A City Sings in December

This article appeared in The Equator Line magazine, issue 12. You can subscribe to it here. It has some great writing and costs only Rs. 100 for 5 issues!

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'500, 300, 100, 50?’ the man at the counter asked me, sounding rude and disinterested at once.

‘50,’ I murmured unsurely. I was on a student budget – just killing time for an hour before I had to meet a friend. I handed him the cash – pretty much everything I had in my pocket at the time – and he tore the ticket out with care that belied his earlier impatience. Then, going back to his standard mode, he threw the ticket onto the counter and looked steadfastly at some papers on his table.

I picked it up and had barely turned around when I noticed a book for sale at the counter called Souvenir. I still don’t know why I asked for it. ‘50,’ he said, without even looking up from his papers. I didn’t have the money for it. I thanked him vaguely and left.

I went to the door nearest to the counter, where a boy scout who looked too old to be one directed me upstairs. There, I met another boy scout who guided me further towards the sky. Finally, at the highest door of the Madras Music Academy, my 50-rupee ticket was honoured, and I was allowed to enter its hallowed halls.

It was a prime-slot evening concert in the middle of the fabled ‘music season’ of the city of Chennai. The season, featuring Southern Indian classical music and dance — Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam — and a smattering of Tamil drama, is like what some of us know as the ‘drawn-out ten-thousand-wala Diwali cracker’. It starts sometime in late November, picks up pace in the first two weeks of December, explodes into sheer madness of over a hundred concerts a day in all kinds of venues in the last fortnight of December, and splutters to a stop mid-January. Concerts are organised by sabhas – largely, not-for-much-profit organisations; the bigger ones among them have their own halls. Surprisingly, this annual spectacle has no central controlling authority. Each sabha acts on its own, choosing the artistes it wants to feature and slotting them for dates and times convenient to them, like an army of chefs working independently to serve up an overwhelming smorgasbord.

This brings me to the question – is it possible for one person or organisation to conceive of, monitor and execute an event of 1200 performances, lecture-demonstrations and workshops of dance, drama and music, featuring over 600 artistes at more than 50 venues across a city? I don’t think so. With such a state of affairs, the season could only have grown in the disorganised manner in which it did, each sabha adding its own tentacle to this already multi-headed hydra.

To this day, the Music Academy is considered — by artistes and listeners alike — to be the most prestigious in the region. The Academy’s auditorium is impressive and imposing. It has a solemn air, and like the Chidambaram Stadium, that other venerable Madras institution, the audience is described with an edifying term — ‘knowledgeable’.

The concert that evening was by N. Ravikiran, the chitravina artiste who grew from being a child prodigy to one with an aura of redoubtable scholarship. His music as well as his prolific stature seemed to fit the grandness of the Academy. However, sitting in the higher echelons of the balcony at the Academy, I could see that like a typical Carnatic concert venue, the stage had so many things carelessly strewn about. The violinist’s magenta violin box lay on her left, prominently and uselessly taking up space; the mridangam player’s cover was just next to him, so was an extra mridangam and its cover. There were three other bags, a sruti box cover, and a disorganised mesh of wires. It looked like the artistes landed up and in a hurry to start the performance, did not bother to tidy up the stage.

Carnatic music, oddly and thankfully, is anything but disorganised — it is obsessed with rules, its practice demands discipline, its performance is couched in a well-defined structure.

Every composition is in a definite raga and is set to a particular tala. A raga is sometimes described as a scale, especially when being introduced to Western audiences, but actually is much more. While ragas are generally a unique arrangement of particular solfa notes – sa, ri, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni (similar to do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti), they are almost always better characterised by their distinctive phrases and the microtonal oscillations or glides (called ‘gamakas’) that adorn their notes. Many of the traditional ragas were derived from melodies, and rules were drawn from what came in compositions. Today, however, it is the other way around – the rules of the raga, passed on through the ages, are used to develop melodies. Ragas are, therefore, the heart and soul of all Carnatic music. Practitioners of the art spend their lifetimes understanding the scope and limitations of various ragas, studying, meditating, improvising and probing their rules over years and years of hard practice to find new musical meaning.

Since the rules of ragas are interpreted and reinterpreted by musicians – some of them highly original, some rebellious, some more bound by theory, some led on by musicality – they have acquired new colours over the years. Raga Abheri, for instance, used a lower ‘da’ note for centuries until some musicians started using the higher ‘da’ note, around the turn of the 20th century. Today, the latter version is considered the standard, and the earlier version is sung, sometimes, as but an experiment. Carnatic music, in some ways, is like law, with its codes of privileges and honours and its own set of loopholes, which can be twisted or reinterpreted, perhaps with time, even amended and rewritten.

Carnatic music, therefore, has a strange relationship with tradition. Like any classical art, it carries the baggage of ancient roots. Tracing its origins, although tenuously, to the Sama Veda (around 1200 BC) and slightly more directly to Bharata’s Natyashastra (around 200 BC), the music evolved through two millennia in South India, reaching an early version of the currently recognised form between the 15th and 17th centuries. This was around the time when Purandara Dasa, a composer- saint from modern-day Karnataka, standardised the introductory exercises to Carnatic music and composed simple songs that are taught to beginners of Carnatic music to this day.

The theorists and composers of this era laid down the groundwork for the next big moment in the evolution of Carnatic music through the composer trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswamy Dikshitar and Syama Sastri, all contemporaries in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Thanjavur district of Southern Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, it was around the same time that Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven were giving Western classical music a new shape and its modern look. A bulk of today’s Carnatic music repertoire consists mainly of the works of these composers and those that followed them. The compositions predating this era are rare and almost forgotten.

Oddly, there is evidence to suggest that Carnatic music might have changed vastly between the time of the trinity and today. Even amongst the trinity, Tyagaraja and Syama Sastri followed a particular scheme of ragas, which was not followed by Muthuswamy Dikshitar, who preferred an earlier scheme. Dikshitar’s scheme was inherited by his adopted grand-nephew, Subbarama Dikshitar, who compiled the monumental musicological work, Sangita Sampradaya Pradarsini, detailing painstakingly the theory and philosophy behind music, biographies of musicians and musicologists, and most importantly, raga lakshanas — the rules that define various ragas, along with notations of compositions in each raga.

While notating compositions, Subbarama Dikshitar faced a problem, typical of Indian music, of having to represent microtonal oscillations, the gamakas, which were not one note or the other. They were small wavers, exaggerated slides between notes, small spikes to halftones, or other such musical meanderings that were hitherto only passed on by ear. Notation, until this point, was just a slightly broader guideline. But Subbarama Dikshitar wanted to do more. He wanted to represent his school of music fully in the notation, and decided to devise a system of notating the gamakas. After much study, he classified the gamakas into certain pigeonholes and came up with a symbol for each type. He used these symbols in conjunction with the notes to notate compositions and raga theory along with their gamaka symbols. The result was a clunky notation that could not be read by sight. Several musicians and musicologists have come up with newer systems to notate gamakas, the latest being a ‘gamaka box’ invented by vocalist-pianist Ramesh Vinayakam. Still, most musicians stick to the barebones style of writing the notes and learning the gamakas by ear.

TM Krishna, one of the leading vocalists of our times, attempted to recreate the music of Muthuswamy Dikshitar’s times — the late 18th and early 19th centuries — by singing compositions from the Sangita Sampradaya Pradarsini following the gamaka symbols to the tee. The result was that many familiar ragas sounded hauntingly unfamiliar, odd, or just plain wrong to the modern ear. Did the aesthetics of traditional Carnatic music, a tradition that was zealously guarded by musical families and transmitted by ear from generation to generation with extreme emphasis on exactitude and perfection, change unrecognizably in just three or four generations? Was it a case of Chinese Whispers? Or was it just that even the most comprehensive gamaka notating symbols of the Pradarsini were not accurate enough to represent the subtleties of Carnatic music? Amongst Carnatic music historians, theorists and practitioners, opinion is divided, and for this reason, the idea of posterity in music is an all important yet problematic one till this date.

Whatever the answer to the gamaka conundrum may be, there is really no doubt that Carnatic music has evolved with time, and that its present form is not what it was even at the turn of the century. Politics, social history, religion and technology have been the key agents of change. The content of what Ravikiran performed that evening at the Academy, the format for the concert, the woman violinist accompanying him, and the Academy itself, are the products of these transformations.

Carnatic music, in the times of the trinity, had three major strands. First: upper-caste Brahmin men, such as the trinity themselves, who learnt the music formally, usually from other musicians in the Brahmin guru-shishya tradition. The music of this school tended to be religious and patronised by local kings. The second group was temple musicians — men who played the nadaswaram, a reeded wind instrument and the tavil, a two-headed drum. They were attached to temples, came from lower castes that specialised in music or were from certain musical families. While the content of the music was often similar to that of the first school, and they did play a lot of vocal compositions, the nadaswaram players often played music that had no lyrical content. The style was free flowing and heavily improvisational, as they had to play for hours together. The third category was that of devadasi women. The term ‘devadasi’ implied a woman dedicated to the deity of the temple through music and dance. The music of this school, perhaps influenced by the dance that it accompanied, was more emotional, and did not restrict itself to religious themes. The Lord was often imagined as the dancer’s hero, and the content of the art, both music and lyrics, was often romantic and erotic.

In the second half of the 19th century, with the British taking firm grip over South India, the kings who patronised musicians in their courts and temples lost their power and wealth and could not continue doing so. The nadaswaram players and the devadasis suffered directly because of this.

Many of the devadasis were forced into prostitution. Overzealous reformists who did not understand the devadasi system, and who believed that it was only a forced entrapment of women, banned the system instead of advocating measures to protect women’s rights within the system. The reformists failed to see that from as far back as the Vijayanagar Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries AD, devadasi women were held in high esteem. Domingo Paes, a 16th century Portuguese traveler, notes that these women were the only ones allowed to eat betel with the king, and that their streets had the best rows of houses. He also notes, however, that these women were of ‘loose character’, applying Western morality to a matrilineal system he could not comprehend. The reformists two centuries later made the same mistake, although in circumstances where the devadasis were worse off than they were earlier. As a consequence, art suffered, and that school of music and dance all but disappeared except for a handful of families, most notably the Veena Dhanammal clan, that held on to the tradition through the years.

The rise of the British in the bigger cities like Madras pushed many businessmen there. Some of these men became patrons of music. Carnatic music began moving out of the temples and courts and into the towns and cities. The English-educated Brahmin classes moved to these towns to serve the British. Even though they adopted the customs of the British, this middle class sought to find a way to keep in touch with what they thought were their traditions. Many of them forced musical learning on their children, a practice followed to this day. Brahmin musicians slowly began to move to the cities to seize these opportunities as teachers and performers. Madras grew in stature as the capital of Carnatic music. Mysore and Travancore, which still had fairly prosperous musician- composer rulers and a number of renowned court musicians, established themselves as secondary centres of music.

The modern concert format, of a performance in a hall on a stage was a direct result of this urbanisation of Carnatic music. The concert format, earlier made for courts and temples, adapted itself to the stage and the confines of a time-bound kutcheri. Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, a trailblazer in the first half of the 20th century, invented this format, sprinkling his concerts with a little bit of everything, making the kutcheri a space where artistic exploration takes place within the boundaries of entertainment for an audience. The audiences loved this format so much that it became the standard. Funnily, when modern musicians question this format or tamper with it, the same bogeyman – tradition – is used to criticise them.

