Anger

The Hogwarts crest says: Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus.

Now I take quite the issue at people who say that anger reveals your true personality. As if everything else is an Image. Fake. I don’t buy it for the very specific reason that we are not one-dimensional characters. A lot of different things make us up.

By which I mean that Mr. Hyde may be one of our personalities but we could also be Dr. Jekyll. It’s just opposite sides of a spectrum.

Which brings me to another point that force-suppressing innermost unhappiness and dissatisfaction could manifest in the ugliest ways. Dr Bruce Banner may be the personality people best know, but once The Hulk is forced out, that’s who people will remember. Is that anything remotely good? The Hulk destroys a lot of things. Things that never needed to be destroyed if pressure was just let off here and there. That’s how pressure cookers work, a lot of inside pressure released periodically. Job done.

And also conversely, but along the same tangent, the other side of the coin, so to speak, it would be grand if we’d just learn to never tickle sleeping dragons. That, by the way, is what the Hogwarts crest says in English.

Sometimes we just push and push people until they crack. And then we shake our heads and say: I knew it. It’s not so much an Aha! moment as it is unfortunate that we force people to reveal the worst of themselves. Then we forget everything good about them. We forget when they’ve shown exceeding kindness or just a congenial personality which, let's face it, is who most of us are. It’s how we survive in society, flying under radars. Conforming. Making the best of situations. Ranting and amiably verbally abusing authorities in the safety of friend groups.

We are not any of us cut out in black and white. We are multi-dimensional beings just shuffling along. For the Christian community, who pressure each other to be passive-aggressive and sort of suppress a lot of emotions and glory in suffering silently, we are often told to emulate Jesus. What Would Jesus Do, right? But even in this realm of ethics, WWJD technically includes flipping over tables and chairs and people’s businesses at a temple/church because he got angry. Are we really going to say that that violent nature is his “one true” personality?

Sometimes I think because we don't like some people, it is difficult for us to accept that they are decent people. Maybe they're just mean to us. Maybe we just rub them the wrong way. Human life is often not a zero sum game. 

Anger is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Anger gets a lot of things done. It moves a lot of things. It has altered courses of history. Controlling it is something we must do. Because too much of anything is never good. But otherwise, in and of itself, not the worst. And unless it is psycho level anger issues, just a part of a healthy psyche.

You should watch Inside Out by Pixar. I highly recommend. Also read Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. That will teach you about dragons, too. Also maybe watch Avatar, the bald head monk one, not the blue people one. 

Dragons, the other side. Still, don’t tickle them.

Nang A Thu, Kei A Thluk?

Music is beyond all the magic they do at Hogwarts. 

A long time ago, I heard, quite by chance, a song by a blind opera singer that I understood not a single word of. But it made me feel things I did not understand. Google has taught me since what the song was about but it didn’t really matter. I loved it before I understood it. The song being Con Te Partiro by Andrea Bocelli. My favourite version is the Anglo-Italian version, the English part rendered by Sarah Brightman. I can listen to this song at any point in time. I never get tired of it. I still don’t fully understand all the feels it makes me feel but I love it. That has not changed.

Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore discussed the superiority between tune and words in Music & Lyrics. I don’t remember what they agreed on, but I think probably a marriage of both. A tune without the lyrics is still music, but lyrics without the tune becomes poetry. There’s still a gentle melody in poetry, though, so I’m not sure why I made the distinction. 

There are a ton of Mizo songs that have used western (or otherwise) music for the words. Kan Zotlang Ram Nuam by Rokunga is also a lift of an old country (or folk?) song by Bob Willis and his Texas Playboys called Faded Love. When I visited Pi Sailovi one time I asked her about Matehawngi which was written for her, and she said she thinks they just used the tune of some western pop song but she no longer remembered what song. People do this all the time. Even Kya Kehna is a direct lift of Oh Carol. It is how we enjoy different arrangements and aside from copyright infringements and all that, I think it is nice. I don’t really think gatekeeping music is all that necessary. Art is art and art is designed to be shared. No? I don’t know.

In April this year, one woman forced me to buy at least one item from her second-hand pile. I don’t usually buy thrift these days but I purchased one T-shirt because I liked the colour and the French words in the front. In an idle moment, I Googled what the phrase meant and was pleasantly surprised to find out it was a song lyric. Quelques mots d’amour by Michel Berger, if you want to Spotify it. If you’re anything like me, you won’t regret it.

Around the same time, I also watched a lot of food reels on YouTube and Instagram. Very often they’d play this one sweet song I didn’t really know what language it even was. One day, on the comment section, I saw someone say they loved this song as well. It occurred to me then to look for this and I did and found it was called Mori no Chiisana Restaurant by Aoi Tashima. Japanese, if you couldn’t tell. Such a sweet song. I’ve been playing it on loop for ages now.

These are by no means isolated incidents or novelty experiences for me. I’ve always had a tendency to love songs I didn’t understand. When Shakira came out with Laundry Service, she had a song in it called Te Dejo Madrid. I fell in love at first listen. I never bothered to learn what it meant but I memorized the entire song from intense and continuous replays. I can still sing the entire song. I can’t sing her other Spanish songs but I love some of them all the same – like Gitana (over Gypsy), or Suerte (over Whenever, Wherever mostly) or the newest diss track BZRP Music Session #53. Aside from the ones where she does the same song in both languages, I have no idea what the lyrics mean. Especially Te Dejo Madrid. I have never even bothered Googling it. It doesn’t matter.

Sometimes they are silly. Like Aseraje by Las Ketchup. I know all the words. No idea what it means. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Or that one Khasi song Uff Ka Jingied. The one by the four girls in formation choreograph in the café. I don’t know the ladies but what a beautiful song! I know I’m not alone in saying this because everyone in Mizoram who grew up in the 90s know “that Khasi song”. Music really does transcend languages and I know this for a fact because when I was studying in Delhi, I don’t think there was a single Naga owned laptop that did not have a Michael M Sailo song in it. Sometimes people asked me to write down lyrics for them. This was how I learnt some Mizo songs like Damlai Par by Mami Varte and of course, Pari Zun by Michael M Sailo. I think also Hmeltha Sensiar by him and SP-i.

I’ve often wondered if the true test of music is how a song is still beautiful if arranged differently or without music, in a symphony. Taylor Swift’s music has often been criticized for being stuck in a teenage angst by people who don’t bother to listen to her. If you give her music a try, it works without the lyrics too, a lot of times. Although to be honest, sometimes the words are what we feel the most, too. Even people like Shania Twain. She did a duet of Still The One with Paula Fernandes, a Brazilian singer who sang her part in Portugese. Chills. Gorgeous. Or remember the time Il Divo did Unbreak My Heart in Spanish, retitling it Regresa a Mi? Lovely.

I’m not very good at music so I don’t recognize a lot of world famous compositions. I mean, I know Beethoven’s Für Elise and Symphony No 5, or Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, mostly from movies, mostly all from Bugs Bunny, to be honest. Bizet’s Carmen especially. Looney Tunes has always been good at this. I just sort of listened to them properly after I grew up but I also always have Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig in mind whenever I listen to these pieces. Image association, possibly. Funny how the mind works. Doctor Who is very good at music, to me. One of my favourite ever piece is Clara’s Theme from somewhere in Eleven’s run. Beautiful.

I guess my takeaway in all of this is that Dumbledore was indeed right when he said music was beyond all the magic they did at Hogwarts. Beyond.