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!

***
'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.

A Sorry Interruption

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Dummies Guide to Making Rava Upma

Hi there, dummy! How is life? Or, as they ask in North Karnataka, Oota aitha? 

My first tip to you is this -- while starting cooking, always start with the soaking. While whatever needs to be soaked soaks, you can do the cutting. This will save you time. Now, upma requires no soaking. So, you could first go soak those clothes you need to hand-wash because colour will run. Or, take warm water in a tub, add salt and shampoo and soak your feet in it. Feels good, doesn't it?

Upma, though, needs roasted rava. Don't bother with roasting rava. That process does not soothe your soul. In other words, it's deadly painful. Just buy roasted rava. Or, buy Naga Sooji Double-Roasted. That's the granddaddy of all roasted ravas. Because it's the only one that's double roasted. So, if you roast it again, it becomes triple roasted. That's overkill. Don't roast Double-Roasted Rava. Don't. It's the third basic rule of cooking. (The first rule is: Don't be afraid. The second rule is: Say "Sai Ram" before you start.)

Upma optionally requires cutting. Of onions. Or tomatoes. Or carrots. Or beans. On okra. (Ok, I'm kidding about the okra.) Take any of the above vegetables in whatever quantity (see, I'm pro-choice) and cut them into smallish pieces. If the pieces are not of the same size, you will be docked 41 points by the Samayaleshwara, the Lord of Cooking. But don't worry, Uncle Samayal's brain -- like cooking itself -- is a great combination of bad mathematics and a ton of forgiveness. So, he won't really dock you anything.

So, once you're done cutting the onions... wait... you're not one of those types, are you? The sort that doesn't eat onion and garlic because they grow underground, but eats carrots, beetroots, potatoes and chamagadda? There's a word for people like you. It begins with 'h'. No, I don't mean 'hare-brained'.

Sounds like.

Back to our chopped onions now. Just keep them aside. But not too far away from your stove. You'll need them sooner than you think.

Take a pan -- a kadai (in India) or a wok (if you're in the East) -- (ok, I want to say cooking is no "wok in the phak", but I shall refrain) and put some oil in it. Don't put too much, it's not good for your health. But don't put too little; else your tongue will complain. Switch on the gas. Put the kadai on the gas.

Now, dummy, I presume you know how to switch on the gas? You take the starter (it looks like a steel syringe with no needle) in your right hand (if you're a right hander), place it near the mouth of the burner, press and turn the knob ninety degrees (No need to get your protractor out. You can just use an approximation.) counterclockwise with your left hand (if you're a right hander), and then click the starter as if you're injecting life into the burner. Watch the flame crackle brightly, warming the cockles of your heart. (You might have to click more than once.)

Right. Now. Gas burning. Oil heating. Quickly introduce some mustard seeds (kadugu) into the pan, and follow it up with urad dal and channa dal. Hop on one leg twenty-one times in front of the pan, holding your hands on your hips. The time taken for you to hop will be enough for the dals to have browned a little. If you aren't an h-word, add the onions. Now, hop on the other leg twenty-one times. By this time, your onions will be transparent. (Now, you may ask me why you should hop. Why can't you just count in your head? There is a reason, dummy. It's healthier. It builds an appetite. Most importantly, at the end of all that hopping, whatever the upma tastes like, you'll devour it.)

Now, you can add all or any of the following -- green chillies (slit), green chillies (chopped), green chillies (whole), dry red chillies, ginger, ginger paste, garlic, garlic paste, methi seeds or curry leaves. Wow, that's a lot of choice, isn't it? You know the great thing about cooking -- there are no rules. You feel like adding coffee at this point, add coffee. You feel like mixing some wine, mix some wine. You want to add coconut milk, add coconut milk. You want to add ragi malt powder, add ragi malt powder. You want to add whipped cream, add it. You want to add pasta sauce, add pasta sauce. See, if you add tasty things, it will taste good. (No, that's not always true. But there's no better way to find out than to actually get into the kitchen and try.)

Now, add the remaining vegetables and water. Two cups of water, approximately, for one cup of rava. Then, add salt (to taste) (obviously to taste, not to not taste) (ok, bad joke).

[Life tip: Err on the conservative side with the salt, you can always compensate later. If you're too liberal with the salt now, you're stuck with something too salty. Then, your only option is to hop away until you can eat the upma.]

