Silences between the sounds - U. Srinivas

Music plays a very significant role in the social construction of my reality. So I can only imagine what it must have been for the greatest musician of all time, U. Srinivas. Even his dying moments must have been gloriously suffused with the music that emanated from every pore of his being. It must have elevated him from the hopelessness of his physical condition. Hopefully in those moments he had vivid fantasies of creating a lengthy and complex ballad and playing it on the world stage for uproarious commendation. As his life seeped out, he was released from the petty and irrelevant acts that surrounded his life which found him in a bitter divorce battle for over two decades. Such wasted energy that could have been channeled into his glorious music. Given his genius, I know he was not an architect of this acrimony but merely a helpless pawn in the happenings of his life.
As I go about my mundane middle class life trapped in the mediocrity of my thoughts, the question that keeps popping up “is today the day when the music died?” And then in an epiphany it came to me. Mandolin’s greatness was not in the sounds he made with his instrument, but in the silences between those sounds. Today he became that silence, evaporating into the music that he has created and left behind.