Celebration of life...

Non!
Rien de rien...
Non!
Je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien
Qu’on m’a fait,
Ni le mal,
Tout ça m’est bien égal!
Non!
Rien de rien...
Non!

These are the lines to one of the most beautiful and popular songs around the world, sung by a singer for whom the song could not have been more apt. Born in a brothel, mother a prostitute, addicted to morphine and died at the age of 47 of liver cancer…

It fills all of us with a sense of wonder at the lives these people have led… Which is why I have titled the article, a celebration of life…

Life truly is a great big celebration, and some people just get the party alive… It would require strength beyond the ordinary for a person to feel happy under the circumstances that is most often their life… However these people go way beyond… They also make our lives so much more fulfilling…

Ever think of it??? A Swiss Patent clerk, having failed most of his high school math imagining something as extraordinary and beautiful as Special Theory of Relativity… Out of obscurity these people rise… Until their worth is suddenly realized… and when it is we celebrate our lives through their creations…

The line between art and science often become obscured at critical thresholds… When Feynman came up with his diagrams it was aesthetically more closer to a work of art than just science…

So what does it take for these people to come alive… and help us along the way to celebrate life with them??? Can most of us even begin to imagine what these people go through everyday till the time when the world hails them and often causes them to shrink back into their shells… While people around most of the world are escapists, these people have a passion from which they possibly cannot escape… To them life is focused at one point… Their dreams are stronger than reality and everyday mundane reality bites them hollow… But do they give up… Of that we can never tell… We only worry about them that have been hailed by the media, guaranteed by society… Do we really look around us??? Or even within???

To quote a few more… Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Gia Carangi… All their lives have been restricted to ages of 30 and about… Could they not take society any longer??? Of being misunderstood at every step in their lives? The normal boring people with mundane work can only dance to music for an hour, attend a concert, see a few movies but can surely never understand the level of commitment and passion… We can criticize, challenge and even celebrate their interests, but how long can they take the dull society as the only ones to provide them with the bare necessity… of being recognized for what they are… Are they truly ever recognized…

Like the proverbial Howard Roark in Fountainhead, they have only the mirror to understand them, and does that ever work truly???

The song of course comes at the end of the movie ‘dreamers’… no title could have been more apt… Of course a striking similarity to ‘hazaaron khwahishein aisi’ was evident… Both masterpieces… Both talking about the pseudo-intellectual society… the passionless selfish, 2 minute fame wannabes…

The real ones are always hidden… in the crowd of the common… Once they rise though the celebration of life begins… And once it begins it is not possible for any force, to ever stop…

Song (translated)

No, nothing at all
I do not regret anything at all
Either the good that has been done to me
or the evil
everything is equal to me
no, nothing at all, no...
everything is paid, swept away, forgotten
I don't care about the past!
With my memories I lit the fire
My pains, my pleasures,
I don't need them anymore
My love stories are swept away
with their troubles…
swept away for ever
I'm starting on new bases
no, nothing at all...
Because my life, my happiness, today everything begins with you!"