You can also mix all or any of the following (Yes, you're supposed to say, "Whee! Such a libertarian recipe this is!") -- turmeric powder, coriander powder, chilli powder, sambar powder, rasam powder, peppercorns, crushed pepper, heeng, garam masala... Feel free to improvise. Unimaginative cooking is insipid cooking. Insipid cooking is tasteless cooking. (God, I sound like a self-help guru.)

Let the water boil. Let the vegetables cook. Into this colourful, boiling goo, pour the rava. (Hopefully, you have Naga Sooji Double-Roasted rava.) (No, they haven't paid me for this blog.) (Really, they haven't.) (I wish they do, though. Hey, Naga people? Can you hear me? I'm advertising for you guys. Come on. Give me some dough.)(Shouldn't have said dough in a cookery blog. It has different connotations here.)

While pouring the rava, remember this -- POUR IT IN BATCHES. AND KEEP STIRRING. IF YOU DON'T FOLLOW THIS INSTRUCTION, GOD WILL PUNISH YOU. (See, we're not all that libertarian after all. More like Gandhian liberalism. "Hey, I'm liberal. You're liberal. We're all liberal. But we mustn't drink. We must pray to God. We must be clean in thought and deed.")

The thing with upma is that when you add the rava (as I said earlier, preferably Naga Sooji Double-Roasted), it turns into upma faster than you think it will. I'd say, on full flame, you've upma-fied in 45 seconds flat. In other words, in fifteen one-legged hops. Newbies don't expect that. And because they don't, they screw it up. The trick is this: when it is still a little gooey, say two-thirds its final intended consistency, turn the gas off and cover the pan. (This is because it will solidify in its own heat. If you turn the gas off when it is the consistency you want it to be, it'll turn into rock upma. Can you smell what The Rock's cooking? I can't. Thank God. Have you seen the guy? Do you feel like you want to smell his cooking?)

This is the great thing about upma -- you can make it (and make it quite tasty) in less time than it takes for you to read this blog post. (That's partly because I digress a lot, and I like irritating people with my sense of humour. A bit like Govinda or Ravi Teja, you know -- the humour is based on the fact that it is slightly irritating. If it gets too irritating, it's too irritating. If it gets any less irritating, it's not funny anymore.)

So, if you avoid the cutting of too many vegetables, you're done in 5-7 minutes flat. At the end of it, you have yummy, healthy, traditional South Indian breakfast. That hot-Tamizhnaattu-pulchritude/ NRI-Karthik-Iyer-who's-missing-South-Indian-food (delete as per preference) you've been trying to impress  will fall head over heels in love with you.

So, what are you doing here? Get into the kitchen, and cut open that packet of Naga Sooji Double-Roasted, yo!

A nine-year-journey...

Sometime in 2004, when I was nineteen and a half, under-confident, lonely and impressionable, I chanced upon Roger Ebert's Great Movies in a Punjabi friend's room (so much for stereotypes). Back then, I read a lot of books, yes, but nowhere near what many of my peers did. My tastes were limited. Narayan was my comfort reading (although his stories left me sad). I loved Wodehouse to bits. I read Harry Potter like my life depended on it. I knew all sorts of things about Tintin. But anything heavier made me drowsy. My music-listening was limited to Bollywood, Rahman and Carnatic, in that order. I listened to pop when my roommate played it on his computer. But that was it. Crucially, my movie-watching was limited to extensive David Dhawan, some Mani Ratnam and some Ram Gopal Varma. 

I started reading Great Movies with looking for movies I had watched and then reading about them. One of the early essays I read was about The Godfather. When I read the essay, I realised I hadn't really seen the movie at all. I was taken aback by the subtext. From sources in the hostel (it was the sort of place where you could source almost anything), I got a Divx of The Godfather and watched it repeatedly for a few days. Then, I re-watched the Hitchcocks -- Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, The Birds… Then came the Chaplins -- Modern Times, City Lights, The Great Dictator -- Ebert's analysis transformed what were, in my head, slapstick comedies into biting satire and art of the highest form. 

