Tales of South India

The Highway Poet

Somewhere down the serpentine labyrinth that is the organization chart of the National Highways Authority of India is a little box that is an offshoot of the Department of Highway Safety. This box is the proud bearer of the title “Couplets and Proverbs Division (L&T K-W)”. It has a single employee, a long-haired, dreamy-eyed, thickly bespectacled youth, the nephew of the Chairman of the Department of Highway Safety (S-India). This young lad, who had been a gentle, sweet-natured child, the kind parents pointed out to their boisterous offspring as a shining example of what they ought to be like, created a major commotion in his family when he declared that he wanted to study Literature in college. He displayed a firmness and refusal to budge from his position that were in complete contrast to the gentle, pliant nature of his early years. His family, peopled thus far exclusively with engineers and doctors, were just recovering from the shock of the renegade’s announcement when he sent them reeling afresh with a further declaration that it was his intention to become a Poet. He would kill himself, he threatened, if anybody tried to prevent him from achieving his goal.

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.

The Poetic Landscapes of Tamil Nadu

Covering an area of over 130,000 square kilometers, India’s southern-most state has a variety of landscapes, terrains and habitats. There are beautiful, wave-lapped golden beaches and emerald green paddy fields; lush tropical forests and cool mountain ranges. There is a staggering variety of flowers, trees, birds, mammals, marine life, insects and reptiles, a nature-made counterpoint to the cultural and historical riches of the state. It is mineral-rich, with abundant reserves of lignite, quartz, feldspar, bauxite, limestone, graphite and granite. 

A Few Thousand Words

For Kanchipuram, City of a Thousand Temples.

Kailasanathar Temple

Flanked by its belt of defensive jungles is that city
Whose doors are never closed to those who seek the prize
Lovely like the pericarp of the many-petalled lotus
The navel of the dark-hued Lord.....

(From the Sangam poem Perumbanatruppadai, translated by N. Raghunathan)

 

Over the River and Through the Streets

Over the river and through the streets
To the Brooklyn Museum we went
Past buses and bikes and trucks and cars
For a mu-si-cal event.....

I do apologize - the heat and humidity do strange things to the brain. But let’s move on, shall we, to safer - and saner - territory?

'Tis the Witching Hour of Night

‘Tis the witching hour of night,
Orbed is the moon and bright,
And the stars, they glisten, glisten, glisten,
Seeming with bright eyes to listen,
For what listen they?

John Keats, 1795-1821                                                                                                                          

Years can go by, but the habits of one’s growing-up years never really fade away. I came of age in staid Madras, in an era when the city was dead by 9 o’clock at night. Weekday or weekend, I was dutifully tucked into bed and fast asleep well before 10 o’clock, waking up at the crack of dawn to the raucous cacophony of chants, calls and cinema music from the neighborhood temple, mosque and teashop that each competed to drown the other out.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

My life is a strange paradox. On the one hand, I am gloriously, happily busy, doing things that I love, but, on the other hand, my laziness and disorganization have reached record heights. Ideas for new posts are scribbled on bits of paper that vanish without a trace. What seemed like a brilliant idea while drifting off into dreamland feels tame and lame in the harsh light of day. An overflowing pile of unwashed clothes beckons, demanding action, as does an empty pantry.  There is family to tend to, friends to catch up with. Spring - beguiling and fickle, garbed in bright, sun-splashed colors one day, in damp, sullen gray the next - is knocking at my window, urging me outdoors.

All this means that I have nothing new to share with you right now. But I am not above taking the easy way out. Digging through my hard drive, I found parts of my Croatia travelogue that I have not posted here. A gentle dusting off of virtual cobwebs, a little smoothing out of rough edges, a touch of spit and polish, and voila hey presto! A new-old (or old-new) post! 

Nurturing Nature

The state of Tamil Nadu rolls gently and smoothly south-westwards from Madras to Coimbatore. The terrain is mostly flat, save the occasional hills that rise and fall like soft sighs. The scenery is vintage South India: emerald green paddy fields, lush groves of banana and coconut, clumps of tall, dust-kissed trees. It is a landscape of timeless beauty, soothing and serene, and of all the beautiful places in the world, it is this that ignites a spark deep in my heart, that whispers to me, you are home.

