Kid Supreme (The Soul Behind The Machine)

It took me a while to realise as a kid that there were other kids in the world that were obsessed with the things I was obsessed with. This thought didn’t sit well with me, I wanted to be the king of the world, I wanted to be Kid Supreme. I didn’t wanna be just another pattern, and I was probably very young at the time when all these thoughts started flooding my brain. This was one of the main reasons I never got along with other kids, I just couldn’t believe I was born into a world full of kids just like me, or not maybe exactly like me, but I mean in the way how we all wore the same uniforms when we went to school. 

School, I hated this word. Everything I ever knew at that young age I had learned by listening, English was the first language I ever learned, I had unintentionally developed a pretty decent vocabulary for a three year old, I had shocked my whole family apparently. I was deemed a child prodigy, I was just a kid and all that praise definitely went to my head, it shouldn’t have but it did. And what it did to me at a young age was diabolical, and it took a long time for me to realize that accepting praise and compliments restricts you to go further, it gives you a false belief of having reached the finish line, and for that reason you stop growing. It's like going and telling a plant that it looks so pretty and has grown so much in such a short time, the plant now assuming to have already reached full potential stops accepting all the nutrients required to make it grow into the towering Banyan tree it was meant to grow into. I'm trying to paint a decent enough picture in Metaphor world, because in reality the plant would take no mind and ignore such back handed compliments and continue it's inevitable path to the towering banyan tree it was always meant to be. This is exactly why I love the concept of a tree, it's inspiring, it shows you how to be.

 

A person is ever evolving, especially a person like me, and in my head I’m the only person like me, there’s no other. Last week I was a different me, this week I’m the same me as last week yet a bit more evolved, in ways I couldn't explain. I consider the experience of my evolution a very personal thing. The soul as I feel it, has reached it's final state in evolution but the human body, this complex machine of ever changing flesh and blood has to be capable enough to show off the unclogged complexity of the soul. And for that things have to be done, things I don’t wish to document, but I’m writing all this so it should mean something. 

People assume things, and as I always keep to myself they assume things about me. And I don’t mind being the means to someone’s assumptions. But what I do mind is when they assume wrongly about me in this very regard. I love keeping to myself, as I said the way I look at the world is subjective, very subjective. And I love to keep it that way, I like to wander within the walls of my mind, for my mind has no walls and is ever awake always thinking, countless thoughts flowing and ebbing, doesn’t matter if I’m awake or otherwise, my brain works overtime.

Believe it or not my constantly thinking think machine got me into a ton of trouble back in school. Focusing in class was hard because my brain craved “feel good chemicals” aka dopamine in order to stop the thinking and focus on the external world, and why would my brain ever do that in something as mundane as a classroom setting? A jaded environment as I referred to it, when I got to do it every evening in front of the television. And that’s why I spent my time in class thinking about things constantly, deriving dopamine from my thoughts. Magic, magical beings, science, science fiction, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Tinkle comics, Amar Chitra Katha, Lord Krishna, the stories of all the gods I came to love as a child, the Super Hero squad game on my Sony Playstation Portable, Chotta Bheem, Classic Ben 10, every movie Hollywood or otherwise I had ever seen, constantly replaying in my mind over and over again just because I was put in a place that simply couldn’t match the amount of dopamine my brain had derived from the aforementioned entertainment. I blame the system, you can't be boring and authoritative. Dance Monkey 

Dance, entertain me whilst you educate me, you fail to do so, hence it's on you.

There were times when classes got interesting, and that’s when I’d actually focus, but then I’d get disappointed again at the lack of fun I was experiencing and would go back into my own personal world I had constructed in the walls of my mind, an escape from reality that I very much deserved. All this got me lagging behind in my academics, and I didn’t mind, because I had my own personal television right in my head. I could listen to songs, rewatch movies re-experience my favourite books and comics. Why did I need school and classes, I had all of this. Anything I wanted to learn I could learn myself, and so I never believed in the notion that school would make me whole, the perfect student, the perfect person in the perfect system. The path laid in front of me was too conventional for me to wanna pursue, cause in my head I wanted to break conventionality. 

Conventionality is the dirtiest word in my dictionary at least, and that’s exactly why all my life I’ve done very unconventional things. A few I definitely regret, there is always a prize to pay when all you do is blindly follow intuition. It’s almost as if you listen to the group of thoughts that hit you instantly, sometimes you sit and think if what you think really has to be done, but in my case I just do. I’ve learned to reconsider recently, and nowadays I’ve understood that certain things have to be done to have the right kind of intuition. 

I was obsessed with Spidey as a kid, and then the Incredible Hulk came out and somehow I understood the deep meaning behind the Incredible Hulk. I intuitively knew that Bruce banner had an Alter ego, in his case a split personality that he had in a way unintentionally manifested through ptsd. And so I began creating an alter ego myself, not intentionally, but I was definitely influenced, or maybe this alter ego was always there and the movie just made me accept it, making me unleash him once a while. I know all this sounds like I’m making it up, but trust me I’m not. Spider-Man 3 had come out in 2007 and I was just five at the time, and I somehow knew that the venom Symbiote had in a way influenced Peter wrongly making him unintentionally unleash what was already inside him, a bipolarity. Peter Parker, knowing his back story all the trauma he had endured, no one would be surprised if he had a dark side to him. I’m no Peter Parker, but me being who I am and having my own unique experiences felt the need to unleash this pent up basket of emotions, bundle of energy, call it whatever, it is all synonymous to the concept of an alter ego. 

