Indian Classical Music

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                                                           Alaaps, Raagas & Riyaaz

AR Rahman’s concert at UN General Assembly in New York on 15^th August marked the centenary celebration of the great Carnatic singer MS Subbulakshmi.  It took place 50 years after the latter performed there in 1966, on invitation by the then Secretary General U Thant. Why do certain Indian musicians become legends? What magical sounds do they render to have a diehard following over continents, irrespective of language and nationalities?  Welcome to the fascinating world of ‘alaaps, raagas and riyaaz’!

‘Kausalya Supraja Rama’ is the first rendition of the day at sunrise in every south Indian home. They would affirm that this classical enunciation of the mantra by MS evokes celestial vibrations in the environment and connects a devotee to the divine. It’s a demonstration of a simple raga in a voice of perfect pitch and that's why “Venkateshwara Suprabatham" album still peaks in the market. MS demonstrates the bhakti rasa here.

The rasa is derived from ragas made up of notes and srutis.  Swara or note (Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni) is not just a particular musical frequency that can be found by hitting the right key but in the case of a great musician, it is an utterance that comes from deep within the soul. The singer may have the perfect pitch and yet not get to the next level. Iconic singers indulge in a seductive foreplay and approach the swara tenderly and lovingly and arrive at it from below or above, caressing that hidden half note that hovers next to it, and this is what makes their notes really shine forth.

People throng to hear a great musician sing or play an instrument. For the adroit performer, ragas are not abstract aesthetic constructs made up of notes, but are connected to emotions, events and even seasons. With ragas, the musician paints a beautiful sound-painting resulting in an emotional reaction. Ragas, played to perfection with alankars and taans (embellishments), can create rasa of love, bhakti, playfulness and also thunder, lightning and hailstorms. Crescendos of such colour and emotion are the result of years of meditation on musical notes - and on life itself.

If the celebrity musician is in the right mode, they unfold and lay out the raga in the ‘alaap’. The languorous lovemaking continues in the ‘jor’, awakening each note to the seductive drone of a tanpura. Progressing gradually, the ardour increases and the percussion joins in to imbue the music with a vigour, keeping pace with the rising tempo of emotional fervor. The crescendo arrives with the ‘jala’ - the pitch of union and fulfillment personified by unending reverberations of exhilaration.

Namita Devidayal, in her book “The Music Room”, writes, “Merely mastering the notes is not enough. You have to reflect on the human condition, on life itself. Every time a musician sings a raga, it unfolds and expands, revealing new insights and pathways. That is why they say that a musician really becomes a musician at the end of his life. When a veteran musician uses notes to tell a greater story, he attains celestial heights and his art then breaks free from material grounding. The note ma in Raga Yaman lies in the uppermost sruti, the one closet to pa. It is only when you start hitting the precise sruti of the raga that the raga will open up to you and say “Aah! Now you may enter me ….”

Riyaaz is a musician’s hours of sadhana stretched endlessly. 

 Lost in sounds of cascading music, trying to achieve the perfect note, they lose all sense of time.  Devidayal writes, “One evening a man on his way to an all-night theatre, passed the maestro’s house after dinner and heard him practicing a particularly complicated taan- a piece that shot up, did a number of stunning trapeze swings and twirled its way down a spiral, all in one breath. He did it over and over, but one note kept slipping. The man listened for a while and then went his way. It was close to four in the morning when the man intoxicated with sleeplessness, returned back. When he passed by the great singer’s window, he heard him practicing the same taan.  It was now perfect.”

Bombay Jayasri, carnatic musician from South, is famous for her soothing and sober style of rendering. Voice culture and breath control are techniques that singers master very early in their vocation, and keep stretching it more and more over time.   Kesarbai Kerkar, one of the most noted Khayal singers of the last century, had a strong will and determination. She had long stopped learning from her guru Alladiya Khan, the founder of the Jaipur gharana. But then, just before he passed away, he gave a few private concerts where she heard him sing ‘Samporana Malkauns’ – a rare raga that uses all the seven notes. She marched to his house determinedly the next day and asked him to teach her the raga. The two got together every morning and once again the jewels of music were passed on from guru to shishiya.  Alladiya Khan at that time was ninety and Kesarbai fifty years old.

Lastly, there is no saying about ‘The Rahman Effect’.  With his unparalleled capacity for work, AR Rahman creates exceptional ‘sound designs’ fostering team-play of talented musicians in India and abroad. His imagination has synthesized and tapped sound patterns unheard of before. Humility in the face of his prodigious talent combines to form a potent package. He says, “Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.”