While Brahmin musicians and their school of music were able to adapt to the ways of the city, and the requirements of kutcheri music, the nadaswaram players were not able to make this shift. Barring a few top musicians, they either remained in the temples they were attached to or took up other careers, playing the nadaswaram only as a means of keeping in touch with their roots. In Madras and the other bigger towns of South India, Brahmin audiences, Brahmin concert organisers and Brahmin musicians formed a clique from which the other castes began to feel left out.

It was in this milieu that the music season was born. The Music Academy’s December 1927 conference was the first of its sort. But the season as we know it, with multiple sabhas holding concerts and conferences at the same time, started in 1933 when the Indian Fine Arts Society entered the fray to host a competing conference. Sabhas, with December festivals of their own, mushroomed over the years, their rate of growth remaining robust even through the recession to make the season what it is today. Even though the music season is the largest of its kind in the world, the size hides the fact that, by and large, the same musicians perform at every sabha. Apart from the big names, the rest draw partisan crowds. The audience at some of the morning performances, especially at the smaller sabhas, is embarrassing. Each sabha has its own loyal audience, but the floating audience is usually the same at all the sabhas.

More importantly, the season is very exclusionary. Brahmins make up only about five per cent of society, but they form most of the musicians and most of the audience for the concerts. Nadaswaram players, who were still revered by co-musicians around the 1920s and ’30s for their improvisational brilliance, are now relegated to mangala isai — auspicious music to mark the beginning or end of a concert series at a sabha. The sheen or standard of their music has not dropped an ounce. Musicians from the devadasi tradition are a rarity. They are seen as exotic, and often patronisingly celebrated. The season is big, the season is mad, but the season is a unique product of subtle social exclusion.

Carnatic music is no longer the music of the people because, at some point, it excluded everyone but certain kinds of people, an inheritance of a long-winded history of class, caste and tradition mixed in with the purity of music. The variety in the art form has reduced, and a sameness has set in amongst musicians. For centuries, Carnatic music was a contemporary art drawing from a wealth of traditions. If it has to continue to be so, it must inspire people of different backgrounds. It needs rule-benders, it needs mad scientists, it needs people who question its foundations.

Sehwag: The Madurai Mani Iyer of Test Match batting

Ramachandra Guha wrote recently on being reminded of Sehwag's batting while listening to Bismillah Khan. Khan-saab, he wrote, was "both joyful and guileless". This assertion struck a chord, for I've always associated Sehwag's batting with another Indian classical musician, Madurai Mani Iyer, a Carnatic vocalist from the first half of the last century, who could be described in those very terms -- joyful and guileless. 

Mani Iyer's music makes you sway from side-to-side, it makes you tap your feet, it puts a ear-to-ear smile on your face. His music is audacious, it is irresistible, and when he gets going on those long swarakalpana flights, it seems almost unstoppable. He can be funny, he can be cheeky. He can make your heart skip a beat with the most pure phrase, and he can make you raise your eyebrows with something unexpectedly unorthodox. His music was for the laymen, his music was for the experts. 

Sounds like Sehwag?

But the more I listened to Mani Iyer, the more I discovered how much was hidden below the surface. It was joyful, yes, but it possessed depth that isn't usually associated with joy. It was weighty, and again, that word doesn't always go with joy. It was more scholarly than I had initially imagined, and somehow, the scholarliness rested lightly on its shoulders. It was pristine classical music, steeped in tradition, soaked in history. That sort of music is supposed to be obscure, inward, pondering. Not joyful, right? 

The cliche about Test Match batting is similar. It takes years of training, years of experience. It is supposed to be a slow grind. Tantric concentration is key. Physical and mental stamina must work together with technique and judgment to erect monuments. It is supposed to bring joy to those who know what goes into it and be inscrutable to the others. 

Sehwag inverts that idea of Test Match batting, like Mani Iyer did with classical music. His batting is carefree; he often sings while batting. His batting is intuitive, it is impulsive. His batting isn't about control, it is about letting go. His batting is visceral, it is overpowering. Still, Sehwag is first a Test Match batsman, because, like Mani Iyer's music, his batting has pathos, his batting has weight, his batting is scholarly. 

Sehwag's technique is underrated. While his feet don't move as much as the purists would like, his balance is faultless. In economy of movement, Sehwag has almost no parallel in his generation. Even so, he gets into great positions, he gets his weight behind the ball, he generates power, his timing is almost otherworldly. When he is batting at his best, there is not one extra flourish, not one unnecessary movement. If that isn't great technique, I don't know what technique is. 

Madurai Mani Iyer's swara-improvisation was marked for its "sarvalaghu" -- a way in which he spontaneously built patterns and structures of notes, almost unendingly, one after another, like torrential downpour. Nothing was planned, nothing was pre-set. And following that intuitive path of "sarvalaghu", Mani Iyer created edifices of notes and patterns, on the spot, that people struggled to create with meticulous planning. It sounds easy when you hear it -- he just sings what comes to him at that point in time -- but it is more execute to do than just reproduce plans. It needs an innate grasp of a dimension of the art that is most elusive -- its philosophy. Mani Iyer grasped that, just like Sehwag understands the philosophy of Test Match batting. That insight is what makes their art joyful.

Serious health issues deprived Mani Iyer of his voice at the peak of his powers. He came back, singing at a lower pitch, now more a senior statesman than a young maverick. He brought joy every kind of listener performing, literally, until the day he died. 

I hope Sehwag comes back to Test cricket, perhaps settling for a lower, more comfortable pitch, to delight us with his most unbridled brand of batting for some more years. 

Train House

"Park your car in that corner, you won't be able to take it inside the street," the old lady said, hauling a mridangam from the back seat onto her shoulders. I parked the car, picked up the other mridangam, the heavier one, and followed her onto the street. With a sprightly gait that belied her age - she was seventy-two - and unmindful of the weight of the mridangam on her shoulder, she turned into the most invisible of gullies that led to this sprawling network of narrower gullies.

"They really should fix that streetlight," she said, pointing to this dark pole. It was eight-thirty in the evening, and it was too dark to even tell if there was supposed to be a light on that pole. Then she realised, "Oh, there's no power!"

She shined a torch from her phone, and took a right turn into an even narrower gap between two buildings only wide enough to admit a small motorcycle - even a malnourished Royal Enfield wouldn't make the cut. The buildings on that street were locked in a tight embrace, covering every inch of space, almost growing into one another, sharing walls, terraces, balconies and doors. Compound walls were forgotten as a concept, breathing space was given a go by, and the view from any window was only another one. Even in near darkness, I could sense that I had stepped into another age. I had to remind myself that I was still in Central Madras.

She stopped at a narrow iron gate leading to a long, tapering, snaking corridor lit by two tired bulbs and lined by three worn out motorcycles. "We have a small generator - I can use one light and one fan when the power is gone," she said. At the end of the corridor was a dull blue door that had surely seen happier times. When she opened that door, a new world unfolded behind it. I didn't realise that there was so much space behind that iron gate. Her torch light revealed more iron gates next to the one we entered, and I wondered if all of them hid worlds like this.

"I used to live closer to the tank, but the owner wanted the house back for his daughter's family," she said, "But this is not too far from the tank. I walk down, sometimes, but I'm growing a little old, no? I am looking for a house closer to the tank, though." I smiled. Civilisations grew around water bodies, I had read in my history classes, but I couldn't believe that proximity to a tank was still a prime consideration for choosing where one lived.

On the ground floor was another blue door, of the same construction as the one outside, and the indistinct hum of a Tamil serial - that mix of pounding background music and thundering melodrama - floated from behind it. I thought I heard a child scream, but that might have also been the serial.

In the corner of the corridor was a closeted flight of stairs that had been standing for half a century at least. I didn't ask her how old the building was, but the stone stairs had a particular kind of construction that suggested that era. "Thank you so much for coming. You see how difficult it would have been for me with two mridangams up these stairs." The stairs were steep, and the mridangam I was carrying was boring into my shoulder. If the walk were a little longer, I might have needed a little break. "You're carrying the big one," she said, "I can't even lift that anymore. It's that heavy. But that naadam..."

We reached a landing that was almost cruelly taken over by a large and incongruous asbestos door. She unlatched it, and led me into what used to be the landing - it had a tap in one corner, a chair and two pairs of slippers on a tiny wooden shelf - now converted into her sit-out. She kept up the chatter, as she fumbled through her handbag for the keys to the inside door.  Her nephew, a well-known mridangam player himself, lived in the next street, she said. The neighbours here kept to themselves, she hardly knew who they were, she complained. "They don't even come and talk, you know," she moaned. She still gave me a fairly detailed biography of the family living in the house watching the Tamil serial.

The inside door said, "Mridangam and vocal classes" in a scribbly Tamil handwriting. No one could see this board when the asbestos door was shut. I wondered if that door was a new addition.

She found the key, finally, and opened the door and led me into a room that was not much wider than the door itself. On one side of the room was a wooden bench with two pillows on it. The other side of the room was a thin shelf that held a bewildering assortment of things. She put her mridangam on the bench, and I followed her. There were two more mridangams in that room, both standing proudly on their thoppis. I walked up to one and struck it. "Tom!" it rang across the house. I was quietly proud that even though I hadn't played one in three years, I could still get a clear tom out of it.

The narrow room ended in another door, beyond which there was a columnar kitchen, about two-thirds the length of the first room. "That's about the entire house," she said, proudly, "The first room is where I sleep and take mridangam classes. This is the kitchen. And there," she said, pointing to another hidden door on the right side of the kitchen, "Is a bathroom." The entire house was built like two coaches of a train with a toilet and bathroom in the vestibule.

A thought struck me - it would be nice to disappear into a house like this, in a gully like this for a few months. It was hidden away from the madness of mainstream Madras, but it was still right there, in the centre of it all.

"Sit down," she said, "I'll make coffee."
I had to go back to a friend's concert, I protested. I'll come back another day, definitely, I promised. "It will take me five minutes to make you the coffee," she insisted.
My friend would be most upset if I missed her concert, I said. Another day, one-hundred percent, I assured her.
"At least have some kali," she said, "Today is a special day for Nataraja. You know that, no?" My grandmother had mentioned something in the morning, and so, guiltlessly, I nodded. She hurriedly put some kali on a steel plate and handed it to me. Suddenly, she said excitedly, "Oh wait. I wanted to show you. I have Anna's photo here on the wall." I looked. It was her much more famous older brother, and it was the photograph most widely released to the press. "A very nice photo. He looks so happy!" She attended almost every one of his concerts in Madras, "I am not able to travel too far these days. You know, Anna plays in places like Madipakkam and Annanagar... Then I can't come. But otherwise, I come, somehow or the other." And she always sat in the front row, and enthusiastically kept taalam for the stage.

Next to her brother's, was her own photograph. She was with our dark-glassed leader in it, receiving an award. "Kalaimamani," she said, as I finished my kali and handed the plate to her, and added "I got that years ago. You can wash your hands in that sink," like the two were a part of the same thought. I looked closely at the photo. She did look younger, and so did our leader. I had heard strange things about that particular award, about when, why and to whom it was given, but she didn't look like she could pull any strings.

There was another photo next to it, a still from a popular Tamil film. I remembered that scene well - a bunch of mamis reinterpreting a popular Hindi song Carnatic style at the behest of a man dressed as a mami. There she was in that still, in the left-hand corner, playing the mridangam. I remember being amazed by the fact that they had actually found a mami to play the mridangam.

I smiled, as I bid her goodnight and walked out the door, but I couldn't help wondering, given her talent, if her life would have been different as a man.

