S R Ramakrishna's Blog

Ready reckoner to your maestros

2010-03-18T00:38:00.000-07:00

Amaan and Ayaan Ali's 50 Maestros, 50 Recordings is a guide to the masters of Indian music, and comes with a superb CD compilation of their music

Twins Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan's smartly packaged book about Indian musicians showers adulation on their famous father Amjad Ali Khan while remaining respectful about his most formidable peer Ali Akbar Khan.

50 Maestros 50 Recordings looks so good that music lovers will find it difficult not to pick it up. But don't worry, at Rs 350, it's a worthy buy, if only for the music CD that comes glued to the last page. The book isn't bad either. It gives you a quick overview of the deities in the Indian classical music pantheon, and is sprinkled with some refreshingly candid personal observations.

Insiders and music lovers curious about artistic rivalries are likely to quickly flip to the pages about Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, two of the most celebrated sarod maestros of our times, to see how the authors (also sarod players) have managed the comparison.

"What can you say about an icon whose very name means music to you? What do you write about a man for whom the world is music and music is the world?" they say of Amjad Ali Khan, while they mostly list out the occasions when they met Ali Akbar Khan, and finally balance it all out with "He (Ali Akbar Khan) left behind a legacy that is priceless. His teachings, his musical genius and his calibre are unparalleled."

But then, if they don't gush about Ali Akbar as they do about dad, they aren't always afraid to express their opinions either. They refer to Sharan Rani's claim that the sarod existed since 500 BC as "baseless" and having no historical or musical evidence. The sarod, they say, evolved from the Afghani rabab, and was modified in India by one of their forefathers. They praise the role of the guru, and say only a guru, and no formal institution, can produce a great performer.

Happily, Carnatic music is well represented in the book. No one will dispute the inclusion of Semmangudi, D K Pattammal, M S Subbulakshmi and Balamurali, but the exclusion of such giants as G N Balasubramanyam and K V Narayanaswamy will be noticed. Also, among violinists, the choice of L Subramaniam over Lalgudi Jayaraman is likely to evoke scepticism. But then, to be fair, it is never easy for musicians to write about musicians and make lists, and Amaan and Ayaan have pulled off a small miracle by compiling music of such sweep. Their writing is clearly aimed at the non-specialist, and can sometimes look sketchy. The introduction to Indian classical music shows journalistic ease. The choice of pieces is well thought-out (for example, Bhimsen Joshi's 1968 recording is intensely beautiful).

The book dedicates two to four pages to each musician, giving biographical details, and placing them in the context of the authors' own musical discovery. This is a representative way of introducing young people to the wonderful world of Indian classical music, and publishers Harper Collins combine marketing pizazz with a genuine desire to spread the art. An additional attraction is the photographs the book brings together. Getting copyright permissions from multiple record labels couldn't have been easy. Amaan and Ayaan write a brief note on each of the tracks in the albums they have culled their gems from, helpfully pointing in the direction of further listening and exploration.

With its colourful, classy cover, 50 Maestros 50 Recordings will definitely adorn your bookshelf. You'll enjoy the music, and hopefully, so will your kids.

Zany new proverbs on Twitter

2010-03-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

The trending topic 'modern proverbs' is inspiring tweeters to tweak age-old aphorisms to sound funny and contemporary

For two days, Twitter was awash with gems of urban wisdom. The trending topic "modern proverbs" inspired tweeters to attempt variations on old proverbs and create zany new ones.

An example of the first variety is "History repeats itself" becoming "History retweets itself."

Many proberbs borrow from the vocabulary of tech, and social networking. "Give hashtag where hastag is due" takes off on "Give credit where credit is due," replacing 'credit' with the hash sign used by tweeters to recognise and promote an exciting topic. "What's in a user-name?" is a variation on Shakespeare's ubiquitous line "What's in a name?"

Television and popular culture are other big influences, as in @jhunjhunwala's witty proverb "Actions speak louder than Words but Arnab Goswami speaks louder than actions and words."

Thousands of 'modern proverbs' had appeared on the micro networking site before the tide started ebbing on Wednesday. Many tweeters were Indian, but they were not a majority as they were when the Nithyananda scandal broke.

Here are some I liked:

@mansigrover History retweets itself

@avinash_y Every day is a monday except saturday and sunday

@creatitwitty: Accents speak louder than words

@krishashok: The leopard cannot change his spots, unless Photoshop is involved

@vinod_raman: Tweet to live, but don't live to tweet

@eJeremy: Give hashtag where hashtag is due…

@Jhunjhunwala: Don't judge a book by its cover ,download the free PDF and then judge it

@jhunjhunwala Actions speak louder than Words but Arnab Goswami speaks louder than actions and words

@darshanp82: Love thy neighbour's Wifi connection.

@sujayendra: For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program

@The_Prachi: i m in a good shape. round is a shape.

@vinod_raman: Too many hooks spoil the blog

@boredtech: He who hath smelt it, surely must have dealt it

@sandsekh: make love, not mms

@c_aashish: One man's meat is another man's jail term under Section 377.

@shahstruck: "Man proposes, and woman disposes of his income".

@dharmeshg: If at first you don't succeed, go to the 'Help' menu

@OMGhumor: Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

@telljeeves: Roaming was not billed in a day

@teatattler: Google helps those who can't help themselves

@johnnypixel: Life will give you many challenges. Much of which can be outsourced to India

Cerebral music on violins and cello

2010-03-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

The Madras String Quartet played Thyagraja and Vyasaraya, setting off the beauty of South Indian music against Western harmonies

The Madras String Quartet presented some fine, cerebral music at a three-day festival that concluded in Bangalore on Sunday, February 28.

Led by violinist V S Narasimhan, the group played 45 minutes of Western classical music, and followed it with half a dozen Karnatak compositions, adapted to the quartet style. Understandably, the southern Bangalore audience was more tuned to the second part of the concert, and responded with respectful applause after each composition.

If you are familiar with film music in the southern languages, there’s no way you could have missed hearing Narasimhan, even if you have never heard of him. He has played the lead violin in hundreds of films. His work with Ilaiyaraja, especially, ihas won him a following among more informed music lovers.Besides Narasimhan, the Madras String Quartet comprises V R Sekhar, B J Chandran, and Hemantraj Muliyil.

