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25 May 2006
This journal has moved to the following address
25 May 2006
A new haven for the musings maven and how I love tooting my own horn
In spite of all my apprehensions about the adverse effects of the Internet on the way we think, speak and write I am convinced now that there are some technological advances that are indeed for the better. For the last two years, I have in these pages tried to resist the pull of popular 'publishing tools' such as TypePad, Movable Type, Wordpress and so on and have only relied on these bare hands to conjure a modicum of the conveniences they afford. My first dabbling into these affairs in the month of April in 2003 resulted in the three column design with some links for permanent use by the left and links that were relevant to the entry by the right, juxtaposed alongside the corresponding entry. Subsequently, in May 2004 I conceded a point to the weblog movement when it became apparent to me that a long page full of incoherent rambling would not amount to much when it came to archiving. Even back then, I toyed around with the notion of moving to a full-fledged publishing system but the idea of giving up much of my editorial freedom on how the content appeared alongwith the appalling notion of having to put up with content advertising immediately put paid to any such designs I had. Instead, I decided to plod through this the hard way -- I set up an indigenous 'permalink' system whereby after each entry was written up and thoroughly vetted for typographical, factual and literary shortcomings, and this usually happened at the time of the next update to the journal, I would set in place an arduous sequence of operations: copy the relevant entry and paste it into a 'permalink' template, then index the new 'permalink' on a separate index, then catalogue the 'permalink' in the RSS feed and finally update the main page with a link to the same.Also, I had to make sure that the main page itself did not go on endlessly. So, from time to time -- a rough basis was a trimester, but there have been longer periods as well largely because of inactivity -- I would catharsise the main page, splicing away entries made during that period into a separate subpage. I then had of course to index that page and update the set-up on the main page. What a tedious chore, no doubt -- extremely painstaking, draining and largely pointless. But still, it had to be done and I did it. Slowly however, it also disincentivised my wanting to write anything at all. At first, I was persuaded to resort to block-writing the entries but subsequently with other calls to my time and efforts and with a slower network infrastructure at home I began to abhor this entire Frankensteinian process of mine. Time and again, I kept going back to check on updates in the content-management system world for solutions to my conundrum. All I needed was to pursue a largely minimalist design with as little change as possible to the content layout and something that did not make too many impositions on the nature of services supported by the webserver but alas, it was all in vain. Mine was a very peculiar problem and, apparently not interesting enough to warrant a market product.
In the meantime, in March last year I had acquired a new laptop laying to waste my old and trusty Toshiba Satellite 3000-S353 -- a companion I have had all of nearly five years now. Back in 2001 when Francis and I purchased our machines, doubtless we were the first among many to acquire laptops, the Toshiba Satellite 3000-S353 was the state-of-the-art. It has a Pentium 800MHz chip, with 256MB RAM and 20GB hard disk space. It came with Windows ME which, for some strange reason, I never thought of uninstalling even after making Linux my operating system of choice all through those five years and even after two other computer systems (my Dell office workstation and the Compaq laptop) coming into my possession -- both carrying Windows XP, even if not the best solution, at least the better one. Simultaneously, I had heard a lot about Ubuntu and had been wanting to check it out. It was then, that the penny dropped -- all I had to do was to make my laptop the webserver, set up everything that a standard, simple, no-frills content management system -- say Wordpress -- would need, which was Apache2, MySQL and PHP. Of course, there was lull in between on account of Parichaya when all the time I had went either towards working on the movie or on research. Finally though, I managed to set up Ubuntu's Breezy Badger 5.10 -- oh, what a charming and nifty piece of software it is! -- quite easily, and subsequently all the necessary auxiliary tools. The machine already had a name from a long time ago -- I remember a phase of a full month last year when I had to use only Kapi because of a 'thermal error' on the Dell motherboard (those 'permalinks' can be quite handy!) -- and I was online without needing to mediate with a séance.
Setting up Wordpress was the next order of business which I managed to get through last evening. But perhaps, the most important task was to find the right design. At first, this seemed daunting and I had almost resigned myself to having to come up with something on my own. Luckily however, Wordpress has a great theme-design community -- even though I settled on a rather simple, absolutely spartan theme called the 3c-seo. This was not my first choice and I continued to grapple with how I would get the 'Daily links' and the 'Permanent links' incorporated into the new design. Tinkering around with the sidebar's PHP script was out of the question -- I had now become a rapid convert to more automating of content-generation and was loathe to have to go back to old ways. I found a perfect solution; in fact the solution I ought to have had in the very first place when I was toying around with those link-things -- footnotes with links in them. Wordpress impressed with a plugin that did exactly that: Linknotes.
A constant lamentation on my part all through these years has been how there were times when I had no opportunity to write an entry into the journal, but yet I was ferociously collecting bookmarks on del.icio.us. While not exactly a labour of love, my compilation of bookmarks on del.icio.us is something I pride myself in. I now had the freedom of assimilating more of my del.icio.us persona onto the journal, thanks to del.icio.us linkrolls and tagrolls. The added benefit to absorbing those bookmarks was that I managed to circumvent the problem of posting my 'Permanent links' on the left sidebar by merely using a specific tag (.perm) on the del.icio.us bookmarks and importing that onto the journal main page.
Finally, the movie reviews page that I maintain separately has been languishing without an update for a while. I lay blame again squarely on the opportunity cost involved in opening up a text editor and writing over a relatively slow network connection. The new set-up now gives me the luxury of tags -- it will always amaze me when I think how we managed to pass through an entire decade of the Internet and the Web without them -- and that means I can combine the movie reviews into the general flux of things.
All that was the technical mumbo-jumbo. These pages are now more than three years old and have seen several facelifts, spurts of intense activity followed by long phases of absence, different cycles of fall, winter, spring, summer and fall, the (second?) wettest winter ever, many concerts, many cooking and household experiments, many glorious Tests, many homages, obituaries and observations on death, holdings-forth on language, reflections on the quaint and charming ways of the BBC and on the tragedy of journalism, sublime music, horrific tragedy, political zeitgests, incomplete travelogues, literary disquisitions (in particular the compelling effect of Jane Austen and her body of work on modern society and television), nostalgic reminiscences and of course personal achievements.
16 May 2006
Parichaya
For the past couple of months, I had been involved in organising a cultural show that aimed at showcasing elements of Indian culture. The show was held on 11 May 2006 at the Ramo Auditorium in Caltech. The show comprised a Carnatic music concert by Prabha Mandayam (accompanied by Naresh Satyan on the flute and me on the violin), a "one-act" play titled 'Tales from a Stormy Night', a rendition of two songs from vintage Hindi movies by Chaitanya Swamy and Prabha Mandayam (accompanied by Mayank Bakshi on the harmonica), a dance performance by Iram Parveen Bilal and Radhika Marathe based on the song 'Dola Re Dola Re' from the movie 'Devdas' and finally, the premiere of an indigenously made movie, 'Made in Heaven.. Arranged in Mumbai' which I had the pleasure of directing.Needless to say, each individual part of the show entailed significant effort and planning; my particular involvement in three of these items -- I played one of three lead roles in the play -- meant weaning myself away from the regular pursuits of the Web and contributing to this page. It is good to be back.
18 April 2006
Gone to lunch
Will return after May 11.5 April 2006
Wetter, wetter, wetter
If last year's rain-barrage was meticulous yet good-natured, this year it has been uneven and short-tempered. All through yesterday, the rains fell at nary the slightest excuse of cloud cover -- tempestuously, noisily and quickly. Feet placed where street-corners meet sidewalks would nearly be chopped off by the ferocious passage of water down-slope; pines -- green-enriched -- under the constant scrutiny of innumerable celestial sojourners threaten to droop like moustaches; the mountains to the north are etched out of the landscape by a steadily thickening colloid of grey and white. It warms many hearts to think that the rains here in the plains are the flurries of snow atop those mountains -- they that may yet bear on them a hoary likeness of the wet winter into spring.19 March 2006
North and South
Over the weekend, I watched upon Karen's recommendation the wonderful BBC mini-series 'North and South' adapted from Elizabeth Gaskell's novel by the same name. The series is set in Industrial England and relates the story of a woman from the more culturally refined and urbane South who moves with her family to the proletarian and working-class North. Comparisons with that other work of near-perfect adaptation, BBC's 1995 presentation of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' are inevitable. Not having read Mrs Gaskell's book, I am somewhat disinclined from commenting on the plot outline but I will however assume that the television series itself hemmed very closely to the book and say that 'North and South' comes across as being deeply influenced by 'Pride and Prejudice' in how the story is developed, the central characters -- an erudite and marriageable young heroine of limited means and income and the proud, wealthy and misunderstood hero -- and how it resolves itself towards the end. This may of course, perhaps have been the theme for most plots in the Victorian Age of literature in England but still seeing as Pride and Prejudice was written in 1813 and North and South in 1854 it does appear to be more than just a coincidence and even probably a case of the latter being influenced and inspired by the former. Needless to say, that is not just condonable but also commendable -- any effort to imbibe some or all of Pride and Prejudice into every subsequent work of literature written ever since is welcome and a favour to the English language; more so than something of the same manner done with Shakespeare's work. At the same time, there are also glaring contrasts which, I would be doing grave injustice to Mrs Gaskell by not mentioning. Austen's work was set in a happier, halcyon time when nobility was perhaps shining brighest before fading away. She chose consciously to focus her writing talents on portraying the social and cultural patterns of the age and away from its radically transforming economic realities whereas Mrs Gaskell wrote her book at a time that was seated just right at the crest of the Industrial Revolution, giving her the perfect vantage point to issue forth critiques on its impact on England and the different cross-sections of the country.Coming to the basics of the television series itself, I was highly impressed by the soundtrack, the art direction and the cinematography -- all brought to light the hardships endured at the cotton mills in nineteenth century England as effectively as they did the steadily maturing romance between Mr Thornton and Ms Hale. The support performances, particularly from Sinéad Cusack as the matriarch of the Thornton household, were extremely apt and well done. Daniela Denby-Ashe played Margaret Hale bringing to the character the demure, restrained and fragile charm a lady of the South is expected to display as well as the upstanding, firm of conviction and compassionate spirit of fraternity a woman of the North acquires in her time spent in the midst of penury and struggle for everyday existence. Richard Armitage playing John Thornton, the master of the Marlborough mill, seemed -- as I thought was the case even with Colin Firth's Mr Darcy -- a little too handsome for the part though he made up for his good looks with all the glowering rage and fiery passion for Ms Hale in his eyes.