Ideas for a Carnatic Music Bar

I was at Zaras last night with some friends, sitting at the absolute edge of a table of nine people. I didn't hear a word of the conversation at the table. I was distracted by a little thought-breakthrough, an idea that took over my mind last evening, whose clouds will not leave for a while - not a full-blown cyclone, no, but a refreshing thunderstorm. But this post is not about that thought-breakthrough. I just worked it in to make myself sound posh. It is about another idea that intensified when I couldn't hear the conversation over the DJ-din last night.

Music at Zaras, and most other decent pub/bar/lounge-types in Madras, suffers from three issues. First, it's homogenous. It's the same kind of music everywhere. If you don't like that particular kind of music, you're stuck, you have no option (of course, there's Queens Bar in T.Nagar that plays SS Music, but those are exceptions). Second, it is usually too loud, yet not of danceable variety. So, you cannot talk, and you cannot dance. Which means you end up staring at each other with a rather silly expression on your face for most of the evening. Third, the music simply sucks. Last night, at Zaras, they were playing The Offspring. For Lord Kapaleeshwarar's sake, The Offspring! I count buying that cassette with Pretty Fly (For a white guy) in eighth standard amongst the most embarrassing moments of my life. Sheesh, Offspring!


So, I told my friend, a fellow Carnatic musician sitting next to me, "Dude, we should start a bar that plays Thodi raagam." He demonstrated an exaggerated Thodi, and I said, "Yes. Exactly."

Here are some preliminary thoughts:

1. Music: The music will be hardcore Carnatic - you are likely to hear Punnagavarali or Asaveri over  Kurai onrum illai. There will be no songs in Marathi. There will be no Meera Bhajans in badly pronounced Hin-dee. We will play English Note, don't worry.

Of course, lots of Thodi will figure.

The evening will typically begin with some KV Narayanaswamy, and over the course of the night, it will progress through Brindamma's wailing padams, Mali's broken spurts of beauty, and S. Balachander's overwhelming raagamalika taanams. And then, after the waiter asks you for the last order and makes the lights a little brighter, and you're in that phase when you get up and realise you're drunker than you thought you were, we wind-down with MD Ramanathan's baritone that seems to emanate from the centre of the earth. It will give you a sense of balance and purpose.

There will be regular occasions, like November Nadaswaram Nights (ideally live, open-air, late night), February Fusion Week (we have to attract youngsters also), Mridangam Mondays (featuring extended tani avartanams where you will get free drinks for putting correct taalam), Tambura Tuesdays (Where you drink to the drone that somehow signifies the omkara, that primordial sound that contains a  universe. Yes, yes. We have philosophical pretensions also.), Flute Fridays (cocktails will be served in a large flute the size of the table - you can put straws in each hole and drink), Violin Wednesdays (where if you tune a dummy violin correctly, you get extra sundal), and the occasional Seshagopalan Saturday or Sanjay Sunday. Cheesy things like playing music by musicians called Krishna or Krishnan or Krishnamurthy on Christmas will be encouraged. Occasionally, like the Music Academy, the bar will feature a Hindustani night (and the mama who comes there every week will identify every raga as Mishra-Maand) or a Ghazal night (which will be popular amongst those mamis who find Hariharan cute and his voice mellifluous, and amongst posh Sowcarpet residents and the Annanagar North Indians.)

For the sake of inclusiveness, themes like "Raga-based songs of Maestro Ilayaraaja" and "Golden Melodies of AR Rahman" will appear once a year.

The sound system will be uniformly bad, the recording quality worse.

2. Decor: The walls will be plastered with portraits of "doyens" of "yesteryears" who rendered "yeoman service" to Carnatic music, with appropriate flower garlands, incense sticks and a solitary, small, red zero-watt bulb. Drinks will be served in steel tumblers with davaras. Plates will look like kanjiras, spoons like morsings, straws like flutes (with fake holes, of course), pitchers like ghatams. Just so that the electronic tambura doesn't feel left out, one will be left on each table for no reason. You can irritate everyone at your table by constantly changing sruti. If they tell you off, tell them you're playing jazz.

3. Decorum: Decorum without rum is mere deco. Therefore, the worse you behave, the better the ambience is. You will be expected to let out an occasional "Mtch-mtch," or a "Tut-tut-tut-tut..." or a "Bhale" or a "Sabhaas". You are expected to noisily put taalam. You are expected to bring along a small raga book for ready reference.

If you wear shoes, you will be asked to remove them at the entrance (take that, Zaras!), if you wear a veshti, you will get extra ribbon pakoda, if your shirt is un-ironed and nondescript, you will get the title of Rasikar Vendhar along with some coconuts, bananas, a dilapidated orange, two suspect apples, a few betel leaves of no use to man or beast, two packets of pak, a shimmering ponnaadai that no human being can publicly wear, a citation and a purse of Rs. 101.

Men and women will be made to sit in separate enclosures (oh wait, they already do this at Bikes and Barrels).  Then we won't do this, we don't want to copy. Like Kamal Hassan, we will be different.

4. Food and Beverage: While all the regular items will make an appearance, there will be some raga-based cocktails. The Gandharam Gargle is a tribute to Thodi's ga - its taste will be ambiguous yet heavy, and it will taste differently when drunk from different parts of the glass. A vodka-and-red-bull-based cocktail is planned for Kadanakuthoohalam's jumpiness. Prussian Blue, based on Neelambari's lullaby will lull you into comforting slumber. Piping hot filter coffee with a dash of brandy will be available.

As a tribute to the local, Vorion 6000 beer will be given prime importance.

Keera vadai, samosa, ribbon pakoda etc. will form the side eats. Special sundal during navaratri. Pongal and chakkarapongal during pongal. Adirasam, murukku and mixture from Suswaad, T. Nagar, throughout the year.

5. Karaoke Night: Once a fortnight, there will be a Carnatic karaoke with live mridangam and violin. They will play the raga and song of your choice, which you will choose from an unmemorable yellow and pink printed file, to which you will be required to do elaborate neraval and swaram. Sometimes, there will be a Royal Challenger RTP Challenge where each table nominates one person, and the pallavi goes around the bar in sequence. Tables will be eliminated if they muff up their round. The eduppus and the ragams get tougher as each round progresses.


More ideas are welcome. This is a work-in-progress.
***

(I wish to acknowledge the occasional inebriated inputs from one Shri. Aditya Prakash (Los Angeles).)

Her Obviousness - Part IV

Chandni Kedar floats around the terrace, the melody forms a part of the atmosphere, its phrases, the pulse of the teentaal bandish I picked up from that recording rings in the air.

My music isn't deep, ever. Even when I ponder, like I often do, I only ponder the notes, only ponder the glides, the connections, the phrases of the raag. I read of music and its higher purposes in many books; for me, music is what it is, my purpose is the raag, my contemplation is the ornateness of the notes that make it up. I wonder if my music lacks pathos as a result. I have a feel for music, I know; my haphazard training has meant that it has developed primarily through feel and not through mechanised training. I wonder if I should, for instance, contemplate the moonlight as I play Chandni Kedar, make the listener feel its softness through the music. But then, if I just meditate on the raag, shouldn't its natural construction emit the feel it is supposed to?

It's not like I haven't tried. I meditated on a radiant light while I played Deepak, but the raag suffered. I tried playing like the rain when I played Megh Malhar, but I realised that I could play many raags like the pitter-patter of the rain or the pounding of a thunderstorm. I wonder if these purposes are too obvious. What is the purpose, say, of Bhairavi? Or Gaud Saarang?

Sundari keeps beat with the drut teentaal in the Carnatic style. In some ways, I like it, it gives me a framework to play within. But it distracts me. I finish the drut with two long rounds of improvisation, and end with a complicated set-piece of threes. Even Gopal, hard as he is to impress with music, seems suitably soothed.

I am out of practice, though, I can feel it. Some phrases don't come out the way I want them to, some don't have the right feel, others don't pack the right punch. The stresses are a little off and the clarity of expression doesn't match the clarity of my thought. In improvisational music, what you imagine and what you execute must be a part of the same transaction; you must not be able to tell one from another, each must flow from the other, each must push the other. If your physical faculties struggle to keep up with your imagination, cyclically, your imagination suffers. Today, after this downward-spiraling internal tussle between idea and expression, I know that I not only have a long way to go, I also have to re-traverse the path I have un-traversed in the last month.

If you ask me why I haven't played the sarod for a month, I won't be able to give you a satisfactory answer. I haven't been all that busy, I admit - I am at home on most days by seven, on some days, even earlier. But I've spent my evenings vegetating on obscure sites on the internet, solving crossword puzzles, reading conflicting opinions on socio-economic-political issues (often ones that have no relevance to my existence - like the healthcare systems in the United States), going through blogs and profiles of women I will never meet, watching videos of cute babies, virtuoso musicians, mimicry artistes, ridiculous Sandalwood song-and-dance routines. I have spent them getting lost amongst cheap plots in cheap novels of espionage, intrigue, thrill, women of otherworldly allure, popular science, popularly wrong or popularly misleading science, ingenious methods of mass destruction, imagined motives, imagined communities, imagined realities.

Somewhere, it begins with a laziness to pick up the instrument and sit down with it. This laziness slowly transforms itself into guilt, and every evening, when I come back, a voice inside my head tells me to play, and I plead with the voice for some time to let my mind calm down after work. Before I know it, time evaporates from under my nose, I droop off, and wake up the next morning. My mind turns numb to the pricking of this guilt in a few days, and soon, the musiclessness becomes a part of my routine.

The sarod, unlike some other instruments, requires a proper sit-down session - it needs space, physically and mentally, it needs time, it needs a single-minded devotion. I told myself, over the last month, that my job did not give me this space, and that my music would, naturally, erode and die. How easy it is to lie to yourself.

All that was until I encountered Viayat Khan's Chandni Kedar recording, Live at the Taj, the cover says, accompanied by his brother, Imrat Khan on the surbahar, an instrument with a hauntingly deep, low, bass timbre. Here was a Kedar with a quirk, the komal nishad that made fleeting appearances to liven up proceedings. And every time I played it, Sundari opened her twinkling eyes, and gave me a look of pleasant surprise.

"Too beautiful!" Sundari says, when I finish my rendition.
"Thanks."

There is a long silence, only punctuated by Gopal's incessant fiddling with his phone. Avantika sips her glass of water poignantly, and I suspect it might not just be water.
"Who is your teacher?" she asks.

Avantika laughs, "Tell her," and turns to Sundari, "This is his favourite story."

I am flushed, it is my favourite story. It is the only thing I'm proud of.

"No one taught me," I say. "One of my uncles," the one who made that prophecy, "Is a collector of musical instruments. During a trip to Benaras, he discovered this sarod made in a style that was abandoned a hundred years ago for the newer model. He wanted to buy it, but the guy who owned the shop refused to sell it. He offered to make one in the same model, though. My uncle brought that replica back, proudly, and showed it off to everyone. I just picked it up, and started fiddling around... I was around eleven then, you know. In six months, I began playing some small tunes - film songs and stuff, you know, Didi tera dewar...
"No one taught the sarod in Mangalore - that's where I grew up - so, I learnt from another uncle, who is a vocalist, mimicking whatever he did on the voice on the instrument."

"His technique is almost blasphemous sometimes," Avantika juts in, "It shocks sarod players' consciences. I've seen that look on some of their faces, it's too funny!"

