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. 

Auteur, madarchod!

When you are in bed all day, wrapped in a bedsheet in the sultriness of Madras, knocked out by a fever, wavering ever so subtly between sleep and waking until you don't know which is which, your brain starts functioning in a zone of its own. Time becomes fuzzy, even irrelevant. Fungible. Ah, yes. That's the word, fungible! I like that word, it's so cuddly, so flexible.

Your brain thinks thoughts, your brain reaches startling conclusions, and when you try retracing the steps you went through to reach there, you find the breadcrumbs eaten away by the demon-like birds in your head.

The little iPod embedded in my brain, constantly buzzing, always on shuffle, sings now in Anu Malik's voice, "She gives me fever, fever, fever." His distinctive inflection, his fake not-Bombay-not-America accent, his slight tunelessness at the end of each line, all ring clearly in my head. This hasn't happened in a while. I open my eyes, and find my neck drenched in fevered sweat, the fan groaning while it whirs unenthusiastically, and vague sounds of a Tamil serial from the adjacent room. I reach out to the bottle of water on the bedside table and drink a rather large gulp. When that water break morphs back into my febrile sleep, I hear that voice again. Anu Malik. That paragon of frivolousness. That antonym of mellifluousness. "She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh."

My closed palms feel warm, my feet feel cold. I shiver a little.

The song makes it way to the core of my existence, it consumes my soul, it kindles the flame within, and it unearths a curious memory that lies buried deep, deep within.

I am now in the summer of 2000. My friend and I have been packed off to Trichy to spend some time with his aunt. The mornings and evenings, we spend cycling in and around the little town. We unexpectedly run into some girls in a park. We make nervous conversation with them. The voices in this conversation seem to come from a well -- there is a slight reverberation about them. Like dream sequences in the movies. The girls ask us if we want to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger's End of Days in a theatre nearby. I hold one of the girls' hands throughout the movie and kiss it just before the climax. She blushes.

The kiss wakes me up. I am back in the present, and I realise that my brain just added its own cinematic masala to a rather monotonous holiday. I smile. I doze off again.

Now we are in my friend's aunt's house in Trichy. It is a dreary, meandering, dull, drooping, dreadful, afternoon. We are channel-flipping between vague Bollywood music channels. And we discover this song. The anthem of my fever. "She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh." A pre-Big Brother, pre-UP-Bihar-lootne, pre-yoga-in-extreme-tights Shilpa Shetty, looking extremely desirable, canoodling a drugged-out Sanjay Dutt on an uncomfortably shaped sofa in a dingy set. And in the background, off-key women chorus singers going "Whose that girl with the lovely, lovely smile...", soon to be joined by Anu Malik trying to sound lovelorn and horny at once.

The movie, I finally recall, is Jung.

I am not in that drawing room anymore. I am now in Kalpana Theatre, Udupi, and the moth eaten seats bring a flood of memories. Of the the jail-like ticket queue, of Rs. 18 balcony seats, of drinking local cool drink Ba-Jal during the interval, of vague art deco construction, of actually kissing a girl in the the darkened halls while watching Mission Impossible 2 in Hindi.

"She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh," Anu Malik continues singing, now in surround sound. Shilpa curves and cavorts around Sanjay Dutt and the sofa. I am not sure which of the two is luckier. My friend's hands are not where they should be. Our verdict, "Shilpa Shetty has come out good, man!" She scorches our senses and blanks out the rest of the movie.

(I am now reminded of Sanjay Gupta's previous outing, Khauff, which I watch in the same theatre with the same friend. Until the movie starts, I think I have come for an English movie called Cough.)

As Jung hurtles towards its laborious climax, I hear a threatening baritone from my left. I turn around to see a dark, bulky, french-bearded figure bearing down on me, asking, "You must be a fan. You seem to have seen all my movies."
It dawns on me. The new entrant is Sanjay Gupta himself. I reply, in a voice that isn't my own, "Not all. I missed Aatish: Feel the Fire. Although I must admit, of all your movies, that one has the most thrilling title."
He smiles, "You lucky bastard. Imagine how many times I must have seen it during editing."
"That explains the mindnumbing Hameshaa. I knew it couldn't have come from a straight-thinking mind," I console him. "Your expertise always lay in remaking Hollywood movies, featuring silly, overloud comedy, steamy song sequences, desperate posturing, a bored Sanjay Dutt and faux grittiness."
"Thank you for reducing my life's work to a stereotype," he says.
"Oh, come on. I'm telling you that you're an auteur," I offer, "A French word, monsieur. That must make you feel posh."
He collapses into the seat next to me, and says, "You know. It's funny you use that word -- auteur. It's become famous in India these days." There is a gleam in his eyes, as he turns around to the projection room and shouts, "Projectionist! Start from the beginning!"
I look at Sanjay in horror, "Dude, I cannot go through this movie again."
"I merely want to refresh your memory, pal," Sanjay says. The 'pal' proves he watches too much cheap Hollywood for his own good.

The titles are now on the screen. Familiar names whizz past me. Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt, Raveena Tandon, Anu Malik... And at one point, he stands up and screams again, "Projectionist, pause!"

I stare at the screen in shock at the name on it. Anurag Kashyap. Yes, that very same Anurag Kashyap -- the Hindi New Wave hero, the man they call the saviour of Indian cinema, the toast of the Cannes Directors' Fortnight -- is involved in writing an embarrassing rip-off of a middling Hollywood film called Desperate Measures.
Sanjay roars with laughter, "But Anurag is an honourable man!"

I am dismayed. I ask into the void of Kalpana Theatre, "Et tu, Anurag?"

A pair of dark-rimmed spectacles appears on the screen. Soon these are filled by large, keen, black eyes. A round, stocky face forms itself around the spectacles, and an uneven beard grows. In a barely masked North Indian accent, the face speaks, "I can explain myself!"
"Admit it, Anurag!" Sanjay hollers, "You did this once more. This movie called Paisa Vasool."
I ask, utterly disappointed, "Anurag, you wrote that cinematic excreta also?"
"No, no. Wait," Anurag tries.
But Sanjay interjects again, "Anurag is an honourable man! Hahahaha. You see, young fellow, where Gangs of Wasseypur comes from? It's not him going nudge-nudge-wink-wink at masala. He's just making what he knows how to make, and people are attributing nudges and winks. Auteur, saala madarchod!"