In all, not having seen 'Pride and Prejudice' for a while (and having rectified it immediately the day after), I was quite satisfied with its Industrial-age cousin.
8 March 2006
A letter to the editor
Hi,I used to be a regular reader of the online edition of The Hindu, religiously making sure to read the edition as soon as it came online at about 12pm PST every day. The Hindu was even on my daily bookmarks list. All this was until a few weeks ago. Now, I no longer regularly visit the main page -- all this because of your irritating pop-under advertising policy.
It does not make any business sense to put advertisements that annoy and anger your readers, because they are simply going to avoid visiting your site like I have. I am all for advertisements as part of the content, which you already provide in terms of keyword-based advertising on a sidebar to the right of the news material -- this is unintrusive, yet prominent and even effective in that readers are made aware of business propositions and online vendors selling items that may be related to the content they are currently browsing. This is the future of online advertising, as vindicated by what a share of Google costs on Wall Street nowadays.
However, to succumb also to crass and obnoxious pop-ups and pop-unders advertising online casinos and for-a-good-time chat rooms suggests short-sighted strategising and opportunistic money-grubbing. For all your vaunted efforts to bring transparency and integrity by going the way of the Guardian and hiring a Reader's Editor, I would rather you cleaned up your online content, did not scare away your international readership and stayed on the level with us. I am nearly tempted to say that such underhanded subterfuge could only be the doing of your tabloidal counterparts, such as the Times of India and the Hindustan Times but in light of falling standards in your own broadsheet ethos I will demur from such commentary.
You might imagine that such shellacking is unwarranted for so harmless and innocuous a transgression as Flash pop-unders for American Express credit cards, but for someone like me who sets great store by Hindu's commitment to upholding high standards and who has grown up with Britannia Marie biscuits, piping hot cardamom tea and a crisp edition of The Hindu this is as grave a folly as any other.
I fervently hope that you will take heed of my plea and do away with those nasty little devils. It serves to bear in mind that simplicity goes a long way towards a platform to make yourself heard, read and felt -- look again at Google, or much closer home to your purported role model in newspapers, the Guardian.
Regards.
1 March 2006
B M Khan and Sons Cycle Works, 8th Main Road, Malleswaram Bangalore 560003
A few hundred metres before 8th main road merges with the upsloping 11th main road to become a single non-entity big street parallel to the railway tracks and humiliatingly having to dive beneath the tracks at the Srirampuram bridge (the lodestone of many unfortunate mishaps), before the lonesome printer/copier/binding shop fashioned out of a ground-floor 15 feet-by-10 feet leased-out room with two large presses, and immediately after the videotheques, the grinding mills and the kiraana shops with electric smoke-lighters that had been kissed by a thousand cigarettes and beedis was the only cycle-repair shop in all of four squared-kilometres that had a roof above it. It had an electric bicycle pump with a dial indicating pressure that grew slowly opaque and eventually invisible as a result of neglect both on the part of the school-boys that outgrew looking at it, and the owners of the shop who gauged tyre pressure like general practitioners felt the pulse by gingerly pressing on unknown veins. Partly to ward off evil eyes, and partly to advertise their specialisation a lonely steel rim shorn of a tube or tyre hung on a nail outside the shop when it opened for business. The unusually high ceiling had one pulley mechanism used to haul up misbehaving bicycles, while in the far interior several abandoned, handicapped and aging bicycles languished. B M Khan and Sons Cycle Works also ran a rental operation that loaned at by-the-hour rates Hero bicycles with thick rubber flapping mud-guards, 'carriers' for light wives, schoolgirls and naughty, snivelling brats and stoppers that swung from below the back tyre. Some even came with a cute mini-replica of the seat attached onto the bar to allow the renter constant supervision of his child as he picked him up from school.Punctures (flats to you Americans) were fixed traditionally by dipping different parts of the tube into a tub of brown water until bubbles frothed, then using a slab of black granite to smoothen the tube and applying sweet-pungent red resinous adhesive and pasting shards of rubber on it -- all handled at Rs. 1.50 in the late eighties, then slowly rose to Rs. 5 soon after the 1991 reforms started to make sense to the Khans though air from the blind pump stayed put at a rhinoceros-faced twenty-five paise coin per tyre.
The shop had as its mainstay the Son, a nameless thirty-something frog-eyed Muslim male with hair worn like Amitabh Bachchan playing an honest cop and a thick well-kept moustache dressed in greasy workclothes and rolled up sleeves and pants. Son almost always had little boys as Apprentices who wore rags that were torn, smudged and grating to begin with -- these were the ones he would order about to fetch his tools. In his best moods, when the wrong tool was fetched he would just abuse and let out a smile and in slightly more vexing situations he would rush menacingly threatening to beat the Apprentice. The patriarch Khan, in the rare occasions that he visited to check on revenues and accounts, would occupy a lonesome seat inches from the overhanging bicycles and shutters which were down, needless to say, on Fridays. I was a regular customer at B M Khan Cycle Works, with first my BSA Champ and then my BSA SLR -- both of which were enemy products to his Hero line of rental wares.
That was more than ten years ago. Last weekend, I fixed a flat (puncture to us Indians) on my bicycle by following elaborate instructions from Jim Langley's amazing bicycle website. A new tube cost $3.50 after a 10% Caltech discount from Incycle on Colorado, the tire levers cost a couple of bucks and a tube repair kit replete with sandpaper, a small tube of adhesive and some strip of rubber cost in all another $3.50. To tighten the seat, all I needed was to work a 5mm Allen wrench on the seat post. Air is free and available any time of the day, ironically or otherwise, with my Schwinn bicycle pump.
22 February 2006
A Bay Area wedding
This last Sunday, Abhishek, Tejaswi, Sowmya, Vijay and I were in the Bay Area to attend Harish's and Lee-May's wedding. We had decided to set out for the north at about 1pm on Saturday afternoon, giving us about 6 hours to get there with the inclement weather forecast for that weekend and the long weekend traffic on the freeways. Quite surprisingly, the weather was picture-perfect Californian and the traffic its pleasing opposite -- we made the trip in just over five hours for the duration of which, a long sandwich from Quizno's at Pasadena was the ideal meal. One of the reasons for our departure in the afternoon was so that we could get to the Bay Area in time for dinner at one of the Saravana Bhavans in Livermore. Luckily for me, and doubly so -- since we were later informed that on a Saturday, the waiting time for a table at the restaurant took more than an hour -- Harish waylaid us and called us over to his place for a dinner with his family.And so we got to Torrey Pine Lane in Union City, a full two hours after the dinner party had started. It turned out though that we were still in time to catch a pre-wedding ceremony that had been delayed because the priest got lost on what would normally have been a thirty-minute drive. I could see why Harish would have wanted us there, seeing as we were the only five with the exception of his brother, Vinay who were within ten years of his age. Our arrival was auspicious, since minutes later the priest appeared too, flustered and slightly apologetic at his faux pas. He set about in right earnest, while a gentle hush settled down on a bored company of middle-aged men augustly dressed -- mostly in whites by way of either kurtas or full shirts. The women, with the exception of a few odd ones, continued to chatter about and flutter the pallus of their resplendent silk sarees around in whose wakes a small sacrificial fire that had been started, nearly threatened to put itself out. The chanting of the mantras befit the solemnity that began with it -- the women had straight backs; their woollen socks were nearly well-concealed beneath the accordion zaris of their sarees; the men at a distance sat plushly in couches with their necks craned and stooping down on the boy and his family; and the five of us were partitioned away from the kitchen counter near-wheres the action was all to be had at, foregoing thoughts of immediate dinner and praying for any religious compensation for Harish and his kin to brush past us too.
It hardly required any prescience to guess how long it was before entropy -- that great adversary of order to set in. The women were now slouching, some had excused themselves on account of their sore, bulbous bodies to reseat themselves amidst the men in the couches and thereafter promptly were lulled to sleep by the priest's metronome. Amongst the five of us, two had already seated themselves by the dining table and one was helping himself to the savouries and drinks that were to appetise for dinner. The groom and his parents though, bore on with the priest leading them by his staccato Sanskrit diction. There were periodic pauses during which the priest wanted us to believe that he was collecting his thoughts, composing himself before repairing away to more enunciations from the Vedas. Late he may have come, but the priest was in no mood to relent from fulfilling his compact in entirety and so the ritual lasted every minute it should have which was all of nearly ninety minutes. Following a sumptuous dinner that also included some delectable home-made holige -- the Kannada equivalent of polis -- and conversation with some of Harish's quixotic uncles, we headed back to our original point of the journey's termination -- the Courtyard of Marriott in Livermore. Without the aid of a laptop charger to accompany Vijay's laptop, we were consigned to an early retirement rather than a through-the-night cricket reverie.
The following morning started out late for us, seeing as we only had to report at the Shrine Event Center at the roundabouts of 1pm. We first embarked to Pleasanton for a brunch setting at a bakery that had mirror-strips lining its walls making for a voyeur's delight of a meal. We got to the Event Center at 1.30pm to find Harish and his family, and Lee-May and her family handling the pre-wedding jitters with great, unhurried poise. The hall was well-partitioned into a dining room adjoining a theatre of empty seats that looked to a stage and a pandal on the stage. Abhishek and I were two of the four designated ushers, the other two being very close friends of Lee-May's. Suiting the occasion just perfectly was Abhishek's magnificent kurta that stopped a foot short of being a ghost's blanket, pyjamas to match it and a generally pleasing demeanour. In stark contrast, I had on a khadi kurta that exaggerated to just about below the pocket-line of the jeans I wore with it. I was certain I felt icy stares from all concerned, and came very close to losing my job but with time bearing down on all of us my sartorial gaffe was quickly condoned in return for the pledge of an evening's worth of fealty to the Bhat family. Soon after all the 270 chairs were neatly arrayed -- the ones with the moth-eaten seats being winnowed out -- we placed a program description of the yet-to-unfold wedding ceremony thoughtfully on each chair. Abhishek and I were pinned with two handsome red roses on our breasts to signify our special rank -- what a proud and well-savoured moment it was! Our directions were simple -- to direct all incoming traffic through delineated routes onto the central aisle of the wedding arena upon reaching which, depending on one's inclinations towards the bride or the groom, each was to be seated in the most optimal manner possible and keeping in mind tardy invitees in the proper half of the floor. This was only moderately complicated by one of Lee-May's aunts deciding to tie up ribbons over chairs and connecting one row with its anterior and posterior on either side of the central aisle -- perhaps in conformity with traditional Christian wedding arrangements. No matter, we were to use our heads and that we did for it was nearing on three, and our guests had begun to arrive. To make up for my skimpy attire -- and mind you, I had excuses from Golmaal in hand in case anyone were to demand an explanation for a short kurta -- I wore an extra pleasing smile (while also trying not to overdo it and expose the yellows of my teeth) to each and every guest that walked in.
