An Anatopism

I had never really understood the reason for classifying raags as morning and evening raags and the concept of associating them with attributes almost as if they were personalities in Hindustani classical music until today.

During the course of the two glorious months this summer that I had completely to myself in between jobs, I decided to dabble in music once more and exercise those vocal chords in a good way. Luckily for me, I had a friend who also believed in the concept and decided to sign up for music lessons with me. It was also one such other lucky coincidence that a telephone number written down barely legibly on someone else's visiting card led us to whom I believe, with all the faith I am capable of, to be the best music teacher in Greater Bangalore.

Since my friend and I had only about two months before we had to head back to two different continents, we enquired if a crash-course in music could be worked out for us and were told that it certainly could. Our teacher spent less than five minutes explaining how the speed at which she would teach us would only be constrained by the speed at which we could learn and proceeded to give us our very first lesson by introducing us to raag Durga. Soon, the lessons became part of a routine and among other things, we rediscovered the poetry in taking down notes in Hindi and Kannada depending on the day's lesson. More significantly, we achieved what even our teacher considered to be progress.

Since our teacher is not one to pause to revel in crossing minor hurdles, she decided to train us towards a mini public performance as part of an event her students organise every year on the occasion of Guru Poornima. As the event drew nearer, raags were assigned to each of her students and there were endless rehearsals, mostly for the benefit of the 'senior' students who would be performing for the better part of an hour. We were given a composition called 'Koyaliya bole' set to raag Malkauns (an evening raag if you must know). On the day of the performance, we were introduced as 'the students from the UK who are brave enough to perform on stage after having trained for only a month'. We went on stage after deliberating if we should ask the compere to clarify that one of us is going to be working in the UK and the other is a graduate student in the US and after deciding against it as that would not make the audience any less judgemental. We also had our nerves to deal with the pressure of just having been described as 'brave'. There is no recorded version of that performance but from what I recall, we had sounded better in several of our rehearsals than we did that day. Nevertheless, we were not insufferable (nobody fainted or anything).

This evening, in my room in Birmingham, I listened to the CD on which we had recorded one of our rehearsals of 'Koyaliya bole'. The song is about the cuckoo heralding the arrival of spring and has in it a quick and lively succession of notes that can convey to an audience that doesn't understand either Hindi or the genre of music that the piece is about spring time. While usually the song cheers me up and reminds me of my two minutes under the spotlight, today, it did not have any of that effect. The irony of listening to a song about an exquisite Indian spring in a grey snowy wet English winter then struck me. You could nearly feel the notes from the music system freeze in the frosty evening air and lose their way rather than resonate and uplift as they did a few months ago. Well, the song is not really anachronistic because even if it seems like a distant dream, technically, spring is coming which is what the song affirms. But I guess the song is not meant for a continent that is subjected to a season of cruelly short spells of negligible sunshine before the season when the sun finally commiserates and decides to smile brilliantly.

I am sure there is another raag for icy winter evenings.

More London

The first time that I visited London during my stay in England, I was plain relieved. We lived in a quiet little suburb outside Birmingham called Solihull and the initial excitement at discovering peace and quiet and the simplistic esthetics of red brick houses began to wear off quickly and was replaced by a deep craving for the chaos of a metropolis. The only two places I have lived in are Bangalore and Mumbai and it is only natural that total silences and sparsely populated neighbourhoods make me feel unsettled. The one thing that I didn’t quite get used to in Solihull till the very end was how all commercial set-ups closed by 5 pm and how the roads wore an eerily deserted look by 6 pm, except of course, on Fridays. My first visit to London coincided with the Thames River Festival and it was all that I had been pining for- lively, crowded, noisy and stretched till late into the night. I was also lucky then to have two very enthusiastic sets of friends, both card-carrying (the Oyster card I mean :p) Londoners, showing me around town.

Ever since that first visit, London became my biggest addiction and my panacea to all my troubles- from severe stress to a little boredom. Looking back, I am now glad that I had the chance to discover London and its different avtars in my several trips. I have stayed in Woolich Arsenal, a relatively new residential locality in Zone 5 where a majority of its residents work for the financial organizations in Canary Wharf, in the Halls of the London School of Economics near the Tower Bridge with a dear dear friend from college just when she was about to graduate, in Watford, a picture perfect suburban locality where all the houses had a front lawn and a driveway and finally, in an apartment in a tiny lane near the London Bridge tube station after the friend from college had moved out of the Halls and started work (sigh! how quickly these things happen!). I did the touristy bits- the London Eye, the Original Bus Tour and the River Cruise with my mum when she visited me in the UK and I was pleased to see mamma dearest being as smitten by London as I was.

My most enduring memory of London is walking across the Millennium Bridge after attending the midnight mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Eve. I remember how the huge metal spider on display outside the Tate Modern (part of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective on show at the modern gallery) looked surreal and wondering how they got the lighting just right for the voyeuristic pleasure of the few pedestrians who would walk by it after sun-down. The other memory I have of my visits is of running late for my return train/bus in every single one of these trips since I had to reluctantly drag my feet out of London just before leaving it. And I mean running in the literal sense - with the different sets of friends I visited helping me with my luggage; we ran by the Thames near Westminster Pier, we ran along the London Bridge and we ran on the platforms of the Marylebone station just so that I could catch the last train to Solihull.

Here’s to London- the city that was my happy-place for 6 months. And just in case there’s any of my friends from London reading this- you know how I nod understandingly when you complain about how London is not as great as it seems to an outsider and how life there can get to you? Well, that’s just me pretending- I still completely fail to understand how everyone is not as big a fanatic about the city as me! Woolich Arsenal- England's ammunitons
factories during World War 2 were located here.
The factories have now been smartly converted into
apartment buildings with the original structure intact.

