Google my life

I have always been a die hard music fan. International music more than Indian filmi music. I hear most of the music on television, music channels. on radio stations and buy that CD, cassette, or download that MP3 for the songs I like.

The more elusive ones are the real challenges which try your levels of patience and persistence to the limits. Bits and pieces which you hear some place and have no way of knowing which singer, or which song it is. But that bit clings to your ears and your heart, you want to hear more of it, all of it and over and over again. There are so many such bits and pieces which still roam my mind, with no hint about where to start looking for, in the ocean of music out there. The yearning in the heart to hunt them down, find them and listen to them grows stronger with each single day when you suddenly remember those pieces and your heart & mind writhe in agony.

The most difficult such search which I remember, was for an international classical song. I had first heard this song some years back in and around the festive Christmas season on board a Lufthansa flight on way to Germany. Lovely soothing music, a powerful and melodious voice of a male classical singer, a lot intensity and depth. Alas ! The song was in some foreign language which made it difficult for me to hold on to the lyrics. On a German airline, on way to Germany – I presumed it to be German. I moved around in Germany and the song followed me so many places I visited. Some restaurants, in the reception of some places I visited. It really seized my heart when I heard it once in the ball room of the hotel I was staying in. During a lovely marriage ceremony with happy smiling couples dancing to the tune of this song. The chandeliers hanging from the ceiling of the ball room flooded the whole place with very bright yet soft golden light. Wonderful memories like these weaved weaved itself with the lovely melody and got stamped on my mind and heart.

A couple of times, I tried asking my hosts or to people on the reception, however the language barrier meant they did not understand what I was trying to ask and a lot of times people asked for some leads as to which song I was referring to and I had no way to talk about it – except perhaps sing it. Thankfully I spared them and the lovely singer from embarrassment and the agony of hearing me sing.

Down the years the song flowed in my mind and my determination increased with each day that went by without my knowing what it was. Memories increased and with it increased the restlessness in my heart.

I googled the net with things like “famous German Christmas classical song”. Google leaped with joy and threw all the Mozart, Beethoven, Bach at me !!

The thirst one day reached a level that I took time by myself to draw a plan rather than random and emotionally driven google searches. Too many times in my life I have chased shadows driven by desires of my heart and only found myself leading from one blind alley to another. I decided to use this precious learning from life to find this song.

I compiled all the facts I seemed to know about this song so that I could use analytical elimination and focus on a narrow stretch.

The facts were simple the genre was western classical, the language and country of origin was perhaps German. And the singer was Male.

I lost all confidence in myself. With these facts, I could deduce without using a single grey cell that this search was going to be more complicated that I had thought earlier.

However my eagerness, the longing in my heart fuelled my determination.

On to Plan B. I have always believed strongly in two primary spiritual laws which drive the universe. Rule # 1 - “Deserve Before You Desire” and Rule # 2 - “When You Are Ready A Master Appears”

My interpretation of rule # 1 was that I should perhaps spend some time understanding western classical music before attempting to search for this song. So I googled and used all the Wikipedia’s wealth of information.

I learnt the following

* Classical male singers are called Tenors.

*They sing in an Opera to the accompaniment of an orchestra of assorted musical instruments.

*Based on things like the type of voice, frequency and modulation of the voice, the pitch, the huskiness, etc. Tenors further get classified in to several types.

*Tenors in addition to classification based on voice also belong to a particular style or type of performance. It can be contemporary, modern, renaissance, etc.

As I delved more, I learnt more about Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli, Placido Domingo, José Carreras. The list grew on. I also learnt that the song I considered German was not really German. With all the research I did I narrowed it down to either Italian or Spanish.

I had reached a point where I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The universal second law came in to effect.

One fine morning I woke up to a realization that I do not need to use google again but a site which sells music. The best bet was Amazon.com

I knew that I would still not be able to pin point the exact guy, I had to enter something general. I entered “Top Modern classical tenors”. It threw up so many top 100s, 50s, 10s albums. I noted each one of them,

Part -2 : Dashed over to my favorite torrent search engine and entered each album I could find there. I downloaded all the well seeded ones, hoping that some of the album would have that song.

Over some weeks I downloaded multiple gigabytes and 100s of MP3s from the net. Each night I slept with a lot of hope and excitement and each morning I was up and ready at my computer, playing each and every song in the download, hoping it would be my song.

One fine day, I started the same exercise. The album was “Greatest Classical Stars of all times”. I double clicked on a song, one of the hundreds I had clicked so far in the search and suddenly my mind went numb, a familiar piece of music, which so far had played in my mind alone, flowed from the speakers.

Russell Watson – Volare, a Spanish song sung by the famous English tenor. I repeatedly heard the song many times over and over.

That night I slept with a long yearning in my heart quenched. On a lone day with the euphoria settling down somewhat, I contemplated on the amazing and long journey I had started on, on a search for something so impossible. I tried to reason with myself about what made the song so special as to invest so much time, so much effort, and to learn a whole lot of new things including a tough genre of music.

I heard this song again from this perspective and I suddenly found that it was a great song, but perhaps only for my ears. It was not the best song out there. What made it so special was that I had embarked on a journey into the unknown to find it. It was a journey which my heart had yearned for. Without which it would not know peace. The experience, pain, and happiness which I experienced in the journey to find this song, made it so valuable.

I contemplated on this learning and expanded the thought to life.

So many times in life, we get in to situations where we experience a feeling as never before, something overwhelms us so much, takes over our mind and heart to an extent that we dream it day and night. We long for it. The end we are looking for is special because we see it as such due to that moment in our life. And then begins the journey, a quest to fulfill what our heart yearns for, longs for, without it our heart can perhaps find no peace.

The journey teaches us so many new things in life, about life itself, about people, relations and most importantly about our own selves. The journey has its curves and ups and downs, moments of happiness, sadness as well as desperation, anxiety, fear and loneliness. There are moments when we feel we have achieved the end, and that beyond this there can be no happiness. Only to find the next moment that it was an illusion.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that divinity puts these desires in to our heart perhaps only to make us embark on the journey, in the quest to satisfy the desire. For without this journey, we would never learn the lessons life has to teach us. I firmly believe that till such time that we learn the lessons well, divinity keeps on moving us in the same direction, till such time that we learn the lessons well. A number of times we slip in the journey, loose faith and the find journey meaningless and at times even stop the pursuit in sheer frustration. However divinity has destined for us to learn the lesson and so some day will put us on a similar journey again – to learn the lesson.

It is undertaking and learning from this journey, which is more important, than attaining the end. Perhaps that is the reason that in several such journeys we undertake in life, we do not reach the end at all. The journey has given us the experiences to learn the lessons from. If we do learn we grow wiser and understand divinity’s intention of the journey. If we do not learn, we despair and loose faith in life, in divinity for not getting what we set out to achieve. So many times as human we are so strongly driven by desire and emotions that we look only at the end and not choose to learn.

It is only wisdom alone which can help us judge the difference.