Some had it writ large on their faces, but I nonetheless laboured to ask displaying no prejudice or pre-determination whether they represented the bride or the bride-groom (I later found out quite to my embarrassment that the bride-groom is simply... the groom) as they entered the hall. They were most courteous, all of them. They bowed, curtsied, thanked me profoundly, blushed profusely, tiptoed hush-hush when going the other direction past me to use the restrooms, made small-talk confirming in half-questions that I was Harish's younger brother and subsequently being flummoxed to hear I was not, asked polite questions about how late into the ceremony they had gotten into, made way straight to the dinner tables before being informed that a sacred ritual was on. The other two ushers, Jeannie and Jennifer were stationed at the reception desk outside the hall to inform each party of its respective table and to receive their material compliments. In the meantime, the priest to make amends arrived at the strike of three and waited for no critical mass or consensus, boarded onto the stage and started his prayers. Harish and Lee-May, who was dressed now in a divine sari, Harish's parents and Lee-May's parents bore witness on stage to the priest's eagerness to rush Harish and Lee-May into holy matrimony. Most of the shlokas he uttered himself -- some in fact were repeats and carry-overs from the previous evening's rituals for the benefit of those that had not the fortune of attending and for those that had not the fortune of listening -- some were repeated by Harish's father, some by Harish and one particular set was even recited by Lee-May's father with caution and amusing charm. All this while, Abhishek and I soldiered on with our duties to the State of Bhats. The bride's side had been filled up dutifully starting from innermost, but unsurprisingly we were having the toughest time with the groom's side seeing as most were chuffed even to be suggested a particular seating order -- this was after all an Indian wedding and they had been to these dozens of times in the past; they needed no heed and gave none.
Soon after, seeing as the different stages of the wedding took longer than the usual wedding ceremony the novelty of the Kasi Yatra, the Ganapathi Homam and the Kanya Daanam wore off and the hitherto quiet crowd started to splinter about with perambulators being taken for strolls in the hall weaving in and out of already laid-out tables, heels coming unstuck off shoes causing some to limp about awkwardly in their stockings, restroom breaks increasing in frequency and clusters of men beginning to form on the sidelines on either side of the hall. Finally, almost unannounced the rites concluded with the traditional saptha-padi, a few mumbled utterances and blessings showered with grains of rice from assembled family members on stage. Dinner was only minutes away now, but was first preceded by the equivalent of the evening reception in Indian weddings whence everybody lined up, this time along the central aisle, to walk up to the bride and groom, wish them well, pose for photographs that will never be seen or cherished in family albums given the Digital Age and head back to their designed tables. Following a round of samosas and pakoras for appetisers, champagne was served around to toast the couple as toasts were delivered in order first from Lee-May's father, then Harish's father, then Lee-May's best friends and Harish's friend. Emotion teemed, while glasses clanked for kisses after every toast was ended. A slideshow later and after most of the tables received their victuals, table #27 comprising Chaitanya, Tejaswi, Abhishek, three other single girls and myself announced our candidature for next-to-be-served.
Following a hearty supper, the star of which was undoubtedly the jackfruit payasam which was nearly matched by the aviyal and the more kozhambu, we hit the dance floor shaking a leg to the most exotic compilation of tunes ever. This was perhaps the most spectacular part of the evening, particularly the sight of forty-year old Kannadiga women tucking their sari centre-folds onto their waists and wildly gyrating, swinging their hips and breaking into uncontrollable frenzy when a Kannada song followed. They danced relentlessly, putting their pot-bellied husbands and coy American-born daughters to shame, scoffed at all the traditional swing and ballroom dancers some of whom had come well-dressed in low-cut cocktail gowns, body-hugging halter bodices and sun-tanned skin for the occasion, unmindful of the sheer outlandishness of it all. Heck, they even danced -- nearly in-step -- to a Chinese tune. Once those crazy ladies wheezed out their last dance, the younger 'uns came out slightly less intimidated and less overwhelmed. For all that elaborate procession of rites, and promise of late-night fun-frolic most were perhaps tired of having been at a wedding for six hours straight -- clearly, this was their first taste of an Indian wedding -- and retired early. We of course had to get back to Pasadena, and we started at 10pm taking our leave of the newly-weds, Vinay and Mr and Mrs Bhat. Tejaswi drove for a little more than four hours without so much as a pause and yawned only once through the start at Livermore to my doorstep in Pasadena. A long day it had been, but a memorable one.
3 February 2006
Sell-out
Time was when the Internet was a new-fangled notion nobody paid much credence to in India. Dial-up was for kids with rich parents and the lone five-star restaurant that accepted Diner's Club and Mastercard. Local calls were Rs. 1.20 for a pulse of three minutes and long distance needed your father to draw down half his pension. Before Reliance, VSNL, Tata Indicomm, BSNL and electronic bill payments there were manual switch-operators and unvarnished, urinated rugged-iron roadside boxes with the ITI seal that were the exclusives of linemen who collected weekly protection sums to maintain live connections. My formative years were spent in this crest of socialism and equal discomfiture for all. This was how I imagined the rest of the world to be, no different from mine -- with children in the United States and Europe contracting the pox with promiscuous regularity and squatting on ridged-steps smelling their own faece as it slid down the hole, fathers riding Lamberettas with helmets made from material that was only marginally stronger than styrofoam and mothers staying at home and watching what little entertainment the state saw fit to throw their way in the form of Afternoon Transmissions on Doordarshan that featured sewing tips, birth control and puppet shows.We were a proud and young nation fashioned by great men and women like the Mahatma, Nehru, Ambedkar, Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi amongst others. Nehru's Five-Year Plans, his focus on dams (that were the Temples of Modern India), his visions of non-alignment laid the foundations of our secular, socialist, sovereign state. Gandhi's asceticism seeped through our collective entity and we rejected money and capitalism as materialistic. In our textbooks, we learned of the excellent schooling systems in Russia and looked at the ever-cheering faces of children trudging down to single-storeyed buildings in winter. Through Misha, our awe of the Cyrillic alphabet was enhanced and we were dazed by how that part of the world, in a fit of individual exercise, permuted the Roman alphabet many times over until each letter sounded and looked the exact opposite of its English counterpart. We won every single battle we fought, and we fought every single battle because of an aggressor country. China stabbed India in the back after children lining the streets of Delhi proclaimed 'Hindi, Cheeni, bhai, bhai!' and Nehru drew up the 'Panchsheel' treaty. Pakistan attempted to invade Kashmir after Kashmir of its own volition decided to become part of the Indian union. The Asiad in '82 in Delhi marked our country's finest sporting moment for which we built thousands and thousands of apartment blocks in the Asiad Village. Shammi Narang and Salma Sultan graced our television screens at 9pm with the news in Hindi following a pastel of shaded white that enveloped a filled circle to a squeaky violin rendering 'Saare Jahan Se Accha'.
And now, after all these years, hinduonnet.com looks more and more like all its peer newspaper outlets selling classified adspace to match-makers, jewellers and retirement homes and springing pop-unders stealthily on unsuspecting, staid, old-school nostalgics like me. Decommissioned.