Then, I began to look for the other movies he wrote about, partly because I wanted to watch them, and partly because I wanted to read what Ebert said about them. He wrote with such tenderness, such love, that Ebert opened a door in my head. I discovered, in a frenzied six months, Welles, Hawks, Reed, Keaton, Leone, Ford, Wilder, Scorsese, Kubrick and most importantly, Woody Allen. And if Ebert's book had a couple of movies of a director I liked, I sought the others. Imdb's Top 250 list was a spectacular companion, and torrents were integral parts of our lives. 

Gingerly, I stepped into the rather chilling waters of "foreign" films -- foreign to the Americans, of course, given Ebert was my frame of reference. I used Ebert to grapple with Fellini and Bergman, the former's images came in my dreams and the latter's in my nightmares. While I made a visceral connect to their films, the historical significance of Godard and Truffaut would have been lost on me if not for Ebert's essays. Kurosawa would have sounded like an incantation karate people did in the movies before launching into a bloody attack if I hadn't read Ebert on Seven Samurai. 

It was Seven Samurai that got me deep into cinema. Being known as one of the "movie buffs" (although I had only been buffing for a few months then) in the hostel, I was put in charge of organising film screenings during "University Week". This loose sub-committee had myself, a Bengali brother and cultured Chandigarhi. It was as inclusive as loose sub-committees came.

 On the first night, we screened Seven Samurai. We printed posters and pasted them all over campus. "One of the four of five greatest action movies of all time," the posters read (Yes, that was my analysis.). By 9 pm, a huge crowd gathered at the quadrangle. The sub-committee was mighty pleased. The screening began. In fifteen minutes, there were murmurs, "Boss, I can't read so many subtitles!" "Where's the action, dude?" A couple of people left. Some people who walked in late didn't even bother sitting down. They walked away indifferently. Soon, someone commented that the people in the movie run funnily. A section in the audience was sniggering at that observation. We could feel the restlessness. The committee that made us the sub-committee glared at us like we repent for our sin by committing seppuku. 

Needless to say, the sub-committee was disbanded, and more populist voices took over the screenings. Over cigarettes outside the main gate, the sub-committee -- the Bengali, the Punjabi and me -- decided we would start a film club. We would show movies we liked. We would talk about them, we would tell people what to look for, we would watch movies we wanted to watch in the process. In other words, we would be to the world what Ebert had been to us. Of course, this was born out of a superiority-complex, but I must insist that trying to get people to see what we saw was a crucial cog in the wheel. 

The NLS Film Club -- pompous in name, pompous in functioning -- was a moderate success. When we screened movies people wanted to watch, we had audiences. When we screened movies they didn't want to watch, it was just me, the Bengali and the Punjabi in the hall. We got ourselves a membership to Habitat on Church Street, a delightful shop that rents foreign movies and sold jazz CDs. We poured a lot of funding into renting DVDs, and made sure we ripped them into Divx-es to get our money's worth. These were still times when a 2GB pen drive was a novelty, and my desktop, with a 128GB hard drive was considered "huge". So, we wrote these Divx-es on to DVDs and backed them up on other DVDs in case these conked. 

I preferred making 700MB rips that I could copy on to regular CDs, and displaying them like a CD collection in one of those 50 CD pouches. I lost my dearest pouch with my dearest movies. The hostel could be cruel like that. 

By this time, Ebert was only one of the many people I read on the internet. I watched genres and directors he rarely mentioned, if ever. I found myself drowned in bizarre cinematic experiments that he didn't really explore in his writing. But then, as I said earlier, Ebert had opened the door. He was still my first stop when I encountered a "great" movie and didn't get what the fuss was about. He had this way of making the obscure accessible -- although I found many people criticising him for doing just that. Ebert had not just opened the door, he was always around to guide me through the labyrinth of cinema. 

He pointed me to The Terrorist, an Indian movie he rated so very highly. He even pointed me to The Apu Trilogy. That led me to spend days and years coming to grips with Ray's subtle art. From Ray, I moved to study India's parallel cinema movement, and then, slowly, discover the masters of the Indian mainstream world. Ebert had, in a strange way, taken me on a ride all over the world, and brought me back home to Guru Dutt, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, K. Balachander and Bharatiraaja. More interestingly, he led me to people (like Scorsese and Tarantino) who made me understand that I could be a film buff and still watch Kyunki Main Jhoot Nahin Bolta for the umpteenth time on a Sunday afternoon.    

