Kalam takes frisks

Last week, employees of an American airline landed in serious trouble for doing their duty.

They went by the book and frisked all passengers, including former President Abdul Kalam, little realising that they would have politicians in this country soon baying for their blood.

Gentleman that he is, Kalam hasn’t said a word against the frisking, but almost everyone who sits in parliament wants Continental Airlines thrown out for the sin of insulting our nation.

The police have quickly taken the cue and filed an FIR against four employees of the airline. And these are the same policemen who will tell you, when you go to them in distress, that you should try the next police station.

But we should understand the outrage. Politicians in India believe they constitute the country. “Indira is India, India is Indira,” a Congressman’s notorious slogan during the Emergency, should give you a fair idea about their philosophy.

That is a philosophy that has percolated everywhere. The police, the public utility providers, and the bureaucracy believe they are in the personal service of the netas. Which is why, at offices and police stations, ordinary citizens are routinely harassed. Politicians get things done without standing in a queue or having to talk to nasty employee of the government.

Kalam is not a politician (he was a nuclear scientist before he was made President). But politicians are always quick to react to anything that threatens their privileges. If an airline could do this to Kalam, what would they do to MPs next? Tell them not to spit?

The irony of it all is that it happened to Kalam. Now, Kalam is a folk hero because he isn’t the sort to take ceremonial titles too seriously. He didn’t make stuffy speeches as President. He was filled with teacher-like enthusiasm the moment he saw children. When citizens wrote to him, he wrote back, and solved some of their problems in the process.

Kalam does not talk the language of divisiveness. He is a Muslim who reads the Kuran, but at the same time he loves things Brahminical: vegetarian food, classical Tamil literature, and the veena. Nor does he talk the language of privilege: he would go around talking to gardeners and other less privileged employees at Rashtrapati Bhavan, in some cases getting them to enrol their children in school. And he has returned to a life of simplicity since his retirement.

The staff of Continental Airlines would have violated the law in their country had they waived security checks for Kalam. But perhaps they will now learn a lesson from government employees in India, for whom VIP is god, and his word law. A good majority of our "government servants" just won't enforce the law for the rich and the privileged.

Kalam deserves a salaam, but more importantly, ordinary citizens of this country deserve a better deal.

Mamma Mia! It's pop happiness

The musical is a treat for Abba fans, even if the characters say vacuous things about love, life, and identity

Chowdaiah saw full-house shows of Mamma Mia! on Friday and Saturday, and with good reason. The musical, produced by Varalakshmi Sharathkumar, had everything you’d want for a pleasant weekend outing: music, dance, and some completely harmless drama.

The best part of the show, of course, was the music of the Swedish pop group Abba. The actors from Chennai sang their hit songs, superbly live, to the accompaniment of karaoke tracks. And then there was energetic, synchronised dancing of the sort we see only in the movies.

The musical, directed by Mithran Devanesan and choreographed by Jeffery Vardon of Chennai’s Hot Shoe Dance Company, tells an unbelievably cheerful story in which an island full of people drink from the fount of love and find mates after an hour of meandering exchanges. Mamma Mia! is a slickly produced pop fairy tale.

It must take a lot of time, money and effort to put something together on this scale, and all credit to the artistes, the producers, and the sponsors (Seagrams 100 Pipers) for making it possible.

For those of us in college in the 1980s, Abba and Boney M presented an easily accessible window to Western pop. We heard their songs on LPs with their wonderful, warm analog sound, and liked them instantly. Abba's music is agreeable even to ears tuned only to Indian songs, which is probably why many of their numbers were plagiarised by Indian movie music composers (The otherwise original R D Burman borrowed Mamma Mia! for Mil gaya humko saathi in Hum Kisise Kum Nahin).

Mamma Mia! was first made as a musical in 1999, and then turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan in 2008. It has been performed on stage by franchise holders in many countries. The movie was a top grosser, and even beat Titanic in the UK.

Sophie, about to get married, opens her mother Donna’s diary and finds that she has had flings with three men. She is curious to know which of them is her father, and invites all of them over to the wedding, without Donna's knowledge. The Greek island where Sophie and Donna live thus becomes the locale for friendly and very superficial exchanges about love, life, and identity.