Sleepytime Stories

At 9pm on most days I am likely to be eyeing the finish line of a long day - long, alas, usually in hours, not on things achieved. Make it 9pm on a frigid February weeknight in New York, and that likelihood turns into a certainty. And yet, there I was just yesterday, out in the West Village of Manhattan, my bedtime a distant prospect, bundled up against the arctic wind, trying to make sense of a crudely hand-drawn map.

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 Cook

Shankari Mani had been married for 31 years. Most of those years had been lived in an independent house on a tree-lined street that overlooked a park in Sivaganga Colony. At the time of her marriage,  she was a qualified chartered accountant, an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer, a decent club-level tennis player, a barely tolerable singer and a terrible cook.

Infinite Beauty

On the last Tuesday of January 1913, on a clear, cold winter’s morning in Cambridge University in England, a 35 year old mathematician of rapidly growing fame and esteem opened a letter. The letter, thick and unwieldy, bore the grime and wear-and-tear of a long journey, and a ragged line of stamps, unfamiliar and exotic. It started with the words, “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum............”

Love Thy Neighbor

When you have been involved with something for most of your life, you come to recognize this: the longer the relationship, the more things there are that you realize you do not know. And also: you can meet some people every day, for years on end, share laughter, tears and memories with them, live right next door to them, but there are aspects and areas of their lives that remain complete mysteries to you, lived behind doors that only a select few people have the keys to. Let me explain. 

I Fleetly Flee I Fly....

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen goodbye.....Only for several weeks, dear readers. I will be back in Croatia, to teach once more at the International Vocal Arts Workshop.

The last (and first) time I went there, two years ago, I had no idea what to expect. I was filled with the excitement and anticipation that come before an adventure that is a glorious mystery, a journey into uncharted waters. I was nervous, and terrified that I would not live up to what was expected of me, that I would not enjoy myself, that I would spend my days wondering, "what am I doing here?"

Another Time, Another Place

Many moons ago, in a now nostalgically-remembered era when cell phones and iPods were a rarity, when people wrote and spoke in full sentences and looked each other in the eye, when food was merely food, when men and women could agree to disagree politely without shouting each other down and when human beings walked around being themselves and were not defined by a thicket of labels, in that long-ago time, I was a pawn in a corporate American arena.

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.

A Junkie and a Monkey

Here is the Ramayana on drugs. It is a far cry from the black and white world of the evil Ravana and the squeaky-clean Rama, the pious Sita and loyal Hanuman. A Ramayana where a lustful Ravana, burned out on angel dust, kidnaps Sita, his mind clouded over by passion and desire. Where Rama and Lakshmana, wandering, frustrated and helpless up and down India looking for Sita, dull their pain with endless joints and pipes. And then Hanuman enters the story, a "hardcore ex-con tattooed" Hanuman who rallies his drugged-out monkey army with a big, happy substance abuse recovery-house reunion. What follows is a war - of monkeys and junkies, everybody high, everybody in a fog, in a fuddle, on cocaine, on LSD, a tangled disarray of tarnished minds and bodies. A war of relapsed junkies, and only Hanuman has the cure: the Sanjeevani herb.

On the Island of the Gods

 
Straddling the equator in an azure expanse of ocean 3000 miles east of India, on the restless backbone of a volcanic belt, lie hundreds of islands. They form a land-bridge of sorts between India and Australia, emerald-green, beautiful, bewitching and fascinating, a region where a succession of dynasties and civilizations have left their impact. Aborigine, Hindu, Malay, Polynesian, Islamic, European. With names that conjure up such romance and mystery, enchantment and beauty: Java, Sumatra, Celebes, Borneo, Bali.

Vignettes from Sivaganga Colony

Early every morning, just when Sivaganga Colony is stirring awake, the peace and quiet are shattered by a raucous cry that reverberates through its streets. It sounds like the anguished wail of some unidentifiable animal, but it galvanizes the housewives into action.

The Lady of Many Smiles

When I was twelve years old, I came home from school one day and got the shock of my life. While getting out of the car, I saw, sitting on the veranda next to my mother, a white-clad lady who was grinning at me. That grin stopped me in my tracks. It was the sort of grin that might haunt you in a nightmare, a wolfish leer, a flash of over-sized, protruding teeth, sinister and chilling. A shiver ran down my spine.And then, as I stepped closer and saw who it was, I relaxed, and both of us started laughing. We laughed till tears ran down our cheeks, as we clutched at our sides and gasped for air. She cocked an eyebrow in inquiry, and I shook my head emphatically, no. 