27 January 2006
Sesquibicentennial Mozart
Today marks the 250th birthday of that great stalwart of western classical music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (which, I have been informed from a radio announcer this morning, is an Anglicised version of his real name). Aficionados and quick-buck entrepreneurs worldwide are commemorating this event with gala festivities including cake&concerts, 24-hour Mozart marathons, Mozart cuddly toys, Mozart T-shirts, Mozart baseball caps and Mozart golf balls. In his birthplace, Salzburg at the stroke of seven in the evening when Mozart's mother was 'delivered of a boy' hundreds of church bells will be struck to celebrate that happy moment. In addition, the Vienna Philharmonic has lined up an evening concert playing some of Mozart's classic and well-known compositions. The wonderful local Western classical music radio station, K-Mozart has provided a live radio feed to the event. And for the obligatory contrarian point of view, please tune to Alex Ross' 'The Rest is Noise'.12 January 2006
Bollywood old school
One of the movies I watched when I went back home was Bluffmaster. Although it was essentially a con movie and notwithstanding the fact that it borrows many of its subplots from a few well-known Hollywood movies of the same genre, Bluffmaster also is a throwback to the glory days of Dev Anand's Jewel Thief, Amitabh Bachchan's The Great Gambler and Don and a few other buddy-movies of the '70s ('Heeralal, Pannalal' to name one of them). The movie has two brilliant remixes of songs from that age -- Geeta Dutt's drunken 'Tadbeer se bigdi hui taqdeer bana de' and Mehmood's cynical 'Sabse Bada Rupaiya'. It has Abhishek Bachchan mostly in a pinstriped coat with a red shirt under it -- somewhat of a tribute to Amitabh Bachchan who defined that look in Deewar and his subsequent angry-young-man movies. Perhaps retro/old school will be a recurring theme in Bombay -- and, as Bill would have it said, I am all about old school -- given that 'Don' is scheduled to be remade and so is 'Sholay'. While on that, I came across a wonderfully delectable caché of old Hindi movie posters from before the '80s which quite got me.10 January 2006
Waterborne
I finished watching, in many parts, 'Waterborne' -- a surprisingly good indie movie today. What made this viewing different was that for one thing, it is amongst the first of many instances of independently-made movies being released directly to a wider audience via the Internet, and Google Video in particular. This bodes well both for the movie-lovers as well as for the movie-makers whose labours of love do not go entirely unnoticed. 'Waterborne' is in many respects quite akin to the other brilliant ensemble-piece based in L.A. that has been doing the media rounds in the run-up to the Academy Awards, Crash. In a smaller way, and not because of its limitations as an independently-helmed movie or any lack of starpower but because its theme attempts to encompass a much larger scope of issues, 'Waterborne' deals with racial tensions in the same searing manner that made 'Crash' so riveting. It tells the story of a number of 'Los Angelenos' -- not even an exotic-sounding name however manages to fuse ten million people, a million of which are on the roads at any given time, into one collective entity -- who are suddenly dealing with a shortage of water owing to poisoning of the water supply. The one niggling shortcoming of the movie was that as imaginative, relevant and refreshingly original the premise of the movie is, Ben Rekhi somewhat yields to the temptation of leveraging it to deal with the equally sensitive, though clichéd plotline about stereotyping and racism. So a movie that starts off to be about eco-terrorism and its horrible shadows of Doomsday scenarios ends up giving mere glimpses of the Apocalypse playing up the race angle instead. Nonetheless, props to the producers for backing the movie as well as taking the bold and pioneering step and opting for wider dissemination over a few days of limited release in some forsaken art-house cinema in some place in Colorado nobody has heard of. I daresay that in the years to come, the movie will perhaps be remembered more for this than for its snatches of the chill to come.* * * * *
The BBC starts to rhyme now
There has been a surfeit of stories about rodents in recent times, but this one in keeping with my fascination with the quaint, often charming, often hackneyed, usually (un)intentionally mordant and always Leftist-but-don't-tell-anybody ways of BBC deserves special mention. The BBC tracks down a vengeful mouse in Fort Sumner, New Mexico and augments its story of settling scores with a title chock-full of iambic verse.28 December 2005
Home and away
I returned from a memorable three-week trip to Madras. This year, following the record triple rainfall and being bombarded by depression after depression, Madras wore a different look all through the winter. The roads were deprived of tar and considerably worse while the heavens looked a lot more magnanimous to the December-wanderer. As always with a trip made after more than a year, I had to brace myself for radical change -- both in the people and in the places. And I did find it, reassuringly positive at times and disturbingly degenerative at times. I hope to write up travelogue snippets in the following weeks to describe what I saw and felt.29 November 2005
The year the elements struck back
It is less than a month to the first anniversary of the horrific tsunami catastrophe that struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and a half-dozen other countries. With a ravaging death toll of 200,000 and counting, the tsunami seemed to be the worst manifestation of what raw might seethes silently around us but it was only the beginning of a series of unprecedented natural disasters that have been uniform and cruelly non-partisan in their scope of terror. CNN reported today on its main page on this year being the worst hurricane season ever for the United States -- this included both Katrina and Rita with the former having wiped out a city. BBC has been laudably persevering to keep the Kashmir earthquake in short-term public memory and its photo-retrospective today of how those millions of homeless and shelter-deprived are being provided for reminded me how abysmal the situation is in Pakistan. This was also the year when the rains in Bombay claimed close to a thousand lives and this is also the year through which Tamil Nadu is suffering from its worst flood crisis in years. Few other periods come to mind when there have been such consistently compelling reminders of our utter powerlessness against the elements and one hopes that with the passing of the epoch on 27 December, 2005 we are excused our presumption and nonchalance.21 November 2005
The full-moon hike
On 16 November, seventeen of us from Caltech went on a wonderful full-moon hike through a fascinating history-laden trail to Echo mountain where dwelt once upon a time a mountain railway line and resort. The drive took slightly less than twenty minutes, and once we got started on the trail we hardly noticed time pass. A full white ovule from a parched-dry sky shone above us only moistening, but not entirely washing away the dirt-road in its silvery breath. And then, there was the spectacle of the dim, shimmering tim-timming city lights of Pasadena at the footsteps of the mountain which in spite of its artifice was something to behold.15 November 2005
My Austin-American experience
I spent most of last week visiting the wonderful town of Austin, TX. In all my travels this far, I had somehow managed to stay away from the South and although Austin is said to be more liberal than most other cities in Texas I still anticipated to see some of the trademark symbols of deep-rooted conservatism. I was not disappointed because soon after I jumped into a cab on the way to the university I noticed a billboard put up by the NRA close to a Conoco Phillips gas station that said: "Conoco Phillips is no friend of the Second Amendment". This was also the time when a flurry of ballot initiatives were being decided upon across the country. The prominent initiative in Texas was a constitutional amendment to define a marriage as that between a man and a woman. Although the measure was passed by a two-thirds mandate and while, as some have pointed out, the wording of the amendment leaves the entire institution of marriage in limbo, in keeping with Austin's contrarian political leanings (contrarian from the rest of the state) -- which you will permit me to be amused by the irony of since Austin also serves as the state capital -- there was one lonely obscurely-placed signpost outside a largely student-infested apartment complex that read "Families matter! Reject Initiative #2!".3 November 2005
3 Jammin' Gents
(Note: This post was begun on 18 October and concluded on 3 November)
On Saturday, the 15th of October Amanda, Pete, Jessica, June and I went to the 3 Jammin' Gents concert at Ramo. Even before the concert's commencement, there was some intrigue to it. Originally scheduled to be staged at the Beckman Auditorium the concert was subsequently shifted to the Ramo Auditorium -- a significantly smaller capacity hall. The official reason or perhaps mitigating alibi all ticket-holders were given was that Ramo provided the chance for the audience to be closer to the group. Some of us knew better. The other hiccup was of a more sorrowful turn. The 3 Jammin' Gents originally comprised John McEuen, David Amram and Vassar Clements. However, Vassar Clements the fiddle player passed away two months ago and handpicked Buddy Spicher to replace him on the program.The program opened with surprising informality as an elderly gent strutted out, weaved his way through the instruments already on the stage and looked upwards at the crowd assembled on the incline. He spoke highly of Vassar Clements, chipped in many interesting anecdotes and hilarious asides to which a good number of the crowd responded -- that was my first indication that having never heard of Vassar Clements much less grieved and prayed for his soul, I was the poseur in the room. His eulogy to Mr Clements was short however and he quickly went about the business of introducing the evening's performers who followed the cue and walked out briskly. I ought to have guessed that the white-haired members of the party were the 3 Jammin' Gents but the fact did not seep in until a little later. Mr McEuen took on the mantle of warming to the crowds and needless to mention referred rather self-deprecatingly to the venue-shunting. Mr McEuen resembled a much slimmer James Coburn with a mane of white hair in place of the short crop. Their first piece was titled A Pilgrim and A Stranger -- a New Orleans song that was a tribute to its musicians.
What followed after the song and in every subsequent interlude between renditions was sweet, amusing chaos betokening the spontaneous, uninhibited ambience that makes the best jazz music -- Mr Amram trundled from the microphone to piano to drums, tripped over loose wires but steadied himself, trembled as he picked up notes of the next piece to be played while all this while Mr McEuen continued to make merry chatter in a dulcet calming tenor about his upbringing in Los Angeles, his apprehensions of being a misfit in Nashville and if Alice, his sister-in-law was seated in the audience yet. The next song was a deliriously funny and self-deprecating riff on jazz and country music -- 'There Ain't No Such Thing as Hillbilly Jazz'. This was followed by a Chaucerian 'Acoustic Traveler', a sombre '99 Years for one dark day' which had as its narrator a convict serving life for murder and a return to mirth and good humour with 'Once you've been to Texas, you'll never be the same'. The three of them took turns playing their pieces and courteously calling out to the other to follow up with their piece -- while Mr Spicher in with his velvet-lined hat and disport of comity and avuncular grace was everways on the fiddle and Mr McEuen only shuffled between the stringed instruments -- guitar, mandolin, banjo -- Mr Amram had with him a din of whistles, Egyptian shehnais, reeds, pipes, lutes and drums. Presently he was engaged in a flute solo and I could discern that his tunes and monologues on the instruments were essentially simple, one-step variants to a common refrain made all the more spectacular with his antics. Nonetheless, every time he played for us he took us to a deep thicket where birds twittered and a creek gently gushed. I also began to wonder why with the notable exception of Jethro Tull, the flautist was never part of any rock ensemble. The flute's sharp, pointed notes add cadence and metre to the guitar's free-spirited strumming. Indeed, as if to underscore my thoughts Mr Amram proceeded to play two flutes simultaneously.
But nothing previously of Mr Amram's exploits prepared us for a thoroughly enthralling monologue he delivered of his life and times in the Fifties hanging out with the Beat generation. He spoke of the time he spent with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and others -- "the disillusioned, soured, embittered self-hating Beatniks". One after another, his anecdotes of his war years and the jazz scene in the country back then opened up the artist to a privileged audience -- even his colleagues on stage were awed into reverential silence.
The rest of the night continued with a coruscating 'freestyle' rendition by David Amram to a juggling of different beats, some folk music favourites like 'There's a circle, be unbroken', a performance with Egyptian bongo-like percussion instruments called dumbeks, aphorisms like "In music, when in doubt leave it out", an impromptu rendition of 'From Cairo to Curville, TX' -- the special Pasadena version that came without the lyric sheets, them 'a been forgotten and on which John McEuen remarked "That takes a lot of nerve!", a perfect summary of Mr Amram by Mr McEuen who related a faintly fictitious anecdote about how the latter as a child told his mother he wanted to be a musician when he grew up to which his mother replied he could not do both, two rapturous encore exits and re-entrances in the space of which Mr McEuen in jest told us the protocol they had to observe on encores -- head backstage to the dressing room, touch a wall and reappear.
They finished out the night in typically gallavanting panache to bring to close one of the most memorable concerts -- nay varieté shows -- I have ever been to.
