Sofia Ashraf & Prashanth Techno – Are You Alright | Sofar Chennai
Sofia Ashraf & Prashanth Techno performing “Are You Alright” at Sofar Chennai on September 29, 2018
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Artist: Sofia Ashraf & Prashanth Techno
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Filmed by: Shishir Ramnath
Edited by: Nirav Chidambaran
Audio by: Radioaktiv India
Lyrics
Are you alright?
I know up feels down right now and down feels downer, but they deliver the same spiel, asking you if you feel alright, like there is a right way to feel.
But you, you don’t shop at the same retail chains where they mass produced emotions.
No.
Your joys and pains don’t have names.
Their sadness has a hue – Blue was it?
Your sadness is colourless, lifeless, like the scent of a skeleton placed on display for too long in a biology lab.
In fact, sadness seems like an upgrade from the low you feel.
And your joys?
Your joy is wild, restless, violent, euphoric,
Like a mosh pit at the last song by the last band to play at the last gig at the end of the world. Manic.
Are you all right?
They say you’re losing your mind, only you wish you did because your mind is the one thing you can’t seem to get away from.
That crushing weight in the middle of your skull telling you
“Be smart. Be funny.”
Be anything but you. That voice that sounds eerily like your own telling you that you don’t matter. That indiscriminate chatter that chisels away at every Happy Birthday ever sung to you censoring every “I Love You”.
“Nobody loves you. How could they?”
Are you all right?
Your skin feels like a prison wall that you slit again and again and again and again and again inscribing it with tally marks of the number of times you felt like the dead weight that was stopping the earth from rotating a little faster and keeping the sun from rising a little sooner.
The number of times you felt like the photo-bomber in your own family portrait between a smiling mother and father.
A misshapen gap in a tetris of perfectly aligned friends – the outsider.
Are you all right?
“It’s all in your head”, they say. Like depression is a choice. Nobody chooses to be helpless.
Nobody chooses to be helpless.
Nobody chooses to be less and less of anything worth loving. Nobody chooses to be consumed by a fatigue that chokes you like a corset and simply walking to the closet feels like an Olympic feat with no Gold medal at the end of it.
You can’t turn off diabetes.
You can’t snap out of anaemia.
You can have loving friends and family and a stable job and still have arthritis.
No! You can’t just get over it.
Are you all right?
Maybe you’re not. And it’s OK.
Maybe they’ll never be like you. And that’s OK.
But maybe they do understand. Maybe I do understand.