The quartet was formed in 1993, and has performed across India. If younger music lovers in Bangalore haven’t heard about them, it could be because the Madras String Quartet is no youth band, and they don’t play rock... Their music calls for serious listenership, and is a sure delight for anyone with even a passing familiarity with Indian and Western classical traditions.

At Sunday’s concert, they alternated slow compositions with brisk ones in the first part of their concert. They specialise in the music of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and it would have helped if they had announced the names of the compositions they played.

The first composition they played in the Indian section was the simple Raaravenugopabala in raga Bilahari. With its happy, major-scale appeal, it energised listeners, and many started humming along (not such a good thing, since some were off-key!). The quartet then went on to play complex compositions of Muttuswamy Dikshitar and Thyagaraja, and concluded with the Vyasaraja composition Krishna nee begane baaro in raga Yaman Kalyani.

For most of their work, they kept the grammar of the raga intact, but in some passages, like in Evari bodha in raga Abhogi, they introduced harmonies using notes outside the raga. That sounded a bit too radical for ears tuned to the tonal restraint of Karnatak music. Overall, the performance was acoustically satisfying, showcasing genuine, sensitive musicianship. It sounded lovely most of the time, even if one detected a couple of uninspired moments.

The quartet’s music is niche, definitely not something less rigorous musicians can pull off. Narasimhan played most of the leads, and the others played shorter solos. Everything was notated, which means that it didn't have the improvisational expansiveness of a conventional Karnatak concert.

Sekhar’s cello had a seasoned, mellow feel, and his touch was exquisitely delicate. (Incidentally, he is the son of the Carnatic violin wizard Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan). Together, the four musicians played authentic, grace-oriented Carnatic music, setting off its beauty against the harmonic richness of the Western classical idiom. It was beautiful.

Unique tabla school enters 25th year

2010-02-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

Kallur Mahalakshmi Tabla Vidyalaya is producing some of Bangalore's brightest young percussionists

Kallur Mahalakshmi Tabla Vidyalaya, one of Bangalore's most respected music institutions, begins its 25th year celebrations this Sunday.

Founded and run by well-known tabla player Rajgopal Kallurkar, it is the only school in Karnataka dedicated to the tabla. “The focus helps,” says Kallurkar. “Students here can go all the way up to a Ph D in tabla playing.” Most students train for exams conducted by the state board, or academies such as the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya.

The school’s 150 students come from all corners of Bangalore. It gets overseas students as well. Kallurkar founded the school in Dharwad in 1985. He migrated to Bangalore in 1997, and brought the school with him. “Bangalore was a bigger city with more opportunities, and my friends, especially the famous tabla player Ravindra Yavagal, advised me to move out of Dharwad,” recalls Kallurkar.

Wah Taj effect
Like him, several Hindustani musicians moved from Dharwad to Bangalore, looking to survive by performing and teaching. The cultural curiosity of the Old Bangalorean ensured that they had a steady stream of students. Many families switched from Carnatic to Hindustani music. Around the time the school came to Bangalore, tabla playing had become glamorous, thanks to Ustad Zakir Husain's TV appearances.

“Young people are crazy about the tabla,” says Kallurkar, whose youngest student is four. He gets enquiries from parents who want their children to hang out at the school even if they don’t take lessons. But six, he says, is a good age to start learning.

Kallurkar slowly built up the school, conducting classes inside his ground floor house initially, and then adding the first floor. He gives free lessons to about 20 needy students.

With a master vocalist
In Dharwad, celebrated vocalist Basavaraj Rajguru used to drop by at Kallurkar’s school during his morning walks. He would watch Kallurkar teaching his young disciples. And then, there were long practice sessions and concerts with him.

“It was such an awesome experience playing with him,” says Kallurkar, who believes he learnt a lot about complex rhythmic patterns and saat sangat (accompaniment) from that master. Kallurkar has fond memories of Gangubai Hanagal, who graced the 10th anniversary of the school. His photo album shows him with some of the greatest musicians of our times. In one, Kallurkar, then just a teenager, is standing shyly next to a regal-looking Pandit Bhimsen Joshi.

Kallurkar holds an MA in Sanskrit, and could have become a lecturer, or, if he had followed his father’s vocation, a priest. But his heart was in tabla playing. As a boy, he moved from his native Kallur to Dharwad to learn under Pandit Girish Avate. He then trained under Ustad Sheikh Dawood in Hyderabad.

Life’s roopak taal
“Teen taal, with 16 beats, is the king of taals. Take two beats off, you get deepchandi, four off, it’s ek taal, nine off, and you have roopak,” Kallurkar remembers the ustad telling him.

Incidentally, Kallurkar has named his son after the seven-beat taal Roopak. The 12-year-old is among the more accomplished students of the school. Adarsh Shenoy, another of Kallurkar's students, has already won the acclaim of hard-to-please musicians. And when disciples put together a memorial concert for Ustad Sheikh Dawood, Kallurkar met another tabla legend, Ustad Alla Rakha.

“He was short-tempered, and a chain smoker,” Kallurkar recalls. "He scared the others away, but let me sit with him and have a picture taken."

Thanks to his crisp, imaginative style, Kallurkar is a much sought-after accompanist on the concert stage. He is also active on several academic boards and committees.

As his school enters its 25th year, Kallurkar looks forward to offering scholarships, instituting a national award, and doing lots more for tabla studies.

Silver event
The school's 25th celebrations begin at 9 am on Sunday, February 21, with a concert featuring Prasanna Gudi (vocal), and a tabla solo by Pandit Vijay Ghate. The venue is J S S Auditorium, 8th Block, Jayanagar. For details call 98452 05803 or 94806 12234.

Life: A documentary you'll love

2010-01-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

Life - A preview of the series. from Documentally on Vimeo.

Just thought I'd share a link to this wonderful documentary that the BBC is making.

Magic Mouse scores big

2010-01-10T21:37:00.000-08:00

  Apple’s new Bluetooth mouse looks smart and pulls off impressive tricks, but it doesn’t come cheap

Magic Mouse, Apple's new offering, looks a bit like Dove soap. The attractive contouring is the first thing you notice when you open the box. But beyond aesthetics, the USP of this wireless mouse is its touch technology, adapted from the company's more iconic products such as the iPhone and the MacBook.