I would like to end with words from Vikram Seth’s book, ‘An Equal Music’- “Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness, why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music- not too much, or the soul could not sustain it- from time to time.”

Roald Dahl 100 years

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=12133&date=2016-09-18&pageid=1

    Fun with Gobblefunk!

This past week we‘ve been having a scrumdidlyumptious time celebrating 100 years of the British author Roald Dahl, who invented gobblefunk. Chatbag, babblement, scrumdidlyumptious, muggled, snitching and wonka- vite are some words that every reader of Roald Dahl books identifies with. Nicknamed Moldy, Lofty and Stalky, Roald Dahl was born on 13 September, 1916. His motto - “My candle burns at both the ends/ it will not last the night/ but ah, my friends, and oh’ my foes / it gives a lovely light” inspired him to write children’s books which have sold more than 200 million copies and have been translated into 59 languages.

RD was terrorized by the thought of writing boring books for children. He did not want his books to be daunting and preachy. On the contrary, he wanted them to be funny, exciting and wonderful. He wanted children to laugh (belly-rumbling laughter), squirm in their seats or be tense and excited while reading his books. This made his books real page-turners. Some of his famous works are Matilda, Esio Trot, The Magic Finger, The Enormous Crocodile and Fantastic Mr Fox.

His formula of success was to conspire with children against nasty adults. Matilda had nitwit parents, Mr Fox had not-so-fantastic neighbours, Jame’s aunts were mean and the Twits were ugly in themselves. He said it was important to have nasty characters in a book - the more you loathe them, the greater the fun you have when you see them being scrunched in the end. Whenever a brilliant idea struck him, he quickly wrote it down and later worked on it to develop it into a complete book. The famous book ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ germinated in a flash – “How about a chocolate factory that makes fantastic and marvellous things… with a crazy man running it!”

He specially noted to parents – “Be sparky and fun with your children – never forget how you were when you were a child.”  Sophie, his granddaughter recently wrote, “He had all the accoutrements of magic: Amaretto biscuits whose wrapping papers you lit and watched shoot into the sky, a miniature steam train, that huffed and puffed round the dining room table if you filled it with water; the house was dotted with Witch Balls – ancient, mirrored spheres that hung from a window so that, should a witch be so bold as to come knocking, she would be confronted with her own hideous reflection and flee, never to darken the door again. He was famous for writing the names of his children, and later on, me, in the grass with weed killer while we slept. ‘The fairies have been,’ he’d say over breakfast. 

‘Let’s go and see what they’ve been up to.’”

Roald Dahl enjoyed inventing words, especially naming of things. For example, in the book  BFG, there are some wonderful names for the giants and for food, not to mention the BFG’s particularly interesting vocabulary. “But if you don’t eat people like all the others,” Sophie said, “then what do you live on?” “That is a squelching tricky problem around here,” the BFG answered. “In this sloshflunking Giant Country, happy eats like pineapples and pigwinkles is simply not growing.” At the beginning of his career as a writer, Roald Dahl collected lists of words in an old school notebook. “When you’re describing something or someone,” he said, “you can’t just choose dull words like beautiful, pretty or nice. You must search for more meaty and imaginative words. 

Here is a list of words Roald Dahl collected under the heading ‘Angry and Rude or Nasty’:

arrogant blazing brutal choleric coarse cruel dangerous devilish disdainful disgusting evil fierce furious ghoulish grim gruff harsh hostile icy-frosty inflamed infuriated impudent irritable insinuating intolerable malicious malignant menacing mocking murderous nauseating nettled noxious odious offensive ominous piqued rapacious repellent repulsive revolting rough scowling shrill smouldering smug snapping snarling superior stern taunting truculent tyrannical vengeful venomous vindictive.

Now isn’t that what being a writer is all about – to have the most appropriate word in context for a character? No wonder, he succeeded in fleshing out the most intriguing characters such as Mrs Trunchbull, Willi Wonka, Matilda and BFG.