The Music Teacher

This is an old story of mine, one of my earliest, dusted off and polished up for your re-reading pleasure. Thanks, Lekhni, for spurring me to do this!

 

He stood at the front gate, a short, tubby man, young but balding, his forehead liberally smeared with holy ash, a large red dot in the middle. He hesitated a little before sliding the bolt back and opening the gate. The barking of the resident dog sent him scampering outside, bolting the gate safely behind him.

“Who is it? What do you want?”

Tales of the Seven Pagodas

Legions of giggling schoolchildren, high-spirited college students, trysting lovers, coy honeymooners, and tourists, both frivolous and serious, have traveled the 60 odd kilometers from Madras to Mamallapuram. I have made the trek, too, several times, in all these capacities, the first over four decades ago.

The Reluctant Maami

I'll come out and confess this: I am an abject failure. A bitter let-down to a proud tradition and lineage, one who failed after barely trying, who lacked even a pallid and watery version of a single attribute required for success.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

September blows in with cool winds and dazzling sunlight, the skies awhirl with lazily spinning leaves. A perfect day fades into a long, still night wracked by feverish coughs and disjointed dreams. Wild thoughts bubble up, puncturing the surface of sanity. A cool hand soothes a hot brow and in the twilight zone of delirious reflections and drifting reveries, one phrase repeats itself: plainly mad, plainly mad, plainly mad….

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.

D.K. Pattammal: The Meeting that Never Was

Early every morning for a month last year, I pushed open a stubbornly creaky gate and walked passed her home. My steps slowed, stopped for a moment, and my eyes quickly scanned the verandah. Nothing stirred. The only sounds were the raucous caws of squabbling crows high on their treetops, and the muted hum of traffic from nearby Gandhi Mandapam Road. I walked on, up a narrow, curving flight of steps, rang the bell and entered a home that bustled with life and activity. 

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.

A Day in the Life of Ejamanar

 This is dedicated, with tongue firmly in cheek, to my very own Ejamanar (note: Ejamanar, in colloquial Tamil, means Lord of the Household or something to that effect)

 The Cast of Characters

Ejamanar:  The Lord and Master of the Ejamanar household in New York, cut from the traditional lord and master mold. He takes his head of the household duties and responsibilities very seriously. Unfortunately, the rest of his family does not. Undeterred by this 21^st century attitude to his 19^th century ideals, Ejamanar never falters in his determination to keep his family, particularly his two children, firmly under his thumb and watchful eye. The children, however, under the strong influence of the Ejamanar genes (Ejamanar was notoriously rebellious and independent-thinking as an adolescent) pay scant heed to his remonstrations about the abundance of evil lurking in innocent corners. Ejamanar is an ardent exercise freak, profoundly scornful of “leftists” and a nightmarish driver who believes that any other vehicle on the street is superfluous and needs to come within an inch of being eliminated.

Mrs. Ejamanar: An independent thinker herself, at her most sullen and untalkative early in the morning, at the very time that her husband is at his most chipper and communicative. The current manifestation of her independent thinking is the fusion food she subjects her family to. Fearful of her unpredictable temper, they swallow her culinary concoctions in silence.

Thilakavathi:  The Ejamanars’ oldest child. She has her father firmly wrapped around her little finger. She is 18 years old, a rabid rap music fan, and enjoys wandering around the city at all odd hours. (A clarification: Ejamanar considers any hour an odd hour; Thilakavathi feels all hours are created equal, and are fair game for her peregrinations.) Father and daughter have argued endlessly about this; neither has budged an inch from their respective positions.  Of late, Ejamanar has taken to cunningly concealing his message and moral in long-winded anecdotes, which miss their target by a wide margin.

Chokkalingam: The Ejamanar Son and Heir. Fifteen years old, the abiding passion of his life is basketball, not academics, to his father’s never ending chagrin and anguish. Ejamanar’s repeated and enthusiastic efforts to switch his son’s passion to the wonders of the capitalist economic system have fallen on deaf ears.

Minor Characters:  

Ravanan, Head Clerk of The Ejamanar Corporation.

Cheran, Chozhan and Pandian: Ejamanar’s best friends and fellow scorners of leftists.