"Order, order," I shout, my legal instincts coming to the fore, "We must allow the accused to present his case."
"Milaard," Anurag starts, "Around 1999, there was this series on TV called Darr starring Kay Kay Menon and Irrfan Khan. Neither actor was well known then -- their career defining roles still more than half a decade away."

I remember it being a fairly gripping series about a dope-head serial killer (Irrfan) called, if my memory serves me right, "Desi Jallad" engaged in a battle of wits with a policeman (Kay Kay). I wonder where the accused is going with this.

"It was directed by my brother, Abhinav Kashyap, and the two of us co-wrote it. At some point during the series, my name stopped appearing in the credits, and the series turned a little less edgy and a little more melodramatic." He pauses, catches his breath, and asks, "You want to know the truth?"
"Yes," I say.
"You can't handle the truth," he says, his voice acquiring a stentorian quality.
"Dude, too many movie references. Stick to your story."
"Sorry, milaard," he says. "The truth is, I never wrote Darr. My brother wrote it, he directed it."
Sanjay laughs. I make notes in my notebook, and say, "Yes, Mr. Accused. Go on."
"You see, Satya was out by this time, and he only wanted me to lend my name to it. You know how far a name goes in show business. And I did this only for my brother. My own brother. My own blood. Same mother. Same father also. Mere bhai ke liye main itna bhi nahin kar sakta kya? We both came from Uttar Pradesh searching for jobs. We slept on benches, footpaths, beaches. We often ate Tiger biscuits for breakfast, lunch and dinner because you got nothing more wholesome for Rs. 3. Sometimes, we didn't even have enough money for that... Is what I did wrong? My hunger did this, milaard. My desperation did this."

Sanjay wipes a tear off his cheek.

I think for a while and pronounce judgment, "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.' "

Anurag says, "Saale, milaard ke bacche, you think only you've read The Great Gatsby? Even Bachchan Amitabh has read it now."

I smile sheepishly. "Wait. You haven't explained Paisa Vasool. Your co-writer (and director) on Paisa Vasool was a man called Srinivas Bhashyam. He can't be your brother. Even if he his, he's definitely not same mother, same father."
"You must understand. Bhashyam's greatest achievements at that point were that he was Assistant Director on the hilarious Tamil classic Magalir Mattum and Second Unit Director of Mani Ratnam's blockbuster Bombay. He was making a Bollywood debut with Paisa Vasool. I was helping him out... After all, even an artist needs to eat some light Indian breads with lentil soup twice a day, no?"
"Srinivas Bhashyam sounds like he would prefer rice and mulligatawny soup."

I hear a distant voice. It is my grandmother's. Anurag, Sanjay, my friend, the theatre, all dissolve into my bedroom, now bathed in a dim yellow light from a distant bulb. My grandmother says, "Wake up, kanna. Eat some rasam saadam. It will do you good."
I say, "One minute, Paati. Coming."

I start my laptop, open Youtube, find the song, and listen to it.

The Dark Knight Rises: An Early Review

You know how in competitions you don't want to go after the best act because you fear you'll get judged harshly? That's exactly what The Dark Knight Rises must feel like, as audiences around the world queue up for it with one question lingering somewhere in the back of their minds, "Will it be as good as The Dark Knight?" If I had to answer in one word, I'd say, "No." Two words, "Nowhere close." Three words, "Oh, fuck off!" But then, coming second to The Dark Knight isn't really that sad, and TDKR does a lot of things right.

It gives the Batman a lot of time to introspect (He's been sitting in the east wing of his mansion for eight years, and still doesn't have answers when the movie begins!), it asks difficult questions of him, it pushes him even further down the rabbit-hole he jumped down in Batman Begins. He ponders, at various times, the purpose and price of his life. His parents are central to all this, as ever, but that explanation for his anger grows old -- perhaps even within him. Alfred wants him to run away; he thinks that's the only way to move on. Wayne's wounded, he's rusty, and Alfred isn't sure how battle-ready he is; but he is, on the surface, raring to go. What drives him? Is this impulse true? He isn't sure. He learns, first, that conquering all fear might not always be the best thing to do, and later, that he hadn't really conquered it in the first place. He learns that only fear can make you free, only the fear of falling can push you to make the jump. There is, of course, a lot of back and forth on relationships crucial to him -- with Alfred, with Gordon, with crime, with justice, with Gotham. In other words, it gives the Batman a lot of time to be Bruce Wayne, the eccentric millionaire.

With him on this journey, are a quirky set of characters.

There is a smooth, sizzling, scheming cat-burglar with an eye for his mother's pearls, who, strangely, steals his fingerprints. She is as planned and as deliberate as the Batman's other nemesis, the Joker, was impulsive and reckless. Even without the Batman having a vague mix of a crush and suspicion on her, she has dilemmas of her own -- an identity she's trying to get rid of, and an almost unnatural desire for self-preservation.

Then there's the bizarre man in the mask -- Bane. No surname, no first-name. Just Bane. (Clearly he's no boon) A disciple of Bruce's guru, Ra's Al Ghul, and an outcast from the League of Shadows, just like Bruce, he has the brain, the training and the brawn to pose the most serious threat in eight years to Gotham -- a threat grave enough to force Bruce out of his mansion and into his long abandoned costume. His plans are clear for us to see, but his motivations remain unclear.


There is another orphan, a too-curious-for-his-own-good, smart, tough, honest, rookie cop who has discovered Bruce's mask and is intrigued by it. He wants to understand the Batman's motivations, he almost seems like he wants to wear a mask himself. He perceives more than most others, he acts swiftly, decisively and level-headedly.


There are the people of Gotham, basking in the sunshine of the Dent Act, named in honour of the white knight, Harvey Dent -- it gave teeth to the police, the Commissioner says in a speech --  that cleansed the streets of Gotham of organised crime. The very people who believe the Batman betrayed them and murdered their saviour.


Commissioner Gordon lives that lie, repeating it each day, and hoping he will be able to get the truth off his chest soon. He thinks they should know the truth, but he doubts the people's ability to take the truth with equanimity. The lie is eating him from the inside, slowly.