He taught me to be more patient with cinema. He taught me that the notion that cinema is only a source of entertainment is naive. He taught me, at the same time, that great cinema needn't be boring or inaccessible. He first made me a snob, and then peeled the layers off to strip me off my snobbery. I don't agree with all his views on cinema -- hey, Midnight Cowboy is a great movie and Slumdog Millionaire isn't, ok? -- but if it weren't for his writing, I wouldn't even be confident of disagreeing with anybody. 

He died yesterday, after a decade-long fight against cancer. He wrote about his fight on his blog very openly, but he never asked for sympathy. He wrote to share his story with the world, just like he wrote about the films he loved and hated. Did this constant swimming in his favourite medium of art bring him that strength? Last year, he wrote more than 300 reviews -- he had never done so many in a year before, and I doubt if any movie critic has. It wasn't a stunt, he wasn't trying to get himself in the Guinness Book. He was doing it because that's what he loved doing. It is this mad passion for cinema that made me such a fan of his, irrespective of what I thought of his opinions on this movie or that.

He ends his last blog post with, "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies." 

You showed me how to "see" movies, Mr. Ebert, I will see you at every one of them.

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. 

Thirteenth Day

This is part of something much, much larger. But it sort of holds up on its own. And, I haven't written in a while and the blog feels neglected. Hence.

***

My grandfather died when I was 17. We lived in Dehradun then, and he died in Madras. My father was a bureaucrat and we lived all over the country. This meant that I met him only when I came to Madras for the holidays, once a year, sometimes twice. 

He was a journalist with the Express, and he wrote a weekly column on politics and current events. Each day, he left for work only after a leisurely lunch. On many days, he never went anywhere. So, we read all the newspapers together. And we deliberated about the news. Our discussions stemmed from what we read, but very soon, we found ourselves far, far away from where we started, debating, discussing, throwing ideas and arguments at each other. I remember refusing to eat for a whole day after a long argument we had on the ethics of begging. I was indoctrinated to never give money to a beggar -- I was encouraging begging, my mother said. But he argued (and I never found out whether he was being serious or just playing devil's advocate) that I was being inhuman. I think I told him I will earn my food, and that he need not give me anything. He let me be hungry until I asked my grandmother for food the next evening. I don't know if that exercise taught me anything else, but it sure taught me hunger. 

I wrote to him regularly when I was away, and he replied unfailingly. He rambled and went off topic in almost every letter. He was often obscure, and he assumed I knew many things. Like, he would write about something he read in the EPW, and say, 'It makes the standard utilitarian arguments.' But I was 12. I didn't know what utilitarian was. It was a wonder that he wrote such precise, clear, forceful editorials week after week. I was, perhaps, his outlet for all that went on in his head. 

One day, I heard him speak at the University of Madras. He spoke on the space where language and culture meet, and linked it to Tamil patriotism. He spoke in a language that was neither English nor Tamil, switching so seamlessly between the two that his tongue had a fully formed structure of its own. I wondered if he was making a subtle point with that exercise. 

His lectures were famous, you know. He had this New Years' Eve lecture each year on contemporary politics and what to look forward to in the coming year, and I was told that the halls would be overflowing and people stood in the aisles for two whole hours. Each political party would send its spies to find out what he lauded and what he criticised. 

It was almost cruel that after a stroke, he lost his ability to speak. He taught himself to communicate through guttural sounds and gesturing, but there was no way he could lecture. He lived like that for four years. He was healthy enough to walk around sometimes, but other times, he was wheeled around by a nurse. 

One day, four months after the stroke, my uncles who lived with him noticed that he was reading a lot of political theory and making furious notes in some old diaries. When people asked him, he revealed nothing. Just a grunt or two dismissing their questions. Then, a month or so later, he demanded that he be taken to the University of Madras library each morning for half a day. My uncles, glad that he still wanted to do something with his life, made the arrangements. 

He read all sorts of journals and essays. He started maintaining boxes and boxes of photocopies. He cut out articles from newspapers each morning and put them in folders. His poor nurse bore the brunt of his compulsive arranging and rearranging. 

He met some of his lawyer friends every other day and spent hours discussing things with them -- apparently, he would write what he wanted to say on a piece of paper, and they would respond vocally. Each night, after dinner, he would write. First, on one-sided paper. Write, edit, rewrite, tear pages, write again… Then, he would transcribe his first draft into notebooks. These were refined with a red pen and fully re-copied. After almost two years, he handed four notebooks to my uncle and asked him to get whatever was written there typed out. 