A Meeting of Worlds

Recently, I attended an event at the Asia Society in New York, to mark the U.S. release of Namita Devidayal’s book The Music Room. This book – which I highly recommend – is a story of several musical journeys and lives: the author’s, from being reluctantly pushed into it by her mother, to the music becoming something that she could not live without, a source of solace in times of melancholy or trouble, an escape to a zone of serenity and beauty; that of her guru, the modest and reserved Dhondutai Kulkarni, who dedicated herself wholly to her music and never married, blessed with the voice of a nightingale, bearer of the keys to the magic, riches and glory of the Jaipur gharana of Hindustani music, yet who struggled to make ends meet, uncaressed by fame and fortune; of the flamboyant and theatrical Kesarbai Kerkar, she of dazzling musical brilliance, beloved and worshipped by hordes of admirers, male and female, inheritor of a precious musical legacy from the hands of the great maestro Alladiya Khan, who brought this style to life; of Alladiya Khan himself, and his gharana, distinguished by its lilting eloquence, seamless melding of double ragas, serpentine taans of filigreed intricacy and beauty, and variety of swara patterns.

The Abode of the Virgin Goddess

The Call of the South: Part Three: Kanyakumari

 It is impossible to write a simple and straightforward account of anything in India. Say you want to write about a place. You start gathering your information, your memories, your thoughts. And you find you have stepped into Looking Glass Land, a mare’s nest of goddesses, demons and kings, ancient travelers, age-old feuds and modern politicians. The strangest of bedfellows clamor for your attention, and you cannot afford to ignore or dismiss any of them. You have mythology rubbing shoulders with history.  You have to consider politics, religion, culture, science and economics, each with its attendant brood of issues and points of contention. The past and the present are inseparably intertwined. You step back and view this lively patchwork, this teeming tapestry. And you say, wow.

The Call of the South - Part Two

National Highway 47 and Suchindram

The distance from Trivandrum to the temple town of Suchindram on the promisingly named National Highway 47 is barely 50 miles. This is the deep south of India. The land of gently swaying coconut palms and emerald green paddy fields, red earth and sea-misted air. 

The Call of the South

Part One: Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Trivandrum

How quickly one goes from complaining about the cold to complaining about the heat! It had been barely a few dozen hours earlier that we had moaned about the New York winter, unfolding with cruel frigidity and stretching endlessly ahead while our eyes gazed blearily at the bleak, wind-whipped, snow-swept landscape all around, draped in monotones of white, gray and brown.

Balamurali Redux

I know, this is my third post on Balamurali on this blog - the last two hot on each others' heels. (Here are the earlier  ones.) But, after listening - repeatedly, obsessively - for an entire morning, to a sublime jugalbandi between Balamurali and Hariprasad Chaurasia, after concocting a fresh set of excuses for not writing something new, after I "discovered" this piece, languishing on my hard drive, I decided to put this up, with the promise (which, of course, comes with the usual caveat that promises are meant to be broken) that this will be my last post on Balamurali. 

If you ask any connoisseur of Carnatic music about Dr. M. Balamurali Krishna, chances are that you will get one of two reactions: impassioned praise and declarations that he is the best singer of all time, a genius who is Lord Krishna reincarnate;  or downright scorn, and assertions that he is a charlatan, a disgrace to the ancient, timeless traditions of Carnatic music. It is very unlikely that you will encounter a tepid or indifferent response. Such has been, and continues to be, his impact, on Carnatic music.

Close Encounters of the Musical Kind

I am sure that most of us remember our adolescent years as some sort of a long-playing horror show. Mix together mood swings, temper tantrums, unreasonable parents, pimples, a body that sprouts strange things, sniggering siblings, and the whole wide evil world that seems intent on taking you by the scruff of your neck and rubbing your face into the muck, and whirl all of this at a blinding pace around a sullen, glowering teenager, and it seems a miracle that most of us somehow emerge unscathed.

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.

A Heavenly Magic Carpet Ride

Come with me, let us travel together on a magic carpet ride. It is a beautiful evening, all soft light and gentle breezes.  All we need is some music to make it perfect.

