Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Constant Witness

A typical scene from my days as an architecture student comprised of a comfortably messy room, with me perched on the bed, in front of my drafting table ,mostly at midnight.....going over a taped sheet of paper, in an essentially linear motion..... quite certain in my mind, of the impending doom the subsequent morning during design review (a regular feature in most archi-students' lives).

Apart from the occasional chirping of the cricket, the sounds that filled my otherwise eerily silent nights were, either the voices of enthusiased reporters, with the same news, probably being telecast for the nth time on NDTV ...... or the familiar voices from bollywood, through a movie, also probably being showcased from the (n+1)th time on Set Max.... Yes, the constant witness to those "nights outs" , those aimless channel surfing sessions, those mood swings...... my television.

The voices I mentioned above were the ones that did'nt really seek any attention, since I already knew the content....they just kept me company.... And then there were the ones that transported me to Greece one night, France the next and made me want to travel like never before ....and the ones that made me an ardent fan of the art of film making..... the ones that made me walk up to the mirror and repeat a line from a film that had touched me....
the ones that taught me that the American Chopper was a kind of bike people rode, and not exactly the war helicopter of sorts I thought it to be!....

Its funny, something that was intended to be an inconspicuous buzz on the background during those never ending "night-outs", actually made me discover so much of the world, and myself .....just sitting on that bed.