As I sit in my living room, Shivkumar Sharma’s santoor fills the airwaves around me, as a 2002 album called The Flow of Time plays on my speakers. The musician regales me with phrase after phrase, building nuanced tension and releasing it, playing with dynamics and expressing an onward journey that reminds me of a caravan march. Now, I’ve just started to notice Zakir Hussain’s tabla accompanying the santoor with steady vivacity, though as if residing in the shadows as not to overtake the now full-flowing zest of Shivkumar Sharma, who just concluded a stirring crescendo.
Placing the music aside, I’d like to think in writing about the flow of time as I experience it. Though we are always in the present, memories and imagined possible realities project us into our past and future. Bringing the mind back to the present is a technique of basic mindfulness meditation, training the mind to focus on a single aspect of reality- the breath, a point between one’s eyebrows, a flickering flame, the sounds around us, the cadences and feeling of our footsteps, etcetera. Likewise, writing sentence after sentence trains the mind to focus on one’s written creative and productive output, and persist with the effort of writing. Simultaneous to us paying attention to such singular pursuits, feelings and sensations arise. We can pay attention to these and use them as raw data for understanding what our body and unconscious mind might be trying to tell us.
Emotion, as we all know, pervades all human experience. Emotions, whether we suppress their expression or not, offer clues about what our goals are, how we are doing in the pursuit of our goals, what we are attracted to, and what we feel repelled by. Thinking about emotions involves adding an extra dimension to our emotional experience, as it involves us relying on words to pinpoint what our feelings are and what they mean in the grand narratives of our lives. One can keenly observe how, as we grow up and learn a greater number of words to label and describe emotions, our emotional experience itself becomes more robust and nuanced. That we can express our emotions to others using language is the icing on the cake, though I’m no exception to the general rule that many of us feel inhibited in doing so.
Before we put into words and speak our emotional experience in conversation with other humans to communicate and order our social interactions, it would seem to be beneficial to inquire into our own emotional state when we are alone. Checking in with ourselves, asking what am I feeling? Why am I feeling what I’m feeling? How do I feel about feeling this way? What other emotions that I feel are related to this feeling? What do these feelings tell me about my goals? How are these feelings affecting my behaviour? The possibilities for introspection are near-endless; the more we take some time out of our busy days to invest in understanding our emotional content, the better.
To avoid sounding too much like a middle school textbook introducing pupils to the subject of psychology, I’ll return for a moment to the pulsing santoor furiously ramping up to a final tihai (a concluding pattern identified by being repeated three times), and now Zakir Hussain having just played the final note of the track before I’ve now been switched to the next track on the album. I felt anticipation as the tihai began to take shape, an a-ha moment at the realisation that the track was about to end, and a cathartic resolution when the piece of music made up of thousands of notes ended with a single, clear and lucid tabla bol.
I ask myself now, how do I feel? I feel alert and driven to persist in writing, to express my thoughts and uncover the feelings beneath them. To make something out of nothing and find an audience to connect with across time and place (as writing and online publishing allow me to do). I feel drained upon reflecting on the day’s work I completed for my currently part-time internship-making marketing phone calls to prospective trainees who’d expressed interest in the company’s 4 month-long mental health coaching certification course. I see the threads of the content I’ve been consuming as part of the Emotional Ability Resources team seeping into my writing here, as I attempt to articulate for myself an understanding of emotions. And more so, I’m feeling a desire to lay out my own introspections, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods I’m learning about.
As now Zakir thumps away at his baiyan (drum for left hand that plays the bass notes) as the much shorter musical track comes to an end and the new one begins now with the faultless notes of another stalwart performer- Vilayat Khan playing sitar, an instrument with more obvious drone strings reverberating- I realise that my music app is now playing an automated playlist of tracks similar to the album I began with. I quickly start a Vilayat Khan album from the beginning to get a continuous long-format concert feeling going and realise that this album is called Etched in Time (2007). The clangier sound of the sitar strings really do sound like etchings into a metal plate when compared to the rolling flowing of Shivkumar Sharma’s santoor in the album, The Flow of Time. All this writing about music reminds me of my college entrance essay I wrote for the scholarship program at Oxford College of Emory. Then it was Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s Lure of the Desert that I aimed to put into words, as now I struggle with myself simultaneously to find the right words as much as to pinpoint my presenting emotions.
There’s a tension in the gap between striving and result. As I give myself grace, I allow my words to flow as well, while also signifying the etchings in time to mark this occasion, this attempt at an essay, this experiment in introspective inquiry, sculpted to be shared with an audience as much as to be a record in the form of a personal journal entry. Checking the clock and seeing that it’s 8:22 pm, I glance into my next few hours in the future and vaguely imagine planning a wind-down routine to get me ready for sleep and the next day. Vilayat Khan zigzags back and forth between higher and lower pitched notes as the tempo has become moderately brisk. The music comes and goes out of and back into the periphery of my awareness. The invention of sound recording allows me to share in the maestro’s expression of emotion in the form of music, 19 years later.
Sentence after sentence, writing keeps me going. I find myself half-surprised and half-reawakened sometimes when re-reading pieces I’ve written, as distance in time has piled up to prevent me from remembering the exact feelings I felt when originally writing each work, while at the same time the traces of those feelings are stirred up. Writing anew each time is an opportunity to start over, to start fresh, to go in any which way, in any direction I wish. The mindfulness of writing is as much the repetition of attention to the disposal of words onto the page as it is an insight-invoking exercise. Self-doubt arises upon rereading a sentence here or there, and I consider going back to revise. There is a tension between repair and rehabilitation of previously written sentences and the impetus to go forward and not look back. As Vilayat Khan plays a most elegant and self-contained phrase, it’s easy to see how in music the present reigns supreme, never more so than in Indian classical music.
So here we are, back in the present, where we began. And as I’d said, we never really leave it, as much as words catapult us into the past and future. It is to the credit of language that it can propel us throughout the universe of concepts just as far as imagination can propel us through the universe of spacetime and matter. Which is to say, to infinity and beyond. I pause here to let myself come to an acceptance of the feeling that what I’ve written is not so great, not so world changing or momentous, but at least I hope it serves as an honest example of my mental process, and what we are all capable of- tuning into our inner world, observing its connection with the world of our outer environment, observing our goals and emotions from a bird’s eye view, and letting the music play and play and play.
(14th May, 2026 6:58 pm - 8:45 pm)
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