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.