There is a nuclear fusion reactor in the middle of it all -- belonging to Wayne Enterprises, controlled by the redoubtable Lucius Fox and Miranda Tate, a clean energy activist -- that Bane converts into a tick-tocking nuclear time-bomb. The scale of the plot, as you can see, is fairly large.

The gadgets are all there -- the new and improved Batpod with a sweet new wheel move, a flying machine simply called The Bat, and multiple Tumblers rumbling along the streets of Gotham. The action sequences are intense and inventive, the CGI simply breathtaking, and the cinematography broodingly beautiful.

But something doesn't fit. Somehow, the movie doesn't come together as an overwhelming meal that The Dark Knight was. The narration in the earlier movie was more sprawling, more messy. There were many sidetracks, many staircases that led nowhere. But that seemed to work in its favour. The tauter, more focussed approach in TDKR seems almost limiting. You're not plunged into a vast drama that no one seems to have total control over, and that, funnily, takes away from the movie.

For a movie where characters think so much, they seem to think too loudly, they seem to speak their thoughts too often. The movie doesn't ponder enough. In the previous two movies, Christopher Nolan found a way to not let the pace drag while still feeding us enough to think about. Here, he does neither.

Most disappointingly, TDKR's philosophy is re-hashed and superficial. Ra's Al Ghul and the Joker, even the Scarecrow (who makes a guest appearance here) and Dent, had their own set of ideologies -- political, social and economic -- and ethics. And this made them incredibly colourful. One of them was flawed, one greedy, one plainly unhinged and one wronged. They were coloured by what they saw, they reacted to what they experienced. Even the Joker, who unleashed mayhem for the fun of it, did it because he believed it was necessary for there to be someone to do it. "This city needs a better class of criminals," he said. They were all uniformly fascinating exactly because they took strong stands on the world around them.

Sadly, none of the villains on display in TDKR had any of this spunk. Seline Kyle was never really a villain, Bane's motivations were unconvincing. The third villain (shan't let the cat out of the bag!) was pushed by a need for... wait for it... revenge! No, I'm not suggesting that revenge sagas are necessarily simplistic. I'm saying that a revenge saga needs the avenger to lose something dear, and for the audience to feel that pain and that loss. Here, the whole thing is reduced to a plot twist -- now that's flimsy, that's insubstantial, that's fruitless.

And that's why TDKR is underwhelming -- because it builds a structure that is gigantically grand, achingly beautiful and painstakingly constructed, but builds it around a hollow, shallow core.

On Campus Novels, Sanskritisation and Causality: A Conversation with Satyajit Sarna

The last time I met Satyajit Sarna (unimaginatively nicknamed 'Surd'), in a few hours, and for a few hours, I forgot who, where or what I was. When I met him before that, after being in the legendary Queens Bar in T.Nagar and the highly underrated Ranjith rooftop in Nungambakkam, for some reason, I woke up in a room at the Taj Coromandel. The next day, at the Madras High Court, various people wanted their photo taken with what they thought was an alien apparition -- a six-plus-feet tall Sardar in an advocate's gown!

Here, I talk to him about his first novel, published this June by Harper Collins, The Angel's Share.
***

The author poses with mint vodka that tasted like mouthwash.

When I heard that you were writing a novel, I wasn't surprised. Somehow you seemed like the sort of guy who would want to tell a story. But I must admit that given the range of literature you read, and the sort of things you tend to talk about (in our bizarre interactions over the years), I was a little surprised when I heard you were writing a campus novel. This genre, in the context of Indian writing in English in the last decade, brings its own limitations, expectations and biases, doesn't it? What pushed you to write about Law School?

Well, to the extent I was thinking about it, I was following advice. They say you should sort-of bleed the autobiographical urge out of yourself, write it, get your own voice out of your head and onto paper and then either publish it, or print it out on a nice big sheaf of paper and lock it up in a drawer. The danger, if you don’t do that, is that the stories you need to tell start showing up in the stories you want to tell. So you get science fiction with a little campus novel in it, and your detectives have coming-of-age issues. The way I see it, if as a writer you feel a need to write a coming-of-age book, you might as well write it so your space cadets and detectives don’t end up with student angst.

So when I sat down and started typing, I decided to go with the flow and tell the stories that I did know, and they came together and grew with time to become The Angel’s Share.

What's wrong with detectives who have coming-of-age issues or a sci-fi set on a campus of some sort? Wouldn't that sort of thing set the novel apart amongst that genre? Are literary genres like ragas that have strict goalposts within which an artist’s creativity is channelled?

Ha ha, of course! That would be wonderful, and there is great work along those lines which exists. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite books that way – a sort of schoolboy story told against a background of interstellar war. What I meant was an unintentional urge to write exactly what you saw into a narrative where it would sit uneasily…

The IITs had Five Point Someone, and the IIMs got the "MBA" series (Mediocre, but Arrogant; Married, but Available and so on). (Have you read these novels?) Law schools don't have a definitive campus novel yet, although there have been attempts to write one. You think The Angel's Share fills that market void?

I read Five Point Someone in third year, and I honestly enjoyed it. It was a light read which appealed to me because I was in college and it was a college book – there was an immediate empathy. It also perversely appealed to me because I liked reading Big Books, and it was the exact opposite of a Big Book and so it felt like cheating. I read it in the back row of class, returned it to the owner and thought that it may be the last I heard of it. Boy, was I wrong!

Campus novels have fallen a long way in the perception of the reading public, which may be a fair assessment of the quality of work we’re seeing, given how many of them are mass-market clones of Five Point Someone.

Coming-of-age, the Bildungsroman, is a very evocative genre– a lot of great writing has come out of it. And as my friend Aditya Sudarshan says, This Side of Paradise is a campus novel. But the tag does make me uncomfortable still.

The Angel’s Share has a couple of settings; I’m not sure I’d have written it or tried to have it published if I had written only a campus novel. In my head it’s a story about youth and growing up. But I’d like to think that if you wanted to tell a story about law schools or law firms in India, you’d have to think about The Angel’s Share and ask yourself if someone got there first.

It's funny you should mention This Side of Paradise, because when I read it, I actually thought, "Hey, Satyajit could write a novel like this!" And in continuing with the Fitzgerald theme, there was also Zorawar who is, in some ways, Nick Carraway to Sasha's Gatsby.

