My ad(hoc)ventures…

I definitely am aware of the unsuitability of the title to this post…and the fact that if I were to start justifying my reasons for using it, it would probably take more than one post to make my intentions clear… so I am clearly side-stepping all those stuff here, and just for the general understanding, here I used the term ad-hoc to refer to “temporary”…I guess that would make the crap that succeeds this a bit more understandable…

This three month holiday was quite unique and different in quite a few ways -- being the longest one I ever have had,  quite unproductive, too, and probably the most depressingly boring vacations that I could ever have had!! It is the usual norm that students usually await holidays eagerly after a long stint at school or college, but perhaps this will be the first case witnessed by me when the students have been literally fed-up by these holidays and are yearning to return back to college…

Well, I already mentioned that perhaps these holidays were the most unproductive… that would not be quite literally true, because just like every other instance of a holiday, I did have quite a few activities lined up in my “have-to-do” list…and just like every other time, this time too, most of these activities were too unrealistic to be completed successfully…it’s not that I was not aware of the extremely low chances of my aspirations being realized…nevertheless, I persisted…with varying degrees of unsatisfaction as a consequence, though…

So now, as the three month long endurance test of patience draws to an end, I give to you an extensive detailed list of my (in)activities during this period ----

1. The foundations to this were laid a long time ago…even before I was aware of the existence of Slash, Santriani or van Halen, let alone their exploits with this wonderful instrument… perhaps it was the classy appeal of the instrument, or the fact that it was something that could be used as a suitable accompaniment with the fast-paced hindi tracks, which made it a much more coveted instrument than the bulky tablas that I was literally forced to learn during that time(no offence meant, though)…With time, I have learnt to respect the table as a really fundamental percussion instrument, and did learn it for a long time, but all that did never ever cause any reduction in my yearning to learn the  guitar… 

So it was natural, with a three month long holiday on the cards and a real scarcity of any productive activities to involve myself in, I made sure that buying a guitar and learning to play it would make it to the top of my list… but it was the learning part with which I messed up…

It was my plan to avail some of the online tutorials which teach you how to learn guitars(yeah, I know now, that was preposterous…) and I sure did act accordingly, downloading tutorials and theory books and videos…I downloaded everything that I came across so that there was nothing lacking in my arsenal(of tutorials)… thus armed, I began my quest to become a guitarist…

The first few lessons were easy enough… I mean, what’s the big deal in memorizing the names of the six-strings and stuff??

But then came the part where the videos kicked in… and though the tutor was an affable person with a patient face and an understandable accent, I somehow, even after repeated screenings of the video, failed to understand his fingering techniques..  and even though I tapped in my extensive resources of tutorials…I somehow couldn't help feeling that there were quite a few things that i was missing out......

Trudging through that section, I reached the part where they taught you how to read stave sheets, and this was a bigger disaster….because no manner of explaining could really knock anything inside my head, and all those signs and symbols really felt like pieces of alien language to me…and because all the subsequent lessons involved playing pieces of music written on those darned stave sheets, I had to abandon my idea of self-learning guitar …and to add to my woes, there was a humongous amount of money charged by those unfeeling telephone authorities  ( my habit of downloading extensive tutorials and high quality videos for my “self-learning” purposes also contributed to it, though...)

Finally, in the end, I succumbed to the traditional option of getting myself an instructor to teach me how to play…..and irrespective of the fact that we are proceeding at a frustratingly slow pace….I do feel I’m making some sort of progress, and that does satisfy me quite a bit….