I’m on a train right now. I was planning on reading, on maybe writing something, or coding something. But I don’t want to do any of those right now.
I am either sleeping, and when I am not sleeping I am just looking out the window with this one song on repeat. ‘tu kisi rail si‘ written by Varun Grover, sung by Swanand Kirkire.
There is one particular couplet that has me taken:
tu kisi rail si guzarti hai
main kisi pul sa tharthara hoon
you pass by like a speeding train,
and i shiver like the bridge below.
(Translation mine, though I’m probably butchering it.)
Wow, that’s some good shit right there. I don’t know. There’s something about using this metaphor in a romantic song. Turns out that this couplet wasn’t written by Varun Grover, he writes about the song in an article for the Indian Express. It was written by Dushyant Kumar, a Hindi writer born in the 30s. He wrote poems and ghazals, short stories, novels, and dramas.
There’s something about that metaphor that has me mesmerized.
So I listen to the song on repeat, doing nothing else on this train.
(Yes, I know that this a simile and not a metaphor. Please do not write to me about this.)