I think that what you may be doing is upgrading me vastly by association. I thank you kindly, but fear that you are far too generous. The Great Gatsby remains my favourite book of all time, and I reread it every year or so. Every time, I see more than I saw the last time, which is incredible given that it’s an even shorter book than The Angel’s Share.

 I see where you’re going when you contrast Nick-Gatsby with Zorawar-Sasha, but there is a little difference in the dynamic, even while Zoju plays the straight man to the inspirational personality of Sasha. If Zoju wasn’t so callow and insecure, Sasha wouldn’t shine so bright, and if Nick wasn’t a non-judgmental Midwesterner, than the East Coast opulence of Gatsby wouldn’t seem so mythical, and Nick’s judgment in the end wouldn’t be so damning.

But, in Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is squarely at the centre of the book. The big question is how big Nick is  - does he tell the truth fairly? How much does he grow and change independently of Gatsby? Zorawar is a lot more active than Nick and his growth and story is more central by comparison.

If I may refer to another one of my favourite books, I could venture that maybe, in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty is a better example. Dean appears and disappears and changes Sal’s life, but the story is about Sal. Dean is more the idea of Dean, and less the person of Dean. And so Sasha.

However if you had to point to a hero in these three books, I feel that you could without hesitation point to Jay Gatsby, Dean Moriarty and Sasha Kapur.

Your novel is intensely personal. It is about people you've known intimately, and spaces you've inhabited for a considerable period of time. Did the familiarity make writing it easier or tougher?

Some of the characters are based on traits I saw in real people, and on events that I saw or heard about. But when you sit down to write fiction, it’s impossible to tell it like it happened. The rules of fiction are different from the rules of life. Events happen in a very diluted non-causal fashion. People are a lot more alike than they are different. You blur lines, mix and match, exaggerate – do the verbal photoshopping you have to make an interesting picture.  What familiarity does help with is description. When I need to describe a setting, I can just tell it like I saw it.

There are things you take for granted when writing about National Law School. For instance, you mention the "Five Buck Shop" and "Amma" without really explaining who or what they are.  Would that put off outsiders? Or are these things not really central to the plot anyway?

Hopefully, neither ‘Five Buck Shop’ nor ‘Amma’ would put off readers. I tested some of these terms on ‘outsiders’ before publishing it, and it appears that anybody who went to college had a Five Buck Shop AND an Amma. There’s an institutional logic to these elements, and its bound to be common to most colleges. If, however, you have ever been to Nagarbhavi and stared into the deep and knowing gaze of Amma, then the reading experience may be so much more the deeper for you.

I’m now trying valiantly to recall whether I still owe any money at Five Buck Shop or to Amma. I think I cleared my tabs at Convocation, but the details are hazy…

There was a moment in the novel when I thought I must launch into a diatribe about Sanskritisation and Westernisation. When you mentioned that for our generation of Indians, cricket was no longer the number one sport, I wanted to jump into the pages of the novel and talk about how Westernising city kids have shifted to football, but for the Sanskritising small-towners (like myself), cricket (which used to be the upper class, elite, city-game) was still number one. This is not a question. I feel like faffing, and I faffed. You may comment, however.

I see your point. Of course I meant this in the context of urban India, where the rise of football is self evident and is definitely influenced by televised international sport and focused marketing by the English Premier League and companies like Nike and Adidas. You are right in that this rise of football is not even across India and that for the vast majority of children in India, cricket is their one true love.

That said, the way I hear it from my granddad, the sports he used to play as a child, and even past independence, the sports that really held the Indian imagination were football and hockey. If you look at the past of Indian football, the Durand Cup predates all but two tournaments and clubs like Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting have very old and storied pedigrees. Maybe the history of subcontinental sport would have been different if FIFA had allowed India to play the 1950 World Cup barefoot…

I’m no expert but the rise of Indian cricket in the sixties probably has a lot to do with decolonization and the scars it left on the Indian psyche – a need to ape our colonial masters, perhaps. It’s not an obvious fit for our conditions – the equipment is expensive, a proper pitch and grounds are very hard to maintain – but cricket-like games happen everywhere.

I could go on, but so could you. That’s how faffing works.

That’s one skill Law School really taught us, didn’t it? I wouldn’t be half the man I am without it.

Some would say that’s an improvement.

In a report somewhere, it was written that your novel exposes "hard-hitting truths" about National Law School. It made me smile slimily. Your reaction to that (not to my slimy smile, but to the phrase)?

I smiled slimily. I did not intend to write a comforting and sweet paean to NLS. I love the institution and had a fantastic time of it myself, and telling the truth should take nothing away from it. NLS is an amazing college with great alumni, a unique culture and the remarkable achievement of having changed the face of legal practice in India by example. But every institution requires honest assessment, and nothing is perfect.

While The Angel’s Share isn’t a report on the functioning of NLS, it does shine a light on the life of the college that outsiders probably don’t see. The biggest problem with NLS in the years we were there is probably that nobody wanted to tell the truth about anything – infrastructure, safety and security, quality of teaching, lack of effort from students, parochialism, discipline, drug abuse – and nobody wanted to hear it. If the institution and its stakeholders (including us) had been more honest and forthcoming, and more willing to listen to each other, I think we’d have learnt more, done better and a lot of people wouldn’t have graduated with such a bitter taste in their mouths. The courage to talk about things is something that I wish we had possessed as an academic community in those years.

I hear that these things have gotten a lot better, and that’s great to hear. I hear exam papers don’t have roll numbers on them, and that there is an actual functioning ‘open-door policy’. I hear that extracurricular activities get more support from administration. Fewer people lose years now and thankfully, the suicide rate is dropping.

You talk of lack of effort from students, drug abuse, discipline – and these were issues that our professors often cribbed about… Remember the time when a professor said he wouldn’t send his daughter to NLS because he saw a guy and a girl make out on the tennis court? Isn’t this (and the consequential lack of student-teacher dialogue) a symptom of a problem that is fairly central to the incident that led to Sasha’s death in The Angel’s Share – of a cultural disconnect between Law School students and the people around them?

Law School was a bubble. Maybe it still is. The world within was culturally, politically, linguistically different from the ‘Portugal’ outside. I would hesitate to draw that link so explicitly because the saddest part about Sasha Kapur’s death is that it dealt to him by unknowns as random act of unthinking violence. When you attribute causality, you reduce the world to a simpler thing than it is.

