I wake up and there is a
rhythm in my head: it’s hazy. I climb into the shower and the water tapping on
my scalp reminds me. As I sit on the metro rail to go to college, I get strange
looks from passengers as I tap the rhythm onto my knees, but it’s not yet fully
formed. Throughout the day, I feel it evolve and develop until I inevitably sit
down at my synthesizer and play. From my brain via my heart it enters my
muscles; they transfer it to the hands which relay it to the instrument.
Eventually, the air gets my gift and the rhythm returns through my ears. Even
after the sounds are gone, the rhythm is not. Until I go to bed, a day’s
repetition keeps it rebounding inside my cranium, in my own private concert
hall. This is the journey of my daily rhythm.
I wake up and there is a
rhythm in my head: it’s not straight for this rhythm swings. At 8:00 am in
Delhi I get on a coach and as the wheels rotate beneath me I get closer. My
coach has thirty five other people in it, each one is carried forward in their
own sense of time. My imagination, my hands and my synthesizer have to
communicate my inner rhythm; the audience must be able to feel it or else I
have failed. Rhythm is the barrier to embarrassment. As the opening to “Tum Hi
Ho” begins to take shape, all my trust is placed in the pattern I have within
me transporting me safely to the end. If this vessel sank, I too would go with
it.
I wake up and there is a
rhythm in my head: but it is quiet. In fact, no-one hears it; it makes no noise
and never will. Between the hours of 0915 and 1645 I have 6 beats: each one
signaling another unit of learning. This phrase is repeated 5 days a week for
32 weeks a year and the chorus goes on 3 more times. My song is my college, and
in it I am caught up in its inner rhythms that I cannot control – I must give
in to them. The melodies that are assigned to these rhythms are made up of
fabrication methodologies, energy solutions and numbers that don’t exist. From
these, cadences form that give me a progression through education. Each part of
my song has been given a name; there are no verses, no choruses but consecutive
Key Stages. The rhythm indicates when I should make the transition: there is a
series of fills, but they are not called fills. They are called exams and as
the stages progress, the fills get more intense. In fact, they get more
frequent and at the end of my college life, I look back to a year where exams
punctuated my calendar. In February, I will have moved to the dominant, only to
complete the progression in May when I descend and finish on the tonic: a
perfect cadence.
I wake up and there is
rhythm: the rhythm is life. The cycle of night and day and the constant pulsing
in my chest are rhythms, and as the Earth revolves around our local star it is
in time with the universe. I think in meter: a man crosses the street and his
steps divide the distance between one curb and the next – they provide a beat
in the asphalt bar, or at least that is how I picture it. If animals could not
use the rhythm of the seasons, then they would surely die. Life is a rhythm and
all that it contains is in time. When the rhythm ceases to exist, so will I.
S Gupta,
(Enrollment# A2305410268)
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