A Song for an Elusive Moon

There is a song that I've been repeating on my ipod today. A song called 'Khoya Khoya Chand' from Sudhir Mishra's film of the same name. I have been trying (fairly fruitlessly) to find meanings for all the Urdu words that I didn't understand, and I have been trying to assess why I have suddenly fallen in love with it.

And this is it- this is who I am, this is who I have been for some time.

I am the coarse earthiness of this song; its shamelessly abstruse academic poetic references; its quest for an elusive moon; its wounded heart bouncing on its sleeve; its lost string of questions; its self reproach; its gouging of dead stars; its eccentric determination of destinations and distances; its admission of its own hypocrisy at walking on new shards of grief that it seeks, like an addict given over to pain; its loss of goal in an inky life; and in a fit of perverse snobbishness, a celebration of the whole mess that is its identity.

The identity of such songs is defined by the elusiveness of the moons that they seek; their ordinariness is dispelled, their fault lines blurred, their disloyalties cleansed by the single mindedness of the seeking.