Private Investigation 1: While My Guitar Gently Sweeps

While My Guitar Gently Sweeps

 Part 1

Leisure activities teach us several things. An awareness is being instilled, which otherwise would not have been possible in our mundane life. The knowledge that soaked consciously or unconsciously in our pursuit does a great deal to make us understand things.

It does not matter what you do, but how you do it. In solitude or in company, there are several things we can take up for recreation. These activities in our life are provided with several doors, which lead us onto large rooms for exploration as well as discovery.

For the past ten years, we have been playing guitar for fun. This hobby has fine-tuned our receptory veins, enabling us to separate the best piece from the better lot, and the better one from the good collection. You cannot call me an expert because I still don't know how to read music on staves. But the years that I have spent strumming my Signature semi-acoustic instrument, have been quite an experience. One of the most remarkable incentives is garnering the deftness to critically appreciate music. The world of music, which many people have been traveling along, transforms into a familiar valley of wild orchids, streams, and sweet melodies when our guitar started sweeping gently.

In our teens, it was our deep interest in rock n' roll that gave us a hitch to this place. Our seniors had then advised if we could play A-D-E, we were done. We improvised on those simple chord progression, fingering techniques, and further graduating into groups – playing easy Led Zep and Dire Straits riffs, or anything short we could make out from the dizzying spells of Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Angelo, Eric Clapton, Richie Blackmore and their ilks. Finally, we found there was something more hidden in between the notes. Music is life.

Everybody has the desire for making it big some time but, unfortunately, it does not count anymore as far as our guitar is concerned. However, the journey has enabled us to feel the intricate emotions of the musicians that we have been following. Our frames of reference are broadened and we got newer perspectives to view the world. 

 

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Especially, when we were growing up in a chaotic place like Manipur, our guitar was a useful weapon. It had provided us a space to get rid of boredom in the listless Imphal atmosphere, a solution to ease our frustration caused by the moronic and megalomaniac leaders, and a means to excuse those eye-soring activities of the numerous self-interest, social psychopaths. In other word, our weapon doubles as a medium, allowing us to mend the emptiness of life in our hometown.

It is a pain to relate our guitar to these political trash but we know more than meet our eyes in reality. This is just one aspect, and unsurprisingly, there are still several lessons that we have learnt from the six strings.