The Hong Kong tour diary!

I recently had a chance to go visit Hong Kong for the Openstack Summit 2013. Well to be honest, i recognize the name Hong Kong from a very long time. We always heard of HK as a city that produces quite a few gadgets infact, in Silliguri, West Bengal - we even have a market called "Hong Kong Market". They sale all sorts of electronics/gadgets/watches/shoes etc over there for cheaper prices of supposedly famous brands. So when i heard about the summit, i went to youtube and played some videos about HK. To be honest, i had this perception that i would come back from HK with a lot of gadgets and possibly a few watches - coz i like fancy watches. Still, i wasn't too excited about it and the feeling sort of aggravated coz my flight tickets were booked on the night of Diwali. I mean i know Diwali is not as BIG in BLR for me than compared to at home but over the years i have made friends and frenzy to come to terms with it and i would always want to be in some part of India during that time.

I was convincing myself over ONLY a 6 day trip. With a heavy heart, i reached the Bangalore Intl Aiport on 3rd Novemeber 00:00 hours. It's a pain to keep reciepts of all the travels you make esp for a guy who's as messy as me but i kept reminding myself to not loose anything. My flight was booked in Cathay Pacific. I had heard good reviews of it and thought as much till i reached the airport and found out that it's actually operated by Dragon Air. I met one of my colleagues at the airport. He was travelling to Beijing. Beijing is in Mainland China and HK falls under the chinese administration. Regrets about leaving on Diwali night clubbed with a cramped leg space plus the timing of the flight - all made into a clear counting hours back to return.

I had heard about the HK airport being beautiful, so i woke up just before landing. It was a 5:30 hours flight from BLR. The airport was indeed beautiful. The aircraft actually gives you a feeling that you are landing on water with mountains surrounding a scenic view. At the immigration, they asked me fewer questions than they asked me before leaving India and O yes - no where in the HK airport they stamp your passport. I didn't quite  understand why. Anyway, i had another colleague coming from hyderabad whom i had never seen in India but finding Indians in HK airport shouldn't have been a hard problem - only if i knew it would be.  I got the US dollars converted into Hong Kong dollars and headed for the hotel. I had booked Holiday Inn. We took a cab from the airport and hence began the journey through the mountains and sea shores to our hotel which was at Tim Tsha Tsui in the Kowloon district.

I was surprised by real estate i could see from the taxi window. They have built bridges on the ocean (i know most of them have) but the infrastructure gave you a feeling that land is not easy to come by in HK and hence they made use of every inch of land they have there. They have ressidential complexes that go beyond 40 stories easily. As we stepped into the city, the traffic took over. It felt like India for a while but then i realized that the traffic actually moves in the city and people follow lane disciplines. Around 40kms from the airport and we reached the hotel. The hotel itself was a 18 storyed one. Now given that i come from India - i am not used to sky scrappers. We reached around 12:30 HK time, and i was still feeling very sleepy and hungry at the same time. I looked up the menu in my room and they had Indian dishes listed in the menu - but skipping through them i ordered for a veg fried rice. I had tasted chinese food in Canada and i knew i wasn't a big fan of the authentic chinese food (mind you, i love the tibetian /chinese food we get here in India - the so called "Indian Chinese" food). The fried rice was indeed - a bit exotic but it was good to satisfy my need for a brunch. In the evening we took a stroll out on the roads around the hotel and i saw only watch stores. Watches that definitely were out of range for me. Rado, Rolex, Omega and what not. We took a walk towards the hardbor. It was beautiful.

We came back to the hotel early - with no signs of "having fun" in HK but we decided that we would hop around the city on the next day. My colleague told me about this huge building called the ICC tower - which offered a 260 degree view of the city.  It has 118 floors and is the third tallest building (wrt number of floors) in the world. We kept speculating - coz we saw another one which looked very similar to that...In my next post i shall try to portray my experiences in HK in the next few days before i came back. For now it's a wrap!

Life takes you where you want.

I am 28. I have learnt a bit about life. I am still to know how the nature behaves to my actions but i know a bit about life. There are times i feel the necessity to find out the truth  but most of the times i am happy being lost. I know it's not about wanting, it's more about giving. Less about giving up and more about carrying your spirit  within a earthly body to reach a place you'd call as the fortress of eventuality. It gets confusing at times between what you want and what you end up doing. There are momentary illusions that blind folds one into believing in things that don't exist or doesn't give you happiness, but that's what makes this life interesting. It's a fight within ourselves...after all, we manufacture every emotion, we create one and then we become desperate to kill the same one too.

Think about the last time , when your heart made a choice...O well, you made that choice, but then you didn't care about the consequences in the rush. Then comes a moment, you want to get out and free your spirit...Eventually it's you who did it and only you call the shots to not do it any more.

If you are caught in a moment, lost faith or maybe you feel dejected for being summoned by the spirals...you just need to ask yourself - the choice, like in the matrix - the blue pill or...you know what i mean, it's always a choice. If you keep making the choice to not change...Well that's your choice too, but if you want - i bet Life takes you where you want!


