White Robe Ripples

On an afternoon in October 2013, when working on our construction site in Mumbai, I heard a melody. I whistled it immediately and recorded it on my mobile phone. It was as if a forgotten melody had been recalled. Back home, when I played it again on my flute, I felt a ‘back at home’ feeling. For many days I tried my best to find out where I have heard this tune before, but in vein.

Three years later I was sitting in the music department of the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune. Even though I had been visiting the place frequently since 2000, I had never participated in any activities other than meditations. That was the first time I had taken my flutes to the Resort (thanks to Surbala and Prem Nisimo).

That day I was asked to play a melody for the evening meeting. As I was not confident about my own compositions, I tried to impress them with a few tunes which were played by Hariprasad Chaurasia and some other famous artists. But they told me, “These are all good melodies; we want something more simple and playful.” Then I played this melody – reluctantly – and it was at once selected as the theme for the night. Naturally, the ambiance support was so overwhelming that after the evening meeting I named the melody, ‘White Robe Ripples’.

When I came across Osho’s quote where he says that existence is a continuously changing multidimensional flux of consciousness, I felt that we are ripples among an ocean of other ripples. Ripples and ripples only. Inside and around. Probably there cannot be any new ripples, nor any old ripples too. No melodies are new. No melodies are old. All melodies are available to everybody, always, it seems. But we rarely listen to them, don’t we? Then we count them as new.

Recently I took a one-month music production course with Live with Music in Kochi. It helped me rearrange the piece as you hear it; it gives me much joy and musical enrichment. This home-made track is my first gossip, under ‘Gossiping Flute’, the name of my music band.

To help me keep my ‘gossiping’ as alive as possible I am glad to have many friends, among them renowned sitarist, Pulak Lahiri and flutist Jay Gandhi (a close disciple of Hariprasad Chaurasia).

All visualization pictures in the video were taken over the years at evening meetings and celebrations during Osho meditation camps in Kerala.

Come, let’s gossip.

Ripples are giggling.

Dhyan Tarpan was born in Kerala, India. He lived many years in Mumbai, working in construction/electrical engineering, and took sannyas in 2000 at the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune. Along with writing articles and travelogues in the Malayalam language, he has translated from English seven of Osho’s books. Tarpan recently shifted back to Kerala where he is fully involved in writing, playing/making music and related activities. facebook.com/gossiping-flute – dhyantarpan.blogspot.com