25 October 2005
A month in the wilderness
Soon after I returned from Champaign last month, my workstation went on the blink citing a 'thermal error'. The problem had to be reported to Dell and luckily because the machine was still within its three-year warranty period, it was fixed by replacing the motherboard. The machine broke down on 21 September and was finally back in order today. In this month I had to go back to my old Toshiba laptop and, more importantly, to Linux after a long hiatus. It was hard at first trying to live a spartan life -- 256MB of RAM instead of 768MB, ~200MB of free hard disk space as opposed to numerous gigabytes strewn around across various partitions, an antique RedHat 9 installation on an 800x600 resolution screen with the odd pixel or two going blind every day and a grinding, whirring underbelly that sniped every time a new browser window needed to be opened. Passwords were back, and each day a new experiment with the fingering technique would be launched into so that I could handle a glass of water on the one hand and tippy-toe into my workspace on the other -- puns and mixed metaphors galore. The AccuPoint pointer device that is embedded like a bead went bald with the three years of constant, rugged friction against the whorls of fingertips and deaf with all the prodding; now back in calling. Single Ctrl-Alt keys, a cracked-open headphone jack, defunct video support, metal scraping off the exteriors: four years ago, it used to be the newest thing in the market.16 October 2005
Hail merry
Over the weekend, Pasadena has been treated to a bouquet of weather patterns and surely enough it sent all the local television networks into a tizzy with solicitous newscasters handing over to weathermen and weatherwomen their moments of self-assumed significance.First the aridblazinghot Friday afternoon, then the cooldampmoist evening and then a draughtyfrigid night that slipped in through the window and played truant with exposed throats. Saturday started off as just another nondescript weekend morning but progressively shrank down the temperature scale. All Sunday morningnoonafternoon in Altadena right at the shoulder of the San Gabriel foothills at the Town & Country Club at the Caltech Y Board retreat was transparent yet feelingless behind large French screens and huddling conference rooms. Sunday evening -- given enough warning from Saturday's pranks -- was closed off with a pair of socks, fastened screens and draped blankets but the night was felt through hail and shower falling lightly, intermittently, inexorably. Cooling units clanked with watery spikes and frosty missiles that assailed their diamondy grids. All those sounds eddied around and drained into a sinking bed of subconsciousness but they left behind in their absence soggy shoes and shrivelled, unwanted leaves that are always ruthlessly offered first as appeasement to the skies. By Monday, the squalls and the thunderstorms and the cloudbursts that we had heard and read so much about in Bombay and New Orleans were upon us in Pasadena.
Ten minutes during the afternoon hour past lunch was apocalyptic in the wondrous play of light. One moment there was wide daylight with all in full relief and the next, white and red streetlights of caution came on following the sudden shroud of darkness. A hushed silence in due anticipation of pelting showers; and on cue came nicely rounded capsules of ice that fell on concrete like lead pennies. Even they were quickly hustled off and the heavens were sprayed over again with white paint.
12 October 2005
In which the virtues of a circuit-breaker are extolled in cases when one can be found
Until this June, staying in California meant using gas to cook at home. I spited the electric stove and conjoined to it all my bad memories of desolate Midwest winters; sunny California meant no more of melting plastic, charred vegetables and denaturing cooking oil. I could only be stoical when electric stoves returned to roost in the new apartment -- surely, for the vastly expanded living experience cooking with coils could not be all that bad. Sooty scrapes and plastic-milk in airier environs with an exclusive patio and a fireplace sitting beneath engraved mirrors upended any previous frivolous grouches. And in fact, for a few months I thought we got along splendidly. The coils needed tender care and ample patience, I surmised.No more. What gods wrought upon us these fiendish agents of the devil? Last evening, as I had four of these smouldering coils with flecks of glowing ember passing their little-begotten heat onto water, starch and stringed beans the coils or the coils that heat them exploded and sent the entire "unit" plunging into darkness. All of a sudden, our vulnerability was acutely felt. I had heard tell of the California blackouts while ensconced safely in the Midwest where common sense and gentility always trumped opulent profligacy. I had lived the days of wanton load-shedding in Bangalore when transformers going *phut* in Rajajinagar meant living under starlight and thin glowing candle-pricks that fizzled with ebony cinders of burnt wings. I now cringed in my private darkness with all the world about me alit and atrot. But if it were burnt electrical fuses that needed replacing in India -- and often times you would need to run down to hardware stores that sold them and fit them for you -- there were thankfully circuit-breakers that avoided opening up the fuse-box and replacing the filament. So it was in our case, that one of the circuit-breakers had valiantly done its job albeit not without acoustic side-effects. They just needed resetting -- and so we set about in bluelight of timed afternight cellphone-displays to figure where our circuit-breakers dwelt and guarded our home and hearth from fierce, fluctuating electrical unleashings. The three in the corridor adjoining the living room were experimented upon, with some advising caution -- there were quite some number of us assembled for a dinner -- against switching lights on and off with abandon. None worked at which point of time we arrived at the consensus that there must exist an overlord circuit-breaker not immediately in full view of its charges.
We scurried downstairs to our garage-underbelly that also housed our tariff-meters. The circuit-breaker, Arun observed then and I failed to spot then, seemed functional and so was duly ignored. We concluded that this failing was beyond self-correction. We left for the night for brighter and more reliable ambiences where food provided could be consumed without apprehension of what we consumed with it or of what we missed consuming with it but not before grudgingly laying down sheets and newspapers to prepare ourselves for the thawing ice-age from inside the refrigerator. What we needed, as my mother would often say to me, was light. The circuit-breaker was easily located in the morning's daylight and reset back on and sure enough, all was restored to order. Our home was back fighting fit, but our hearth not fully operational yet. Still, defunct electrical cooking units are a lot more tolerable when you have so much living space to vent out your complaints in.
4 October 2005
BBC+India
It has been quite some time since these pages visited the BBC-India nexus. In the space of two weeks, the BBC has had at least five special interest articles featuring India. The first one made the case for some exotic words that ought to be assimilated into English if only for their picturesque definitions and tongue-teasing pronunciations -- one such being 'nakkele' from Tulu meaning a man who licks whatever the food has been served on. Of course, nakkele itself has been presumably borrowed from Tamil since 'nakku' means 'to lick' and 'ele' means a leaf, or in this case the plantain leaf out of which people eat their food in South India. There are other wondrous gems too -- madh from Albanian meaning a strange fascination for facial hair and plimplampplettere from Dutch for skimming stones.No BBC feature on Indian food and its viral spread in the United Kingdom is whole without somebody patting themselves on the back for the colonial days. Some get posthumous titles, some monetary honoraria, some mentions in one of the Houses and Sake Dean Mahomed was acknowledged with a green plaque in commendation of his enterprise when he established the first 'curry house' in the UK.
BBC added its mite to the furore on corruption in India with its two bit-pieces on the raids. While one featured a grassroots-based radio raid in rural Gujarat, the other was about the CBI nationwide raid to which BBC added a drily wry disclaimer: "Corruption is endemic in the country".
27 September 2005
Flaubert's Parrot
I finished reading Julian Barnes' wonderful 'Flaubert's Parrot'. In part biography, in part commentary and in part wonderful satire, the book seeks to restore Flaubert as more than merely the author of 'Madame Bovary' and as a writer of rare genius -- replete with witticisms, philosophy, world-wandering and syphilis. In addition to highlighting Flaubert's pioneering contributions to the paradigm of realism, Mr Barnes also offers many gentle asides on the Art and Form of writing, the scourge of criticism and the quaint delights of hobby-biographers.17 September 2005
The Summer of '05
In the summer of '05, England beat Australia 2-1 to win the Ashes after 19 years of jaded pouting and what-ifs before the series and merciless excoriation afterwards. It took a consistently superhuman performance from Flintoff, a rare, lethal all-empowered bowling attack that knew how to work the old ball as well as how to intimidate and finally a fantastic run of luck with the tosses. Scarcely before and hardly ever again are we likely to see a series of such excellence, verve, guts and edge. I admit to have been slightly skeptical at first when Vaughan claimed that he had a team that could beat the Aussies, sanguine when Australia lost four matches on the trot before the series commenced, realistic after the first test when their way convincingly, intrigued after England's tingling two-run Edgbaston test win, floored following Ponting's innings leading to the draw, and before you knew it I was rooting for the new underdogs but only mildly so. By then, not just England but the entire sport of cricket willed an Ashes reclamation as was witnessed in flaunting tabloid front-page splashes, condescendingly hush-whispery broadsheets and even sports columns across the pond such as the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix. Of course, even before the noises have died down Simon Jones has already clamoured to crown England the reigning test team but it would serve him well to keep caution and discretion still in his company and would be advised to learn from the example of Ganguly whose pompous claims of supremacy following the drawing of the series Down Under ring hollow in light of India's entangled performances. All this of course makes England's tour of India highly anticipated.In the summer of '05, the United States suffered possibly its largest natural disaster. While the initial estimates of tens of thousands of lives lost is thankfully now embarrassingly overstretched, the hurricane that hit New Orleans could still potentially bring about a social upheaval as big as the ones following the Gold Rush and the Depression in the country's past. With nearly 200,000 homes lost to putrefying, E. coli-filled stagnant water, 400,000 children left with no schools to attend and upwards of $200 billion in damage and necessary reconstruction expenses -- all wrought by two days of nature's ferocity and weeks of tragic mismanagement -- Hurricane Katrina will define and dominate the political and economic landscape in the United States for some time to come. At the expense of poorly paraphrasing a quote I shall say that hell hath no fury like a woman's name scorned.
In the summer of '05, two significant moments dawned that will define the cultural, economic and political scope of our time. Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement and George Bush announced John Roberts as a candidate to fill her seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. But with the passing of William Rehnquist, Mr Bush shifted Mr Roberts' nomination over to be the Chief Justice of the United States while preparing for another nomination to fill Ms O'Connor's seat. The import of this historic milestone is immediately conceived of by looking at the near-endless coverage the country's news media is devoting even in the midst of a terrible domestic tragedy and ongoing violence in Iraq. It also provides for a tantalising opportunity for a layperson such as me to follow this intriguing and elaborate procedure some call the nomination process which begins with hearings in front of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee where the nominee is required to present his person, his judicial philosophy and any convictions while at the same time refrain from jeopardising his chances by opinionating more than necessary. Once the committee is satisfied, or at least less dissatisfied, with the candidate before them it votes him onto the full Senate body where, barring the curious manoeuvre of filibustering, his candidature is decided on by a simple up-down vote.
In the summer of '05, I shunted north-by-northwest into new quarters from the sheltered domicile of Caltech housing. We now have a large Hispanic Man Tuesday, no fortnightly spickspan cleaning services, a small sidetable with a defunct lamp acquired from the streets, a dining table acquired a day before it was to be sent to charity, a walloped beanbag and nakedness otherwise. Yet, the light comes in from meshed sliding rectangles to make this my new home the warmest of all.
In the summer of '05, I reluctantly travelled many thousands of miles into an unknown country and returned with a familiar language, a village full of family, two blisters in my hands from the trenchwork and cement-mixing that refuse to scrape off and seventeen people who I am sure will for the rest of my life be included as a sidenote in the occasional happy thought that strikes me.