Many believe the Magic Mouse is a huge improvement on the Mighty Mouse, Apple's earlier Bluetooth tracking device. I tried out the Magic Mouse on the iMac 24 inch, Apple's top-end home desktop till recently. (They now have a faster 27-inch model).

The installation wasn't easy. To make the iMac Magic Mouse-ready, I installed Snow Leopard, Apple's latest software upgrade (also called OS 10.6), but the mouse just continued doing basic things, and wouldn't reveal any of the great tracking features it was being praised for.

The Magic Mouse comes bundled with the new iMac series, but I had heard that it would be compatible with the previous generations of Macs as long as they were running on Snow Leopard. It was puzzling why the mouse wasn't coming alive fully even after I had installed Snow Leopard. I googled again and found on a user forum that Apple had put out a patch to make the mouse work. I downloaded that as well.

That didn't help either. I then went online and got software updates for the OS that came with the nine-month-old iMac, which took overnight to download. All this took me approximately two working days to accomplish (since I was busy with other tasks as well). But once I had restarted the system, and activated the Bluetooth mouse option in Systems Preferences, the mouse worked perfectly. A little demo pops up the moment you configure the Magic Mouse, and that is a thoughtful touch, since many users would be new to wireless mice.

The scrolling is very smooth on the Magic Mouse, and is much better than on the brand new Apple button mouse I had been using, which tended to scroll inconsistently. If you want slower scrolling, like when you are reading an e-book or a PDF, just uncheck the momentum option in mouse settings. It also gives you a circular scroll option. Using the Control button, you can also zoom in and out.  

The mouse understands left and right clicks without actually demarcating spaces for them, but the right click needs to be activated first. The double-finger left and right swipes are a nice surprise: on Firefox, for instance, you could use them to navigate to sites you have visited previously.  

The Magic Mouse isn’t designed to work with Windows, but as always, there’s the friendly online hacker who can help you find a way around the problem. It runs on two AA batteries, said to last about four months, and some users are upset it can’t be charged from a USB.

Overall, this is a mouse that looks good, and works well. But at Rs 3,890, it can’t be your idea of an economy accessory (when you can pick up a decent mouse for Rs 200). But then, if you’re looking to indulge in a luxury mouse, this is the one for you.

Jackets smother sweaters in fashion war

2010-01-03T02:30:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed sweaters fading away from the Bangalore landscape? This city’s sweater culture seems to be on the way out, along with all the other things old Bangalore was once famous for. The reason could be that it is a much warmer city that it was some years ago. And the ones who need protection from the cold would rather wear jackets or coats.

So is wearing woollens one of those lost, forgotten pleasures? Maybe in Bangalore, but Delhi hasn’t given up its love for knitted wool yet. On the Metro, which makes commutes within the sprawling capital a breeze, almost everyone wears a sweater. Many shops at Connaught Place start promoting winterwear, especially sweaters, in October-November.

Some years ago, Bangalore used to have a big annual sale of woollen knitwear, but you won’t find too many sweater ads these days. When was the last you saw someone hand-knitting a sweater?

Jackets are probably seen as more macho (even by women who wear them) and contemporary, but they can’t beat the romance of the sweaters. But, on the other hand, jackets are water-proof, which sweaters can’t be.

Sweaters are crafted in colours, textures and designs that are a feast to see, touch and feel. Pure wool doesn’t come cheap, and acrylic is taking its place, but sweaters of whatever material still have a delicate charm that jackets just can’t match. Hundreds of colour and pattern possibilities present themselves before a sweater designer. Can you say the same of jackets, mostly made in manly, sober colours? I would imagine jackets wouldn’t inspire a designer as much as sweaters would.

In Bangalore, the first challenge to sweaters came from ‘windcheaters’, jackets made from thin nylon-like material, and designed like the stuff that motorbike racers sport. These are meant to protect you from the wind, and were a huge hit among two-wheeler riders in the 1980s. Where have they disappeared?

Bangalore’s motorcycle riders now wear thicker jackets. And thanks to easy loans and rising incomes, many of them have graduated to air-conditioned cars, in which the atmosphere can be controlled, and they don’t much feel the need for warm clothing. Shawls are still in vogue, but they seem to be preferred by the elderly and the art fraternity.

Many moviemakers now use sweaters are a class marker: only the less affluent or lovers of retro styles wear them. But do check out the stores in Bangalore. They have on offer a winter collection of sweaters that could, if nothing else, delight the art lover in you. Shawls may be dignified, and jackets functional, but sweaters are beautiful.

C Aswath: Sufi, boatman, rock star

2010-01-01T07:57:00.000-08:00

Many reverential stories will be told about singer C Aswath, who died on his birthday on December 29. This is perhaps a good time also to recall the quixotic tales fellow-musicians tell of him.

Filmmaker and friend Nagabharana, for whom Aswath did some memorable work, was among the many who called him crazy, but everyone who knew Aswath knew it was an epithet used more in affection and exasperation than malice.

Story 1: Aswath was irritated by a fellow passenger who insisted on playing his two-in-one loudly on a night train to Chennai. He got down from the upper berth, and started chatting pleasantly with the boy. “Very nice, could I take a look?” The boy handed him the player. “Where did you buy it? How much does it cost?” The boy told him. “And do you get these in Chennai?” Yes, the boy nodded. Aswath slid up the window, flung the stereo out, handed the boy cash to buy another, and went back to sleep.

Story 2: Aswath used to tell musicians the way to attend a Pandit Bhimsen Joshi concert was to carry a boulder to the hall. Joshi and Michael Jackson were among the musicians Aswath loved. “Every time Joshi delivers an extraordinary turn of melody, we bang our head against the boulder. And by the end of the concert, we are dead!”

Aswath was energetic, and restless. His confidence in his music was staggering, prompting some to conclude he was full of himself. But he was also an open admirer of unpredictably diverse musicians, as the second story demonstrates.