"That is super-cool!" Sundari says, "As in, you learnt all the instrument techniques from scratch? All by yourself?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
"Impressive, man."
Gopal says, suddenly jumping into the conversation from the corner of the terrace, "This Uji only looks like an unimpressive bumpkin. He's actually a dude. In other words, he's the opposite of what I am!"
This is Gopal fishing for a compliment. I don't react, but Sundari falls for the bait, "What are you saying? You're really a stud, man! You're doing a cool fellowship, you write so well, you're on TV all the time..."
"I live in a little shit-hole in T.Nagar with an aged uncle. I have no job, I have nothing I want to do." He is taking this too far now, but Sundari laughs this bait off.

"Are you guys drinking vodka?" I ask.
Avantika laughs, "Yeah. Want some?"
I walk into the apartment, and holler from inside, "Yo! What are you guys drinking this with?" I know that my fridge has no soft-drinks or juices.
"Cold water!" Gopal says. That is disgusting, vodka with cold water. I fish out some whiskey from my cupboard and fix myself a drink with ice.

Just then, I get an SMS, from Uma, "Awake?"

I call her back immediately, "Hello!"
"What's up!" she exclaims in a way in which only she can, mixing the excitement with a slice of restraint.
"I'm just drinking whiskey! What's up with you?" I ask, sipping my whiskey. It is a single-malt, bootlegged from Pondicherry, and goes down my parched gullet eagerly.
"Coming for the wedding, no?" Uma asks, sounding slightly tense.
"Of course! Why are you even asking?"
"Generally..." She pauses. I sense that she wants to tell me something else, but doesn't know how to. I wait for a few seconds for her to say something, before changing the topic to my eccentric guests, and the mini-performance on the terrace.
"The girl must be cute!" she says.
"Gopal has his eyes on her," I say, dryly. Then I add, remembering suddenly, "You remember that party where I first met you?"
"Vaguely!" she says, sounding vague.
"Yeah. So, I met this girl there. I even spoke to her for some time. But she doesn't remember me at all!"
"You reminded her of your conversation?" she asks, matter-of-factly.
"No! But we spoke for quite a while. And I remember her so clearly."
"Uji, did you say, 'Hey! Remember, we met at that party?'" she says, imitating my voice alarmingly accurately.
"No, man!" It is a ridiculous question to ask, I'm sure.
"Well, then how do you know she doesn't remember you?"
"She spoke about that party, she spoke about seeing Gopal there. Hell, she remembers you!"
"Hmmm," Uma says.

There is another pause, again awkward, where I sense Uma wants to tell me why she called, but she isn't able to bring herself to. We speak of other things. We discuss each other's jobs for a while. She writes on films and drama for a living, and she tells me that she has this idea for a book of famous stills from Indian cinema, with some comments on each of them. Her choices veer between the cliched and the eccentric. She has the immortal beam of light from Kaagaz ke phool in mind, she also thinks of the last freeze-frame in Charulata. From Sholay, she tells me of a shot of Jaya on the balcony - I don't recollect it, but she assures me it is worth it. She wants to include a couple of shots from an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie I haven't seen. "Gopal was named after him, you know?" she says. We discuss this and more for a bit, until I get through many more sips of my whiskey, before I get impatient, "Listen, Uma. You didn't call me for this chit-chat, did you? Because I have to go back to my guests at some point."

Uma laughs nervously, and says, "Ok. Listen. I am getting really nervous about this wedding."
"Next Sunday, right? Isn't it a little late to be getting nervous?"
"Better now than after, I think."
I laugh, and ask, "What are you nervous about?"
"Random things, you know. I've been seeing Arun for a year-and-a-half, yes? But living with him is a completely different deal, no?" Before I can react, she continues, "I mean, who knows what I'll discover about him, what habits will irritate me... I mean, it's all okay to love someone, and I love him, okay? But I'm getting a little tense about the permanence attached to this wedding."
"Why don't you live with him for a while before marrying him?"
"Yeah, right."
"I'm serious."
"Dude, we still live in India, as much as we try denying it."
It is time now for falsely confident advice. "Hey, it'll all be perfectly fine! I mean, he's a great guy, you love him... Yeah, you'll probably find some things about him that you don't like - and you'll never discover these things unless you live with him. But those are just small compromises, right?" I don't know Arun too well at all. I have this theory, that you can never know a person unless you drop societal niceties when you talk to them, and I've met him only twice, in very civil, very social circumstances. But this is cliched advice, I don't need to know Arun, or even Uma, to give this speech. Like the horoscope advice in the papers, "Control your temper to avoid confrontation", it is applicable to any person, of any persuasion, on any day of the week.

She reacts with silence. I drone on along the same lines, telling her of stability, long-term vision, and lasting relationships. I morph into a nondescript self-help book.

She says, suddenly, "Can I come and stay with you for a couple of days?" She pauses, and continues, "I just need to get away from this world for a bit."
I am taken aback, but I don't let it get in the way of my response, "Yeah, sure!"
"Thanks!" she says, sounding relieved. And she adds again, "Listen, no Gopal for those two or three days, please?"
I almost saw that request coming.

Some time ago, Uma came to Chennai for a weekend. She wanted to get away from her work, her extended family introducing her to various eligible boys, and her boss who was developing a dangerous crush on her. I didn't live in Chennai then, I would move there a couple of weeks later. She stayed with Gopal at his uncle's house. Conveniently, Gopal's uncle was out of town.

I have heard this story from both parties, and my version is a little muddled.

Uma told me on the phone, the evening I told her that I had met Gopal after years, "It was too much fun, you know. We walked all around Madras, going on aimless walks on the beach, around Georgetown, in the bylanes around the Central station. We came back home, drank lots, watched art movies, read poetry to each other... It was a lot of fun. It felt like we had finally gotten over the fact that we had broken up."

Gopal, on the other hand, said, "So, she came one afternoon. I picked her up from the station and showed her around the by-lanes. We saw all sorts of stuff, we bought strange books off pavements. Then I took her to Georgetown, bought her Burmese noodles. We went to the beach, we drank, we watched movies. It was highly romantic.
"We did some hanky-panky at night," he added, "And she promised to come back next weekend. But she didn't. And she didn't come on the weekend after either. Then, one day, out of the blue, she called me and said she was seeing this other guy. Some fucker called Arun. He's a lawyer, apparently. Sounds like a bloody bore, no?"

Uma had a different version of Arun, "You remember this guy I told you about? The cute, fair, tall, slightly plump guy..." I remembered her mentioning some such. "So, I'm seeing him now."

Gopal said, "He has a fascination for cars, apparently. So hackneyed, man. I'm sure he's a James Bond fan. She deserves better, dude, don't you think?"

"He's so refreshing," Uma told me, a month into the relationship, "Never tired, never irritated, never complains of work, or the pressures of the world. He's a big-shot in his law firm, but it doesn't affect what he's like outside. Such a breath of fresh air, to be around him in the evenings!"

"They seem very settled, man," Gopal said, resignedly, "I'm not saying she should dump him for me, but she really should find someone better. Anyway, thank god she never found out that I was getting some relapse of feelings." Uma found out, soon enough. She ignored Gopal completely for a while - and that was the least she could do for his well-being, give him that little distance from her - and Gopal eventually stopped talking of Arun and his mainstream-ness.

It was in this context that I re-connected with Gopal - he saw me as a window to Uma, and he tried, in convoluted ways, to gaze through it. Sadly for him, she closed the curtains firmly. In this second-coming, I saw a Gopal who was a faint shadow of his earlier self. He got drunk and sobbed about his failed party, he withdrew into his uncle's house and buried himself in writing some fiction. He showed me a few chapters of the book, they were stultifying beyond belief. I don't know if you can describe it as fiction at all, much of the book seemed like a pompous autobiography masquerading as a novel about a young student leader getting disillusioned by a nasty system. The novel was unbecoming of someone of Gopal's intelligence - it was biased, the characters were dreadfully two-dimensional. I thought of Gopal's understanding of people as so perceptive and nuanced, that I couldn't digest this drivel. I wondered if his circumstances had forced him to paint his characters in such clearly black-or-white shades. The writing was boring, the character arcs were predictable, he segued too often into political sermons and morality tales. In short, it was the opposite of unputdownable - unpickupable.

I don't know how the novel ended, because he never finished it. He found the strength, somehow, to be objective about the book, and gave up.

What intrigued me the most during this time, was that Gopal managed to maintain his regular media appearances. He remained a much-wanted talking head on TV and wrote columns for newspapers and magazines. His opinions still leaned as leftwards as they had when he was in the party, but because be fashioned himself as an academic, and not a politician, they were seen as having more credibility.

Gopal and I became each other's only close friends in the last year or so, walking around the bazaar, drinking tea and whiskey, riding around the city on his bike, and making whimsical trips to places around Chennai. Gopal has vast interlocking networks of politicians, academics, writers and dramatists, who hang out in my balcony often. He uses my apartment as his lounge, and I don't complain; I don't have too many visitors otherwise.

I don't know how I will handle Uma's request. It will be impossible to tell Gopal that Uma will come, but she doesn't want to meet him. If I tell him that I'm going out of town, and he finds out I'm here, he'll get very upset. He has a house key, he might even try taking advantage of an empty apartment.

But then, Uma will come only on that condition. "Yeah, sure. No Gopal for those days," I concede.
Uma says, "Great! See you next weekend?"
It is Thursday today, "You mean day after tomorrow?"
She checks something and says, "Oh yeah! Yes, day after tomorrow."
"Done."

I walk back to the terrace to find my three guests locked in what looks like a fierce debate, but on closer inspection, turns out to be merely a dissection of Gopal's rebel-plan for Sundari. "Mussolini had a greater respect for human liberties than your parents!" Gopal says. She seems a little uncomfortable with the statement, but says nothing.

Gopal then plans a weekend getaway, to Bangalore, and lays it down like it is a military operation, "Tell your parents that you're going with a couple of friends, and come. Even if they refuse, just leave. Drastic action is the order of the day."
"Which weekend are you planning this?" I ask, hopefully.
"Tomorrow night," he says.
"You're also going?" I ask, with more hope in my voice.
"I am." I am relieved now. Uma can come without fearing of bumping into Gopal.

"Come along?" Sundari asks me, with those pleading eyebrows of hers - in two words, turning my solution into a whole new conundrum.
***

Have had a very tough two weeks. Too many night show movies, concerts, partying, a trip to Bangalore and work. And, I'm off westward today - for the first time in my life, beyond Jaisalmer. Back in two weeks to tell you more of this story.

Her Obviousness - Part III

Continued from here. All parts together, are here.
***

"How is Uma?" Gopal asks. He asks me this question every time we talk of her. In the time when I was Gopal's understudy-cum-manfriday, I developed an unclassifiable love for Uma. She was a whole five years older than me, she had a job, and lived in a world that I barely comprehended at the time. It strikes me that she was, then, as old as I am now. Through the eyes of a eighteen-year-old, twenty-four did seem like an eternity away - it is that natural feeling, isn't it, where ages seem older until you actually live them.

Uma accompanied Gopal to most of his rallies and meetings, and because he spent most of his time hobnobbing with the bigwigs, we spent most of our time talking to each other. There was always an aura of melancholy about Uma; but it was an assured melancholy, as if she was very happy being like that. She was social, sometimes, too social for her own good, had multifarious friends in multifarious surroundings, but she never fit right into anything - there was a removedness about her involvement. Even when she spoke to me, in conversations that were often preciously private, she never looked at me - seemed to be addressing a third person who invisibly sat in front of her eyes.