In the summer of '05, in the company of Tofu the goldfish, in the mellow warmth of afternoon light, in the midst of new friends and newer freedom and despite them all I arrived at an elusive MileStone. It took two years of unsteadiness and malaise, a westward trajectory, two years of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 1 and a $30-registered copy of WinEdt to get there. This was the summer of '05.
3 September 2005
The pot calling the kettle black
Only a few cynical minds could ever have envisioned the graphic cataclysm that is being played out in New Orleans. Perhaps Katrina may not ever compare to that great tragedy on the 26th of December 2004 which bespoke of moments such as now when the number of lives lost was beyond reckoning and beyond imagination -- some claim hundreds while some thousands, the former are almost sure to be wrong and the latter would love to be wrong -- but a time will appear not too far off in our lives when they will both be mentioned aside each other in the anthology of great tragedies that befell our generation.All of a sudden it does not seem to matter that the last test between England and Australia will start in less than a week's time at The Oval with "everything to play for" or that Michael Owen's move to Newcastle is kicking up quite a storm in England or that China and the U.S. have still not come to an understanding regarding textile sanctions. It troubles me that news of Sania Mirza's progressing through to the next stage of the US Open is making more news in India than the woes of Hurricane Katrina, that Rediff seems more content in delivering tips on investing for women than in covering Katrina threadbare, that the Hindustan Times should lambast and lampoon the United States for Katrina even before they begin to write about its trail of carnage and continuing misery. Words hardly matter now but I feel somewhat at unease knowing that none seemed to have come from the powers that be in Delhi -- neither of condolence nor of solidarity -- I can only rationalise by saying that a Katrina in New Orleans is only as internally relevant to them as the Bombay floods were to the United States, never mind the dissonance in the scale of impact and the lives lost, never mind our 'moral superiority', our infinite capacity for compassion and commiseration.
31 August 2005
Hard times at the Big Easy
Last month's ghastly 24 hours of cloudbursts in Bombay and this Monday's slow, benumbing disaster in New Orleans demonstrate chillingly how ominously vicious water can be. On 26 July, a city of more than ten million was quelled into submission by incessant downpour. More than 900 lives were lost and a month on, Bombay has still not managed to recover from that single day of anonymous judgement. New Orleans knew its slayer to be a fiery demoness as she brooded and bred in the bay whenceforth she finally made assault on the city ripping open its brittle levees and forgetting it instantly. Water -- it lives in and exorcises the hearts and minds of all, it manifests itself in festering carcass, swirling eddies, floating rooftops, lost wives, fungal cornerpits on walls and the smell of bloated death.The calamity in the Gulf Coast seems to multiply manifold with each passing hour as witnessed by the condescension-laced rhetoric when somebody said "it's like living in a Third World country". Yet, when Bombay suffered through its torrential downpour there were scarcely any reports of unrest, arson and violence as there are now from New Orleans. It asks of course for a fascinating study in contrast -- while Bombay took the blow full-on with all its residents on board a ship bereft of a soothsaying foremast man and losing a few thousand of them, three hundred thousand of those in New Orleans evacuated to safety well nigh in advance of the broken ridges thanks to expert weather forecasting.
It took the fortitude and magnanimity of the many hardy souls of Bombay to provide shelter to neatly-dressed executives in ghettos and slums, secure safe passage for children and the elderly through the mighty squall, rescue bus passengers before the ferocious onslaught of rain-mud-slime-saltwater whooshed the vehicle off its nervous footing whence all the while the government stayed a safe distance from and above the anguished hoi polloi of its citizenry beseeching patience, betokening exasperation and bemoaning its helplessness. New Orleans now is off-limits to all bar emergency management officials, Red Cross volunteers and local police authorities. The hundreds of thousands who are stranded by the waysides north-east-west of the submerging city have no answer to how long their nightmarish exile will be prolonged for and to what pillaged, battered, foul household they will return to. A city that was already dubiously distinct for its tattered poverty will return from its siege to even more telling misfortune and chasm.
27 August 2005
North and South
Up in Berkeley where I was for the most of this week, the inlet currents into the Bay put a healthy distance between man and the scorching sun. Mornings began hazily with newspapers crisply rustling in the tender air and spewed steam from coffee danced upwards and mingled into the mist. Lithe bodies wrapped themselves in denim and down feather, leather boots and suede jackets, folded hands and entwined hands. Sweet water was forsaken for shots of whisky to regurgitate the heat from below. The only warmth there was, was in the words of the African-American women when they were talking of their churches and the fine octagenuarian women in them. The afternoons were balmy and sun-dappled however, and the campus would molt out of its winterwear to display colours more varied and in keeping with its vibrant all-kinds spirit. The evenings brought out both the sinking sun and the street-lamps serenading under a sharp moon-clad sky. The restaurants -- Japanese, Ethiopian, Mediterranean, Italian -- filled up to the brim, the nightclubs across the moat that keeps the prying city at bay teemed with revellers and teetotalling companions alike, the music blared at the upper reaches of screeching audibility. And then, three days of an academic interlude prevailed before I took off for Los Angeles whence the flight took half as much time as the shuttle back to Pasadena did.I am beset with muggy, drenching heat. It rushes up and burns open eyes, scorches past the nose, reddens the ears. It melts the golden-tinted hair, pierces past artifices set to block it and howls an ungodly, maddening cry. The loo or the hot winds that prevail in the desert sands and parched earth of Gujarat and Rajasthan are here in our midst, they bring with them no stench of imminent festering but clammer incessantly for our wilting.
16 August 2005
The Third Test
At the time of the paper round following the heartwrenching Edgbaston test, the media hailed the duel as the "greatest of all time", "thrilling", "dramatic". To get so close to the target and fall short by two runs no doubt must have made for an extremely palpitating match. Following last evening's draw at Old Trafford the same adjectives were in circulation once again. The only difference was that I was witness to the final hours of play of the Old Trafford test -- there when Pointing had not yet completed his century and Clarke was middling the ball amply well all the world having forgotten about his back problem. BBC's Test Match Special was missing Blofeld for the entire test and it was not quite the same listening to CMJ and Jonathan Agnew along with Geoff Lawson calling the match but it just had to make do.Of course with 399 runs to make towards a possible successful chase and ten wickets to take towards a tubthumping 2-1 series lead, the stakes were high for the last day's play. Surely England knew the match was theirs to lose when Clarke got out to a stunner of a delivery from Jones leaving Australia at 263/6 or when Gillespie played and missed so many and finally -- hapless as he had been -- got caught in the cross-hairs of the umpire's view of the wicket, or when Warne nearly perished were it not for a hard untaken chance. It could not be forever that the elements would be in Australia's favour -- the third day's rain was plentiful enough. Unfortunately for them though, Ponting's need to survive and hold together was overwhelmingly more significant than their own desire to stitch it all up. As Warne fell after a dogged show, Ponting must no doubt have realised Australia was looking at the short end.
It is a strange testament then to his gritty, clinging and gnarly knock that the magnitude of his innings was not felt until a few moments of pause after the draw was eked out. Even in those last ten overs of the day's play -- six of which he managed to stay in the middle of -- when the voice crackling over the hushed din of spectators to accentuate the growing tension told us of anxious English laptops in internet cafés in Vietnam, frantic Australian desktops explaining the game as tersely as possible to Hungarian girlfriends, none of us was ready to gauge Ponting's metier. It scarcely mattered that he had come in at the eighth ball of the day and had faced all the pummelling from Flintoff and party while wickets at the other end 'kept going regularly', it impressed none that the captain of his team had collected a heroic hundred-and-fifty in the most bloodiest of battlegrounds -- all that mattered was that Australia somehow would not lose any more wickets. And then, Ponting fell. He fell because he wanted to save strike for himself, nobody cared that Lee had been in exactly this situation a week ago and handled the pressure so extraordinarily well albeit unluckily. Chaitanya had joined me in my office by this time -- and both of us agreed how tough it was going to be for the Aussies to come back from a 1-2 deficit. The Australians were hoping for a miracle, Chaitanya's hands were trembling, McGrath and Lee at crease.
And in the final over, McGrath faced Harmison -- could it have been scripted any differently given this tour's cachet of death-defying stunts and nearly unpermutable scenarios? Ball after ball as the tense voice called them, one island in the Northern Hemisphere hoped for a delivery from Harmison so fierce that it would blast McGrath's willow to bits and another island in the South prayed for one so benign and forlorn that McGrath would merely be required to defer. The romantics prefer the underdogs and McGrath survived and even got a single. Lee had to face the next three balls and all of a sudden the sun began to shine. The three balls still took an excruciatingly long time but the Aussies had done it and England sadly had to acquiesce -- but it was sweet poetic justice considering how close they had come to losing the Edgbaston test.
Lest I be accused of being a closet-colonialist, I must say that it was nearly as gripping and delirious as the Melbourne test, the Sydney test, the great Calcutta test and the satisfying Madras test. But it was every bit the more compelling to follow from an impartial true Test-enthusiast's perspective and every bit the more fascinating to listen to on the BBC. Nine more days to go before the Trent Bridge test and I hope nobody has been keeping tabs on how abnormally excessive the thrill of following the 2005 Ashes has been.
10 August 2005
Two weeks in Costa Rica: Day 3, 25 June 2005
The TURISMO bus had exactly twenty-two full seats and five-six foldup seats by the side of each row. It was a Toyota and was made in Japan for use as a right-hand wheel drive van, so when Juan purchased the vehicle and had the steering wheel altered either something was lost in translation or the Japanese decided it was too cumbersome to construct a door for the driver. Thankfully, the passengers could board the bus by a small sliding door behind the driver's seat. Each row on the bus was partitioned 2-1 and there were four such rows including one that rode on the hump of the hinter-wheels. Then, there was the last row that could seat five. You could say that as with every bus, Juan's TURISMO bus had a seat for each mood -- the single-seats were for reclusives who could sit by themselves, the last row was for the mischief-mongers who would occupy them with their backs to the end of the bus and the two-seaters were for the various permutations of two lives briefly entangled for the length of the trips.Then, there were the proprietary seats -- Juan in the front at the driver's seat, Chris by his side as his cohort and our filter into roadside Costa Rica and Greg the handyman with his money-bags and assortments of first-aid kits, sunscreen, anti-itch cream, bugspray and the like and Jane -- sometimes staff, sometimes bemused spectator to our frolicking and sometimes herself. For the day, I decided to seat myself just behind Juan and Chris with the intention of partaking of their Spanish conversations and hopefully picking up some nibbles of conjugation, vocabulary and colloquialisms. Besides, my seat afforded me grand views of the road ahead which I have always immensely preferred to side-views where you end up being spectated at as an item of harmless curios caged behind glass windows.