His life work
Aswath’s oeuvre (about 75 albums and 23 films) brought together many stylistic elements, and this is a personal, and admittedly subjective, appreciation of some of them. Music lovers generally recognise the folksy lilt of Aswath’s tunes. His work in the 1980s on Shishunala Sharif’s songs was pioneering, and set the tone for a whole new way of rendering the poetry of the Kannada mystics. In essence, it took classical ragas, and rendered them in an open-throated, folksy style.

The best of Aswath’s compositions may be called Sufi, because their orchestral arrangements suggest syncretic Muslim influences, with their predominant use of the Persian-sounding banjo, bowed instruments such as the sarangi and the taar shehnai, and the bassy daf (or what we in Kannada called the halage or tamate). The wildly popular Sharif song Taravalla tagi ninna tamboori is an example of this style.

Outdoorsy style
Aswath used to say he was inspired by the Hindi music composer Naushad. Another influence is the Bengali boatman style popularised in the movies by S D Burman and later his son R D Burman. Aswath lived in West Bengal for a while, and as he once told me, he kept his imagination open to the influences of that region’s folk music. This style thrives on an open-voiced and outdoorsy exploration of the higher octave. It suggests drifting and philosophical acceptance.

We see Aswath at his best as a practitioner of this style (as in his score for the film Kakanakote). Aswath was one of those rare composers who could get even a strongly individualistic S P Balasubramanyam to adapt to this boatman style, as evident in songs such as Entha marulayya idu entha marulu and Preetiya kanasella karagi hoyite konegu.

Movie gloss
While Shishunala Sharif songs made Aswath famous across Karnataka, his film scores brought him another kind of listenership. His work for Nagamandala was among his best. For Mysore Mallige, he rerecorded songs he had done earlier for the sugama sangeeta album.

The gloss that a huge film orchestra imparts to songs seems to take away from the distinctive power of Aswath’s compositions. His uniqueness comes from a more earthy and less overpowering idiom. Likewise, his music became less exciting when he followed the formulaic orchestral style of 1980s Doordarshan sugam sangeet shows (flute, sitar, keyboard, tabla).

Aswath made many widely sung tunes for the works of 20th century Kannada poets such as Kuvempu, Bendre, G S Shivarudrappa, K S Narasimha Swamy, and Gopalakrishna Adiga. He also produced albums with the poetry of the generations that followed, notably of H S Venkatesha Murthy and B R Lakshmana Rao. Aswath was particularly proud of his achievements in this realm.

Rock scale
Aswath’s first Sharif album appeared as an LP, with an attractive jacket adorned with a painting by S G Vasudev. That was around the time gramophone records were giving way to cassettes, and it is in the cassette era that Aswath reached Kannadiga homes in a big way.

Even though his inspiration was the intimate music of the Sufi and the boatman, Aswath brought a grandness of scale to his world, putting together shows that drew unbelievable numbers. His 2005 show at the Palace Grounds had a rock show-like bigness, and was attended by over a lakh.

Aswath, who worked for 27 years at Indian Telephone Industries and retired as an assistant engineer, had traversed a musical path that made him Sufi, boatman, and at age 66, rock star.

Also read Prakash Belawadi's tribute in the DNA: Ashwath’s passing brings to question the very future of sugama sangeeta, the ‘light music’ tradition of Kannada.

Sanehalli's theatre experiment

2009-12-30T00:55:00.000-08:00

Not many in Bangalore have heard of Sanehalli, although the name might ring a bell among this city’s theatre lovers. This remote village in central Karnataka houses a theatre institute, and its repertory company takes out shows to towns and cities across Karnataka every year. Sanehalli is known for a Lingayat religious institution headed by Panditaradhya Swamiji. The pontiff is a playwright of some merit, and produces what theatre students would describe as morality plays, but he is better known as an enlightened supporter of theatre education.

“For religious institutions, theatre is almost taboo, but Panditaradhya Swamiji takes a liberal view,” says Chidambara Rao Jambe, director of the institute. The pontiff runs a theatre school for 20 students, selected from districts across Karnataka, and gives them free food and education for a full year. That effort costs him Rs 15 lakh a year. The students come mostly from poor families, and are children of farmers or pliers of small trades.

The Sanehalli experiment is based on the now famous Ninasam model. In a village called Heggodu near Sagar, K V Subbanna built an institution called Neelakanteswara Natya Sangha (abbreviated to Ninasam), now acknowledged as a realisation of the Gandhian decentralisation dream. What Subbanna did for over 50 years inspired the Swamiji to set up this school.

The Sanehalli experiment is informed by the egalitarian and non-violent philosophies of Gandhi and Basava, but it seems to have left the police uneasy. They recently told a reporter they were keeping an eye on the mutt for Naxal activities, and accused the swamiji of encouraging Maoist-leaning intellectuals.

Jambe studied at the National School of Drama, Delhi, and then served as a director of the Rangayana theatre repertory in Mysore. He makes a monthly trip to his hometown in Shimoga district, but otherwise spends all his time overseeing work at Sanehalli. He is supported by Nataraj Honnavalli, a Ninasam alumnus who has made a name as a director.

Nataraj is now rehearsing a Kannada translation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure with his students. For weary city types, Sanehalli looks like a magical little cocoon. The Mumbai highway is about 40 km away, but the village isn’t overwhelmed by the Internet, mobiles, or the movies. Landlines work, but when it comes to mobiles, Airtel and Reliance hardly catch any signals.

The village retains the picturesqueness of an earlier era. All houses, except one that stood out conspicuously with its new-age city architecture, are tiled. At a little eatery in a corner, we ordered snacks (khara mandakki) and tea for two, and the bill didn’t cross Rs 12. Hung prominently here was a picture of C G Krishnaswamy, the famous theatre director who helped give shape to the swamiji’s vision for a theatre village.

The late CGK brought to Sanehalli several theatre experts, and helped the swamiji build an amphitheatre that can seat up to 3,000. That’s where they have their annual theatre festival, and people from villages in the vicinity come to catch Shakespeare, Chekov and Kalidasa, besides the best of Kannada playwrights.

Earlier this month, folklorist Ramanna had come down from Mysore to teach kamsaale, the vigorous folk dance form popular in the Male Maheshwara region, and was putting students through the paces at the amphitheatre. After the kamsale class, students flocked around singer Gajanana Hegde, who was teaching them music.