We didn't use Gopal as a crutch to hang out together for much longer, we met independently of him. Afternoons, when I rarely had class, were spent together inhaling book-dust in Bangalore's cubbyhole bookshops, and drinking diluted beer in its gloomy pubs listening to lazy music. If you ask me what we spoke about on those afternoons, I will struggle to tell you. We spoke about books, I think, we loved very similar authors - the Americans, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, and the Indians - Ghosh, Seth and Narayan. Often, we walked down MG Road, when it still had its boulevard, slightly buzzed, slightly melancholic, completely silent and absolutely content being in each other's company.

She was from a family that heard a lot of Carnatic music, though she didn't know much, and I remember conversations about Hindustani and Carnatic music. We both loved O.P. Nayyar, and despised A.R.Rahman, and went on long drives in her car, listening to and singing along with old Hindi music cassettes.
"How do you know all these songs?" she asked me, once.
"My father," I said, "Was a fanatic." My family didn't like my father's obsession, because they came from a family of Hindustani vocalists, all descendants of my great-grandfather, who was a close friend of the legendary Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, in addition to being a respected doctor. My grand-uncle had an indelible impact on Yakshagana music, being one of the pioneers who gave it a Hindustani music twist. Uma's grandfather was a leading concert-organiser of his time, and her family, who viewed me as an adorable kid who was, perhaps, in love with her, organised two concerts for me that year.

The end of Gopal's relationship with her came quite inevitably - he was too busy to spend enough time with her, and she was too irritated with his unpredictable schedule and his increasing involvement with the Party. "The Party is his only girlfriend," she said, unwittingly echoing what Bhagat Singh once said about independence being his bride. "If I have a boyfriend, I should be able to talk to him at least once in two days, no?" she asked, tiredly.

I was in a strange position, being a close confidante of both parties. "She's too clingy, man," Gopal said, "I mean, if I go to a village with no network for a couple of days, I'm dead." I wanted to tell him that landline phones were everywhere, and that he could call her once in a while, wherever he was, but, unlike now, our relationship wasn't one of equals then.

This break-up upset me a little more than I thought it would. Gopal and Uma seemed so naturally to fit into each other's lives. Uma's modelling gave her an aura of being stupid, but she wasn't. Sometimes, her intelligence and depth of emotion dwarfed Gopal's. Gopal came across as someone who was all about impact, but even he had an inherent intellectualism about him. He was someone who found justifications for his living, however indefensible his ways were, and went to great lengths, reading, thinking and writing about these theories. She saw through him, and I knew he liked that.

They understood each other in quiet ways that I haven't seen much in couples. They spoke very little, and communicated without any fuss. They never had a misunderstanding that I knew of - and being a close friend of both of them, I knew a lot. The end came because they just drifted apart, they felt very little need for each other. They got each other so well that they never had a break-up conversation. One evening, they had a normal conversation in my presence at his apartment, and by the end of it, they knew it was time to break-up.

I begged Gopal many times to talk to her, and get back together with her. He said, "Your being upset with this is most bizarre. Both Uma and I think you're in love with her, and now when your coast is clear, you're getting upset about it. We are fine, we've moved on. I think you should too."

Uma said, "Uji, I sometimes think you were in love with Gopal and me as a concept, and not the two of us individually."
I disagreed, "No. I'm only in love with you, I'll admit that. But I have no chances whatsoever, I'll admit that also. But it will pass, I think. It is a question of finding someone else."
She laughed, "Then stop getting upset about this."
"But you guys were so perfect..."
"I was in that relationship, Uji," she said, with an air of finality, "Not you."

They kept in touch, I think, for some time, although I lost all contact with Gopal. Every now and then, I'd see her reply to an SMS with the her Gopal-expression, and walk away to a corner when she got a call, like she did when Gopal called. When he came back to Bangalore, for weekends, they would make plans to meet, and occasionally, these plans fructified. But their relationship faded away completely within six months, leaving behind hazy memories that are half-true, half-fantasy, and the satisfaction, Uma told me, of knowing someone as lovely as Gopal.

By the end of my second year in college, my life was so meshed with Uma's, that people presumed she was my girlfriend. In college, that made me a cool guy, I was Gopal's successor in every way. Amongst her friends, though, it made her highly uncomfortable. From the cosy comfort of a close friendship, I watched her draw harsh lines that just made us good friends, then friends, and eventually old-friends-who-say-hi-occasionally. "Oh, each time we meet, we pick up right where we left off, like we've always been that way," we say, to other people. Only we know how untrue that is.

Gopal never fails to ask me, "How is Uma?" every time we talk of her, like he has done just now. Initially, I doubted the genuineness of his question, but of late, I'm convinced that he is actually concerned. She never asks me about him, unless I bring him up in conversation.
"I spoke to her yesterday," I say, "She's getting a little tense about all the wedding planning."
"The wedding planning? Or getting married?"
"A bit of both, I think."

"Who next?" Sundari asks, excited by this conversation.
Gopal goes into a ponderous silence for a few seconds and declares, "There was this other girl, Mandavi..." Gopal stops, and I know why he does. He has confessed to me that this relationship lasted only for a few weeks, and that he is embarrassed about remembering precious little about it. "I don't even remember where we first kissed!" he told me once. He said, "I'm telling you what happened and how, so that the two of us can reconstruct it later."

I wonder if one can forget an entire relationship, however unserious it was.

"But that didn't last long," Gopal said, "Ended as abruptly as it started."

There is an awkward silence - everyone expects Gopal to say something more about Mandavi, but he doesn't, he has nothing to say.
Avantika breaks the silence with, "Anyone wants chai?" She will offer to make some now, but I don't want her chai, it lacks punch, it is too subtle for me.
"Let's walk down to the tea shop at the end of the road?" I ask, and everyone seems more enthusiastic.

Gopal empties the bowl of fruits on to his hand, distributes them amongst us, fairly and equally, in his communist manner, and leads us out of the doorway, down the stairs and through the front gate.

I live in T. Nagar, where South India buys bling sarees and davanis for bling weddings, in what used to be a quiet lane behind the immortal Pondy Bazaar. My mother told me, when I was a kid, that it was called Pondy Bazaar because most of the goods came from Pondicherry. Recently, a book put that theory to rest for me - the name came as a corruption of Soundara Pandy Bazaar, named after a certain Soundarapandian Nadar, whose statue proudly stood at one end of the bazaar.

On weekends, only the brave denizens of the neighbourhood venture out on foot, and only the foolish take their cars outside the safety of their apartment's minuscule parking lots. Pondy Bazaar is frighteningly crowded, and frighteningly popular. You cannot walk three feet without bumping into a bargain or overhearing one. You can buy anything for a little less than half the price he quotes for it, you can find spare parts for anything you own, you can find someone to repair every kind of machinery. In a year and a bit, Pondy Bazaar hasn't disappointed me even once.

But once the shutters fall down on the mega-shops, the gaudy, flashing neon lights rest for the day, their employees work their way into jam-packed buses to their suburbs, the roadside hawkers throw tarpaulin over their little shops, the area acquires a different glow. The roads are bathed in orange, from the hazy lights that dot the roadside, the pavements are taken over by small omelette and tea sellers, a few drunks walk to and from the local wine shop, families and shoppers gather at the eateries for dinner, the occasional bike speeds by, a few cars sail along the street. Strange city maintenance vehicles trundle along - the garbage trucks that make half-hearted attempts at cleaning the streets, another one that emits some spray that apparently de-mosquitoes the area, tow trucks that had a busy day making small money off parking violators, assorted cranes from frenetic construction sites make their way back to their nightly resting places.

We trudge down my street and take the right turn on to the Bazaar. Gopal and Sundari walk a little behind Avantika and me. They are engrossed in a conversation about some play she acted in last week. Gopal is giving her some kind of feedback, I gather.

Avantika says, "Pretty girl, no?" I nod. "I think there's something going on," she adds.
"You're meeting both of them for the first time, and you still want to gossip."
"I'm just speculating, pah!"

We congregate around the tea shop, an open air set-up made entirely of tyres, plastic drums and plywood. A young boy sits behind this plywood counter and takes orders, and doles out cigarettes and crunchies along with the tea. We get four teas for the four of us, and I help myself to a cigarette. Gopal gives me a look, and I say, "Dude, I told you, once a week. The habit's on its way out."

I take a strip of glossy paper kept on a plastic plate, ignite it in a small lamp kept for the purpose, and light my cigarette with it. I ask Sundari, "So, why are you being hidden from your parents?" Her non-recognition has made it very difficult for me to talk to her, and this question has taken some courage.

She giggles and says, "Long story, man."
Gopal butts in, "So, some guy was supposed to come and see her today, even though she made it very clear to her parents that she was not interested in this sort of thing."
"So," she continues, "We made a plan. I left home in the morning, and haven't gone back since... My parents know most of my friends, and they would have started looking by lunch time. But they don't know Gopal, so I'm hiding with him. I send them messages from STD booths telling them I'm alive, and that I'm only protesting."
Avantika laughs. I say, "This plan smacks of Gopal."
Sundari beams at him, "Yes. Gopal is planning a rebellion for me."
"That's a bit extreme, no?" I ask him, "Even with your background?"
"You don't know her parents, Uji," he says, "She can't leave the house after seven, unless she is at a concert or a performance."
"Or at a friend's house they approve of." she adds.
"Yeah. It's too oppressive... She's not a kid, right?"
"You know, they didn't even ask me before beginning this matrimony process. Suddenly, I find a guy's matrimony profile in my inbox, and when I ask my Appa, he coolly tells me that he has sent out my profile along with my email address to many eligible boys. I am checking my desktop for something, and there's a folder with my photos - in different poses, different clothes, singing, acting, dancing, at home, with my parents, with my brother, with cousins, grandparents. And, to top it all, a zip-file with all these photos in it! God knows which creep or his father has been checking me out.
"Two weeks ago, they met this aunty and uncle, who saw me act in a play and fell in love with me. So, their son, some boring engineering dude, with some boring engineering job, in some boring software company was supposed to turn up this evening to check me out."
"You decided you'd rather have Gopal check you out," I say.
She giggles again, "Yeah, why not! He's good-looking, and, from what I gather, rather smart also."

Gopal says, "You're the only one who thinks I'm good-looking."
He is lying. Uma always told me she thought Gopal was handsome. Hell, even I think he is handsome.
Gopal is interested in this girl, and he is making it uncharacteristically obvious to everyone.

"Okay, you're not a John Abraham with mass appeal," Sundari laughs, "But you have an appeal about you."
"Yeah. His mass appeals to some people," I say, punching Gopal on his tummy.
"I'm working on it, dude. Strict diets, walks around the neighbourhood... It's all happening."

"Tell me," Sundari says suddenly, "Don't you think this John Abraham looks like his face has been photoshopped on to the rest of his body? Or, like one of those photos you take with that cutout on which you add your face..."
We laugh, and she says, "I was watching him for an hour on Koffee with Karan this morning, and that is the only thought that came to my mind. I didn't even hear what he was saying." We laugh some more.

Avantika is the first to finish her tea, and she asks for another one. We finish slowly, and are happy with one. I stub out my half-finished cigarette. The fact that I don't enjoy it anymore is encouraging.
Trudging back to my house, Sundari walks with me. She asks, "Will you play for us when we go back?"
"I haven't played in a month, I've almost stopped, you know," I tell her. She looks a bit disappointed, so I add, "But I'll play." I make a theatrical look towards the skies, and declare, "I'll play this raag called Chandni Kedar?"
"Like the moonlight?" she asks.
"Yes," I say. I am such a fraud; the moonlight has little to do with my choice of raag, I have just spent the last week listening to a Vilayat Khan recording of it. I like listening to classical music recordings over weeks, they take time to seep in, they take time to get under your skin, possess you and push you to want to recreate the magic. The Chandni Kedar, a raag I never learnt formally, is nearly ripe now.
"I don't know much about Hindustani music," she says, "Although I can identify some raags. Is Chandni Kedar like Kedar? I think I can identify that..."
"Oh yeah, it is. The differences are very small," I say.

