for his blind passion for and dedication towards music.  His zest for learning was evident in the way he learned Carnatic music from TV Gopalakrishnan. (If I remember correctly, this was after he became a famous music director.)  Directors continue to wax eloquent on his famously early start to his day, his singular focus on music and all the long hours in his studio with lyricists, singers and his orchestra.  Over generations, his music has been meditative, uplifting or exhilarating, depending on where one wants his music to take them.  Such is the staggering variety.  But as much as I have enjoyed the fruits of his mad passion, I have wondered if he also achieved the second goal mentioned by Bedi – “peace.”

As a master of the background score, Raja has always been adroit in knowing where silence must exist as a punctuation amidst music, in order to accentuate an emotion.  But I do not know if Raja, the person, feels the same quiet within himself that allows him to find peace amidst all the noise of the film world.  As a celebrity, he has warts in his personality that he has never shied away from admitting.  In fact, in an interview (with Ashameera Aiyappan and Navein Darshan), he smilingly said, “All my idiosyncrasies and temper tantrums that you tolerate, that defines me.  I know that I make these mistakes, but I am unable to correct them.”  It was moment of acute self-awareness on his part, that always made me smile.  Whether he has achieved inner peace is something that only him and those who know him on a deeply personal level will know.  As an ardent devotee of his, I can only hope that he has achieved the same level of tranquility that his music gives me.

Not everyone of us might be a Raja or a Bedi in our chosen field.  But it does not matter.  There are things that I am passionate about, be it in my professional or personal life.  What I strive to learn from the likes of Raja or Bedi is to stick to my areas of passion with sincerity and devotion.  In a few carefully chosen areas, I do invest the time, thought and effort to continually evolve.  I generally avoid taking the easy way out.  I believe in the power of ‘grind.’  And yes, I do, at times, exhibit a sense of craziness that makes people smile.  But thanks to Bedi’s sagacious words, I do strive to find that inner peace too.  A key ingredient of that peace is to reflect on my efforts and the result of those efforts in an intrinsic manner, defining success on my own terms.  Yes, external validation is nice.  Sometimes necessary too (especially in a professional setting) since we do not exist in a vacuum.  But equally important is whether we can look in the mirror and say, “you did good, my friend.”

There is another anecdote from Bedi in that show that I have as a sort of feedback loop every time I let the scales of my mind tilt away from internal quiet towards external noise.  Bedi describes a lead singer wanting to start a religious concert after being fully prepared.  When someone suggests to him that they wait for more of a crowd to build, he responds, “If you sing for yourself, it is devotion.  If you sing for others, it is a performance.”  The line is nicer to read but harder to practice in this modern age of views, likes, retweets, shares and all other measures that dominate social media.     

To concretize what I have written above, let me share an example of an initiative where I shall let you decide for yourself if I was successful or not.  I had watched Rahul Ravindran’s, “The Girlfriend,” a supremely compelling tale of a girl's evolution over a series of life-altering events in her college.  Through my dear friend (the ever-supportive Subha Jayanagaraja ma’am), I was able to get in touch with the director for an interview.  He kindly agreed to giving me time post the OTT release of the film.  A few days ahead of my interview, he had put his 100-page screenplay of the film on social media.  I downloaded and printed it, making notations at several places where I wanted to understand the transformation from what existed on paper to what I saw on screen.  Rahul was an interviewer’s delight.  I had a lovely time interviewing him.  During the course of the conversation, after a discussion on one specific element of the film, he said, “You know, this is easily the deepest dive that I have done on the film.”  

Alas, when I put the recording out, it got very little traction on social media, be it the print or the audio version.  Those who had read or listened to it enjoyed it.  But I had believed that it would reach a wider audience.  It did not.  A younger version of me may have found it difficult to digest the end result of that initiative.  But as I have aged, I am more acutely aware of the devotion vs performance aspect highlighted by Bedi.  My passion for writing and film criticism meant that the nights spent watching snippets of “The Girlfriend” on my phone while scribbling points on the margins of the script (for the scene that was playing!) gave me a certain sense of fulfillment.  And that fulfillment propels me to write further.  Rahul’s words, of course, meant a lot to me because the film was his creation.  Had he not shared the generous compliment, I may have had even less external validation to feel good about.  The point is, what I could control, I did well.  Was this little passion project of mine a ‘success’?  You, the reader, can decide that!

Regardless of my areas of passion and expertise, I am who I am because of the Rajas and the Bedis of the world.  I am neither a musician nor a cricketer of any repute.  But through how they approach their own craft, I try to imbibe lessons that I can, in turn, apply to the things that I am passionate about.  In the process, I just realized that the Raja concert that started with my frantic attempts to zoom in on him, has eventually led to me zooming in on myself.