Ponnammal Goes to London: The Final Installment

Continued from here

I stared at Suji, shocked. I was too stunned to retort that Ponnammal was not going to a higher calling in London, she was not getting an education, she would merely be doing the same menial work, but in a strange place where she knew nobody, where there would be no one to help her deal with the new place, language, climate, customs, people….. But all I could do was stare back at Suji and then walk back silently to my flat. Once inside, I sat down, my head in my hands.  Yes, there was a lot of truth in what Suji had said. Who was I to judge what was good or not good for Ponnammal? She could certainly do with a break from her husband. Who was I to grudge her this opportunity? She was resilient, had coped with so many horrors in her life with dignity and pride, perhaps she would do the same this time as well. She was resourceful, so maybe she would learn to navigate her way through London.  Maybe she really craved some privacy, battered as she was now by the ceaseless demands from all around her. Maybe it would all turn out just fine.  But I would talk to Ponnammal about it and make sure that Suji had not twisted her arm into agreeing to go, and that she was at least aware of some of the issues she would face in London.

Ponnammal Goes to London: Part 4

Continued from here

In the meantime, Suji rattled on.  Her son would offer her a Rs. 1,000 raise in salary, which would be deposited directly into a bank account he would open for her. People like Ponnammal could never dream of such an opportunity, just think of how much her life would improve with the extra income.  She could fix the leaks in her roof, she could buy back all that jewelry that she had sold to the pawnshop, she could afford to eat better food….the words raced out of Suji’s mouth and it was as if she did not want any of her thoughts or doubts to overtake them.  Finally she stopped, and looked at me with a faintly challenging air. Would I be small-minded enough to deny Ponnammal this once-in-a-lifetime chance?

Ponnammal Goes to London: Part 3

Continued from here

After more than two years of working for me in prickly hostility, Ponnammal permitted herself to relax, oh-so-imperceptibly.  But the real turnaround came when my daughter, Chitra, was born.  From the moment she set eyes on her, Ponnammal was completely bowled over. The complete change in her demeanor astonished me and it took me a while to reconcile the new Ponnammal with the old. But there was no going back – the new Ponnammal was here to stay. Ponnammal would rush through her cleaning work (and I did not have the heart to scold her about the unswept corners and the growing accumulation of dust on everything) and cooking (here, though, there was a marvelous transformation – an amazing variety of exotic dishes now started appearing out of the kitchen) and then settle down to what she considered the most important part of her day – playing with Chitra.  It was such a joy to watch the two of them together – Ponnammal, with not a trace of her former stiff, prickly self, rolling on the floor and abandoning all dignity in her efforts to make Chitra laugh, and Chitra, a look of pure adoration and joy in her eyes, chortling in her high baby voice, begging for more, not allowing Ponnammal a second’s respite.  I could only shake my head and smile.  

Ponnammal Goes to London: Part 2

Continued from here

I enjoyed spending the occasional afternoon with Suji when all the chores were completed, and some sweet tea and a gossip session seemed in order.  Suji’s fund of information about the building’s residents seemed to be inexhaustible. She had a real knack for extracting life details from people.  She was a caring and careful listener, inserting a pertinent question or two to keep the narrative going, her expression of perfectly blended concern and interest in only what was being told to her, of nothing else mattering, spurring her audience to confessions they would not have made to others. 

Ponnammal Goes to London: Part 1

I am a simple person.  My needs are few, my demands uncomplicated, my pleasures humble and plain. I am happy to eat bland thayir saadam day after day if I need to, I remain unruffled by the frequent power cuts that plague our neighborhood, and I frankly don’t care if it is the DMK or Congress which is in power, it’s all the same to me. There is, however, one thing, or rather, one person, that I absolutely cannot do without.  That is my maidservant, Ponnammal. 

Moonlight Sonata in the Kastel

Croatia Chronicle: Part Five

Everyone is in high spirits after yesterday’s rollicking, wildly successful Carnival and the party at Rok and Lea’s. The big event for the day is our pianist Jose’s recital for us in the Kastel. He has a big performance coming up in Spain a few weeks later, and we are to have a preview concert of selected pieces. He has been practicing for hours every day, and I hear beautiful music wafting out from the Kastel, from the music school, the studio, wherever there is a free piano to practice on, all through the day. 

The Music of the Night

Croatia Chronicle: Part Four

Sunday, the last day of the Mayor’s Festa.

 

Groznjan: a happening place

The day dawns wet and cold, with a sharp wind and a continuous, gossamer-light drizzle. A sagging, weary, silent group shows up for practice in the studio. Even Olinda is subdued, worn out after the all-night revelries of the Festa. Nobody has slept more than a couple of hours. Irritation quivers in the air and exhaustion weighs it down. Tempers snap as an argument breaks out over how some chords should be played on the flute and guitar.  The others fall silent, and Jane, sensing the collective mood diving swiftly downward, calls for a “group hug”, a concept so strange and pointless to Olinda that he just stands and stares, shaking his head in disbelief. Such things seem to mean a lot to Jane, so I wink at him and beckon him to our loving little circle of huggers. The sheer absurdity of the rite cheers him up, I think.

