the story behind creating the song
When mum goes pup... (part 1 of 2)
I’ve become quite a sniffer pup of sorts after my recent Aarohi-x “activations.”
(I explain activations in my next post)Like a sniffer pup, i go hunting for ‘bones’/ expressions of creativity in my family. When I catch a whiff of a bone, i start digging. When I find it, I lick it clean, pass it around for everyone to enjoy (like this post you’re enjoying is one of today’s bones) and at the end of the day I settle down for a happy chew-time, just me and my bone. (reflection or whatchamacallit)Another instance of sniffing out a creative bone was
today’s slo-mo, slothy morning.
We spent almost an hour trying to transition from horizontality (is that even a word?) into some semblance of verticality.We lay on the floor, rolled on the bed, flopped on the sofa… talking to each other about the inevitable but highly unpleasant act of “getting up…”(You can’t blame us. At home, there are 2 pups, 2 birds, 2 kids, and 2 (fake) adults… so life gets tiring and we can’t “get up…”)And then I sniffed a splinter of a creative bone. One kid started to hum “I should be getting up…” in a trance-like rhythm. Another kid joined in with vocal counters and I started to drum.And then the song was born!
Well, I wish I could say that. But no, none of us was really dying to create at that moment. So the song wasn’t born at that moment.But I dug and dug looking for the entire (creative) bone, annoyingly so. “Chalo yaar…poora gaana banayenge… ” and we all groaned in unison at the thought.But we still did get down to it. All in horizontal positions, nevertheless.One of us scrawled some words down, while another looked out the window and thought of some “relatable” lyrics and the third explored beatboxing while cuddling the sleeping pups.(Lifelong learning not perfection, right?)And then, in glorious imperfection, after an hour of laughs, scoffs, and “does-this-even-make-sense” moments, the song was born.Now, excuse me if you will, it’s time for me to lie down with today’s creative bones, (the song and these posts) for some happy chew-time… (reflection or whatchamacallit)
When fam goes pop: A note on activation (part 2 of 2)
Like the word suggests, activation is about bringing to life, something that lay…inactive or dormant. One surefire way to go about this is Group energy. Like we do at Aarohi-x.Group energy activates us to express, rather, explode in our personal best forms of creativity.One such activation experience was after each fam was asked to compose and sing our own family song at Aarohi-x.Each of us in my fam brought our best to the table, literally, as one of us drummed away (on it), another wrote the lyrics, the third of us set a tune to our own family song.
That activation experience unleashed a musical and theatrical volcano inside us.Ever since many of us in my fam turn to music to express our strong/big feelings: negative or positive.And like someone said, expressing our feelings is akin to the F5 key in a page of life.It clears and refreshes our page, and we are ready to take on the new and the next.
The writer - NITYA