Egged on by volunteers, many in the audience at Chowdaiah grooved in the aisles to Dancing queen, Money money money and a couple of other Abba numbers. Many teens from the '80s had brought their children along, and were humming along (I saw some with print-outs of the lyrics).

For me, the play took away some of the mystique of the lyrics, making them a bit literal (somewhat like what happened when Ramanand Sagar made a TV Ramayana). But overall, Mamma Mia! was a fizzily produced evening of pop nostalgia, where Vijay Mallya-style tastes met Prabhudeva-style dance floor energy. This isn’t Fiddler on the Roof, or gut-wrenching drama of any kind, but you might still like the glitz and the colour.

Spiritual materialism

Whitefield and Bannerghatta Road are famous as Bangalore's IT corridors. But not many know that Kanakapura Road is this city's guru corridor. It has scores of ashrams along the way. It is not as busy as Bangalore's other highways, but the density of dollar-rich tourist traffic is disproportionately high on this green, picturesque stretch.

The most well-known among the gurus here is Sri Sri Ravishankar, who presides over a sprawling estate, and controls a worldwide empire from a lotus-shaped head office. Late last week, our chief reporter B V Shiva Shankar stumbled on an interesting story about yet another 'spiritual tourism' project coming up on Kanakapura Road.The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which has branches across the globe, is building a Krishna Leela theme park on 28 acres. It plans to beat Disneyland and such other amusement parks with animated scenes from the life of god Krishna. The idea is to dazzle you with tech, and tell stories from the puranas.

The Karnataka government has granted Iskcon some acres, but the group has gone ahead and bought more in the vicinity, and is now planning to build and sell housing and commercial complexes there.

But this grand dream has run into a roadblock. D K Shivakumar, the state Congress working president, is furious. He is saying it's not right for sadhus to dirty their hands with land dealings. The temple's saffron-clad administrators are doing everything possible, including meeting Shivakumar's mentor S M Krishna, to stop him from demolishing their plans.

There's quite a bit of showbiz involved in the spiritual business. Gurus buy TV time, address mass gatherings that resemble rock audiences, and hire PR agencies to proclaim their glories to the unenlightened world.

No one can deny the usefulness of gurus, especially in despairing times such as ours. But many things about them leave you uncomfortable: their aggressive PR, their desire for fame and influence, their contempt for the law, their greed for real estate and hard cash. And there's something else we overlook... their love of kitsch.

The amusements at the Swaminarayan Akshardham temple near Ahmedabad show what happens when you have lots of money and little taste. Ten years ago, I had occasion to visit the temple a day after I had been to Gandhi's ashram in Sabarmati. I can still remember the contrast. Sabarmati was sparse and unpretentious, hallowed by memories of a man who grappled with the British empire, his countrymen's failings, and his own ethical dilemmas.

The Swaminarayan temple's attractions were movie set-like, tacky, desperate to impress.

It's not clear yet who's right and who's wrong in the Iskcon vs Shivakumar row. But any chance we could be spared the kitsch and the Disney-style tamasha?

Why Gangubai is gold

She challenged the thin-voiced norm set down for women singers

Nurses at the hospital where Gangubai Hanagal spent her last days used to call her ‘cutie pie’.

At 97, Gangubai was so full of good cheer and optimism that she would wave the nurses at Lifeline Hospital over to her bedside and teach them lines from a song she had learnt at school.

The nurses loved her spirit, and had become very fond of her. “About a year ago, she travelled to Goa and sang at a public event for about 20 minutes,” said Deepa Ganesh, a journalist researching Gangubai’s life for a biography, now in Hubli.

For the nurses' benefit, Gangubai hummed a Kannada song she had learnt when she was nine, but they probably didn't know that she had never sung any Kannada song on stage. Her daughter Krishna (who died in 2004) sang the compositions of the Kannada saint-poets, but she herself wouldn’t because she hadn’t learnt any from her Hindustani gurus. Gangubai only sang raga compositions in the north Indian dialects.

Many who hear Gangubai on the radio think she is a man. She used to employ her voice in the manner of an artist using a thick 6B pencil. Her strokes were bold, and etched out pictures that stood out starkly. A doctor had administered electric shocks for her tonsilitis, and turned her voice that way, but Gangubai wasn't the sort to stop singing just because she sounded masculine.