If you had to dedicate this novel to three storytellers (novelists, film directors, playwrights -- storytellers), who would they be? And why?

The first would be Jack Kerouac, the patron saint of youth in search of itself. The second would be Bob Dylan, who signals to me that at no point in your life need you run out of stories to tell or avatars to slip into. I think they should hurry up and give him the Nobel Prize for Literature already; it’s embarrassing that they haven’t. The third would be Nick Hornby, because more than anything else I have read, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch spoke to me and my passions and whispered that fiction is a mask we wear so we can speak the language of empathy.

What about sympathy and genuiness?

:)

Your father is a novelist, and a fairly well-known one at that (I must admit that when I first saw We Weren't Lovers Like That on the shelf of a bookstore, I thought it would be vaguely erotic).

That’s because you have a filthy mind.

Guilty as charged. Please tell him that I loved The Exile?

Will do.

Did having him around help you write this novel? Say, in understanding what it takes to write one -- schedules, deadlines, self-discipline and things like that? Did you pick up these things osmotically? Or how to approach publishers with a manuscript? How to deal with editors? Anything?

I only wish I had the discipline of my father, who wakes up early and works at a steady pace, and makes a certain amount of progress on his projects every day. The writing process is something that differs vastly for different people and you just have to find the key that works for you.

It was helpful to have a published author tell you to keep at it, keep your expectations in check and not to give up when the rejections come in, or worse, with the interminable waiting for the rejections to come in.

More than any tangible assistance, I would say that it’s a tremendous boost psychologically. Writers are booklovers first, and I grew up in a house of books. My paternal grandparents are both famous writers in Punjabi. To have books and writing in the family means that writing is not alien or terrifying. After this many years of reading, of hearing one side of a conversation, you just want to open your mouth and say something yourself. Writing makes the world of books a dialogue and not just a monologue.

***

The Angel's Share can be bought online -- this link will tell you the options you have in India. And Amazon has it here. But keep those brick-and-mortar bookstores alive; look there first?

An unreliable socio-political history of wedding reception food in Madras

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, brides, grooms, their families, wedding planners, caterers, philosophers and sundry wedding attendees, buoyed by liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation, exposed to alien cultures and rituals, realised that since the wedding reception -- yes, that very reception that looks like a school annual day prize-giving ceremony, with the groom in a suit that will cease to fit him in two months, and the bride in an ultra-bling ghaghra-choli that she will be embarrassed to wear in any other environment -- was not a religious ceremony anyway, it was alright to serve food that wasn't, um, auspicious and upholding traditional Indian values.

So, out went the avials and the morekozhambus, and in came the soups, chats, cheese dosas and syrup-y gulab jamuns. The sit-down leaf-served meal made way for the posh buffet served from behind canopied counters. Why the canopy in indoor venues, you ask? Aesthetics, my friend -- a wedding must either be pleasing to the eye or overwhelming to the senses. A canopy can do either, depending on the mental state of the attendee. The servers, originally in crisp off-white veshtis (they used to be white when they were first worn) changed to random black-and-white plain or checked shirt-trouser-and-aprons and wore tall chef hats. Yes, chef hats. Aesthetics, again.

The banana leaf disappeared, and was replaced by mega-sized melmac or plastic plates that were large enough to hold one chapati or two puris or both, with an overpowering-masala gravy concealing microscopic paneer particles, one bowl of instant-diabetes-inducing sweet rasamalai, one collapsed dosa with accompanying sambar bowl and two chutneys, ladlefuls of "variety rice", pulao, bisi bele bath and curd rice, chips, a pappadum, and a minuscule quantity of red pickle.

Vegetable and fruit carving became the latest rage amongst the mamis as miscellaneous barn animals, cartoon characters, gods and goddesses were all sculpted out of carrots, watermelons, pumpkins and pineapples and placed on a central table in the middle of the hall with spurious sliced vegetables - god knows when they were sliced - posing as salads.

But this model had its disadvantages. Firstly, as the number of guests increased, the cleanliness of recycled plates became questionable. Many guests took to rubbing their plates dry with the provided tissue. Secondly, while the youth with their limitless energy went back for refills and repeated helpings, the middle-aged and the geriatric often under-ate. Thirdly, many guests left the hall without eating -- a serpentine queue (Serpent is too tame a word. Some of the queues are positively anacondaic, threatening to eat up the wedded couple by the time the photographer allows it to slither along) to wish the couple was bad enough, another one for the buffet was too much to handle and guests preferred rushing to the nearest Saravana Bhavan for some tame plate meals.

Then, at a wedding, a few years ago, I noticed a new trend. I trekked up to the dining hall to find, curiously, a sit-down meal. My inner mama was highly pleased and I rubbed my hands in glee, waiting for some hot kozhambu. First, they placed a paper cup next to the leaf and poured some thick red liquid in it -- no payasam, friends, instead we got tomato soup! Soon, a guy followed with two little bowls in his hand -- one had bread crumbs, and the other, I kid you not, corn mixture! To my horror, a rubbery rumali roti was tossed on to my leaf next. This was accompanied by a lot of gravy with four suspended grains of channa. I ate this gingerly, hoping we would be back to regular programming in the next round.

Then came some sticky ajinomoto-overloaded hakka noodles and tomato ketchup (which didn't taste much different from the soup, mind you). I witnessed the cosmic sight of two hundred Tamilian brahmins eating hot noodles off a banana leaf with their fingers. The culinary world-tour didn't end there. Immediately after the noodles came some cheesy baked vegetable, and I swear I tasted some aamchur masala in it. A friend sitting next to me actually ate the au gratin with mango pickle.

Then, we were served sambar rice with chips and curd rice. I breathed calmly for a couple of minutes, before the waiter shocked me again with the dessert menu -- again, on the leaf, to be eaten with bare hands -- of chocolate mousse cake and mango souffle!

That night, I didn't sleep. I really hoped this concept dinner, whatever that concept was, was an aberration. A one-off. A product of an overactive imagination of an under-utilised mind. But I was proved wrong.

In the three years since that meal, I have consumed off the hallowed banana leaf, naans and kulchas with side dishes as outlandish as malai kofta, manchurian, penne arabbiata (the flavour was more Ambattur than Arabia), and localised versions of kachoris, malpuas, vegetable momos, pav bhaji, cutlets, dhoklas, french fries, and even a bar of chocolate.