 

Friday the 13th

Croatia Chronicle: Part Three

This is Day One of the Mayor’s Festa di san Vito, Modesta e Crescenzia Festival, and nobody seems to know quite what’s going on. There is an Art Gallery opening, our performance, food and drinks, and posters pasted all over town promise a well organized and tightly scheduled evening. The reality is anything but that. 

An Olinda Day

Croatia Chronicle: Part Two

Our morning lesson is done, and we have some time to spare, which we spend lounging on the steps in front of Bastia. It is a sunny morning, and the village is quiet, basking in the sunshine, and the warmth makes us feel languid and lazy.  Conversation drones and buzzes in low tones. A little black poodle makes his way cautiously to our group, tentatively seeking friendship, and a simple fetch game.  This little game makes him a different animal altogether, happy and bright, where earlier he had been cowering, shy and scared, at the entrance to a bar.

 

In a Fairytale Land

Croatia Chronicle: Part One

I have been issued a mandate that is as tall as it is broad: to teach Carnatic music and Bharata Natyam to a group of musicians and music students in Groznjan, Croatia.  The only other things I have fleshing out this directive are the dates I am to arrive, and depart. That’s it. There is a vague mention of a "theme", taller and broader than the order itself (the stars and air), which I put aside right away. There’s a lot else to worry about.

Weaving a Tale: Of Istria and South India

Indulge me for a little while as I lay out for you a few threads of history. They will seem to have nothing to do with one another – for how can it be possible that little-known Istria, and the glamorous and lovely Venice, and ruthlessly cold-blooded Dalmatian pirates, and just-as-equally ruthless and cold-blooded merchants, and pepper, cloves, ginger and cinnamon, and South India, be connected in any way? Restrain your impatience, hold your sharp comments, and allow me to assure you that they are, as I pick up the threads and weave my story. I have to confess that since my own knowledge of the facts is a bit shaky I will avoid too many details which might maroon me in treacherous waters, and merely skim the surface to present to you – tada!! – the Istria-South India connection, as a preamble to my account of my time in Istria - Groznjan in particular - which will follow.

The Curtain Descends.....Temporarily

Dear Readers,

This blog will fall silent for several weeks. I am going on a voyage, to a place called Groznjan, in the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia. It is, I am told, a small, medieval, hilltop village, charming and picturesque, with cobble-stoned streets and old stone houses. Gazing across the hills over the Mirna River, there are vineyards and olive groves and glimpses of the Adriatic Sea glinting in the distance. For centuries, Groznjan was ruled by Venice, and the Italians call it Grisignana. The Slavs and the Austrians wrested control when they could from the Venetians, and little Groznjan flourished with all the attention. Today, there are remains of town walls, ramparts, a renaissance loggia, churches, stone cottages and other Venetian influences that still survive.

After the geopolitical juggling and wrangling of the post-World War II years, Groznjan became part of Yugoslavia, and life bled slowly out of the little village as people deserted it for more prosperous shores. The streets lay silent and forlorn. Then in the 1960s, it had a rebirth - as an artists and musicians colony. The Jeunesses Musicales International Cultural Center was born, and the cobble-stoned streets of Grozjnan have been ringing with the sounds of music ever since, and painters, potters and sculptors grace its homes and many art galleries. 

This will be my home for the weeks to come. I will be teaching at an international vocal workshop, and I think I can safely say that the hills of Istria will echo with the sounds of Carnatic Music for the first time in their storied history! For those who are interested, go to this link: http://artsynergy.net

So, farewell, and I will be back next month with many tales to tell, many pictures to share with you.

Till then,

Kamini.

Mallika Grows Up: The Final Installment

The monsoons arrived that Saturday morning.  The wind and rain went crazy, lashing into everything with a fury the city had not seen in a long time. There was no electricity. In the middle of a prolonged hammering of thunder, Mallika called, anxious that her parents should not think that the lunch was off.  She had cooked her father’s favorite potato curry and her mother’s favorite rasam. She warned them that her street was flooded and that they should park on the main road which was just a five minute walk away.  Oh, and they were not to wear any fancy clothes or footwear as they were likely to get soaked.