For many of us drawn to Hindustani music through the medium of film songs, anything that was sung by a woman and that didn’t sound thin was initially a surprise, then a delight, and finally a revelation about the politics of timbre. A delight because it rang true, and a revelation that women who cultivated a thinness of voice for its marketability were artistically shortchanging us!

Lata Mangeshkar’s voice from her golden years defines femininity for listeners of Indian popular music. In the south, we see her lineage in S Janaki, Chitra, Anuradha Sriram, B R Chaya and countless other singers. On the other hand, Gangubai is a high art practitioner of a daring style that Usha Uthup, Shubha Mudgal and Ila Arun attempt with varying degrees of success. Gangubai is the gold standard.

When a bridge falls

The Delhi Metro, till yesterday held up a shining example of India's engineering capabilities, is a shameful failure today. A part of the bridge on which the train runs has collapsed. The accident has killed six, and injured 40.

E Sreedharan, who steered the project to success, announced he was quitting within an hour of the bridge collapse, but such is the faith in his incorruptibility that Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit has rejected his resignation.

Sreedharan is a hero: he built the Delhi Metro and the Konkan Railway in record time. He brought accountability to government projects, he took pride in his work, and he wasn’t interested in the pickings. But look how his good work now lies in ruins.

It is possible bridge strength tests were done casually. It is possible contractors were up to their usual game of cutting costs once they had the contract in their pockets. It is possible an engineer overlooked a critical lapse, either out of laziness or because he was pleased by the contractor’s generosity.

In the case of the Delhi Metro, the man at the helm made a huge difference, but someone somewhere cheated, and ruined it all. Which brings us back to an old lament: Indians lack a culture of excellence. What we do we do half-heartedly, and with an eye on how much we can pocket. And that bad national karma returns to haunt us every now and then.

As soon as news of the accident broke, our reporter Chetan went around the Namma Metro site in Bangalore, and was startled to find an expert worrying about the safety of its alignment.

India may produce the world's largest number of engineers, but we are incapable of planning any public service well. Our bus stands, railway stations and airports are usually a mess, and we get by without thinking too much about the misery until something terrible happens, and people are dead. We then make noises of sympathy and outrage, and end up saying it should all be handed over to the private sector.

In January, some of us from MiD DAY happened to be at the site of a bridge collapse near Hampi. As we watched, the rescue team reported a breakthrough, some 40 hours after the suspension bridge had crashed.

Policemen in coracles pulled the first body by its hair, and rowed to the bank. We heard a touching story: the men who had first sprung to the construction workers’ rescue were boatmen who had been protesting the construction of the bridge as it would rob them of their livelihood. But we also saw complete disregard for the lives of rescue workers. A wide 70-foot-high pillar was cracked at the bottom, and looked like it could collapse any which way, but no rescue worker was wearing a helmet or safety gear.

To this day, we don’t know who was responsible for that collapse. We read about tourism minister Janardhan Reddy and his brothers, who rule the region, donating a crown worth millions to a temple, but we haven’t heard a thing from them about a tragedy that killed at least seven poor workers, and flushed crores of our tax money down the drain.

India's car festival

Suddenly, the Indian market is awash with new cars. For a country that once had to choose between just two dowdy brands, Ambassador and Premier, 50 new models in a year is something.

Well, more than something. It’s spectacular. Not just because all this action is happening in India, but also because it’s happening at a time when America and other big car markets have entered their worst year in living memory.

Many things are going in favour of carmakers in India. General Motors, once held up as a great model, is today looking like a shameful profligate in the US. But it is flourishing in India, and hopes to do better this year. By 2010, it wants one in every ten cars sold in India to be a GM car.

That may be ambitious, considering the aggressive competition from Suzuki and Hyundai and scores of other manufacturers, but overall, GM feels this country "holds the key" to its recovery. Many big car manufacturers the world over are eying India with similar optimism.

The collapse of American car manufacturing is widely attributed to its refusal to accept frugal cars. But here in India, the GM’s Spark is available in a petrol-LPG variant, putting it firmly on the wish list of the budget-conscious middle class. The kanjoos Indian is finally getting his own back at the arrogant, splurging American.