It was about two hundred pages in print, and it was a meditation on the notion of equality, from its underpinnings in philosophy and political theory to how and why it was the cornerstone of human rights. For him, everything else was negotiable. Equality wasn't. Everything stemmed from equality, he wrote, and so, if we understood the idea, we would understand the entirety of political science. It was a grandiose thought, perhaps a little too sweeping. Still, the grasp over his arguments, his cogency, and the sheer breadth of knowledge made the argument as convincing as it could be. 

He covered equality in interpersonal dealings, you know, between husband and wife, parent and son, boss and employee... "micro-equality". And he covered "macro-equality", in the way Government deals with people, in the way large corporations deal with each other, in how nations negotiated deals... His thesis was that they are all manifestations of the same idea. The prose was like one of his editorials -- sparkling, crackling with wit and wisdom. His ideas were crystal clear. His arguments were as strong as fortresses without being as imposing. It was incredible.

I remember reading it then (while I read it, his voice rang in my ear as if he were reading it out to me) and not really understanding it. My father, though, read it over and over again for months. He made copious notes while he read. He even sent my grandfather three letters about it. He never got a reply. 

My grandfather's health deteriorated almost immediately after he was done with bringing the book out. I had gotten into IIT Delhi by then, and was waiting for college to start. It was a great time to be in Dehradun. Away from the crippling summer on the plains with nothing to do and an admission in a top course in a plum college.   

Each evening, I would go out with this girl and come back really late at night. She was my father's colleague's daughter. Dehra was quite safe, and neither of our parents cared that we were out after dark. I had a motorbike, and we went on long rides to deserted places. She was smart, though she behaved like she didn't like being smart. She was moderately pretty, but behaved like she was much prettier. She had a fascination for scatological humour.

One day, in some thicket, at dusk, we kissed. I hadn't kissed a girl before, and I burst out laughing. She asked me why. I said, "It's strange, isn't it? That we express our fondness by locking lips." She said, "No. We lock lips because it feels good. I'm not fond of you or anything." 

Kissing became a regular feature, although we barely went much further. My hand went inside her shirt once, and I felt her back and worked my way up to her bra when she stopped me. She giggled about it afterwards.

One day, her parents were out of town, and she told me most nonchalantly that she wanted to try having sex. She was a year older, studying in Delhi, and some of her classmates had done it. I was nervous, but she was confident. I was also excited, of course, that some girl wanted to actually do it with me. She insisted, more than once, that she chose me only because I was "available and attractive enough". 

So, we gave it a shot. No pun intended. 

I sent our watchman to buy condoms and swore him to secrecy. I went to her house by afternoon. We kissed first, and I made nervous attempts to take her top off. She broke off suddenly and declared that we must drink a little to make the whole thing more relaxed. I had never drunk before, and I gulped the vodka like it was a glass of buttermilk. She did the same. A couple of rounds of this vodka, and we almost naturally threw ourselves at each other. After some fiddling with each other's clothes and the pack of condoms, we had awkward teen sex… Limbs getting in each other's ways, not really knowing what to grip and how, never sure what can be done and what cannot, not finding the right spots.  

I even remember her saying, "Don't look down there, you pervert!" And I wondered once, loudly, "Ok, if I don't look, how do I know if I'm hitting the right place or not." I was too nervous to even find it funny. Pressure of performance, perhaps. Of course, every now and then, we got going, and we felt that incredible rush of pleasure. But largely, we were like two people looking for treasure in a dark cave with no torches.

I asked her more than once, "Am I in?" and saying, "This condom doesn't let me feel anything, so I'm never sure."

We weren't wholly unsuccessful, although I had expected it to be a lot more fun than it eventually was. She concluded that the foreplay was more exciting than the sex itself. I insisted that it would improve with practice. She said we would practice the following day. I agreed. Still naked and tired, we threw our limbs around each other and fell asleep. 

I woke up way after midnight, much later than the time I usually got back home. For the first time, I experienced that heaviness you have behind your eyes after you've had sex. My head was pounding. I was groggy, I felt like I was under sedatives. I wore my clothes quickly, gave her some desperately breathless goodbye kisses and rushed back home. 

