The Sum Total of Outcomes

Sipping on coffee and re-reading emails, the corner of my right-eye glanced a Times of India heading..."Zakir 's Album, Recorded in Just 3 Hours, Nominated for a Grammy." Of course, I always muse over how excited the rest of the world gets on American nominations than any other including their own and it's never the other way round but I'll let those thoughts out another time. For now...let's focus on the just 3 hours. Ustad Zakir Hussain, the son of Ustad Alla Rakha (also an accomplished tabla maestro) is the most famous contemporary tabla player in India. Ustad Hussain is a handsome man with instantly recognizable curly flock of hair and a facial expression that's always lost in the distance and he's mostly garbed in a kurta - everything about his stylish demeanor announces him as an artist.

But it's about the just 3 hours that I want to talk about. It's not just 3 hours. Every little enjoyable outcome or expression in life from tasting deliciously gooey gulab jamoons to receiving a global award to a peaceful calm while watching a sunset in a noisy city can be summed up to last just a few seconds...a few minutes at the most...after which, the feeling quickly drops back to normal or below. Often the just a few...-stuff is the culmination of a sum total of a lot of experiences, a lot of hours and even more years. We intuitively know this but are almost never seem to be aware of it. Zakir Hussain did not learn to play the table at the age of 12...he was already touring the world by then and he's 55 now. He does 150 concerts every year - so you can do the math. With every concert, he would push a little more and his internal barometer got a little better - may be a wee-bit but better nevertheless - while his peers would satisfy themselves with lesser number of concerts and lesser practice. The net-net is this: the more potent an outcome and the more simple it is on the outside...the more complicated is on the inside.