I was reading Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba just now and remembered how special it was to me and how I read it in less than an hour and a half with my good friend Gayathri (admin and Sorceress Supreme of the Paperbacks and Backpacks book club) and suddenly my very organically random mind wanted to write so here I am at the keys again.
What teenager has not wanted to be a guitarist? I'm sure everyone has a story about how they got introduced to the sound of a six stringed instrument as was I. My story involves my friend Soumya Basu aka Choru Da who made me listen to Slash and Knopfler when I was in sixth grade and set me on a path that nearly made me a sound engineer, nearly made me a guitar player and gave me a place to hide when I was low. Choru Da, you will read this, I know and you will smile and text me from Down Under and say it means a lot to you. I think what you should know is that you mean a lot to me. Thank you for showing me the beauty of a part of the world that makes me want to seek beauty even in the darkest of times.
But then again, my random mind, forever a slave to Brownian Motion now wants to talk about Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, specifically the lines
"Oh, I kept the first for another day
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back"
What has this got to do with me not becoming a guitarist? Well, after pestering my parents for ages and ages, I did not get a guitar. Come on, this is me! If the story were to write itself the way all stories have so far then it would not be my blog would it? So yes there is a twist in this tale. I scored highly on the analysis question set for the poem The Road Not Taken and I've written about the significance of the poem when I wrote a farewell post for my seniors in college when I was in 3rd year. I felt the poem's message was most appropriate and I think I will have to link that post at the end of this one so that you can revisit it!
Anyway, I did not become a guitarist. But I did become something else. I picked up a camera that my father got from his maiden trip to the USA back when Obama was the POTUS and I decided to go Dexter's Laboratory on it. What were the functions on the camera? What did the wheel do? Why these logos? I took that camera with me on walks and I clicked so many photos. I was enthralled. And then, I got a phone (a Sony Xperia E3, my second Android device) and that camera was stellar. I clicked away to glory. In between, I'd used a CyberShot DSCHX100V and the kind of creative and expressive power that camera gave me was out of this world. And so, a romance began. I became The Guy Who Has a Camera and my college batchmates used to ask me to photograph them and I learnt and learnt and learnt and expressed and expressed and expressed.
I am still enthralled by the sound a guitar can make, I am still in awe of music and still use audio to unwind. But the road to being a guitarist is the road I did not take. I became a camera user. I will not say I am a photographer. That is a road I have not walked down yet.
Ah, the point of this post? Nothing. Follow me on Instagram! (@shoshamitra)
The Bilge Master
Indeed. What child has not at one point wanted to play a guitar themselves.
ReplyDeleteThis story reminds me, funnily enough, of how I decided to sing and not dance. The road not taken for me involves jhumkas and ghungrus; and the one taken involves lonely tunes in the middle of the night haunting me till I sing it out in my sleep. Good days, really.
Good days, flush with nostalgia and having a very important place in memory
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