The Sanehalli and Heggodu experiments are perhaps unique in India, and point to ways in which our theatre traditions, both classical and contemporary, can be practised and propagated.

HOW TO GET THERE: Sanehalli is about five hours by road from Bangalore. It can be reached via the Mumbai highway, but a bridge had collapsed, and we were advised to drive through another route that took almost eight hours.

An occasional bus plies to Sanehalli. But people mostly hop into cargo autos at Hosadurga, 20 km away, and arrive at this village with a population of about 650. Hosadurga is well-connected from Bangalore's Kempe Gowda Bus Station. Shivasanchara, the institute's theatre repertory, goes touring in a van donated by an industrialist.

Allen's newsroom novel

2009-12-13T22:32:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knew Allen Mendonca also knew he enjoyed his journalism. Which is why they won’t be surprised at the earnestness and energy in The Sentinel House, his novel about the newspaper business.

MiD DAY got an advance copy of the book, which Arundhati Nag is releasing at Ranga Shankara on Wednesday. Allen goes about challenging readers, fellow journalists particularly, to identify real-life media people hiding behind his fictional characters. He is a satirist this moment, and a practitioner of pulp fiction the next, but there isn’t a moment he isn’t having a go at the media world. For that reason, it is likely that journalists will grasp the novel's nuances better than those with no access to newsroom gossip.

The Sentinel House narrates the saga of Harivanshrai aka Harry, a media baron driven as much by his hormones as by the opportunities afforded by the new Indian economy. In a hurry to expand his empire, he transforms his newspaper from institution to product, obscures the once-inviolable line between editorial and marketing, and elevates advertiser over reader.

Many will read The Sentinel House as a dramatised chronicle of what Allen saw in the newsrooms of the past two decades. The book also seethes with media-boardroom news and gossip that never made it to print. If journalists sit around at bars and coffee shops with a copy of The Sentinel House, smirking, taunting, hooting, or even getting into brawls, you know why.

And unexpectedly, running through all the masala and the action is Allen’s faith in Hindu karma and Christian compassion. When Harry’s crippled son Sid finally finds love and fulfilment, and wealth and power, Allen suggests it is all because of the character’s essential goodness. The Sentinel House describes crimes provoked by lust and greed, but it is also an optimistic tribute to innocence.

But for all that, Allen’s book is vulnerable, and can be ripped apart easily by any critical book lover. Its sex scenes are inspired by Harold Robbins. Its characters are predictable in what they do when faced with a crisis. (The media czar sleeps around, his wife parties and hits the bottle, and their son seeks meaning in art). The Sentinel House is clearly inclined towards populist fiction and Page 3 reportage. With this novel, Allen joins the ranks of Bangalorean journalists-turned-novelists Narendra Pani and C K Meena, but they take stylistic routes different from his.

If anyone was qualified to write this novel, it was Allen. In the decades he spent in journalism, he changed from intrepid reporter to Page 3 heartthrob to independent entrepreneur. He knew this story from the inside. He did many diverse things, including playing the guitar. Allen died of a heart attack late in September, and it is sad that his first novel will also be his last.

One doesn’t know if Allen would have liked to revise it before sending it out to the press, but The Sentinel House, even in its present form, can deliver a satisfyingly nasty punch.

Perverse face of Bangalore

2009-11-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

MiD DAY reported yesterday how more pedestrians are killed in Bangalore than in any other Indian city.

And last night, I was among scores of pedestrians trying unsuccessfully to cross over from Koshy’s to the other side of St Mark’s Road. Escaping getting knocked down isn't easy. It happens all the time, and not just in ‘commercial’ areas.

How did this city, once considered a pensioners’ (and by extension pedestrians’) paradise, turn into a gruesome pedestrian killing zone? And why are our footpaths disappearing?

There’s money in widening roads, that’s why. Who profits? The contractor who widens the road. The corporators and ministers and other VIPs the contractor pays off. And the vehicle user, who was pushed into buying her vehicle possibly because she was too scared to walk.

It doesn't take an expert to tell us this city's policy makers are boorish, insensitive, and anti-pedestrian. But citizens are still grateful to Traffic Engineers and Safety Trainers, a voluntary forum, for collecting statistics to show that 42 of 100 victims of fatal road accidents in Bangalore are pedestrians.

The corresponding figures are 31 for Delhi and 24 for Mumbai. Kolkata, it seems, is the safest city for pedestrians, with just 11 of 100 road accident victims being pedestrians.

Many romanticise Bangalore, but it is a perverse city in many ways.

Here's why. Some years ago, when they built bus shelters in Bangalore, they made sure they had no benches. And then they also made sure no one sat on the bus stand wall by tapering its top into a sharp, upturned V. Only a sadist genius could have thought up such an idea.

Another example. Sudha Murty of Infosys nobly helped build public toilets, and they worked well for some time. But today, they keep strict office hours, and close sharply at 6 pm. And many have no water! Forget about electricity.

I could go on, but you know as well as I do what happens when they start a Metro project, or decide to build a flyover or underpass. They make it worse than it should be. They dig up a road, don't even out what remains of it, and watch with evil glee as thousands of motorists and pedestrians suffer through the hurdles.

Nobel laureate V S Naipaul describes Bangalore as a city without footpaths. But he doesn’t know why it is so. Here’s why: our corporators and ministers, and their friends in the contract and real estate business, are perverse. Not because they pocket our money – they do that everywhere in India – but because they take pleasure in our misery. They’re not just rascals, they're sick in the mind.

An orehouse brawl

2009-11-15T13:16:00.000-08:00

This is a short, silly, completely cooked-up play in five scenes. Find out what never happened between Yeddyurappa and the Reddys

They’re all smiling. Yeddyurappa is calling the Reddys his brothers. The Reddys are calling Sushma Swaraj (or Swaraz, as they would say) their mother. There’s a lot of family sentiment going around in the BJP. Yesterday’s daggers-drawn enemies are today holding hands and cooing. Is this for real?