We are home, and I bring my sarod out to the terrace, along with my tanpura box. Once the drone begins, I start the arduous task of tuning an unused sarod. The instrument, like most, hates being neglected, and has to be coaxed back into civil behaviour. It takes a half an hour to get the twenty-three strings in shape, and fingers warmed up and ready to play. Avantika and Gopal don't have the patience, and have retreated back into the house, while Sundari watches me tune silently with no comment.

I look up at her, and say, "Ok, I'm ready." She nods, smiling, and shouts, "Gopal! He's ready." Gopal makes some noise from inside the house. She says, "Start, they'll come."

I start, plucking the sa string, and adding a layer of the raag on it with the sympathetic strings. I repeat, until I am sure of the sa. I begin adding notes to the sa now, the ri, the pa. Small phrases, a twang of the support strings, another small phrase, another twang. Then I let out a couple of phrases, very typical of the Kedars. She smiles, I play the phrases again, just to see that smile again. She imitates the curve of the phrase with her hand.

Gopal and Avantika join us in the terrace, with glasses of water in their hands. Sundari whispers to Gopal, "Raag Chandni Kedar." Gopal nods, cluelessly. Avantika says, "Hmmm," to a phrase I play.

The alaap continues, meandering in the lower registers, setting a platform for the raag. I am more unhurried than I usually am, a sign that the raag has made some inroads into my system. Sundari likes the two ma-s in succession, the phrase pa-ma-ma brings that smile to her face each time. I use it more often that I normally would.

She gets a message on her phone, she looks at it, smiles, turns to Gopal and smiles again. I noticed Gopal fiddling with his phone just a few seconds ago. This happens again, and again. I close my eyes, and concentrate on the raag, nothing else can soothe me now.
***

To continue.

De-familiarisation

I hadn't heard much about Ramesh Vinayagam till last evening - I only knew that he composed the music for Nala Damayanthi and was doing some research on gamakas in Carnatic music. I met him about the latter - an interview-article on his study is on the cards - at Ram's place, and the topic of conversation invariably turned to cricket.

Something about musicians from Madras makes them passionate cricketers or cricket fans - most Carnatic musicians worth their salt can reel off Test match statistics like the names of the 72-melakartas. I have a theory - that the temperament required for Carnatic music and Test cricket is similar. In both forms of art, the action unfolds layer-by-layer requiring patience, the thrill is latent, so latent that obviousness is derided upon, the subtleties miss untrained eyes and ears, and the excitement is in the pulse of the drama and not the spectacle of it.

When the meeting was ending, Ram said, "I am now going to ask Ramesh to perform my favourite trick... This is what I show him off with."

Ramesh smirked, and took out his cell phone. I wondered if he was going to do some kind of magic. He pressed some buttons, scrolled up and down a menu, until he zeroed in on something. The drone of a tambura emanated from the phone. He cleared his throat with a sa-pa, and I followed, unconsciously.

Now I was curious - what is this trick that involves a tambura drone?

He hummed a few phrases of a raga I didn't immediately identify, and launched into a Tamil song. The raga unfolded in the strangest of ways - my mind found both madhyamas, the sadharana gandhara, the chatusruti rishabha (rendered plainly), a nishada, a daivata... But the notes didn't define the raga, that was not it. It was one of those phrase-based ragas, and this had the most eclectic collection of phrases - a little like Kapi, a little like Keeravani, a bit of Simhendramadhyamam here, something else somewhere else, a flash of something that sounded like Neelambari even!

It was a beautiful song, a beautiful raga. But the word used was 'trick'. Was the raga the trick? Or would he do something with it? I wondered if he would change the tambura drone and show me how this was some raga I knew, but rendered in a different drone, it sounded so unfamiliar. I spent one verse trying to remove the drone from the music, and listening to the tune for familiarity. Nothing.

The verses came in the same frolicking pattern, in rhythmic cycles of three, still in that same raga, still bound by those phrasal boundaries, exploring little nooks within them.

Now I knew the trick was in the song itself. He wasn't going to do anything with it - he was already tricking me, somewhere, somehow.

In the last pallavi, a phrase of curious familiarity suddenly lodged itself in my head. A sa-da-pa-ma... I had heard this somewhere, definitely! I thought of the phrase just before it - ri-ga-ma-pa. Then it struck me, the ingeniousness of this trick, and the image of an Aquaguard flashed in my mind. I followed the tune until I could predict it - it was just a tune so removed from its familiar contours and Carnatic-ised that it had me fooled!

When he finished, he turned to me with the obvious question.
I said, "I think I've figured it out! It's that Western Classical tune - Fur elise?"

He smiled, impressed, "Yes. The raga is called Beethovenapriya!" And he went on to sing a few more phrases of the raga - a sketch of its geography.

A raga isn't a scale, you know, that is the English language's worst deformation of Carnatic music. A raga is something that has rules, yes, but the rules don't come from outside, they come from within it. Ask Janaranjani, Begada, Sahana - all ragas that seem like a random collection of swaras and phrases - they have a logic to them, a feel, if you like, a meaning. You can find within them an infinite universe.

Ask Beethovenapriya, and she'll tell you the same.

Yodhakaa

Last night, in one of Madras' dingier underground pubs, Star Rock, I was nursing a stiff one when a pretty Sri raagam in a vibrant female voice enveloped me (the sentence could also be "vibrant Sri raagam in a pretty female voice", but I like the adjectives the other way around). It felt like sacrilege to be lounging on spongy sofas and nibbling on peanuts. A slide guitar launched into a drawling solo, accompanied by a punchy bass, bright guitars and groovy percussion. This wasn't the everyday devout Sri raagam, this was something else. Without realising it, I was counting fours with my feet, dissecting the song into swara-s and raga patterns and exclaiming "Sabhaash!" at a cute phrase.



Soon, I realised that I would be doing a disservice to the richness of the band's sound if I approached their music as raga-based fusion. Chennai's hot new act, Yodhakaa, throws a curious mixed-bag of music at its audience - it pits a strong Carnatic aesthetic amidst a folksy rock and samba-jazz-like environment. There are portions in their repertoire that stick to known (and unknown) ragas, but unlike most Indian fusion bands, the band doesn't seem constrained by them. They borrow Carnatic music's style, its sounding system, its way of embellishing notes and enunciating lyrics, but not its rigidity. (As is evident from this paragraph, the music isn't easy to compartmentalise.)

The easy route would be to call it "Carnatic Fusion", but that has become a bad word these days; it conjures soundscapes of jarring Hamsadhwani accompanied by keyboards and rhythm pads. The drummer, Siva, who did most of the (unnecessary) talking, said, "Hey! We're Yodhakaa, and we play Indian music... contemporary Indian music!" This term sounds like the evil twin sister of "fusion", I know, but Yodhakaa have earned the right to use it. For all their mixed-bag of influences, their music is distinctly Indian. Good music doesn't live and grow in isolation, it is a product of the music around it, and Yodhakaa is a testament to that - it doesn't sound like a "fusion" of styles, but like a new aesthetic in itself.

Its other strength is the high quality of its musicians. Subhiksha and Pradeep combine beautifully on vocals, and Pradeep plays a most interesting slide guitar (built from scratch, he says) that produces every nuance of Indian music with depth and clarity. The drums and bass give the band a groovy grounding that sets them apart from most Indian acts, and Akshay on the guitars plays with sensitivity and innovation.

For all this inventiveness, the use of "ancient Sanskrit slokas" seems like a gimmick. That is the only pretentious part of their music. And this leads to my questioning of the term "contemporary" - I can't think of a contemporary Indian connecting with these lyrics. The slokas are religious in content, but the music does not seem to revel in the religiousness - they might as well be replaced by nonsense syllables (the band's name itself, some internet research tells me, was chosen only for its phonetic value), and it would take nothing away from the music. Many of these old slokas are in the anushtup-chhandas, a metre of four lines of eight syllables with a specified arrangement of long and short syllables. Yodhakaa's music, as a result, becomes very similar in its underlying rhythm. In many songs, the verses are all sung in the same tune, and are placed almost as an interlude to the solos. Even if the band wants to stick to Sanskrit slokas, there are devilish little ones brimming with humour and philosophy that might work better than the Hanuman Ashtakam or a series of slokas on the Dasaavataaram (which the clueless drummer described as being "about destruction").

Listening to Yodhakaa gave me the feeling that they would be better in a recording than live (I'm still kicking myself for not picking up their CD that night - it would be nice for the extended drives from work to home). They were extremely tight, don't get me wrong, but they lacked spontaneous energy that lifts live performances. Maybe they were too tight? (The energy high point of the concert was what they described as their "crazy stuff" - "Even we don't know what we're doing!") Their energy is subtler, and their strength is their total understanding of each other's music, but, an improvisational conversation would have been nice amidst numerous monologues. Especially live.

Ultimately, these are only minor irritants in a performance that was truly top-class. Highly recommended.

Tyagaraja, the Environmentalist

The anupallavi of Tyagaraja's popular Kharaharapriya kriti, chakkani rajamargamulundaga, always intrigued me. Consider, first, the words of the pallavi:

chakkani rajamargamulundaga
sandula duranela, o manasa

"When there are beautiful, wide roads suitable for kings, why do you squeeze through gullies?" Fine. Makes sense. If you ignore the traffic, of course.

Then, we come to the anupallavi:

chikkani palu migadayundaga,
chiyanu gangasagaramele?

"When you have sweet milk and cream (yum), why would you choose to drink the..." and this is where I kept getting stuck - "gangasagaram?" I know the Ganga is highly polluted, and I would choose sweet palu and migada (yum!) over it, but I found it unlikely that the pious Tyagaraja would denigrate the Holy Ganges in his songs. But then, I'm a lazy guy, I didn't bother to find out what this word meant. I convinced myself that that the saint was also an environmental activist and let things be. Each time I sang the anupallavi, I would picture the yucky Ganga, floating dead bodies, toxic effluents from corrupt factories, the stench, the green colour, and contrast it with sweet milk, flavoured with a little badam, perhaps, drunk hot from a steel tumbler, early morning, skimming the cream (yum!) off the top with one swift movement of the tongue.

Bliss.

This morning, while writing the notation to this song for someone, I checked T.K. Govinda Rao's book for the lyrics and meaning. And I found, "river of toddy - gangasagaram!" After ploughing through another Telugu book that has detailed commentary on all Tyagaraja kritis, I found that "gangasagaram" was the saint's sarcastic way of referring to toddy. The man had a wicked sense of humour!

I sang the anupallavi with rare vigour this morning. "Chikkani palu migada(yum!) yundaga, Chhiyanu gangasagaramele?"

Season Stories

An edited version of this appeared in Sruti long ago. Somehow, I didn't put it up here earlier.
***

My first brush with this season was trying to book Music Academy season tickets for relatives threatening to arrive from around the world. I was advised to be there slightly early. Now, the counter was to open at nine-thirty. I entered at eight-thirty to a bewildering sight – a hall full of campers, some of them looked like they’d been sitting there for weeks! A middle-aged couple in the back row were eating idlis coated with molaga podi from a steel tiffin box. Two men, sipping coffee in the portico, discussed how their decision to come by five-thirty was now vindicated. Needless to say, I returned ticketless. I must, here, praise the Academy's transparent, fair, just ticketing procedures – I tried pulling many contacts, including a Sangita Kalanidhi and the offices of Sruti. Nothing worked. Next time, I shall come by 3 am with my own steel tiffin box and laugh at the newbies.

