Tag: Lee Marvin

My Life In Three Songs. 2 On 1.

Trust Shackman to come up with this great idea for the weekly Friday blog post where both of us write on the same subject. Please do go over to his blog to see what he has to say. Knowing him as I do, it would be bang on and most appropriate songs.

My question to him is why three when one can do?

He would call it cheating and he is not a great fan of Sinatra anyway.

There was a time, I suspect that it was midlife crisis of some sort,  when this song would have been more appropriate, though it was aspirational rather than real.  Please read Ursula’s comments on my post Fishing.

Another one to sign off an all time favourite:

Food For Thought.

When I looked around for an inspiring thought for today, I found this image in the internet.

This took me on a different quest for something that I had read some time ago. Let me give my own reactions to the five regrets listed there for this post.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I honestly believe that I have lived my life as it evolved without ever wanting to change it and welcoming events as they took place. Perhaps that is why, I have come to this three score and ten plus years stage with hardly any stress which surprises the medical profession no end.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

I never worked “so” hard. And, I am not being facetious at all. When I worked I enjoyed every moment of it.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

This has been a weakness but not something that I would regret as not having had the courage. I would say that I was concerned about the other’s feelings and so avoided expressing my own feelings. There have however been instances when I had indeed expressed my feelings without any restraint when those feelings were on the positive side.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

As my readers well know, I have and so this is not a regret that I have at all.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I have let myself be a happy person and bar those unfortunate losses which gave me sadness, my life has by and large been a happy one.

At the end of the Guardian article this question is asked “What’s your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?”

My answer is simple. I lost my wife too soon. I have no big ambitions left and no desires to change anything. My oft repeated prayer is a Sanskrit one which simply asks for a death that is no trouble to me or my near and dear ones and a life without penury. I have the latter and hope that I will get the former too.

As a post script, let me add another paragraph to discuss the contents of the image given above. Among the unstated regrets that most men have in their lives is one that is rarely if ever openly admitted to. They would like to lead lives as depicted in the song Wandering Star and My Way. Highly impractical former and possible but not likely in the latter. I too have had my share of longing for both and like to hear the songs every now and then just to go gaga! I am sure that there must be songs with similar thoughts for women and I will appreciate some of my readers leading me to them.

Pravin had suggested the topic for this week’s LBC Friday post. You can see what the other writers of the LBC have to say in their respective blogs.  Maria, Pravin and Shackman.

If you could only hear 5 more songs what would they be and why?

I hope that you enjoy reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where eleven of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been chosen by Shackman. The ten other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Delirious, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Maxi, Maria SF, Padmum, Paul, Rohit,Shackman, The Old Fossil and Will. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain… Or so says the legend.”

~ Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds

I shall restrict myself to the five English songs as most of my regular readers do not follow Indian music. My top five would not contain any English songs at all.

The first one has to be this.

I courted Urmeela with many songs. This was her favourite. Those days, we had music like this to nudge as long.
The next one:

Our very first proper home after marriage. A bed sitter as it would be called in the West or a 1BHK over here. We had a primitive record player amped through an old Murphy Radio. This was one of my favourite songs on a 45 RPM disc. I have even forgotten what the other side contained. My cousin Shankar came to stay with us till he could find digs of his own. Both of us had done a fair bit of wandering. He too fell in love with this song. We were blessed to hear him croak this every morning in the shower. Whenever Shankar and I meet, we still sing this song as a duet and reminisce.

The next one:

For the first decade or so after our marriage, my life was like this. I owed my soul to the company store! Yes, Indian banks did not offer loans to individuals those days and employers were the only ones to oblige.

The next one:

23 years later, almost half my life then, I finally had the guts to say that to my employer. I played this after announcing the National Anthem, on the last day before the packers came, during my farewell party to close friends in the company.

The last one, my all time favourite for obvious reasons, even now.

See It To Believe It.

Another well wisher, who insists on remaining unnamed despite much pleading by me, sent me a message. “It is not too late to do something about your laziness. You should start going to class to learn to play the guitar so that you can accompany yourself when you sing.”

The well wisher means well. I have always depended on someone else to accompany me on a guitar, whenever I sing. For those of you who may feel uneasy about my singing, I can assure you that I am not unlistenable to. I am told that I just sound like Lee Marvin singing “I was born under a wandering star.” For those of you, who do not know what that was about, it was in the film, “Paint Your Wagon”. One of my all time favourite Westerns with two of my favourite actors, Lee and Clint Eastwood.

Anyway, my well wisher hoped that I will get enthused if I could be motivated by the possibility of being interviewed by Jay Leno and sent this link to me. The skeptic that I am, thought that this would be one more prank till I saw the video. Let me not give you any ideas. Just see and make up your minds.

What do you think? Will I ever be interviewed by Jay Leno, if I now learnt how to play the guitar and sang like Lee Marvin?