This encapsulates the spirit of 21st century India -- an India that's global yet local, an India that borrows but makes it's own, an India that's as outward-looking as inward-looking, a democratic masala of a nation that is, in every way, a true original. (Or so I console myself.)

***
This piece should appear sometime now in an in-house publication of some sort. If you are in that house, you can read it again. If you aren't, you can come back here to read it.

Vinod Agencies...

... or How I Fashion a Blog-post From Some Disorganised Thoughts on Cinema
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I watched Agent Vinod last night, and it wasn't an eye-opener. In fact, I struggled to keep my eyes open every now and then. Let's start at the beginning, in Afghanistan, in that Desert of Doom or Death or Some Other Such Dangerous D-Word where a skirmish between 75 terrorists (Were they terrorists? Taliban? ISI? Business-sponsored interests?) and two Indian RAW dudes - one of them being a slightly overweight Ravi Kishen (whom I totally love, by the way) who looks like he hasn't run 500m at a stretch in two decades. The two Indian dudes win, of course, bharat mata ki jai etc., and while they are at it, they rescue a scantily-clad damsel trapped in a sack (bharat mata ki jai!). The action sequences are slick enough, if not particularly spectacular, and Saif and Ravi Kishen exchange endearingly silly banter. I want to see more of that woman (in both senses of the phrase). I am hooked.

But then, over-long opening credits ensue, taking one through not just the key actors and technicians, but also the lawyer and chartered accountants. This got me thinking - when the lawyers decide to do the legal work for the movie, do they say, "Boss, we'll waive some part of the fee if you credit us." I mean, I can't think of why a lawyer must be credited for a movie. He doesn't contribute to it creatively, does he? I mean, are the credits about everyone who did anything for the movie? Are they a vote of thanks? Or should they only credit people who worked on the movie itself? The fellow who brings chai for everyone on the set - should he be credited? What about the caterers? Or the hotels at the various locations where the unit stayed? The travel agents? Kareena's dentist?

You see what happened there? When the credits began, I was thinking of spies in Afghanistan. By the end of it, I am engrossed in the health of Kareena's gums. Detailed opening credits, a hat-tip to an earlier era of filmmaking, no doubt, probably work best when there is no action before them. It's like putting lengthy acknowledgments after a gripping prologue in a novel.

And this was the issue with Agent Vinod. There is some pretty engaging stuff - a smart joke here, a fun sequence there, some boiling tension - only to be killed by inconsistently paced and plotted stuff.

For instance, there was that brilliant scene with the Empress of Blandings-esque pet camel that Prem Chopra mercy kills with a heavy heart and moist eyes. There was a silliness to this scene, yes, but it was pitched and timed perfectly that I couldn't stop laughing. Was I the only one who thought Prem Chopra as David Kazaan was himself a bit Lord of Emsworthy - slightly out of sync with the world around him (he gets conned by Vinod, Iram and one man he believes is his own - the Colonel), slightly old, slightly beyond his prime, slightly clueless.

The camel made another appearance, as the password to a nuclear bomb in the last scene. There, it was just downright silly. And, somehow, not funny. The greatest password to defuse a nuclear bomb in all cinematic history still remains "Dulhan ki bidayi ka waqt badalna hai" from the seminal 16 December. Not only did the bomb in that movie require a password, it required the password to be spoken in Gulshan Grover's voice. The bomb has been smuggled into a college fest (yes, a college fest - who would expect a terrorist attack in an engineering college!) as "musical equipment", and Gulshan Grover immediately does what every terrorist does before launching a nuclear attack. He plays the drums. Fakely. With an expression conveying heightened calm and fulfillment. Like he's just slept with three supermodels at the same time. (If you don't believe me, watch the movie here.)

And how do they get him to say the password? They have a phone conversation with him where they "trick" him into saying the relevant words out of context. So ingenious. So yummy. 

You know the other great thing about 16 December? The "agents" are not coolly RAW or Intelligenec Bureau or any such thing. They are from the vastly underrated and underrepresented Revenue Intelligence. (If you're sniggering away, let me remind you that it was the very same Revenue Intelligence that exposed the Nira Radia scam.) But then, I'm not sure the Revenue Intelligence are even one-hundredth as cool as this movie makes them out to be. I don't think they have posh snipers, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, an army of hackers, Milind Soman and an informer as hot as Aditi Govitrikar. For that matter, I don't think RAW has a single fellow like Agent Vinod either. As far as I know, these agencies have your standard-issue, slightly pot-bellied, middle-aged, mustachioed Government employees who do their job and come back home at 5 pm and lounge around their verandah in a torn banian and faded veshti and complain about corruption and rogue politicians. None of the hanging-from-a-cable-car-in-their-childhood nonsense.

I met a detective once, at a wedding, and I was aghast. He wasn't one of those, as Lauren Bacall so eloquently put it in The Big Sleep "greasy little men snooping around hotel corridors". Nor was he fast-talking, super-smooth, gun-toting Sam Spade variety. Not even the highly analytical, verbose Byomkesh Bakshi types. He was a Brahmin mama who lived in Mylapore, and when I spoke to him, was scooping paal payasam off his banana leaf and slurping it off his palm greedily. 

But this is a thing about making films about spies or detectives (or even lawyers for that matter). You have two options. You can either stick within existing tropes, and re-imagine or reinvent existing cliches - they are lies anyway, so you make a slightly different lie. Or you can go research the truth, and show them as they are. (No, while making films about lawyers, don't try being realistic. Some incoherent murmuring, an adjournment, and the bench clerk calling out the next case does not make for watchable cinema.) Sriram Raghavan was, clearly, doing the former. But he didn't go the whole hog - he seemed too constrained by prior art. Barring stray sequences, like that unbelievable sequence in that sleazy hotel in East Europe - that heart-stopping four-minute tracking shot gun-battle weaving in and out of corridors and rooms, with a dreamy song playing in the background, the blind pianist, those silent guns and their muted noise - he was stuck, not knowing which way to go.

There is another kind of spy movie. Vinod, a quiet family man, runs a gas agency, called "Vinod Agencies". But that is only a front. When he is not answering innumerable inquiries from various angry customers on when their gas cylinder will arrive, he is a super-agent. But he finishes all his work so subtly and clinically that he's home at 6 pm each evening to play cricket with his children. Something like a Bob Biswas working for the good guys. Now that's a compelling spy movie.

