Those who dare to think deeply are rarely accompanied; they walk with shadows, not crowds. Nietzsche knew this and his words—“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you”—were less a caution than a confession. Century later, in a different corner of the world, that same abyss seemed to gaze into the life and art of Zubeen Garg. A singer adored by millions, yet forever unsettled, he spoke of nothingness and even quoted Nietzsche. It felt dissonant—how could an artist rooted in Assam’s cultural soil echo a German philosopher of despair? Perhaps it was not dissonance. Perhaps it was inevitability. To draw similarity between Nietzsche and Zubeen is not to impose Western philosophy upon Assamese music. It is, rather, to recognize that the human search for meaning transcends geography. The questions Nietzsche wrestled with—identity, despair, creation after collapse—were the same fires that forged Zubeen’s art. In his melodies, musings and silences, one hears the same urgenc...
If you only had a short time to live, what would you do?”, this thought-provoking thread led me to my third read in the biographical genre “The Last Lecture”. This is a 2008 New York times best-selling book co-authored by Randy Pausch, a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Jeffrey Zaslow. It is a non-fiction book written on the last lecture delivered by Professor Randy Pausch when he was diagnosed and fighting with pancreatic cancer, being married to the woman of his dream and having three little children. Randy wanted to leave a legacy for his children, a guide to achieve their dreams. The book is divided into five units, written succinctly, simple language and in a phenomenal way. It will compel the reader to be in the author’s shoes and feel the emotion of the umpteen life lessons that the writer has conveyed, some of which will hit right on the face. One of it was the striking excerpt from the chapter, An injured lion still wants to roar, “...