Okay, okay... we know you’re dying to know what happened behind the scenes. Which is why we took the trouble to spin this outrageously untrue yarn about what history will remember as the Battle of the Orehouse.

Scene I

Yeddy: We are all working for the betterment of the state, and the crisis is over. Our party elders have blessed us. (Waves a victory sign to TV crews).

Jana Reddy (Watching Yeddy on TV): Over! Look at him waving his fingers in the air. If he needs to go to the loo, must he tell the whole world?

Sriramulu: Anna, atla kaadu. He is giving the V sign… V ante Vekaiah Naidu, or maybe vegetable pulao, vankai pulsu... that’s what they are serving at their camp. No non-veg, like at our Goa and Hyderabad resorts.

Jana Reddy (Flying into a rage): Vegetable pulao! Sushma Swarazji is giving him the bulao, and he is talking about pulao?

Scene II

Jana Reddy (addressing MLAs at the Hyderabad resort): All comfortable? Here, have more Scotch. It makes you feel better… you must be so upset about all those people dying in your constituencies.

MLA Renukacharya: Yes, yes, thank you. I’m very good at nursing drinks, as you know. I’m even better at nursing nurses, if you know what I mean. Pssst… (Winks and shows a picture of his nurse-girlfriend).

Jana Reddy: Okay, guys. Have a good time. The spa is particularly good, and you should try the Thai massage here.

Snoozing MLA (perking up): What did you say, anna? Thigh…

Jana Reddy: See, as I said, you can have as much fun as you want here. Eat, drink, go on cruises, take massages… but try sneaking out of here, and you will find your thigh broken. Hushaar!

Karunakara Reddy (giving a report about what is happening in Goa): This Asnotikar guy, the MLA we got on to our side… he’s a good guy. His men are very obedient. He’s not as naughty as that Renuka, thank God!

Jana Reddy (sarcastically): They are such conscientious, hardworking legislators. They take notes wherever they go…

Karunakara Reddy: Manchidi! Do you give them pens and note pads at the resort?

Jana Reddy: Not those notes, dumbo. The crisp ones… the ones with Gandhiji’s picture on them!

Scene III

Rajnath Singh: No one is asking for a change in leadership. Someone is misleading you.

Reporter: Sir, what about the Reddys? They want Jagadish Shettar as their chief minister…

Rajnath (to himself): What Shettar? If they go on like this, it’s going to be shutters for the party.

Reporter: Huh? You said something sir?

Rajnath: No, no, this is all just a little bit of entertainment. After all, what’s Karnataka without some nataka, he he…

Scene IV

Yeddyurappa (standing in front of reporters): We have betrayed our people. God will not forgive me for giving up an honest officer and an honest minister. They want Shobha out.

Delhi reporter: Shobha who? Shobha De?

Karnataka reporter: No, stupid. Poor thing, this just isn’t a Shobha day.

Yeddy: God will not forgive me for giving in to the Reddys (starts weeping)…

Reporter with leftist leanings: Calm down, sir. It’s better than giving in to the cheddies…

Scene V

Sushma Swaraj: We are all one big happy family. The crisis is over.

Jana Reddy: Sushma Swarazji is our mother. Taayi…. (Falls at her feet). She will never do anything against her children’s interests. She is mine, she is mine, she is mine…

Reporter: Sir, we know this is all about mines. All these days, you wanted Yeddyurappa sacked. What will happen to him now?

Jana Reddy: No, he is our honourable chief minister. (In Health Minister Sriramulu’s ear) As for his dishonourable ways, we know what to do, don’t we?

Reporter: This is all about mining? About Yeddyurappa’s toll on ore lorries? Are you upset you can’t loot the forests?

Jana Reddy: No, no, how could you say such a thing? This is a noble battle. This is our freedom struggle. Swaraz is our birthright. Come on, let’s all clasp hands and dance… Swaraz is our birthright… Swaraaz is our birthright.

Yeddy and party colleagues (sing along): Swaraaaz is our birthright. Swaraaaz is our birthright. Come on, friends, join us…

Reporters: Swaraaaz is our birthright. Swaraaaaaz is our birthright…

Bystander: What’s this? Why are they all dancing to Reddys’ tunes? Is this the Reddy corridor or what?

(All exit singing and dancing)

Parable about madness and love

2009-10-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Yogaraj Bhat's latest film Manasaare (Heartfelt) echoes Foucault's idea that reason-obsessed societies push intuitive, unconventional minds into the asylum

Even if you don’t know any Kannada, I recommend you catch the film Manasaare (Heartfelt), now running in cinemas across Bangalore. It debates madness and sanity, couching it all in a light-hearted love story. Made by Yogaraj Bhat, director of the biggest Kannada hit of all time (Mungaaru Male), Manasaare takes you through terrain that is definitely exciting by current Indian movie standards.

Manohar, played by the dimpled Diganth, is considered a basket case because he has no interest in becoming a doctor or engineer. He is compared unfavourably with his more studious cousin who scores high marks and is all set to go abroad. Manohar just can’t earn any appreciation in his middle class world. With his blithe, irreverent talk, he loses the love of the pretty girl next door, and the warm companionship of his less educated cable operator-friend.

After a disastrous experiment where he tries to show how electricity can be produced from the mechanical energy generated by vehicles cruising on public roads (disastrous because a police van trips on his device and the policemen lock him up), a dejected Manohar is sauntering along the highway when he is mistaken for a rehab patient and picked up. At the fort-like rehab centre, he meets several interesting people, including the wise and funny Shankarappa (played by Raju Talikote), and Dollar, the US-returned inventor branded insane because his gadget, an electronic device to clean kids’s bottoms, leaves a boy with a burnt backside. Manohar’s protests that he is perfectly fine take him nowhere because the doctor just won’t listen to anything the patients say.

But just when it looks like he can escape, Manohar sets his eyes on Devika (the fresh-faced Aindrita Rai), an inmate in the women’s section. Their love progresses as they talk through a hole in the wall (in scenes echoing Adoor’s Malayalam classic Mathilukal). The smitten Manohar, dressed as an ambulance driver, smuggles her out into exhilaratingly shot landscapes (Sathya Hegde) that contrast with the claustrophobic world of the asylum. Predictably, her very real trauma is healed by Manohar’s love, but life isn’t easy when they step out into the ‘sane’ world.