Aap Kaa Surroor v. Rockstar

A comparative examination of the dialectic dinchak discourses and discombobulated lumpen demetia.
***

Fifteen years ago, if someone told me that there would soon be two movies about Indian rockstars singing in Hindi who are wildly popular in Europe, I would've said sarcastically, "Yeah. And Govinda and Navjot Sidhu will end up as Members of Parliament." At that point in time, the only non-English singers to achieve mass hysteria were Ricky Martin and Las Ketchup, and neither was a rockstar in the Himesh Reshammiya or Ranbir Kapoor mould.

The parallels between Rockstar and Aap ka Surroor - the Moviee - the Real Love storyyy are plain for everyone to see. An Indian rockstar, with humble roots and extreme angst caused by flimsy reasons, rises to the top of the Indian music firmament, and in a totally unexpected turn of events, has wild shows in Europe. He gets arrested. He romances some woman who cannot act. There's a spunky other woman whose love he cannot reciprocate. He sports a stubble. He pontificates in Urdu.


(Oh man, Himesh should think of a copyright suit!) 

A detailed point-by-point analysis is required.


Name
Himesh is just called HR. Human Resources. Human Rights. High Risk. Hrithik Roshan. Heart Rate. An html code that creates a horizontal line...
There's a gilt-edged glitz to it. A starry shiny feel. It's the sort of name that can inspire and conspire (and the name rhymes with TR, who rhymed many things with many things).

Ranbir is called Jordan. Jordan? Why would you want to share your name with a Hashemete Kingdom, a retired basketball champ and an erstwhile pornstar? And dude, you're from Pitampura. Face it.

AKS: 1. Rockstar: 0.

War Cry
A no-brainer.

"Jai mata di. Let's rock!" versus "Sadda Haq!" The former is traditional with modern outlook. The latter sounds like a burly Pakistani middle order batsman's genial brother.

AKS: 2. Rockstar: 0

Lead star costume and make-up
This is a toughie.

Himesh's wardrobe included the bizarre Hrithik Roshan inspired black see-through banian showing off his insides in gory detail, the Neo-from-the-Matrix-trenchcoat with an incongruous red baseball cap, and a red turtleneck sweater I'll never forget for as long as I live. But let's face it, the costume was monotonous. And you couldn't see his hair, which just eliminates so many possibilities.

Ranbir wore a Sgt. Peppers' jacket and a Subhash Chandra Bose topi for one concert. For merging these two influences, and showing that the rebel can be a patriot (or a fan of Balakrishna, who famously wore the topi in this mind-warping, soul-twisting, brain-hurting video) Rockstar deserves an award. Those harem pants, those strange things hanging from his neck (sources tell me they included one item from the dargah, one from the temple and a miniature samosa), the I'm-a-turban-I'm-not-a-turban... Rockstar had some incomparable gems. And the hairdo - when Nargis is in coma, Ranbir's hair simply transforms from shoulder-length to middle-of-back length, and he grows a Craig McMillan moustache. Magical realism only.

AKS: 2. Rockstar: 1.

Pained expression of lead star
Himesh was the definition of pained. Even when he woos Hansika with a song, he looks pained. When he is arrested, he looks like someone pinched his nipples with tweezers. And when he asserts his innocence with the legendary, "It's a mistaaaake!" the German prison establishment's hearts melt and they allow him to be rescued by some auto-rickshaws.

Ranbir's expression somehow didn't convey the requisite pain required to be a rockstar. When he played with those Sufi people, for large swathes of the song, he looked bored, not troubled. I guess there's only that much pain you can convey about missing Nargis Fakhri.

AKS: 3. Rockstar: 1.

Lady love
Nargis Fakhri made me wish Genelia played this role - she is that bad. Her mouth is always in the wrong position, her eyes look eternally glazed, and her body is stiffer than Sadagopan Ramesh's feet.

On the other hand, Hansika Motwani deserves every accolade for playing her role with rare elan and panache. She had to act like she was in love with Himesh Reshammiya and repeatedly refer to him as HR. She also gets additional points for holding a cello like it was Himesh Reshammiya, and holding Himesh Reshammiya like she should have been holding the cello.

AKS: 4. Rockstar: 1.

Supporting female characters
Ah. Mallika Sherawat, called "Ruby James", in love with Himesh Reshammiya (this gives men of all shapes and sizes hope). Plus, she's a lawyer and I have professional bias. Plus, she dances to Mehbooba o Mehbooba sung by Himesh in all his nasally overwhelming voice.

Aditi Rao Hydari's ultimate dollness on the other hand.

Hmmmm. Difficult. Hmmmm.
Ok. The sheer yumminess of Aditi Rao wins this. But it is a close call, very very close.

AKS: 4. Rockstar: 2.

Sufi-based song
Gun Faya is a great song, and I love the way the guitar blends into it. Somehow, that part of the movie reminded me of the story about The Beatles at Hamburg. But that's a subject of a different post. Gun Faya is superlative, and the only thing going against it is that in English those words sound like someone setting off some ammunition.

Listening to any of Himesh's songs is like going down the Carrollian rabbit hole. But have you heard Assalam Valekum in an indefinite loop on a still, quiet night, alone in a hostel room through booming speakers and felt a brown creeper growing from beneath your feet, crackling as it wraps itself around you, digging its knife-like thorns into your flesh until the pain becomes your friend and puts you to restful dreamless sleep?

AKS: 5. Rockstar: 2.

Climax
Rockstar's climax is poetic, with that execrably translated Rumi verse about someone meeting someone else in a field and the ambiguity surrounding her death - there's one perplexing shot of her in coma with her bosoms heaving. But she's waiting. On "the field". For him. Really, she should give him better directions. 


Aap Kaa Surroor, on the other hand, had a climax that even Kidnap couldn't compare to, where the villain's confession is surreptitiously recorded on a mobile phone and beamed live on a large screen. And what does the villain confess to doing? In Wikipedia's words, "Khurana reveals that he wore a face mask to appear like HR and committed the murder to frame him."

We have a winner.

AKS: 6. Rockstar: 2.

The Best Movie about Indian Rockstar in Europe Award goes to...

