theseekingspirit

Rediscovering Pink Floyd 5 decades hence   Music Lovers will relate to this...   You are stuck in a traffic jam or on a long boring drive and trying to tune into a channel that is actually playing music and not ads and suddenly you hear an amazing piece of music. You latch onto the station, hoping against hope that the radio host has not yet announced the details of the song and the station is not going to play more ads. Until a few years ago you couldn’t do much about this, you either got lucky or that piece of music was lost to you until you heard it again and caught the host while he was announcing the artist and the band.  Smartphones and apps have finally brought us relief from these frustrations. On one such long road journey on the roads of Colorado, during the summer of 2015, I found myself in such a situation. I tuned into a radio station playing an amazing guitar solo. I scrambled to find the ‘sound hound’ app on my phone as I was driving and barely mana...

I saw pictures of Ladakh when I was in High School. Ladakh is on the northern tip of India, and is a high altitude desert. It’s on the edge of the plateau of Tibet, which is called the roof of the world. I remember being fascinated by the unique landscape that looked completely different from the rest of India. The few highland plateaus of the world (see Picture) have a unique climate. Since Ladakh is mostly above the tree line the landscape is unique. My high school dream of traveling to Ladakh remained unfulfilled due to lack of time and funds. I knew that my parents would be horrified if I even mentioned that I wanted to spend money to travel to Ladakh- a place thousands of miles away. I didn’t even bother asking them to take me there. They hadn’t heard of Ladakh and would be surprised to hear that such a place even existed in India.   In 1998, I watched a Bollywood Movie –Dil Se (From the Heart) which had a song ‘Satrangi Re’ (literally means seven colors). The song depicts t...