Graffiti in London- none of which I understood

From the London Eye

From the balcony of the Tate Modern

The Tower Bridge

Learning the ropes

I know I haven't really used my blog as an emotional dumping ground the way a lot of people I know have done with their blogs. But I'm making an exception today and therefore decided to shout out an "achtung!" right at the very start so that you are clear on the content that's coming up and can flee right away if this kind of thing induces any kind of inflammation, watering of eyes or other allergic reactions in you.

The only reason I'm doing this is to clear out my head and because even I think my friends need a break from listening to my small-big issues when I know for a fact that a lot of them have plenty of their own to sort out! I still want to take a moment here to tell my friends that you (you all know who you are) are all stars and are an incredible source of respite and joy. I know that my friends know how much I love them for it but I'm not sure they know just how proud I am of them.

There is something about the twenties that makes it such a tough period to go through. I, for one, think that it is all the things that I was not able to forsee about life at this age that makes it abstruse. For example, what I did not know while growing up is that when you reach your twenties, everybody around you (who is not in their twenties) assumes that they have a right to size you up and not even be discreet about it. I don't know if this happens with most twenty and odd year olds or if I have an exceptionally raw deal on my hands here- but I find that in any social situation, questions that were earlier considered too personal to be asked by mere acquaintances can now be asked of you by total strangers. Whatever happened to discussing the weather, politics and cricket! On one fateful day, they get replaced by work, marriage and fitness and you will need to have ready convincing answers to questions pertaining to these topics to save yourself the misery of listening to clichés carelessly passed off as advice.

Then comes the tougher part- in that critical change that takes you from being a dependent in the governement records to a productive tax payer, there are whole new dimensions to your personality that develop, which make you feel like a stranger in your own skin at times. And when it comes to such changes from within, it takes a while to understand and accept that you may have the most wonderful entourage- and I'm using the word in the Facebook sense- but there isn't really anyone else but you who can help you deal with it.

I do not mean to paint a melancholic picture of what is universally acknowledged to be the most magical part of the average person's life. God knows, I have always longed for the kind of independence I now enjoy. And the changes and responsibilities that initially seem daunting begin to look exciting on getting used to them. But then there are times when I realise just how significant an impact some of the decisions I take now can have on the way the rest of my life shapes up- and it is at such times that I cave into the pressure and get into melodrama-mode because I do not know if I am able to judge the consequences of my decision well enough. It also seems like it is just us girls who feel the compelling need to express how hard this can be- the guys seem to handle it rather well- but then I know they have their moments too, they just occur less often and can be made to snap out of it more easily, which, of course is a marvelous thing. But there are times when I really wonder if the kind of decisions we need to deliberate over and a greater burden of social conformity makes this harder for women. I don't think there's just one correct answer to that question.

I have begun to digress now. Since this post was for my benefit just as I had mentioned earlier, it seems like it has served its purpose and now would be a good time to end it- also Alanis Morissette is playing on my playlist and like she says "And what it all boils down to/ Is that no one's really got it figured out just yet".

Getting high on masala chai

Well, I’m back from the UK and it already feels like I was never away. I’m also just back from a short but very memorable trip to Kodaikanal with my colleagues.

The timing of our trip was not exactly perfect what with the perpetual showers and a constant thick cover of fog over what were considered to be the best sights around. Despite this, we ended up enjoying our brief stay in Kodai and I was busy relishing some of the many little pleasures of traveling in India that I sometimes pined for while in England- like having endless cups of masala chai and paying for them in Rupees.

It is surprising to see how my idea of what is symbolic of India and to some extent, our national pride has changed ever since I have come back. My idea of these themes and objects now coincides with what a first-time tourist or an Indiaphile who has never visited India would imagine them to be. This is not because a mere 6 month stint abroad makes me think like a firang but more so because I am now probably able to see what India is that not many other countries can be.

Even a few months ago, I was annoyed to see how India was depicted as this strange, exotic land that is a destination for spiritual fulfillment for dummies in The Darjeeling Limited. But now, I see nothing wrong with this description- I would probably only explain to the uninitiated that this too but not solely, is India.

I now see nothing wrong with a tourist defining India by the box of spices in the average Indian home, the stray animals on the road that have a sophisticated sense of traffic etiquette, the colours, the cacophony of dialects, the scary traffic, Bollywood and whatever other stereotypical image there is of India (but no, not snakes and snake-charmers- I take exception to that one – it is surprising just how many people are still told the “India is a land of snake-charmers” story and how many people buy it!) I now see all of these things as catalysts in making the experience of living in India a very entertaining mind exercise. I do not know if I am right in thinking so but I am now of the opinion that we use our creativity and judgment rather well while living in an environment where we take nothing – rules, penalties, liberty- none of it for granted.

India, in some ways seems like the punk district of Camden in London, in standing for the alternate as against the regular- with the exception that we are regular people leading regular lives which just happen to be in essence unusual, without anyone really trying to make a statement. This is why I would recommend India to anyone who is looking for a holiday that is going to play havoc with their idea of the quotidian. The more practical side to it is that it just happens to be a huge landmass that can offer starkly diverse experiences and it is all easily available with a single visa and a single currency.

I can see that my outpour of nationalistic sentiments is eerily close to sounding like a copy for Incredible India . I think I might have fallen prey to the “saare jahaan se achcha” syndrome, which I suspect affects every true blue Hindustani returning from his/her first trip abroad- which is why I cannot be blamed for this post.