Director Bhat pits the pragmatic, competitive, and unimaginative outside world against the creative, human, and often irrational world of the ‘insane’, and echoes Foucault’s thesis that a reason-obsessed civilisation pushes intuitive, unconventional minds into cruel asylums. Like the French philosopher, Bhat acknowledges there is much that can be questioned about psychiatry, but it isn't a discipline you can do away with.

My father’s younger brother was ‘mad’, and we lived with him for more than 30 years. He could be funny and witty with words and songs, but we dreaded the days he turned violent and smashed framed pictures and whatever fragile stuff he could lay his hands on. Sometimes, he just stepped out and kept walking wherever the road took him, not returning for days and weeks.

I loved Manasaare, and could relate to Bhat’s neatly told parable about madness, sanity, and love. We all grapple with our mad inner worlds, I don’t know if I have it in me to willingly live with someone like my uncle again.

Twitter in India

2009-10-13T05:03:00.000-07:00

At first look, Twitter seems like one of those useless, 'timepass' applications. It allows you 140 characters, and expects you to answer the question, “What are you doing now?” Hard to believe that the world would be curious to know what you are doing hour on hour, but what do you know!    

Look at Shashi Tharoor, our Minister of State for External Affairs, whose “cattle class” message made him India’s most notorious tweeter. He manages to tweet several times a day, even when he is touring abroad, and meeting kings, sheikhs, and presidents. He is right now in Dubai, and he tweeted about how the same clothes expand when he has to pack for a return flight. He also made a ministerly statement about the attack on the Indian embassy in Afghanistan: “India will not be intimidated by these criminal killers. We will take all steps necessary to protect Indian lives & installations in Afghstn.” Lofty proclamations find a place alongside the mundane on Twitter.

I read last week that women outnumber men 57 to 43 when it comes to using social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. A woman columnist in the online magazine Salon said this might not just mean that women blabber more than men (who, she believes, may be spending the same time surfing for porn). She surmises mothers are out there using those networks to keep an eye on their children, and working women are developing contacts even as they bond with friends.  

To each his own. Tharoor crossed the three-lakh followers mark yesterday, but he follows just 12 tweeters. For him, Twitter is a medium to broadcast his glories to the world. He is not interested in any comparable degree to what his compatriots may be doing with their lives.

Not all are taking Twitter’s ‘What are you doing now?’ as seriously as Tharoor. Kim Karadarshian, for instance, is using the service to plug products, the latest being for a brand of perfume. You could safely assume she is getting paid for her endorsements. Personal-tech writer David Pogue uses Twitter to talk about his columns, share anagrams, and solicit support for his campaigns. Barkha Dutt and Sagarika Ghose use it to invite questions and comments for their TV shows. Media sites as diverse as The New Yorker, MiD DAY, and Churumuri use it to send out links to their stories.

Job sites push information about vacancies into Twitter accounts. Cartoonists Satish Acharya and Sudhir Tailang tweet about their daily work. Writers as diverse as Ben Okri, Aravind Adiga, and Thomas Friedman use Twitter to bounce ideas. And you can catch MiD DAY’s Ayyo Rama funnies on Twitter too. 

Looks like everyone loves brevity, even writers of epic novels, like the honourable Mr Tharoor.

The story of true fakes

2009-10-06T00:50:00.000-07:00

If you’ve been on the Malaysia-Indonesia tourist circuit, you will surely have come across those unbelievably well-produced fake watches at their little wayside shops. They call them replicas, and you can buy replicas of expensive brands, such as Tag Heuer or Police, for as little as Rs 300. If you are the sort with a taste for expensive stuff but no income to match (and most of us are that sort!), you might be tempted to pick up one of those, and flaunt it on your wrist.

In India we call them ‘duplicates’. The ‘duplicate’ business is big, and every few days, we hear about the police busting a gang producing counterfeit products. It happens everywhere. An electrician I know has astounding stories to tell about ‘authorised dealers’ for big electrical brands in Bangalore’s Chickpet-Balepet area. Some of the less scrupulous sorts, he tells me, are so good at counterfeiting that they stock originals and fakes on the same shelf, and even representatives of the company can’t tell the difference. The counterfeiters of an earlier generation were easier to catch out. In Mumbai, for instance, everyone knew what ‘Made in USA’ meant: ‘Made in Ulhasnagar Sindhi Association’.

This run-up is for a curious story from the world of music. A classical musician in Bangalore has been going around with an injured look ever since he sang a song for a film, and his guru was credited for it. Now, it is perfectly possible that a song sung by one can be credited to another, but then, whose fault is it if you fake a Tag Heuer and people actually mistake it for a Tag Heuer? Was it their fault that they took you at face value and believed you? Or should they have ripped open the case and found that it was something else?

In art, the imitators do pretty well, but then they often compare themselves to someone original and successful, and feel indignant. Kumar Sanu got himself a significant number of songs by imitating Kishore Kumar, but he didn’t last very long. For a couple of years, we also heard of a Rafi imitator called Shabbir Kumar. He similarly faded away.

In Bangalore, as in other cities, you will find good imitators at the ‘orchestras’ that entertain the crowds at wedding receptions and such other events. They earn a bit, but they aren’t in the same league as the original singers when it comes to fame or money. Which, if you ask me, is as it should be.

Coming back to where we began, I don’t know if you can impress the opposite sex by flaunting fake luxury watches and stuff. Perhaps you can. But I have a niggling suspicion with fakes. The watches will in most cases work well and tell the time. And even if I made a dazzling impression on the brand-crazy sorts, I’d still know I was wearing a fake. And I'd despise such a pretender!

Life and times of raga Kalyani

2009-09-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

Ponni Arasu lives in Chennai, and doesn’t speak any Kannada, but she surprised a hall full of theatre and music lovers last evening when she presented an hour-long solo performance in the language. Sanchari, a play scripted by Bangalorean singer Sumathi Murthy, tells the story of raga Kalyani. Directed by the well-known Tamil writer A Mangai, it presents a charming if minimalist picture of the life and times of the raga.