(As a consolation, we give (posthumously) Shammi Kapoor the Best Fake Shehnai Playing Award.)

Parking

There's a dead crow on my street where I park my car,
So I parked my car a few feet away.
This got me thinking:

How long will the crow carcass remain there?
Will someone clear it? Who?
When can I park my car in its usual place?

What happens to dead crows in this city?
Do they burn them or bury them?
Or do they just let them rot?

And what of the street dogs and cats?
And bandicoots and cows and buffaloes?
Do they have a squad that does the dirty work?

And what of all those men and women
Who have nowhere to die, no one to bury;
Who will put them away in a safe place
So that I can peacefully park my car?

Certainty, Remorse and the Death Penalty

By the time you read this, Ram Jethmalani would most likely have walked away with a stay of the execution of three assassins of Rajiv Gandhi. You might not hear of it in the English and Hindi news channels - they're too busy monitoring Anna's health - but the Tamil media is crawling with news, analysis and opinions. Opinion is divided, obviously, for the issue is rather thorny. Is there a case for showing any mercy to three persons convicted of assassinating the Prime Minister and taking the lives of at least fourteen bystanders, even after the President has rejected their clemency petition?

I was reminded, yesterday, of a passage from Dosteovsky's The Idiot (It is a long passage, bear with me):

But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man— and that this is certain, CERTAIN! That’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.

‘This is not my own fantastical opinion—many people have thought the same; but I feel it so deeply that I’ll tell you what I think. I believe that to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. The man who is attacked by robbers at night, in a dark wood, or anywhere, undoubtedly hopes and hopes that he may yet escape until the very moment of his death. There are plenty of instances of a man running away, or imploring for mercy—at all events hoping on in some degree—even after his throat was cut. But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die,—is taken away from the wretch and CERTAINTY substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary—why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man!’

What these three prisoners have faced is far worse. The Supreme Court confirmed their death sentences in 2000 - eleven years ago. They filed a petition for clemency before the President immediately. With no discernible timeline for when the President would consider and pass an order on their application, they have been waking up for eleven years without knowing if they will be alive in the evening. Every book they read, they aren't sure if it will be their last. Every meal they eat, every piece of music they hear, every sunrise they witness, they wonder if they will once more. Surely, this is a far worse punishment than death itself.

These are people willing to die for a cause, yes. They have shown no remorse, yes. They are still considered heroes amongst their ilk. If twenty years of jail and twenty years of uncertainty of existence hasn't reformed them, what will?

But then, our criminal justice system doesn't deal with remorse. Our strongest justification for the death penalty is still retribution. Let me use the cruder term - revenge. Is it possible to feel remorse when an avenger hovers over you, holds you captive and takes painfully long to shut every exit door? We aren't giving our criminals the space to feel remorse.

What of the families of the victims in Sriperumbudur? A friend who did a report on them says they are all struggling to make ends meet, that they are still recovering from the loss. Our criminal justice system has nothing to make them a part of the process; a crime is seen as an offence against the state and not against an individual or a community. The state acts coldly, the state even eliminates the victim from the process, except as witnesses. How can Murugan feel sorry for his actions when he doesn't know what suffering he has caused? Our system doesn't make an offender face up to his wrongs, it only gives him a chance to defend himself against them. Telling a victim that you did nothing wrong is much harder than telling the State that you did nothing wrong.

The 187th Law Commission Report speaks of the death penalty in the most scathing terms, it tells us of everything that is wrong with it. It also deals with this issue - of prisoners on death row, for interminable periods. Our Supreme Court has dealt with cases like this in the past in favour of the offender, but these are quick-fix solutions. Cases where clemency petitions are pending with the President for decades are not unknown.

The first step we need to take is to recognise that revenge cannot and should not justify criminal punishments anymore. The death penalty is heinous, it is violent, it is morally unjustifiable, and it is random. It must go.

Twenty-buck Meal

Apparently, there is a regulation in Tamil Nadu, which makes it mandatory for restaurant owners (from what I gather, the regulation applies to the Bhavans - Saravana Bhavan, Vasanta Bhavan, Balaji Bhavan and so on) to supply some "meals" for Rs. 20. (Just as an aside, the word "meals" is always plural. "Oru meals kudunga." "Have you taken your meals?" "Meals saapudlaama?" Even the menus in the restaurant offer only "Chennai Meals", "Banjabi Meals", "Chineese Meals". This is like caste names. "Saar, neenga Brahmins aa?" I'm tempted to say, "Ille saar. Naa oru Brahmin daan.") Today, instead of ordering "Limited Meals" (misleading name, the meals have enough food to cure famine in a small village), I order the twenty-buck meals. It felt a little cheap, initially, but when the food came, I was very satisfied.

The "Limited Meals" features a mound of rice that's as big as (and looks like) one hemisphere of a football on a plate. The plate also has various (replenishable) bowls of poriyal, kootu, karakozhambu, sambar, rasam, two sweets, buttermilk, curd and more-molaga. Oh, I forgot the appalam. When I finish eating this, I usually come back to office and collapse for a while. It is a highly satisfying meal, I agree, but sometimes it feels too satisfying. Priced at Rs. 55, it is an overwhelming avalanche of food. It makes you feel like one of those vaadyars who has to attend, conduct and eat food at weddings everyday.

The twenty-buck meal is perfect. The rice is about half the amount. There's only a sambar, rasam, kootu and buttermilk (and I suspect these bowls aren't bottomless). A mini-coffee at the end of it, and the world seemed like a good place to be. I know I'll feel hungry in some time (the Limited Meals makes me run away from food for the rest of the day), but there are yummy momos close by.

This is what I love the Tamil Nadu Government for. Things like the 10-buck movie tickets - if you didn't know, you can walk into any movie theatre in Tamil Nadu and ask for a 10-buck ticket. Yes, any theatre, even the Sathyams, the Inoxes and the PVRs of the world. Free mixies, grinders, laptops, TVs, 4 gms of gold (for marriageable women - I'm neither a woman, nor marriageable, but still), free cattle (I'm not kidding you)... What a great place to live!

In the end analysis, this twenty-buck meal is good for my waistline. People describe me today as "well-built", and I can sense that they're politely implying that I'm plump. I don't want them to graduate to saying "plump" when they mean "fat", or "fat" when they mean "gargantuan".

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.