Our destination that day was the Poas National Park. On the way to the park, Juan pointed out many coffee plantations neatly arrayed by the main road -- another nostalgic throwback to the time I spent in Munnar. In many regards, this part of Costa Rica resembled mile for mile the tarred, cesspitted, puddling road and green, greener, greenest hedges of glazened leaves in the crowd-infested hill resorts of South India. Naked roads snaking up and up, wide enough for only one-way traffic but banked on both sides by sandy turf before they hit hard rock, lonesome and haggard wayfarers for whom the passage of a busload of tourists accords a singularly enchanting distraction from the ticklish pebbles and the path yet to be travelled and old women on bicycles visiting family in the neighbouring roadside village. It was then that the comparison vaporised -- for every such old woman on her bicycle/ her family/ and four million other Ticos in Costa Rica I would need to have imagined 250 old women with tattered cloth-bundles, wrinkled skin resting on parallel window-bars under listing jute-screens of a nominally 50-person seating capacity red-yellow State Tourism Development Corporation bus with a gearbox the size of a coffin meant for a short, bulky man/ each of their six children and twenty-five grandchildren/ and a billion other Indians in a land dieciocho mille kilometros away, sixty-four times bigger and four times as dense.
We disembarked from the TURISMO at a higher level than the rest of the main office of the National Park was at. After finishing our various bathroom breaks, we headed towards the crater on a two-lane path both lanes of which were being used for onward progress unsure of whether that was their intended utility. The fascinating thing about a crater is how the climax breaks at some inevitable juncture -- I still remember the uphill drive Abhishek, Tejaswi and I took to visit the Crater Lake National Park in Oregon last year before that wondrous sight suddenly was in our view and the whole of it fit snugly across the lateral reaches of our eyes. Presently, we came up upon a rail leaned upon by scores of American tourists dressed in their panama hats, khaki shorts and scurrying offspring -- gazing steadfastly on the gleaming sulphur lake down in the caldera. Admittedly it was nowhere as spectacular as a regal-blue Crater Lake but the sulphur lake still was a darned fine sight and still deserved its share of backdrop photography which our group was only too happy to oblige with. We posed in succession for each of half a dozen cameras that we entrusted to compatriot United States residents who -- either awed by the size of our group or just from the privilege of being vested with the responsibility of recording for us our various pieces of memories of the Poas Volcano -- bungled up with a majority of the shots. Having satisfied ourselves that the sulphur lake did not betray different colours at different vantage points, some of us made our way to the Botas lagoon -- an adjacent crater now filled with algae and plankton floating on water.
It started out bright enough, mellow sunlight bouncing off the sulphur, off the green lagoon and off the corrugated roof over the walk-way by the souvenir shop and the museum of artifacts which also contained amongst other items of curios pictures bearing testimony to an unexpected collaboration between Taiwan and Costa Rica to promote tourism in the other country and to help develop infrastructure in Costa Rica. And then, as seemed to be the norm the sun followed up with gentle patter made all the more musical as it dipped and collected on the ridges of asbestos above us. By this time the majority of us were already inside the souvenir shop -- some of us with honchos at hand, some others exhorting some of us to get our honchos out and still some others who were quickly weighing their purchasing options amongst the many intriguing mementos and souvenir items. It was around when I looked at a nicely polished sliding-door wooden dice-box containing six wooden dice that the hush-hush of pitter-patter was slaughtered by a deafening and ferocious roar of monster-sized water-pellets dropping like shots of lead from the sky onto the roof. No cover -- honchos, two layers of honchos, or even thick raincoats seemed adequate to counter their barrage and fortunately for all of us the torrent did not last too long. By the time we had finished raining our own shower of colones onto the cash-boxes of a hitherto deprived Volcan Poas National Park souvenir shop, the rain retreated to being iota-sized thistles falling pin-drop about us. From the souvenir shop, my collection comprised of the dice-box and a cute, colourful, cartoonish stereometric map of Costa Rica while the others bought toy parakeets, postcards, photoframes and T-shirts. I resisted the urge of buying the $80-wooden miniature replica of a 1930s pickup truck.
Our lunch stop was at a restaurant which adjoined another souvenir shop and perhaps as an intended concomitant carried many exotic paintings on its walls. But the one most offensive to a little girl not more than seven years old was that of a stylish woman in nude and the girl quickly ran to it and covered parts of the painting that she thought objectionable. Deprived of a fuller appreciation for the restaurant's art, we concentrated instead on hearty platters of potatoes, excellent fried plantain leaves, rice and beans and subsequently headed back to San Jose. The only sight worth reminiscing about was that of an overcrowded funeral service of a seemingly popular now-departed soul at the local iglesia on the way to San Jose. Funerals in Costa Rica are perhaps as colourful as birthday parties are -- and why should they not be, if death is not but a celebration of life -- for the women peeking over the shoulders of their husbands and men at the threshold of the church underneath hoods of spiny umbrellas were murmurring with gossip, their little children re-energised running rivalries carried forward from past funerals and the men themselves were not too shy of praying for the bereaved and the bereft with cigarette smoke.
Our plan for the afternoon was to go shopping. On a Sunday afternoon, nothing else could have suggested itself better. We ambled past a huge gathering assembled to watch a street performance of bumbling clown-jugglers who sported the customary red ball noses and some white cream on their faces. There was still some light rain as we headed into the street-bazaar quite reminiscent of the sabzi-mandis in Bangalore on 8th cross, Malleswaram and the dark mausoleum-labyrinth of vegetable-stores in T. Nagar in Madras. Each shop had a characteristic set of items on display -- little trinkets, T-shirts, woodwork, keychains, stuffed toys -- and a small hinter-compartment that housed stand-in volunteers who would take over when the main vendor wanted a break to take a snuff or make small talk with their neighbours. This was the closest it came to feel like the gypsy colonies so colourfully illustrated in Tintin: there were teenaged girls in denim shirts and skirts but with immensely powdered faces and penetrating stares of morning marijuana, brushed up eyebrows and loud lipstick, drag queens with maladjusted toupées, short men with earrings and wattle-necks in close-necked T-shirts moving nimbly with the gift of attractive women walking in a crowd. I muttered my apologies in "disculpe", "con permiso" as I rambled from stall to stall not particularly set on any more purchases. The others however had not been simultaneously flush with excitement and anxious with fear at the thought of having so many colones to spend for nothing and so that little dark corridor sheltering us from the intermittent drizzle played host to student-tourists from America in addition to their regular cache of passers-by, mothers-daughters, uniformed schoolchildren and body-piercers.
On our return to the hotel, the party acquired a new member -- a mangy and shrewd dog that loyally followed us through the jaywalking, through-parks cutting and step-climbing except on occasion when a sniff through parallel sewers would excite him temporarily before he recognised that there was more by way of bounty if he set store by his new pack of tourists. He attached himself to Jane who seemed to be the most receptive amongst us though admittedly -- stray or otherwise -- the dog was quite a hit with the surprisingly large number of dog-lovers in our Group of Eighteen. There were however some boundaries the dog was not meant to cross and so he stayed by this side of the hotel doorstep behind the heavily-secured gate system.
It was not two hours after we reached the Amistad that all of San Jose was bombarded with yet more of the loud pelter of rain. A screen of pastel watercolours descended on the hillside view and rain sluiced its way through the path of least resistance. It was a sight to watch and behold and listen to but not one to wander out. Chris let us know earlier that this kind of rain was unusual even for Costa Rica and was a consequence of a little indigestion over at the Atlantic. Perhaps the dog outside was in the minds of some but Dan and I were back in our room looking up to our television set in chaste reverence and seeking guidance from it.
7 August 2005
Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
Jessica, her mother, a few of her family friends, Colette and I went to the world music concert featuring Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble at the Hollywood Bowl. Getting to the Hollywood Bowl from any part of the Greater Los Angeles suburbia is quite easy with the Park and Ride shuttle system about which I have written in the past.After alighting at the Bowl, we were swarmed by a multitude of summer outfits and just one man in a blazer around a close-necked T-shirt. Huge picnic boxes, little vanity cases, small suitcases on wheels were all brought out in huge numbers -- all for an evening of music and meals. We climbed up the entrance towards our seats on the huge deck of the Bowl amphitheatre and moved past static salesgirls in a reversal of roles crying themselves hoarse "Don't forget your programs! $1 each" and "Binoculars for rent, $7 each". For 75 cents however, each of us availed of cushions for our seats (or -- as I recently found out to my surprise -- tashreefs).
We spread out our dinners and amongst ourselves -- Colette had with her some vegetarian sushi, Jessica and her mother fixed a grand feast of various Chinese delicacies like mushroom noodles, buns stuffed with pork and mushroom and the Chinese equivalent of the South Indian military canteen variant of the parathas and I brought some puliyogirai rice seasoned amply with groundnuts, coconut flakes and curry leaves -- there was an entire continent's worth of exotic cuisine. Our American neighbours on the row behind us could not but stop murmurring about the food and one of them bent down remarking how wonderful our fare smelled. I volunteered some of my puliyogirai rice which she gently turned down. As Jessica offered me some luscious lychees and as I popped one after another into my mouth sucking off as much of its sweet ambrosia before spitting out the seed, a guessing game in hushed tones followed behind us with the ladies wondering what we were tasting. One lady had hastily concluded that it was a seedless cousin of the lychees not having waited for me to toss out the seed while the other triumphantly and self-vindictively asserted they were indeed the lychees soon as the rump seed was deposited on to our makeshift trash can. We in our turn drooled at the victuals our friends to the front of us brought with them. The Bowl was indeed all about the food and very little about the music -- Colette reminded me how people at concerts in Los Angeles would applaud between movements not waiting patiently to unload their pregnant appreciation for good music, this as opposed to staid, soberly dressed New Yorkers who brought with their sashays and ermine coats also a fine and studied applause as well as a table etiquette to disband it in measured and appropriately timed portions.
