I was around 10-12 years old; can’t remember exactly. I was watching a documentary on TV with my Pappa at our house. The documentary was about a photographer and the photograph that won him a Pulitzer prize. The photographer was Kevin Carter, who took the famous “The Vulture and the Little Girl”.

The documentary was well narrated with right tone and detail, that I couldn’t hold my tears. At least some of you might know, Kevin couldn’t save the little girl and he gave up on his life by suicide the same year, winning the Pulitzer. He was 33 and I don’t know for how many days did the little girl live.

I remember rushing to my room with a heavy heart. That was time when not only was I a simple kid with a very light heart, but also a time when humans were more sensitive to even slightest of the events that translates to loss of life, compared to today.

That day I did two things. I was not in the right sense, i’m sure. One, I wrote a song and then two, I visualized a music for the song. I sang that song many times that it not only just become permanent in my brain, but it became that part of my brain that I love the most. Like all, I do have a cerebrum, cerebellum and medulla oblongata; but along with an addition of what I call Stafanism. It’s the part of my brain that processes and saves the things I do and I wonder how I did those. Trust me, it’s my favorite.

That day I learnt, the best creation of a man/woman happens when he/she is in intense pain or immense pleasure.

This is what the intense pain did to me – Me and My Now.

Like I said, I gave a humming to these lines that day. But like any other kid of that age, I got busy with other exciting events in childhood that this song took home in a book somewhere in the corner of my room.

Days went by, years went by, I had grown to a fully stupid adult and college came and nearly ended. On the final day of my PG, during the farewell night in 2013, we got a chance to perform. Farewell, for passing-out batch is freedom to perform non-curated or rather un-filtered content, whatever it be. For all, farewells are emotional. I was opportunistic I would say. I thought, PG is going to end and this is sort of the last chance, maybe in entire life, I could have an audience to listen. Plus, I nobody’s going to vet what I was going to perform. But wait. I had no plans to perform. I was not the go to person at college when it comes to singing a song, not even for me. So it was a quick decision to reach out to my friend, Keshav (imaginary name) to sing the song – Me and My Now. But guess what Keshav had other plans. He didn’t give right reasons for not agreeing to sing my song, but I can just tell, he preferred to sit with audience for farewell night. Well, we shouldn’t insist anyone for the risky task. For all right reasons it’s not logical to perform an original song especially on last day of college for Keshav, and I appreciate that. Maybe that’s not the last thing that he wanted at college.

But Manoj, Albin and myself were not ready to give up. Manoj was the video editor for the video that can be played on the backdrop screen. Albin was the guitarist and I decided to sing, come-what-may. It’s the last day and who cares if we mess up. And guess what, it was a blockbuster to be honest. But I prefer to keep it simple – we did good, and we are proud that we did.

You can find below the actual performance video, which some gentle soul was thoughtful enough to capture.

But why did I feel like sharing this in my space for the public to know? Why now? It’s more than a decade since we did that performance. The answer to that insists another post, maybe in the future. I’m still processing the answer. The critical ones among you may think, did the song, the performance, all the good things that happened, did they translate into any action? Did I save any babies in poverty-struck nations of the world?

NO!