I had not heard Valayapatti A. R. Subramaniam live before his concert with Tirupati Haribabu at the Academy. I might have missed even this concert if not for my guru's insistence that I listen to his thani. There were three of those that day, in Khandachapu, Mishrachapu and Adi Talam, each more spectacular than the other. It was fascinating to watch a master in complete command of his art. Two things separate masters from the rest. The first is their ease and comfort - even the most complicated rhythm seems so simple. The second is the amount of time they have – they are always so unhurried. A little like Roger Federer knocking a swinging, 230 kmph Roddick serve for a cross-court return winner without any fuss!

On the subject of percussion, my favourite mridangist this season was Arun Prakash. At Nungambakkam Cultural Academy, when Ravikiran announced, "I shall now play a Thyagaraja kriti in Raga Neelambari, 'Nike Dayaraka' in Mishrachapu taalam," I could almost see Arun Prakash licking his lips. He percussion side remained silent for about three lines. Then, he began punctuating the kriti with single beats. Slowly, he built up to just three touches at three-two-two. This was interspersed with very interesting, but very minimal, very delicate rhythms. Neelambari's lilt was given just the right pedestal to thrive on. After the Neelambari, when the audience was suitably blissful, a Garudadhwani came. Tatvamerugatarama. And the mridangam was right on the button, exuberant and joyous!

He proceeded to do the same for Vedavalli at Carnatica (MR Janaki College) and Music Academy – sensing exactly what the main artist is trying to do in each piece, what mood, what emotion she wants to convey, and creates it to perfection. The two Vedavalli concerts feature amongst my favourites this season. I will not forget that intoxicating neraval in Sukhi Evvaro at Carnatica for as long as I live!

R.K. Srikantan never seems to age, does he? A huge audience at Music Academy was delighted by his timeless voice (and that perfect sruti), poise, classicism and immense scholarship. The stage has become such an extension of his persona that he doesn't even think twice before rebuking his son with, "Sruti!" every now and then!

Dr. N. Ramani's concert at Asthika Samajam in Thiruvamiyur was another spine-tingler. Extraordinary renditions of Harikambhoji, Nasikabhushani and Sahana came in succession after which he took a little break. He came back and asked the audience, "Thodi vasikkatuma? Sree Krishnam Bhaja Manasa?" The Thodi alapana lasted for nearly forty minutes, each nook and corner of the raga being explored in the most leisurely manner. And then there were those searing brigas - cascades of swara patterns falling one over the other!

This year saw five flute concerts at the Academy - Mala Chandrashekhar, Dr. N. Ramani (with R. Thagarajan and Athul Kumar - his son and grandson), V. K. Raman, Mysore Chandankumar and Shashank. I wonder if this is a record. Other sabhas featured Jayaprada Ramamurthy, B. Vijayagopal, J. B. Srutisagar, the Sikkil Sisters and many more. Personally, it was disappointing to find one of my favourite flutists, Prapancham S. Balachandran, not performing at any of the major sabhas. Still, it is boom time for the bamboo-wielders, clearly.

When the schedules for the season were out, one concert really intrigued me - Shashank's jugalbandhi with Sanjeev Abhayankar. The two musicians were outstanding, as ever, but they performed two separate concerts – they just happened to be sitting on the same stage. Neither fed off the other or created any energy for the other to take off from. But that's a risk inherent to any jugalbandhi – since the musicians come from different idioms, if they do not interact at the same wavelength on that day, the concert could become an exercise in tedium. (I must also mention here that the artists were let down by an abysmal sound system.)

Another venue with really poor acoustics was the Ananthapadmanabha Swamy Temple in Gandhinagar where the Valayapatti Kaashyap Naadalaya series happened. I was at Sikkil Gurucharan's concert there, sitting behind a large group of giggly girls. When Gurucharan flashed one of his smiles, the entire bunch swooned in unison. I was almost expecting cat calls! I won't be surprised if we find Sikkil Gurucharan T-shirts soon - with his bespectacled, dimpled, smiling photograph on it, and girl-gangs wearing them and sitting in his concerts with flyers and posters. Another prediction – in five years, the December Isai Vizha will be rechristened the December Paattu-Saapattu Vizha. Signs of this change were evident this year. I heard a morning concert at Narada Gana Sabha that did not attract much of a crowd. But by 12.30, when the concert ended, the parking was full and overflowing! Music Academy even had a board at the gate that read, "No Parking for Canteen Visitors". The food served at most of these places is excellent. Sometimes, it is highly innovative - the Music Academy, I'm told, served 'Gabbage (Gos Curry)' one day. I even remember eating ‘rasakullas’ somewhere.

Back to the music. Saketharaman sang to a packed audience (although I didn't spot groups of giggly girls) at Mylapore Fine Arts, which would rate amongst the toughest places in the world to listen to music. It might just be easier to appreciate music in a local train in Bombay, at a DMK political rally or during a Taliban attack in Kabul. Sitting in the last row, I was constantly distracted by smells of fresh sambar, hot decoction, the sounds of a wet grinder, buzzing mosquitoes and sundry chatter. When the imbalanced sound system and its vagaries are added to this noxious mix, the listener gets the feeling he's sitting in a torturous heavy metal concert and not even allowed to headbang.

By the time I heard Saketharaman at Music Academy on a good sound system, late in the season, his voice in the lower registers sounded like a wet grinder. He still did a commendable job, his imagination and Charumathi Raghuraman's violin more than making up for his voice. Sanjay Subrahmanyan also faced similar issues later in the season, especially at his concert at the Academy on the thirtieth. But once that voice settled down, there was no stopping him. His Shankarabharanam was sublime, and his taanam in Kalyanavasantam was nothing short of legendary. A noted critic sitting beside me was in tears, and blamed his long taanam phrases around the kakali nishaadam for them. The pallavi that followed it had a lovely mathematical pattern (we hear he picked it up from Dr. N. Ramani), and he presented it with incredible precision and ingenuity. The RTP of the season, for me!

The season is like one of those extra-large buffets – you can either try a bit of everything, or concentrate on one or two cuisines and really enjoy them. I chose the latter approach this year. While I got to understand some musicians intimately, I missed some of the music. I heard that T.M. Krishna's concert at the Music Academy was a spectacle worth being present for – an RTP in Nattakurinji sounds delicious, and his concert at Narada Gana Sabha was his best in years. Kalakshetra organised a Hindustani music festival and re-staged Ramayana. I couldn't make it to either (it would be nice if they shifted the Kalakshetra campus to Mylapore briefly for the season). Schedules didn't allow me to catch the Malladi Brothers, Vijay Siva, Lalgudi Krishnan and Vijayalakshmi, U. Srinivas, Nedunuri and many others.

This brings me to a question – is there too much happening at the same time? The same artistes perform everywhere, and if one follows a musician around, one figures that much of the audience is also the same. Many concerts are races against time with the curtain-drawer standing menacingly backstage. Artists often find themselves with ten minutes left and a taanam and pallavi to finish. Also, many concerts are sung to empty halls – only siblings, parents, assorted relatives, friends, a sprinkling of retired men and women, NRIs, foreigners and the odd photographer or journalist. Rarely do these number beyond a hundred. Musicians, organisers and sponsors know all of this. Yet, the season grows each year.

I’m beyond trying to explain this baffling phenomenon now. It’s a lot more fun to just pick up one of those season schedule books, a pencil, some loose cash (or season passes), a motorbike and enjoy!

Two Moments

My earliest memory of Carnatic music involves Balamuralikrishna singing Duduku Gala. He sings the anupallavi, "Kadu durvishayaakrushtudai..." At 'vishayaa', there's a pause for the briefest of moments, a thousandth of a second, or even less, where he leaves us hanging at the tara sthayi madhyamam, before he takes 'krushtudai...' That madhyamam, in his bell-like voice, and that pause after, where you have just enough time to gasp, but not enough to sigh, is magical.
***

"Next, I will play a composition of Saint Tyagaraja in the ragam Gangeyabhushani. Evvare Ramayya." U. Srinivas announced. This was three years ago.

I was in the fifth row of the Music Academy, sitting next to a foreigner who knew a fair bit of Carnatic Music. "That's raga number 33!" he told me, excitedly. I smiled. Srinivas started with the panchamam, a fleeting sound, before he turned to his right adjusted his amplifier. He started again, pa ma ga ma ga, a momentary pause, and then the shatsruti ri, drawn from the depths of the lower panchamam. I smiled again.

Ri ga ma pa. Pa pa ma ga ma ga, and then a pause, and that ri again. This was standard fare.

He signalled to the violinist to stop following him.

Then he played sa-da. Held the daivatam for hardly a second-and-a-half before turning to his violinist and smiling impishly.

The damage was done. The da sent a spear right through me - it took me a few seconds to even recognise the note! It had a similar effect on the foreigner. It was like I was being thrown, suddenly, out of an aeroplane, and the surprise caused me to forget how to open the parachute. I knew that the shuddha daivatam would come in this raaga at some point. But Srinivas had distracted me enough for those five seconds, toying with the familiar, before hurling me into the skies!
***

The Two Disappearances - Part IV

Much belated. Sorry. Continued from here.
***

Mani's cell phone was switched off for a week, his landline was 'disconnected' (Ajith wondered if he had forgotten to pay his bill) and Ajith was too nervous to go to his house without calling him first. For three days after the first interview, Ajith expected no call and didn't get one. Then, like a husband with his wife nearing her 'due' date, he began expecting a phone call at any moment and obsessed over being around his phone at all times. At the end of the week, he decided that he had to be the one making the phone calls, but met with the irritating switched-off-voice. Slowly, he grew desperate and started calling Nethra everyday, whining to her about geniuses and their need to show to the world that they are eccentric. People always mistake eccentricity for genius, he told her, and most often, geniuses are taken seriously only when they are eccentric. Nethra suggested that Ajith should go directly to Mani's house.

The very next morning, Shankar called. "Sir wants you to come at three-fifteen this afternoon."

At three-ten, Ajith found the front door wide open and Shankar sitting in the verandah with ironing a veshti with great concentration. The old iron traversed the garment in careful straight lines, crisping it in the process. Shankar looked up when he heard the gate and peered happily at Ajith through his thick glasses. For a moment, the iron-box left the garment and rested on a side table.

"Hello!" Shankar exclaimed. Ajith waved, as he approached the verandah. Shankar placed a chair next to his own, and asked Ajith to sit. Ajith obeyed. Shankar then disappeared inside the house. Ajith, partly mechanically, and partly because it seemed like fun, began ironing the veshti. Almost three minutes later, Mani appeared at the front door, preceded by a four-legged walker and escorted by Shankar.

"Good afternoon!" Mani said, sounding as cheery as he did the other day, "You don't have to iron my veshti, you know! Only my students do that..."
Shankar lunged to take the iron out of Ajith's hand, while Ajith put the iron away on the side table. "It's an honour!" Ajith said.

Mani laughed. Shankar went into the house and returned in a moment with a folding easy chair. He placed it in the verandah facing the road. Mani sat on the chair. Ajith and Shankar then took their seats next to him, and Ajith put his recorder on the armrest of Mani's chair.