Two cars rolled out to high expectations last month: the Honda Jazz and the Fiat Grande Punto. They have got the B segment, one step up from entry-level cars such as the Alto, all excited. That’s a hot segment because of the numbers they can sell, and everyone wants to be there. Volkswagen is coming out with the Polo later this year, and it will compete with Suzuki’s Swift and Ritz, Skoda’s Fabia, and Hyundai’s i20.

The recession is forcing many self-indulgent economies into considering smaller cars. The Grande Punto, for instance, would never have impressed the Americans, who are used to huge SUVs, but it’s available in that country today. The Americans were driving SUVs such as the Hummer, with a grand mileage of 1 km a litre, when the rest of the world was switching to cars that could do 10 to 15 times better.

Thanks to the recession and a sudden awakening of environmental conscience, the car snobs are now encouraging people to exchange their fuel guzzlers for leaner, meaner cars. India’s largest car exporters, Hyundai and Maruti Suzuki, are cashing in on European subsidies (of between Rs 50,000 and Rs 3.5 lakh) for people buying fuel-efficient cars. Life’s good for Maruti Suzuki, whose exports rose 176 per cent in June over the same month last year.

Everyone knows our roads can’t take the traffic, and we need better public transport, but our love affair with cars seems to have just been ignited.

Children of pop

Our education and what our elders call “values” are both based on what we call classical culture. But whether we like it or not, most of us are children of pop culture.

We are inundated by songs, ads, films, television, and newspapers and magazines, all of which pose a big challenge to what we have learnt at school.

Which is perhaps why we constantly swing between the classical and the popular, convinced that the two can never meet. The songs a majority of us hear and hum are those broadcast by FM radio (and not so much songs sung by Balamurali Krishna or Bhimsen Joshi), and the heroes we look up to hail more from the tinsel world than from the world of real-life achievers.

Our textbooks try to instil in us respect for saints, thinkers, freedom fighters, scientists and poets… but we’re happier idolising models, actors, reality show winners, rock stars, and business tycoons who may have taken short cuts to affluence.

If you work for the government, you will have pictures of Gandhi and Ambedkar at office, but at home, your pin-ups are likely to feature smarter-looking but infinitesimally less illustrious people.

But things may not be as watertight as we believe.

The classical and the pop co-exist in all of us.

Let me speak for myself. I grew up listening to a bit of Carnatic classical music, thanks to my parents’ love of M.S. Subbulakshmi, and as I stepped into college, a cousin introduced me to the wonderful world of Hindustani music. But all along, I had also heard a lot of film music in Kannada, Hindi and Tamil.

I heard some Western pop as well… Abba, BoneyM, the Bee Gees and such other bands popular in the ‘80s.

While I did get to read some books described as classics, I also devoured less famous contemporary writing, pulp fiction, comics, and the glossies.

Which is why I am puzzled by people for whom it is one or the other, classical or popular. For me, it has been both, sometimes more of one than the other, but never just one.

Last week, some of us friends and hobbyist musicians tried a little experiment. We took some Kannada poetry from the 12th century, set them to folksy and Indian-sounding tunes, and then put them in what you could loosely call a rock setting (guitars and drums). We presented nine vachanas at Kala Mandira, an art school in south Bangalore.

We had expected the small audience to be startled by the experiment, since vachanas are mystical poems usually sung in the classical ragas.

A couple of well-known writers, such as G.K. Govinda Rao and Shudra Srinivas, were upset, and recalled the beautiful melodies that Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur had composed for such poetry. They found us lacking in meditativeness.

Many others, such as the theatre expert K. Marulasiddappa said the vachanas could be sung in any way, as long as the artistes were respectful of their spirit.

Ki Ram Nagaraj, the famous literary critic, defended us. What we now assume as the vachana singing style, he said, was not more than seven or eight decades old, and it was possible the poetry had been adapted to extant styles through the centuries. And not all vachanas are meditative.

Two things occurred to me.

One: Some were disappointed that they had found no raga-like contemplation in rock. In defence, we could say they were looking for contemplation in the wrong place… somewhat like rock fans faulting raga music for not being energetic enough for headbanging.

Two: We had blatantly poured out our classical and popular influences into our songs, but to some ears, they are best kept separate. But then again, vachanas encourage the lowest to sing; they protest against orthodoxy with folksy energy and irreverence.

Here is Supriya (Acharya) Raghunandan singing Basavanna's Vedavanodidarenu.