His personal life was most interesting. Very much a family man, he begins his two autobiographical books ‘Boy’ and ‘Going Solo’ with a background about his Norwegian ancestry, his parents and siblings. These are my favourite reads and I keep revisiting them whenever I have to prepare for a book-reading on RD, and this particular year there have been umpteen revisitings. RD was the apple of his mother’s eye, who called him ‘BOY’, but when it was time for him to take wings and fly, she let him go and he enrolled for a job overseas, first in wild Africa and later in the RAF before leaving for the US. His adventurous spirit led him to explore deserts, learn Swahili, trudge rainy forests, fly Tiger Moths and Hurricanes in battle zones, and ultimately write when he was posted as an Air Attache in the US. With the birth of his five children he let his imagination run wild, becoming even more animated and joyous by telling stories to his children and concocting fun games at home.

There is much more to RD than just being a writer of successful books. He often said, “If I wasn’t a writer, I would have been a doctor.” He started a charitable trust – The Marvellous Children Society (in Misseden, Buckinghamshire, England) that supports children with terminal illness and other ailments. The Roald Dahl Museum is a centre for children’s workshops and reading programmes. Ten percent of his writing royalties go to these establishments even today. He valued kindness as the greatest human value, even more than courage and bravery.

Alright children, remember to don a Willy Wonka top hat or your fantastic bushy Mr Fox tail for a Dahlicious dress-up day at Broadway Book Centre on 18^th Sep 2016 at 5 pm. Craft your own Matilda Reading Corner, Solve a RD Crossword or take part in the RD Quiz.

RD fun is going to be bigger than James’s peach, more enormous than a crocodile and more marvellous than George’s medicine.

“Never do anything by halves, Go the whole hog, if you want to get away with it- BE OUTRAGEOUS!” – Matilda

     

Symphonic poems

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=11864&date=2016-09-11&pageid=1

House Spirits by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=11575&date=2016-09-04&pageid=1

                                                                Sprightly Spirits!

It isn’t very astonishing that I veered around to writing about ‘House Spirits’ edited by Palash Krishna Mehrotra. It’s an anthology of stories, essays and poems from our very precious tosspots and drinkers of Indian literary coterie - two being personal friends and one a young travel writer, whose book ‘Following Fish’ (my favourite read), might have tipped the balance in favour of a concrete wordy piece which appears before you now. This is a book of hearty gaiety, flavoured and spiced to the palate of our illustrious writer-drinkers and while I enjoy their narratives very much, it may be understood that I have no desire other than to be a good literary compatriot who’s chronicling their jovial doings. Laughter is a privilege granted to man alone. He has sufficient causes for tears and so, whenever one chances upon an enterprise which makes one merry, it must not be lost. With this objective in place, I shall now set to the task at hand. 

Spare me your slanders when I say that certain things must be done to suit the vices of our age. Laughter and vigor comes to those who are innocent of heart, devoid of a creased brow or an upturned nose. The comical act accompanies a light drinker, and it is in this context or a spirit of experimentation and rebellion which sets most drinking in adolescence.  Gautam Bhatia writes, “All of class 7, section B, had raided the liquor cabinet. I could see Samir’s eyes slowly mocking me, his mouth turned up at the corners in a leer of contempt. Before he got a chance to make a remark like, ‘Do you want a straw’, I blocked my nose with my left hand and took a swig large enough to fill my mouth.”

The stories, poems and essays have three overlapping pitches: why we drink, the drink games that we play once we get going and lastly, the downside when the going gets rough with drinks. As Fitzgerald puts it succinctly, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

The overarching paradigm of the book is to establish drinking as a mainstay of people in India cutting across all sections of society. It disrupts the fallacy, ‘India is a non-drinking nation’ propagated by so-called brahaminical Hindu and the devout mullah (the moralistic middle class tribe), who keep up the hypocricy in their homes but for whom subterfuge mingles with salacious bacchanalian fun. Palash writes, “For many Indians, drinking is taboo at home. Which is why the quarter bottle remains a runaway bestseller. It’s something that can be consumed and discarded. We drink everywhere-on trains, outside liquor vends, in our cars, but rarely at home. It’s important to maintain appearances. In Allahabad, my hometown, people hire cycle rickshaws by the half hour. The rickshaw puller’s brief is to keep pedaling until the booze runs out.”