"You're looking much better today!" Ajith said.
"I feel better! But the end is near... I can feel it," Mani said, in a natural, cheery tone.
A silence followed that statement. "Where were we?" Mani asked, unmindful of the reaction his declaration had caused.
Ajith took a second before replying, "You told us about the girl in Thanjavur..."
"Madurai," Mani corrected him.
Ajith looked at him curiously. "You said Madurai? I somehow thought it was Thanjavur..."
"No. Madurai."
Ajith was pretty sure the short story by Janani referred to the Thanjavur Railway Station, but he wasn't sure of what Mani had told him. He couldn't believe that there could be a discrepancy between Mani's story and Janani's.

Mani broke the silence with, "That story's over. What next?"
"You were saying... You were saying you met that woman again, but she didn't recognise you..."
"I don't know if I want to tell you that story," Mani said, looking mischievously at Ajith through the corner of his eye.

Ajith's face fell. But he collected himself to ask, "Any other women?"
Mani laughed, "Too many!"
"Tell us about them?"
Mani smiled, "No."

There was another pause. Ajith broke the silence this time with, "Sir, are you actually a recluse? Or is that just a perception?"
"I'm not fond of social gatherings. Except kacheris," he chuckled. "I like smaller groups of people for social interaction... You know, I get uncomfortable when I am at a wedding or a function. Too many people know me, too many people have met me. I am always worried that I'm inadvertently ignoring people, or I've slighted someone, or I've been over-friendly with someone I don't know too well. It scares me. So, I avoid all these events. So, people think I'm introverted or anti-social. I like a group of three or four people. Then, we're all talking to each other, we can all have our conversations, I'm spending time with all of them. In a large gathering, I'm not spending time with anyone. It's overwhelming. Frightening."

Ajith did not know how to maneuver this odd convesation. Mani then said, "To tell you the truth, the world inside my head is far richer than the world outside it. I prefer living there."

Ajith knotted his eyebrows. Mani signalled something to Shankar. Shankar got up and went inside the house.

Then, Mani said, "Even in my childhood, I had a world inside my head. It was, usually, a version of the world outside. Real people are more complicated in my head than they are in real life. Emotions are stronger, responses are magnified, scenes are in full colour and 3-D. If my father was actually cold and strict, in my head, he would be caring - and perhaps he was on the inside! If I was known for my singing everywhere, I was an actor in my head. I always wanted to act in the movies, and imagined my Abhimanyu play being made into a famous movie. When I watched Ben-hur in Bombay, I was blown away! I spent months trying to convince directors here to make an Abhimanyu movie on that scale and cast me in it. And I would spend days imagining myself in those movies, acting, singing, fighting, romancing... And giving interviews! I read these film magazines that came from Bombay with interviews from the stars. I must've been in my twenties by then, but the interviews really fascinated me. And because no one ever wanted to interview a Carnatic musician then, I imagined interviews, answers, reactions.
"But then, you know, the world is a noisy place. You can't hear what is inside you when the world chatters all around you. An artist needs to spend enough time in that world inside his head. If someone says he has no such world, he's no artist at all. He's just a xerox machine. A musician's music should be his own. Not someone else's.
"This Shankar, for instance," Mani said, pointing at Shankar entering again with the usual tea and Marie biscuits, "Sings brilliantly. Lovely voice. But sings only my sangatis. I sometimes think he writes down my raga alapanas in a notebook and reproduces them." Shankar attempted some form of protest, but Mani cut him off and continued, "He has a band of followers now - a cult of old men and women who liked my music. They hear me in his voice, in his style... Not good at all. I don't teach him anything these days. Just let him sing on his own. I don't even correct him if he makes a mistake. He needs to live in his head for a while."
"Sir exaggerates," Shankar said, nibbling on his biscuit.
It was a confused monologue from Mani. Was he senile, Ajith pondered. He sipped his tea, and found it tasting like dissolved mud. It was the sort of tea his grandmother made - boil cheap tea powder in milk, strain, add milk, sugar, boil everything together and serve hot. The same procedure could result in excellent chai, like the tea kadai at the end of Boag Road proved, but his grandmother and Shankar had got something wrong. Perhaps, they did use mud.

Just then, a Maruti 800 pulled up by the main gate. An old man got out, opened the gate and drove straight in. Mani called out joyously, "Sivan!" and said to Ajith, "My brother, Sadasivam."
Sadasivam waved from the car, parked it, got out and hollered, "Anna! Not bad! You're sitting in the verandah!" and looking at Shankar and Ajith asked, "Shishyaalaa?"
"That one with the glasses, he is Shankar, my student. Lives with me now."
"Of course I know Shankar..." Sadasivam said, suddenly recognising him.

"And this one here, Ajith," he paused, "Am I right? Ajith?" Ajith nodded. "Yes. He is Ajith. A reporter from the Indian Express. Interviewing me."
"My Anna is a big fraud," Sadasivam said, "Always telling people that he's an ordinary fellow and all that. Even he doesn't know the extent of his genius."
Ajith laughed, "Don't worry. We're not fooled by him!"
Mani said, "Ajith, I need to take my brother inside the house - I'm just getting rid of some furniture. Wait here." He turned to Shankar, "Keep him entertained."
Shankar helped Mani on to his feet, but Mani brushed him aside after that, "Siva will take me from here!"
Sadasivam gleefully put his hand on Mani's shoulder and guided him through the door. He turned to Ajith and said, "Come with us. You can continue the interview while we look at the furniture."

Ajith walked with them into the bare drawing room and through the dining room to the landing where the stairs led to the first floor. Lurking at the far end of the landing, partly hidden by the stairs and partly by the dim light, was a door that Ajith wouldn't have noticed if Shankar hadn't opened it. It led to a room that was a grand bedroom in its heyday, where the owners of the house slept. Now, it was a storeroom for old furniture and books. Sadasivam said, "I need a bookshelf. And a study table. I'm converting the sit-out into a study of sorts."
"Oh, the one on the first floor?"
"Yeah."
Mani stood with his walker at the head of the room and said, "Leave that one there on the right for me. It has my cassettes. Take anything else."
Sadasivam scanned the room, moving furniture around to make space for himself. He spotted a large bookshelf at the near corner filled with Tamil books and said, "That bookshelf looks good."
Ajith, meanwhile, walked straight to the shelf with Mani's cassettes. It was a fascinating collection of Mani's music - concerts from the 1950s to the 1990s, all arranged in chronological order, labelled in crisp English lettering, with the year, sabha, accompanists and main raagam on the sleeve. Ajith saw TNK, TKM, UKS, VR and other familiar abbreviations on many covers. There was one that caught his fancy - "SC (nadaswaram)", it said. Ajith asked, across the room, "You've sung with Sheik Chinnamoulana-saheb?"
Mani said, "Oh yes! Three concerts. All of them were bad! When I sang with Rajarathnam Anna, it was so beautiful. I was trying to recreate that effect... There's one next to this cassette with T. Viswanathan on flute, right?"
"Yes."
"That is a great concert - Saaveri, Shuddha Saaveri, Asaveri were the first three ragas..."
"Yes!" Ajith said in amazement, "How do you remember such things?"
Shankar said from near the other bookshelf, "Once, I told him that I had a recording of his concert at Bangalore, 1980 with Thodi raagam-taanam-pallavi in it. MSG on violin. And he said..."
"There's Sahana, Kaanada, Hindolam in the ragamalika. Yes, I remember that concert very well!"
Ajith suddenly noticed something out-of-place. There was a set of Pink Floyd CDs! "Sir, what are these Pink Floyd CDs?"
Sadasivam laughed, and Mani joined him. Mani said, "You won't believe me if I told you. I sang a concert in London, after which Roger Waters gave them to me."
"You know what is special about Anna's music? It is universal, every damn fellow loves it. Anna hates to admit it, but he's a genius. That word is used easily these days, but I mean it. He is a true genius." Sadasivam said, now looking for a study table.
Mani said, "I wish I could be like my brothers."
"What rubbish!"
"Siva, you don't know. You have such an advantage in that you understand people around you. I'm always a little lost, always the oddball. Eccentric. Genius. People like me from a distance - it is an admiration for what I am and what I've achieved..."
"Don't get fooled by this self-pity, Ajith. Anna has admirers who'll do anything for him. Ask Shankar, isn't my Anna most caring?"
Shankar agreed.
"Admirers?" Mani asked, "I don't see a single one at home today. Except for Shankar... You don't know, Siva. I can't walk today, there are things eating me up from the inside. Doctors are trying to prolong my existence; god knows why. And my children are in the US. Too busy to spend time with me. You fractured your leg and your son came to India for a month... It's my fault. I wasted my life being a genius. I should've been with them more when they were younger." Mani addressed Ajith now, "When we were kids, my brothers had all sorts of stories to tell, about their friends, their school, their adventures. I had nothing to tell anyone about. Look at Sadasivam, I'm sure you like him already, with his easy charm and sense of humour. I would've preferred being like him."
"The whole world wants to be you, Anna. Now shut up." After a moment, Sadasivam sighed and said, "I guess I'll have to buy a new study table. Nothing here."
Mani turned around, his walker clanking against the red-oxide floor as he walked into the landing, into the dining room.

Suddenly, he asked Sadasivam, "Dai Siva! Take me to the beach?"

Soon, Ajith found himself in the old Maruti car with Mani, Sadasivam and Shankar, hurtling away towards Marina Beach.
Sadasivam asked, "Ajith, you've been with the Indian Express for long?"
"Six months."
"Oh. Where were you before that?"
"I was with a market research firm in Bombay..."
"Didn't like Bombay?"
"Umm, sort of. I was always looking to come back South."
"Your parents live here?"
Shankar interjected, "You live with your grandmother, don't you?"
Ajith said, "Yeah. My mother's no more. She died when I was barely two."
"I'm so sorry..." Sadasivam said. "What about your father?"
"He married again and left me with his parents. They brought me up."
There was an uncomfortable silence. Mani decided to break it with, "So, Ajith what does your grandfather do?"
"He was in the I.R.S. He's also no more... I moved back to Madras because my grandmother was alone."
Again, it was uncomfortable. Everyone muttered a sorry, but said little more. Ajith said, "He was old..."
Finally, Mani said to Sadasivam, "Hey, I.R.S! You might know him!" and said to Ajith, "Siva's an I.A.S. retired."
Sadasivam said, "What was his name?"
"S. Ramachandran."
That revelation produced the most awkward of the three silences.
Sadasivam said, with a fake enthusiasm, "Ram Anna is an old friend! Great man, he was! Great man."
Mani went unnaturally quiet until they reached the beach. Ajith realised he shouldn't have given away his grandfather's identity. His cover of being an innocent young fellow trying to understand Mani was exposed. Mani would soon suspect that Ajith was only interested in one story. The story of his grand-aunt. Ajith guessed that Mani would be guarded about all his stories now. The openness, the twinkling eyes, the rants, the vague stories would all go.

"In the 50s," Mani told Shankar, "When I was around your age, I used to come here and practice on the beach! There was nobody here early in the morning. Or late at night. In that corner, around the lighthouse, sometimes I would hear a piercing flute - especially at night. That was Flute Ramani, sometimes accompanied by Mali. The beach was otherwise empty."
Ajith imagined the young, handsome Mani, his striking voice, the drone of the tambura and lashing of the night-waves. And he looked at the Mani today, his walker clanking ahead of him as he navigated the pavement towards a cement bench. His brain suddenly conjured another image, of a middle-aged Mani, still handsome, and Ajith's Taapi, a most beautiful woman, sitting together on this very beach, oblivious to the scandal they were creating in their homes.
***

To Continue.