This track “Lost in the Serengeti” is taken from the Album “The Retribution”, performed by Nawaj Ansari. If you know this legend and have purged your soul with his lyrical hymns, then I needn’t say more about him. If you haven’t even heard about him, then I doubt if you really live on the same planet as I do. But as I always used to say, it’s never too late to start praying. Morning is when you wake up (unless, of course, you wake up in the afternoon or as Nawaj Ansari puts it—when “the sun’s going down”. Now that you know about him… Welcome to the Club.
Lost in the Serengeti…
The title itself is self-explanatory. Serengeti is derived from the Maasai language and the term refers to “endless plains”. For your information, Serengeti is located in north Tanzania in Africa. But in this song, Serengeti signifies basically our life. Life is like the Serengeti and we are lost in it. Lost in a vast ocean or an endless plain of life. What we lack most in the modern world is a sense of a larger purpose to our lives.
All of a sudden and out of nowhere, I remembered Albert Einstein and his “Theory of Relativity” while listening to this song. Einstein said that everything in the universe is relative. And this song is full of theories of relativity in one form or another, especially in the first verse. For instance… Different lives, love or hate, wrong or right. It all depends on how you see these aspects of life. There are over 7 billion people in the world, and each of them has individually different experiences of their own. They have the lenses through which they see the world around them and form perceptions about it. In fact, it is not the reality itself but the perception of reality that counts. Einstein must have been really proud of Nawaj Ansari to see this extension of his “Theory of Relativity” into the Music field, particularly in the rap genre… Did Einstein live to listen to rap music back in his days?
The lyrics in this song are more philosophical poetry if you look at them closely. I could go word for word and line by line of the verses, but that may end up as a large manuscript for an epic. Because it’s deep. The rhymes in this song make sense of the world in a way that regular everyday speech fails to do. These rhymes convince you. The words connect.
It mentions the false path that we are attracted to in our life. It is something we are enticed with for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention.
Take for example the case of Mastery (It ain’t mastery, it’s what you write). Who do you call the master? In fact, how does one become a master? What does it take to be a master in his or her field of vocation? What’s enlightenment? In simplest terms, it is the form of power and intelligence that signifies the apex of human potential. Somewhere I read that it requires at least 10,000 hours of practice to gain mastery. Trying something, again and again, grounds the person in reality. It makes you aware of your inadequacies and directs you to the area where you have to work hard on.
Courage and bravery are overrated. I often find people saying that they are courageous and brave… that they are not afraid of anything… that they are fearless… I pity and laugh at them, not for lying to me, but for lying to themselves. There is no such thing as No-Fear. Fear exists, and it should. It is the basis of human survival. Fear is something that we can never get rid of. So what do we do with our fear? And how is it related to courage and bravery?
As Nawaj Ansari put it, “It ain’t bravery that causes you to fight”, it’s for your survival. You fight not because you are brave, but because you are afraid, and that fear makes you the man. Because courage is not the absence of fear… it is the ability to accept the presence of fear and overcome it by facing your darkest nightmare.
“It takes a bullet to ignite a mob”… This now just gets psychological. In the context of civil movements like #BLACKLIVESMATTER, this makes sense. It all started with a bullet, both literally and figuratively, the latter implying the use of force. Fire a gun and the crowd goes mad, turns into a mob, and explodes into a riot.
Every person has his or her good side and dark side as well. Imagine it as an angel and a devil on either side of your head. They are always conflicting. And often your decisions are based on which voice you hear the most. In fact, you are your own worst enemy. To overcome this, embrace the thought of death, because it is the only ultimate truth of life, and the realization of death is what makes life so meaningful and creates a powerful connection to the present. That’s why soldiers fight fiercely when death is viscerally present. The term “suicide” that Nawaj mentions in the line “I wanted to commit suicide…” signifies the psychological death ground. As Aristotle said: Life is defined by movement. What doesn’t move is dead. That’s suicide because you are offering yourself to the selfish world. For almost all animals in the world, speed is a critical factor in survival.
I remember a quote by Christopher McDougall on speed and survival that’s worth mentioning here.
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you are the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
Christopher McDougall
So keep up that adrenaline rushing. Jump off the plane. Take a leap of faith. Sometimes death comes from a lack of energy and the lack of energy is due to a lack of challenges. Take risks and your body and mind will respond with a rush of energy. Life has more meaning in the face of death.
People reveal their true-self when in crisis. That’s why your pain has to remain a mystery. Create a persona that is mysterious, intriguing, and masterful. Don’t be too excited to reveal the inner secrets of how you achieved something. Make it seem effortless because what you don’t reveal to people is all the more eloquent and powerful. People are jealous of your achievement. Your so-called friends shed off their skin on rainy days. That’s why you can’t even trust your friends. Maybe that’s why Voltaire said: Lord, protect me from my friends. I can take care of my enemies.” They know where to strike you to create maximum damage. Trust your inner instincts. Your gut feelings. Pick up a bee from kindness and learn the limitations of kindness. You have to learn to identify your real homies from the fake ones and crush the fakers to the earth with no mercy. “Those who seek to achieve things should show no mercy”-Kautilya.
You better hold your horses carefully. Above all, amidst the turmoil of the events that you suffer, you should take great caution not to lose your presence of mind because the mind is always weaker than your emotions. Your emotions are like the horses and you are on the chariot being pulled by those horses. How you hold the reins determine where you go in life. Are you able to control the horse or is the horse controlling you? Mans’ greatest weakness is losing his heart and doubting himself. You gotta actively resist the emotional pull of the moment, like the way the horses are pulling you. Stay decisive, confident, and aggressive, no matter what hits you.
One of the things that makes this song at its best is that it doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another. Life is simple—you make a choice and never look back. If you want to be a saint or a sinner, it’s your choice. Neither one is perfect. You can be true to yourself but still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. The devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other… everyone has been there. Nawaj Ansari creates a way to take a very powerful experience and message and mold it into a story that every single person in the world could feel and relate to.
And the Sun’s going down for us… Who knows maybe this is the last time we could see it!!!
Lost in the Serengeti.