The hilarity that Palash sets up in the introduction, is upheld by Bhaichand Patel. “My most memorable evenings have been spent drinking feni on Delhi’s rooftops or what we call barsaatis.” He goes further into detailing the decline of Old Monk (which he says is part of the Indian heritage and has a possessive following) with the advent of McDowell’s and now Bacardi. “But it remains a Press Club of India drink than an Oberoi Hotel drink. Always was.” This is a connoisseur talking – one who loves his tipple. This celebratory, passionate tone is carried forward by Jairaj Singh, Sandip Roy, who brands India a whisky nation, and Samanth Subramaniam. The latter is on a trawl in Kerala belt for ‘toddy shops’- “If you ever find yourself on one of Kerala’s highways with an hour or five to spare, you should flag down the first passing male cyclist or pedestrian and say just one word with a questioning drawl: “Shaaaaaaaap? If it is particularly early in the morning, throw in a sheepish smile for good measure. You must note here that the drawl is everything. If you get it right and say ‘Shaaaaaaaap?’-like ‘sharp’ but without the burr- you will get an animated nod and detailed directions to the nearest toddy shop.” Samanth’s writing is replete with colorful imagery and local flavor. He conveys the heat of toddy savors and spiced-up fishy snacks with right dose of humour and ardour.

Siddharth Chowdhary’s wedges of ‘Tipple cake’ with raisins soaked in Old Monk and a full bottle of Sula red goes well with the myth by William Blake - ‘The road to excess leads to the place of wisdom’. Manohar Shetty vehemently slices through it by the following lines in his poem ‘The Morning After’ – “You wake to a false dawn/Your throat sandpaper, /Your tongue curled up /like a dormouse, /Your head/The empty drum/It always was.” Jeet Thayil weaves language games through his story of drinking games and Adil Jussuwalla metaphorically warns us about the trickiness of transparent ‘Glass’.  Pavan Kumar Jain, Vijay Nambisan and Manohar Shetty  talk in a confessional mode  about‘been there, done that’ – a warning note to the indulgent fresher, not that the latter will  pay any heed to them! 

Sumanta Banerjee changes the tone by going into the history of alcoholism in Calcutta and Soumya Bhattacharya inks a riot about drinking in prohibited Gujarat. The hypocrisy of the whole state machinery involved in appearances is upped and ruptured in a searing indictment by him. On a contrarian note, Sidharth Bhatia paints a canvas of drinking in Bollywood. Celluloid depictions upkeep the turpitude (drinking is linked to picturization of villains and fallen men), with just Vicky Donor breaking the norm. Amit Chaudhuri’s admission that he does not drink is carried to the plane of a transgression – “The greatest sin is not the sin of having a bad habit, or of high-handedly deciding which habits are bad and which good, but the transgression of not joining in.” He further interprets the expressions of his friends – “I feel no craving for drink. This is seen by people I encounter socially not only to be inexplicable but suspect. For, to deliberately reject pleasure is sinister. My stance has left me a bit lonely, and lacking in the experience of the camaraderie of drunkenness, and its gift of oblivion. But as I hinted earlier, I’ve known other, more powerful pleasures.”

Paradoxically to Chaudhri’s refrain, Indrajit Hazra’s ‘Control’ is then a parody on people who say, “I don’t want to lose control.”’ Indrajit’s playfulness with language heightens this piece to a wry commentary. “With no drink people are ghosts, vulnerous unsafe. Hollow pagal these non-alcolis. Some non-alcolis try thicken their tongues with pretence to sound alcolis but give way. You cannot hide non-alcolis sign. Hee ha.” That, I would say, is exotically hilarious!

Here are a few lines from the poets of this anthology: “The cup in my hand/ rattles like a drum/ it tells me my need.” – Jeet Thayil.

“I asked him once/ Over a peg, boiled eggs/And a saucer of peanuts/The secret of his long life/And sound health. /He blinked behind his soda/Water bottle lenses and said/ Drink. Siesta /And God bless; / what for you is poison/is for me tonic/ And medicine”- Manohar Shetty

“I had of countless bottles made a river/ And discovered its source. Yet one more dropped its love” – Vijay Nambisan

Though the book has been long in coming, it is finally here  (credit goes to Palash). It emphatically  proclaims that India, as a state, loves drinking, by unmasking the pretentions otherwise; but the absence of women contributors makes it flip over its contention to truth. The prevailing reality is that women are choosing hard drinks over mocktails  in a bid to exert their equality and right in  patriarchal  India. But the book seems to have turned a blind eye to that fact and has only a couple of women voices.

All said and done, I will leave you with a new trick I learnt from Henry Derozio’s essay, ‘On Drunkenness’: – always keep a strawberry at the bottom of your glass, it has a cooling effect which counteracts the fiery heat of 12 hours of drinking sin. Ha Ha!

Dear readers, writing this has been unlike I have done in a long time and it is with great amusement I end here. I hope you will read the book  with the same lightness and jocularity!