Outside my door, there was this little note, 'Thatha passed away. We have left for Madras. Wait here for instructions.' It was a functional note, no frills. But I could sense their anger at my disappearance. I wondered how they might have rushed to Madras. They would've taken a taxi to Delhi, and a flight from there. I was away from home for almost the entire day, and I had no idea when the note was written. There was no way of telling if they had left in the afternoon and were already in Madras, or if they left in the evening and were now in Delhi. 

I first called my father's friend in Delhi, where we usually stayed. He groggily told me hadn't heard the news, and asked me questions about it. I told him I had no clue. It was three in the morning, and I was scared to call my grandfather's house in Madras. I guessed that my parents would have gone straight to the airport, and taken a flight to Madras. I could hear my father's voice asking me what I had been up to. I decided to call in the morning.

Then, I had this brainwave. I called my brother's hostel -- he was studying management in Ahmedabad then. But someone told me that he had left a few hours ago to Madras because his grandfather had passed away.

It took me almost half an hour to register that my grandfather had died. The first emotion I had was of guilt. Guilt for being away from home when the news came in. Guilt for thinking of how to save my skin for being away, when I should have been grieving over his death. Guilt for having sex when he died… I don't know, it was a combination of all these things, I think. 

That's what made me leave for Madras immediately, without waiting for instructions. I took money from my father's cupboard, and got into the earliest bus to Delhi. Then, I went to the airport, but found the tickets too expensive. After half a day of hoping in vain for tickets on some train, I got into the unreserved compartment on the Grand Trunk Express the next evening. I didn't tell anyone how I was coming. It was the guilt, perhaps. It was also, strangely, a sense of adventure. 

My family in Madras couldn't contact me for two days. In the middle of the mourning over my Thatha's death, there were relatives and friends looking for me in Delhi and Madras. My mother's sister, who lived in Calcutta, flew to Dehra, and asked around. That girl I slept with broke down and confessed to having spent the day with me. She told my aunt that I left at only two in the morning. My aunt and her parents asked her what we were doing till then, she merely cried. This bit of news reached Madras around the same time that I did.

I was coming from two grimy, gruelling, grief-stricken days on the train. I barely spoke for those two days -- there was no one to talk to, really. Even in that crowd, I had found the space to be lonely. The world in my head was in one of two modes -- over-activeness or completely blank. There would either be too many parallel trains of thought -- memories of my grandfather, the wrath of my family, the absolute bizarreness of my instinctive travel, the fuzzy whirl of having sex for the first time, all running in tandem, coiling around each other, swirling, in my mind like a slow-boiling broth -- or absolutely nothing at all. Zilch. A whiteness. A numbness. 

I didn't have a reserved seat, of course, and that provided its own challenges. I would wait for the train to pick up enough speed so that no one could get in or out, and then go to the loo. For two nights, I caught sleep sitting up on a wooden bench between two men. I didn't brush. I barely ate. I didn't have enough money to.

In Madras, I was welcomed by my mother with a resounding slap. I didn't know which of my infractions that was for. She said, "I was mentally prepared to start a parallel funeral for you." I said, "Don't be dramatic," and walked inside. I was tired, and I thought the least I deserved was a chance to bathe and a hot meal. My uncle didn't like my tone, and started screaming at me. I turned around, and said, "You want to wake up the dead with all that shouting?"

The family was too exhausted to respond to that statement. They all stopped talking to me. The next ten days felt like that train journey -- surrounded by hordes of people who didn't want to make conversation with me. My brain, just like the train, was on those two modes, of hyper-activity or numbness. I had many variations on the dream where I was having sex with a much older woman who lived near our house in Dehradun, where she taunted me for not being inside her. Soon, I was crying and asking her to let go of me. She kept saying, "Make me come, I'll let you go." This dream woke me up many times, sweating and thirsty. 

On the sixth day, I went to my grandfather's cupboard and picked up a copy of his book on equality and read it carefully for the next week. I joined my family at meal times, conversed with them in monosyllabic grunts, like my grandfather used to do, and stayed as far away as possible. I frequently took walks around Alwarpet on hot afternoons, getting lost often, to come back hours later. No one asked me where I went or why. No one cared anymore.  