 Try to win back your days
You let them all escape your heart
Now that you've come so far
Why did you have to fall so hard
Look at what you've done
What have you become ...

-- Slip to the void (Alter Bridge)

Long Way From Home

2 album with over 20 compositions, yet it didn't satsify me on a personal ground on what i was set to achieve with Dark Project. We were sparse entities living in our own little worlds, in the creeks of places like the hostel rooms or the rented apartments. It had to take a mammoth effort to put the pieces back in place to start making music just the way you hear it on the record. Everybody's sacrifice to come to the city of Bangalore has been a tale i have held close to my heart. When individuals have families, career aspirations and most importantly a necessity to find one's own survival - music in India takes a back seat.

The good news is that i am not with such individuals who play music for instant fame. I am not with a set of individuals who value gimmicks more than art. I am with individuals who win everything they put a step on. 2 years of playing music in Bangalore, together as a band and a will to write an album that would replicate the exact sound of madness that we held inside. Hence came a decision to put the ink to paper and write a record that would correct all the things we missed out in the past and express our feelings as individuals much on a personal level. 

Long Way From Home is not Dark Project's 3rd album, i always regard it as the first and an onset of a journey that forgets about how much we had to fight to put the bricks together but rather sketches a painting of our souls while we try to connect to our admirers in a fresh n new way. The album has  taken almost a year to compose and record. Precisely with 8 tracks - each bleeding into the other, is composed, mixed, played, written, produced by Dark Project.

The songs deal with a variety of subjects including faith, love, bravery, sacrifice and what not. I have heard it on repeat as we went on to achieve near perfection with our limited boundaries. We didn't want this to become just another record but something we have put our best in. Duality is the first single off the album and will be released as a video in the month of September, followed by the album launch and possibly gigs to promote it.

Not everything is in one's hand, rather i think there's nothing in our hands than to just give it the best shot we could. After putting the unmixed record on play - i can rest assure tell the world that i am really proud of what we have made. Sauvik, Ugyal, Korak and last but not the least Daryl have done a tremendous job with the album and only makes me want to write music for another 100 years, if mortality permits that rule.

Sweat, anger, effort and a never say die attitude is what brings this album together in one piece. I guess i would want to dedicate this album to my mom and to each of our families who have been enormous in supporting us through our lives. There cannot be a 'Dark Project' lighting it up without them!!


We meet ourselves,
We meet ourselves into someone we don't know.
We try to chase, we try to chase that someone we don't know.
Will you cry for someone to write the story of your own?
Will you jump, will you break to reach where you belong?

~Salvation!

This world is driven by implicit choices.

This is my first post of the year. Yeah i have been doing too many things, mostly in my mind. I am never out of time and neither i believe in time leaving ones' side ever. This post is about the time travel i did for an hour or so, listening to one of my favorite artists' of all time - Darren Hayes' album - This delicate things we've made. 

Anyway, let's get straight up to what i wish to convey here. In my retrospection, i found that life is driven by implicit choices. We would get to what i mean by that in a bit. I am sure all of us have had this feeling of getting stuck at a certain juncture in our lives - where we see roads that we never want to walk or we see outcomes that we never want to accept. There are these moments, you wish to break free and get out of but all your efforts give you only a temporal relief and you end up finding yourself in that same old place again. So i thought, why don't i put in my life's perspective and search the answer to such miseries. The outcome of this, really surprised me. It surprised me because it's very simple to understand yet it is very difficult to believe in. 

No matter where we are and what we have done so far in our lives, everything was driven by choices that nature chose for us. When i say nature, i mean the conscience that resides within each of us. Some people popularly call it "decisions made by the heart". Never anyone could be happy or could kill a misery by applying explicit ideas of cure. If you scan through your life, it must be full of those butterfly effect moments that changed the next course of history. It could be from loving someone to making sure you don't have that feeling anymore. From choosing to build a castle over happiness or finding happiness in doing so. You really never know where the end lies or when would one come out of it. This is something that is governed by nature. 

Our human brain has a limited capacity but it has infinite capabilities. It's about dimensions of oneself that can only be limited to certain number of choices but one may possibly do endless things in that one dimension. Our human brain has always worked through substitutions. The substitutions are these implicit choices i am trying to talk about here. Your dearest friend may find a reason in you to quit some of his/her habits. Someone may choose to do the drugs to substitute you from their brains. Someone might want to get into someone else and never care for you. But believe me, whenever there's been something new that came into your life, it always took away something. It could be sorrow that got taken away by happiness or the other way around. This is a little disturbing, if you are a firm believer that there's something called this one thing that is made for you and you are made for it. I personally feel, nothing like that exists in this universe. The universe is actually within you and you define the rules. But the dicey part is, that these rules that you define has a far greater reaction within yourself if they are made explicitly and not naturally. These leave with trails of remorse and a life long sense of a lament. 

So if you really wish things to change for you, then wait for that right moment, when you give a chance to your heart to make a choice on it's own. These choices, could be driven by situations, conditions but the acceptance can only come when you believe in it.