Tales of South India

A Tree in the Forest

I visit Madras from New York several times a year, to meet family, to reclaim my Indianness, to realign an off-kilter inner compass. While some things take more adjusting to than others, driving a car is not among them. I slip seamlessly from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the left side, from diligently following road signs and signals to regarding them as mere helpful suggestions, from dodging a crazed Chinese food delivery bicyclist pedalling maniacally in the wrong direction against a stream of outraged New Yorkers driving maniacally in the other direction to squeezing past a wall of sputtering auto-rickshaws  and rumbling buses and the assorted animals and birds who share the road with the craziest variety of vehicles I have seen.

From Court to Concert Hall: The Evolution of Carnatic Music Performance

Now the rich stream of Music winds along,
Deep, majestic, smooth and strong,
Now rolling down the steep amain,
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour;
The rocks and nodding groves re-bellow to the roar.
Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy

It is a well known fact that humans have a tendency to view the past through rose-tinted lenses. It is also well known that we dislike most change and are convinced that anything new, anything that is a radical departure from a tried-and-tested way of doing things, has to be treated with suspicion and derision. This is no less the case with Carnatic music, where we have convinced ourselves that its history and evolution from the days of the Sama Veda was one long, glorious golden period of old-fashioned courtesy and graciousness in which its composers and practitioners had but the noblest of intents, were motivated by the highest spiritual values, cared for nothing but the purest musical ideals. Thoughts of money - that crass, degrading, immoral commodity- never entered their minds. And then, alas, this ideal state of affairs crumbled to an ignominious end with the winds of change that gathered force and struck at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The Street Wall Journal

For as long as I can remember, the walls abutting the streets of my beloved Madras have been a canvas, a battleground, for all manner of posters, paintings and graffiti. Depending on my inclination and mood for the moment, I viewed those walls as riotously colorful, madly imaginative,often hilarious representations of the city's political and entertainment landscape, or as messy, garish, tasteless eyesores that defaced every inch of blank wall space. One look at those walls, and you got an instant picture - literally - of who was in power, and who was vying for it, with political party members and supporters falling over themselves to outdo one another in their fawning, often ridiculous depictions of their political leaders. Come election time, the poster madness rose to a fever-pitched frenzy, and they were often the only means by which many of the city's residents were made aware of who the candidates were, and what party they represented. Movie stars, gods and goddesses, mythological demons and revered, long-dead heroes of yore, all made their appearance on the walls of Madras, taking these already larger-than-life candidates into the glorified realms of the divine, the super-hero and the noble, or the vile, despicable and beastly. In America, television is the primary medium for election campaigning. In Madras, it was the walls.

Here and There

North and South, West and East, the cities of New York and Madras would appear to have nothing in common. And indeed, the ways in which they differ are too numerous to list here, and would serve perhaps as a useful exercise to while away time on a rainy day. Yet, both these places, founded as early-modern colonial cities within a few years of each other (New York came into being around 1624, as New Amsterdam; Madras, in 1639), can proudly claim to be among the most culturally vibrant and diverse in their respective countries. And I, resident of one in body and the other in spirit, am the happy beneficiary of this.

Thatched Roof Memories, and a Mystery

 

The words are like a magic incantation: Dhalankuthakadhiku thaka thadhinginathom. Chanted to a rhythmic marching beat of one-two-three-four. The years fall away, and I am back in dance - Bharata Natyam - class. There is a pervasive memory of heat and humidity.  In my reminiscence, it is always May, when schools and colleges are closed for the summer holidays.

A Luna-tic Rivalry

 The 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing, by the crew of Apollo 11 in July 1969, is the inspiration for this post.

Through most of the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War and the conflicts, tensions and competition between the United States and the USSR and their allies dominated world politics. Its icy tentacles froze thought and reason, destroyed lives and economies and drove a sharp wedge between the good guys and the bad. Who you regarded as the good guys or the bad ones depended, of course, on where you lived and what your government and newspapers led you to believe. Big Brother cast his dark shadow over the lands he surveyed. The scale of this war was enormous. It strained beyond its earthly boundaries, and exploded into outer space, resulting in the Space Race of the 1960s and 1970s (and on a much smaller, far less thrilling scale, the 1980s). The lunar landings were the most daring, audacious and electrifying of all, completely mind-boggling in how (almost) perfectly they were executed with the technology of the time that today seems simple, unsophisticated and even primitive.

The Science of the Kolam

 

 

Let me begin with a doff of the hat to the Math and Science Gene (MSG). He has marched tirelessly through countless generations of my family, far, far back into the cobwebbed recesses of ancestral lore and memory. He has worked hard, ceaselessly, relentlessly, without ever skipping a single progeny of my clan. To be sure, there were some dangerously close brushes with the Lunatic Gene (LG) (known in polite circles as the Quirky Gene), but the MSG always prevailed, always managed to nudge the LG, that over-ambitious and irreverent upstart, aside. In a daring attempt at a coup, the Slothful Gene once ventured to sabotage an entire sub-branch of my family, but the MSG pulled them out of that potential morass, that almost-blight on the family name, by sheer force of will.

'Tis the Season for the Season

The city of Madras is magical in the months of December and January.  The blazing heat of the summer is but a dim memory, and the monsoon-lashed skies have calmed into a brilliant blue. The days are perfect, mild and sunny, and the city goes about its business with a cheery spirit that is infectious.

On a Hot Day in August

A promise: this will be a brief (and hopefully painless) lesson in history. For those of you whose hearts start racing (for all the wrong reasons) and whose mouths go dry and who convulse in horror at the mere mention of history - don't worry, I understand. Memories of unendurably boring history classes are seared into my brain, to remain unerased by time or age. In school, our history "lesson" consisted of the teacher reading out, verbatim, as many pages from the history text book as she could cram into the lesson. For an entire hour, we were subjected to her low drone, completely devoid of any tonal variation. Those of us (which, on most days, was most of our small class of 12) who attempted to relieve the dreary tedium of the "lesson" by talking to our neighbors or falling asleep were made to stand on our desks for the remainder of the period. Perhaps you have similar memories of history class. So, if you fear that a short, heavily diluted (and very likely inaccurate) history lesson might do irreparable harm to your psyche, go ahead and scroll down to the pictures. I won't feel hurt.

(For a wonderful personal memoir and history of Madras, go here )

On a hot day in August (possibly July) 1639, Francis Day, an ambitious and industrious (and, some gossipy tongues maintain, a womanizing, alcoholic, gambling-addicted) employee of the English East India Company, set off on a voyage down the Coromandel Coast of India in search of a suitable piece of land for a textile factory. He went with the blessings and high hopes of his boss, Andrew Cogan, who was the Chief of the Machilipatnam factory.

A Tale of South India

Please don't groan. This is not a bad, sad or plainly mad tale. It is relatively short. Relatively.  Because, once I start writing, I find it hard to stop. But today, I thought I'd spare you (by and large) the verbiage. And give you something to smile about.  I guarantee it. Promise.