Finally, the thirteenth day came. After the big lunch to which all sorts of people -- academicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists, students, fans -- came, a cousin was asked to sing. He was a few years younger than me, and was already some sort of classical music star. He must've been only twelve or thirteen then.

The house had a large,  partly open hall and a courtyard. My cousin sat on the floor of this hall, on a mat, with an electronic tanpura and sang my grandfather's favourite classical kriti-s. He closed his eyes, cocked his head slightly upwards, and sang. There was little sentiment in his demeanour -- he was too young for that -- but the music was highly emotional. Open throated, slightly rough and loud, the voice filled the hall with great warmth. Hope emanated from that little boy's music. An aunt who hadn't smiled in two weeks, smiled. Two uncles started singing along, while another cousin accompanied them tapping on a table. Someone remarked that my cousin sang just the kind of classical music my grandfather liked. One of the uncle's who sang along imitated how my grandfather would've appreciated the music. The hall resounded with laughter. The woe of my grandfather's loss was replaced by the warmth of his memory. 

Soon, the hall was filled with people telling stories about the departed. Really embarrassing stories. His sister even described how he would fart silently and secretly in public, and how she learnt to recognise it from the expression on his face. There were stories about him and my grandmother disappearing shadily on many afternoons. One of his cousins said he once saw them walk into a nearby lodge. 

The hall was more electric than it had been even when he was around.

After the crowd cleared, my father, who hadn't said a word to me about the entire incident, put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Next time, call me. I'll put you on a flight." I looked at him incredulously, but I realised he meant it. After a long silence, I smiled. He smiled back. My brother, who was within earshot, laughed, and said, "God, you are the real pet. If I had done this, Appa would've disowned me."

For the first time since I saw that note, I laughed. 

Their silence

They sit in silence, staring at an emptying wedding hall. There is a sense of satisfaction in the air, the feeling of completeness. It is like the guests have all collectively, contentedly burped. Her new husband sends some relatives off, somewhere near the entrance to the hall, bidding them farewell, cracking a silly joke or two, promising to visit them soon in their distant towns. 

They look at around the hall, still in silence, and they turn to each other. She smiles, he smiles. They turn away and continue staring at the hall. 

She wonders what they are to each other. They are friends, she concludes. They have always been. They met, three years ago, as friends. They worked in offices that weren't far from each other, they knew common people. 

They met for lunch often. Sometimes, they planned it. Other times, they just landed up at the same little dosa place at the same time, often knowing the other was likely to be there. He always ate a rava masala dosa and followed it up with a mini coffee. She studied the menu and ordered carefully -- sometimes elaborate and sometimes minimal. They ate mostly in silence. Every now and then, one of them would say a sentence or two, and the other would nod.

One day, he declared he had a crush on a friend of hers. She nodded. The next day, her friend was with her at lunch. Conversation flowed that afternoon between him and her friend. They met a few times after that, but that died out. "It didn't work out with your friend," he told her, "She wasn't really interested." She only nodded. 

One evening, they went for a long, silent walk down the beach. For some reason, they held hands. They didn't say much about it that evening, and they never discussed its significance. 

They met more often after that. They went on long drives to nowhere in particular, they went for movies whose names they didn't register, and plays they didn't know anything about. They ate, they drank.

They spoke more than they did earlier, trading sentences that had little to do with one another, interspersed with lengthy nothings. They had little to talk to each other about. He read, she didn't. She watched sport, he didn't. Their musical tastes were vastly different. But their silences spoke the same language, their silences had common interests, their silences understood each other like their conversations never did. 

Love came and went in waves. One day, it lashed against them, throwing them off balance, goading them to hold each other for support. Then, it receded, silently, before gearing up to hit them again. They stood in the sea, soaking in the waves silently. 

Only twice did they make attempts to express their fondness for each other in words. The first time, she said, "I want to be kissed." He said, "Let's not complicate us." The second time, after a spontaneous bout of incredible kissing, he asked, "Will you marry me?" She dismissed him with, "You're drunk," before proceeding to bite his ear. 

They are friends, she concludes amidst the winding-up of the wedding. His silence indicates that he's come to the same conclusion. Their silences have decided - they can't always be with each other. The waves come, but they always go back. 

But they know that they will always share these special silences. Nothing, not her wedding, not his, can take that away.