The opening act of the program featured Zola, a singer from Ulan Bator who sang majestically holding a note for what seemed like ages and then moving onto another. Mr Ma's accompaniment on an instrument quite unlike the cello in looks chimed in well with her resonating performance. Following Zola, the ensemble moved next to India and featured Sandeep Das on the tabla. Mr Das started off with a few sundry jokes in a sincere attempt to roll his R's about how it was the only time he could get the strings to perform behind the percussion instruments in order to explain the odd placement. He performed a piece he called Tarang which was a mix of a cycle of 6 beats alternating with another 16 beats long. The Tarang troupe also featured a dafli, a khanjira and of course the ubiquitous Yo-Yo Ma on the cello. Towards the end, Mr Das even attempted a little kunnakol although he slurred quite a few of the aksharas. When he finished, he drew quite an applause from the 5000-strong hall.
All through this while there were low-flying aircrafts whirring above the Bowl swirling by the sides of an imaginary velodrome. They kept approaching the Bowl at the most inopportune moments and it must surely have been quite a hindrance for the performing artists. The final piece before the intermission was perhaps the best of the three. The piece was imaginatively titled "Ambush from Ten Sides" and was supposedly representative of a legendary event that took place in China. The group featured Wu Tong on the guitar and Wu Man on the pipa. The piece started out with the guitar strumming a few notes of a Western à la Ennio Morricone. But then, Wu Man with the pipa took over and I was transported to a medieval, mythical China -- quite as in the movies -- of leaves from tall bamboo trees rustling. Ms Man with the pipa was simply enthralling and her rather simple attire made her seem like the troubled, fervent genius-musician playing in oppressive times a sweet forbidden music. The ambush from ten sides kept building in pitch and gusto until it reached a crescendo at which point one knew that the ambush was upon himself. It continued beyond that to the showdown and a slow resolution of what must have been a bloody encounter. Interestingly Yimou Zhang's sequel to Hero, House of Flying Daggers is titled Shi mian mai fu which literally means "Ambush from Ten Sides".
The intermission saw droves of men and women making for the exits to the lavatories and as the night wore on, so came out the jackets, scarves, blankets and sweaters to drape sparsely dressed skin which just a few hours ago was apt and physician-recommended for the plaguing heat -- the concomitants of a desert climate. And as the cross to the north-east acquires its stream of permanent lighting to shine as a guiding beacon to all those lost and groping to find their way to an evening party or a nightclub under the famed Hollywood banner, little flutters of flashes went off randomly from within the Bowl and two powerful light beams crossed paths and marked a giant X across the sky above as if to mark a target in their crosswires. The hemispherical dome itself has acquired mellow lighting from red to blue and set the mood for a dulcet duet between Wu Tong and Yo-Yo Ma. Mr Tong's voice though not as stiletto-tipped on each note as Zola's was, was nonetheless imbued with a deep melody filled with elegiac pathos, warning and bemoaning perhaps the hardy and fallen merchants in the ambush from ten sides. It was some surprise then that Yo-Yo Ma chose to call Wu Tang their resident rock star instead of resident a cappella artist.
Then came the turn of the Gypsies. While the piece was announced as having originated in Rajasthan and culminated in Romania, it had more shades of a Slavic/Balkan influence than anything remotely Indian. It had three movements -- Lament, Rustom and something I did not quite catch the name of. Up until the Roma piece, the concert had been more or less devoid of any fast beat. The second movement in the Roma piece did however make up for some of this deficiency but not too well. To the untrained ear such as mine, their music was a good and acceptable approximation to real Gypsy music though Colette seemed to think it was more a case of classical musicians trying very hard to lose their rigid bearings and embrace more bon vivant in their music but self-conscious enough not to be able to.
The last two segments of the regular concert were devoted to Persian music and what fine music it was! The first piece was an essay in unalloyed, pure Iranian classical music -- music pagan to staunch and puritanical ideologies but the Word of God to the love-smitten Sufi saints. At its heart, Iranian classical music does not differ much from Hindustani classical music -- the piece had a simple, common refrain that is honed, threshed, sculpted and interpreted differently with each cycle of 16 beats. But as those notes are repeated you can almost see the trains of pack-mules and travellers alike wandering yet devoutly treading the path. The next piece fell back into line with the general confusion of world music acquiring more performers and instruments trying to cope with the Iranians. With the exception of the scintillating Wu Man on the pipa and at times Yo-Yo Ma on his trusted cello, none could come close to matching their vibe.
And when everyone thought the concert ended, Yo-Yo Ma palpably blushing at the standing ovations accorded him and his project launched into two encore pieces. Surprisingly, it took the encore pieces to wipe out the last few smudges of dissonance between the various artists and they all came together to make arguably the best music of the night. Not surprisingly, the star of the show was Wu Man on her pipa, Yo-Yo Ma on his cello finally showing us why he merited the marquee rates and two wonderful reprisals from Zola and Wu Tong.
With that final flourish, the concert ended. Our back-seat dinner-scowlers had for some time been quite enthralled with the music but the encore pieces drove the two men in the party to shriek and howl to register their contentment. The women striving to strike a dignified note, began to brush off Yo-Yo Ma's effervescence on stage as unnecessary showmanship though as is true with all the guilty secrets of middle-aged life they seemed to be enjoying it. For our parts as lofty observers of the world around us, we smiled wanly and to ourselves as we made way for the exits, the 655 bus shuttle and the car trip back home.
6 August 2005
KCET Pledge Drive
One of the down sides to public television broadcasting is the ever constant need to run pledge drives to encourage viewers to make contributions for the sustenance of the television channel. Notwithstanding the recent political controversy about public television's liberal leanings, PBS barely managed to retain its federal funding. Still the station and its network of local television stations must continuously strive to increase viewer funding in contrast to how everyone necessarily needs to fund the upkeep of the BBC in the United Kingdom.This evening KCET, PBS' Los Angeles and Southern California arm, broadcast the debut concert of a new Celtic group calling themselves Celtic Woman. The concert featured a host of fine-looking divas in shimmering evening gowns with pencil-nib sized headsets lining their cheeks. As opposed to more flamboyant Celtic music performances that I have been to, most of the good music at the Celtic Woman concert came from the support vocals, the choir and the orchestra rather than from the women themselves who merely had to flaunt their frills, mellifluous voices and had to bob up and down gently (I was however soon to be corrected by a woman with Rapunzel-tresses gambolling around with her fiddle).
But the funniest moments during the programming came from KCET's pledge drives. Not very unlike most other television solicitation events and sponsored mini-programs, the pledge drive featured a man and a woman constantly piping the merits of supporting KCET, about how it presents a "safe haven for children, balanced views in its news programs" and about how the children learn their rhymes from Sesame Street, the artists are "inspired" from concerts like Celtic Woman. In the backdrop there are three rows of busy-looking middle-aged men and women, all "amazing, enthusiastic... and well-dressed" -- it seemed to matter to those who make their contributions on the phone during a music concert that their volunteers be well-dressed -- taking calls on multi-coloured telephones and scribbling down with pen and pad. It surprised me how all the phones were busy all the time when the hosts were featuring them -- surely, those 'wonderful' volunteers must have down times at some point.
2 August 2005
Alms for the poor
Last night, Chaitanya and I stopped at a Domino's pizza outlet on our way back from Wal-Mart. It was nearing half past nine and we were famished. Soon after I ordered our food, I fished out my wallet and held it on the counter. From nowhere, in walked a scruffy short middle-aged man. He had all the trappings of a tramp -- the torn and discoloured jeans, a week-old scraggly beard and supplicant eyes. He approached me by grabbing on to my arm and asked me for my name. It took me scant time to fathom what he was going to ask of me and I had already made up my mind as to what my response would be, but I went along and gave him my name somewhat ashamedly wearing a wan smile that seemed to goad him on.Soon after learning of my name and discarding it instantly, he held my hand closer and kissed it which unsettled me somewhat. He then started to reel out his rehearsed lines about him being homeless and having three kids to support as he started gesticulating with his hands. I was trying to make out if the man was a Latino or Caucasian or of mixed breed -- his unwashed oily-brown complexion did not give away much -- or if he correctly read me to be of an alien race for he took great pains to make his point across which given his objective was of paramount importance. He then suggested that he needed cereal as he gestured out a box with his hands, then prated on about not having had anything to eat for days on end sounding more and more desperate. Finally, he made his appeal for money which was what all of us -- Chaitanya, the bemused Domino's clerk from behind the counter who was pretending to look busy at the computer processing our order and myself -- were hoping he would do. But what did take me aback was his finishing flourish which given his hand-kissing should not have been so unexpected: he knelt down with folded hands and prayed and begged of me, then stooped to reach my feet. At this point I knew what he was getting to and I quickly evaded his face as he made do by appearing to kiss the floor I tread on (Chaitanya wryly remarked later what I should have said: not before my PhD).
Until such time it was all his show and his time to be performing giving me no leave either to offer him his rewards or to rebuke him but now he looked to me to complete the whole charade. I have to admit that his ground-kissing and the hand-kissing were quite forceful and was somewhat tempted to give him something but all my wallet had was a twenty-dollar bill and buying him a Domino's pizza would really only complicate matters. Thankfully however, I came to my senses with no time to lose and offered him my apologies and here is where I felt my position as a foreigner in this country acutely. For one thing, it is likely that the man would probably not have solicited an American. For another, had anybody else been in my position their refusal would have been more colourful -- surely a convincing lie, a strong dressing down, a silent reproof or in the best-case scenario for our solicitous bumpkin, a few dollar-bills (coins for his act would have been inappropriate and would no doubt lead to him castigating the alms-giver for parsimony). Sadly all I had to offer was a meek, backing-down "Sorry, I can't help you. Sorry.". At least there was no deceit.
Now, of course we had the encore. He was pained from my refusal although points should be deducted for not having persisted with his case which only gave his show away all that more openly. He screwed his eyes shut, drooped his shoulders -- all still while he was on his knees. He looked for the nearest place to lean and found the window sill where he placed his head. Now that he had been turned down, he was under no obligation to look earnest and hard as he tried he could not squeeze a drop of tear out. Instead he just mimicked the restrained bawling by convulsing and shrugging his shoulders though it did not last long. He stood up in a matter of seconds, made his way out and was gone in no time. I will not deny that I experienced some relief that this was all past us and we started reminiscing instantly about our just-departed company. Upon enquiries from Chaitanya, the Domino's clerk let us know that he was a regular who lurked around the parking lot and mall in anticipation of trying his act out on unsuspecting strangers and Indian graduate students.