I coexist with this other personality of mine. I don’t know what to call him, he’s an exaggeration of me, he’s more than me, he’s me waiting for me to unlock more of me to be able to be me, he’s my saviour, he’s my guardian angel, my inner voice, my dark passenger, my inner ego waiting to be expressed at all the right times and the wrong ones, the perfect judge to this imperfect world, a mirror to undeserving people, the defender of my soul, in a way I believe that he’s God, the inner manifestation of my soul, the karma bringer to other people, the pain resolver for other people, the one who silently watches through the eyes of this Kaushik Ravindran, always waiting for the perfect and precise time to show himself to the world. And I get that it can confuse people sometimes, cause people are innately different and there are people who just don’t experience this level of internal activity and they just couldn’t understand, as everyone’s got a darker side to them, but their other guy is never my other guy and vice versa, and I mean that my other guy as I described him to be is unique, he’s not exactly my dark half, although he can be sometimes, but he is my true self, my highest potential, my soul. 

So it always makes me wonder how he’d manifest if I were to ever take the super soldier serum. I wonder everyday, cause the only thing stopping him from being his true authentic self having to lay dormant behind this inferior personality he made all by himself to have something to portray to the world, is this mortal body, that he also loves and cares for deeply. But to make it indestructible that’s when he’d truly manifest. Did I just define the concept of a super hero? Tony stark had to build a suit of armour to transform himself into his true self, Rogers took the super human serum, Peter got bitten by the Radioactive Spider, Banner became the hulk, although that’s a split personality type thing I don’t relate with. For me I think I found music, cause music or more specifically being a guitar player is the closest thing to being a super hero. It's not likely I'll ever be an actual indestructible invincible super hero, so I decided to be a musician, it really is the same thing. Musicians are Super Heroes.

John Mayer wasn’t always John Mayer, Eddie Van Halen wasn’t always Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai wasn’t always Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughan wasn’t always Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t always Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson wasn’t always Robert Johnson, BB King wasn’t always BB King, Yngwie Malmsteen wasn’t always Yngwie Malmsteen, Guthrie Govan wasn’t always Guthrie Govan, Jeff Back wasn’t always Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton wasn't always Eric Clapton and so on. All these Guitar Heroes had a baseline personality but the minute they got on that stage, plugged in their Guitars, they manifested into something else, their actual personality, their souls were bleeding into reality through the Guitar, the guitar became this supposed super soldier serum, and this is exactly why I picked up the guitar. 

I keep wondering, three years back I didn’t know what I know now, so how did I find the nerve to possibly keep going? What was I even playing without understanding all of this theory and information? The best I can answer to my own questions is that I loved doing it, it didn’t matter to me that I couldn’t yet understand what I was doing, but I had the intuition to develop the right enough technique to keep sounding the right notes, whilst mapping out the entire Major Scale map of the guitar in all the twelve different keys, and after a while it just became clear, I could see the shapes in my head, the patterns and the chords and it all seemed to promote itself into feeling, all I needed was common sense and intuition to sit and figure out the magic behind the guitar, I have never googled material, typed in “how to play this particular portion of this specific song”, nope never done that at least after getting to a certain level at Guitar playing. 

All I needed was the privacy of my room, a working guitar and the imagination of my mind. And sure as I jammed and played, countless hours later I figured out how the guitar actually worked, repeating patterns that could be transposed. And that’s when I tried mapping out the whole thing on paper just to see more clearly what my mind had already deciphered, I did that once and never again used the papers, cause it was all in my mind. And the beautiful thing about playing the guitar in specific is that it is its own universe in itself, and one can get lost in the infinite ocean that it is. Even the tuning makes sense after a while, why it had to be EADGBE, there’s just no other pattern of tuning that makes the most sense, giving access to human fingers the way it does to unlock piano like sounds. Even the quirkiness of the B string, how it seems like the odd one out of the six, a half step short to perfection, but it is in fact the magic of that half step that makes it perfect.

 It is as if the Big Bang happened and the guitar was born, or rather the idea of it, floating through space-time waiting patiently for someone to receive it. And it took two blocks of wood, six cables of metal, 12 lines of frets and a precise level of evolved collective common sense to come up with the magic of the EADGBE tuning and the guitar itself.

The guitar seems like a physical instrument, but the more you play it, it starts existing in your mind and then it slowly seeps into your soul. I feel it, I’m at a level where it completely exists in my mind, but I’m still figuring out ways to take it and present it to my soul. 

So yes, I’m a Guitar player for all these reasons, to learn and learn and jam and unlock newer and newer ideas and techniques and expressions having in mind that someday I’ll know what to do with this shape or this colour or this geometry or this set of numbers, or this lick through this shape, or this other transposition, or this chromatic pattern, or this repeating shape and pattern on a different part of the fretboard, and someday I’d sound like me, and people would hear a random note sound through their speakers and know that it is me, the actual me, my soul bleeding and manifesting through the muscle memory/technical ability of my fingers driven by the intuitive tapestry of the sheer puppetry that is being done by the man above, my soul, my true self, the man with the joystick to my body, the actual me, and all I’m doing at this moment and all I’m trying to constantly unlock is a path for him to fully be able to control me. It’s a vice versa kinda thing, the intuition of my improvisation would match the instructions being fed through the strings connected to his fingers that I dance on.