Non-musicians may find it difficult to understand how musicians can be dead serious when they say ragas are human, capable of love, hate, anger, and envy. Sumathi takes this raga-as-human premise further and creates a character who talks about her origins (“I was born to many”), her free spirit, and her eternal appeal (she walks away in the last scene singing the current Kannada hit ‘Ninnindale, ninnindale’). We hear representative snatches of the raga from the classical masters (Mogubai Kurdikar, Mallikarjun Mansur, Balamurali) and the movie composers (Madan Mohan, Khayyam, Ilaiyaraja), as Kalyani moves in and out of a reverie.

Ponni danced and acted out the raga’s relationships with great composers such as Amir Khusrau, Sadarang, and Tyagaraja. She pulled off the Kannada dialogue with astonishing ease, although I would have liked the language of Sumathi’s script to have been a little more conversational. Ponni broke off into Tamil when she had to portray the raga’s refusal to be reined in by the musicologist Venkatamakhi, and into Malayalam when she had to portray her relationship with composer-king Swati Tirunal, who it seems loved raga Behag a little more than Kalyani.

Ponni as Kalyani stood on the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan stage, using cloth paintings as props (Srijith Sundaram) and unfurling them to illustrate the changing chapters of her life. Her costumes (Anusha), for the most part, looked like a fashionable mix of the medieval and the contemporary, but she finally slipped into clothes that looked very tinsel, and very urban-contemporary.

 Kalyani is called Yaman in Hindustani music. Sumathi’s experience as a khayal singer, and her training under Pandit Ramarao Nayak, must have come in useful in the making of the play. Many in the audience, including distinguished connoisseurs such as Chiranjeevi Singh and Jayant Kaikini, felt the play would have gained from more live singing. Mangai promises to take the play to other parts of Karnataka, and will hopefully incorporate more live singing into the play.

  Now, for some nitpicking. Kalyani, for all its beauty, is an overused raga, and although it hasn’t become as hateful as the weepy Shivaranjani (do you remember ‘Tere mere beech mein’ from Ek Duje Ke Liye?), it can certainly put off some listeners (such as myself). I liked the play, but I can’t say I like all compositions I hear in Kalyani. Also, the play could perhaps have a little more action and movement. Thanks, Sangat (Delhi) and Marappachi (Chennai), for making Sanchari possible.

(Sanchari premiered at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bangalore, on Sunday, 27 September 2009)

A rain scene, two films

2009-09-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

A friend had an interesting chat status message last night. It said “My bro is a hero.” She told me a wonderful story when I asked her why.

The two were returning home from work when the motorbike they were riding was suddenly caught in the middle of a flooded road. The water got knee-high, and the boy was forced to stop the bike. He jumped off, and wouldn’t let his sister get off into the slush and water. He pushed her all the way to safety while she sat on the pillion.

The rain is said to evoke the most beautiful memories, but for those of us who have to make our way through the dangerously flooded roads of Bangalore, it is a nightmare. But the story I heard from my friend seemed like a heart-warming scene from a master filmmaker. “Shake your brother’s hand on my behalf,” I messaged her.

* * *

Last week, I saw the animation film Up, and a week before that, I happened to catch Kaminey. Up is made by the Americans, and has all the cutesy elements that go into a children’s film, but it is at the same time a simple, mature story about adventure, love, ambition, loss, and grief.

One of the most memorable scenes in the film shows a grumpy old balloon-maker (grumpy because he has lost his beloved, adventure-loving wife) using his skills to take his house flying towards a dream destination in South America. It works as a sweet metaphor for the sprit of escape one can summon up in trying circumstances. The old man is trying to get away from aggressive real-estate developers who want to break his house down, and what better way to do it than simply to fly away!

Another thing about Up. I liked it because of its music. It is pleasant, symphonic, and very warmly European. Some kids dread going to the movies because they find the sound unbearably loud. The one I went with usually refuses to enter a movie hall, and if he is forced to, stuffs his ears with cotton. He sat through Up happily.

But I can’t say the same of Kaminey. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was a subtle masterpiece, but in Kaminey, he attempts something like a Mumbai masala flick. All very fine, but the close-up and wildly swinging camera angles, supposedly inspired by the Hollywood director Tarantino, left me dizzy.

Vishal is a very innovative music composer, and I was excited with the way he handled the score (especially the qawwali) in Maqbool. In Kaminey, his music sounded so painful. Why did I like Up’s soundtrack more than Kaminey’s? Was it bad cinema sound or bad music? Or, to return to an old debate, was it the digital bombardment of synths as against the warmth of natural instruments?

A faceless Carla Bruni

2009-09-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

The showers on Thursday evening (17 September 2009) coincided with the inauguration of 'Moment, Intercepted', a painting exhibition featuring B Devaraj and M S Prakash Babu.

Prakash's work as a cartoonist and illustrator is regularly seen in the Times of India, Bangalore, but not many know about his painterly side. He is also an independent film-maker, and has produced and directed some quirky short films.

This painting exhibition, his first in 11 years, focuses on formal situations, such as ministers meeting, soldiers marching, and 'first ladies' watching ceremonial parades, all of which he says he has tried to satirise.

Prakash portrays political photo-ops in conservative brush strokes, the irony coming through only in what he chooses to leave out.
In the painting of the wives of the Indian and French premiers, Prakash keeps a little of Gursharan Kaur's face and almost fully crops out the face of the glamorous Carla Bruni.

When he paints two ambassadors talking, he only shows their gesturing hands and a slightly less anonymous scribe.

Although Prakash thinks of himself as a satirist, his work hints at a fascination for the formal and the understated, qualities not so overwhelmingly important in satire. His entire show is done in muted colours.

You won't find Picasso- or Dali-like exaggeration in his lines, but you may catch some stylistic inspiration from Cezanne, and perhaps Rembrandt. Prakash's idiom is a gently self-conscious realism.

Devaraj's work is more stark. He forgoes colours, and plays in black and white to create monk-like figures, sitting in the midst of religiously loaded metaphors such as conches, sea shells, and nails.

His gentle-faced characters use the sacred as a shield against the harshness of the world, and their own inner demons. They are tormented, but not bereft of hope.

Prakash Babu was mortified when I asked him to pose for a photograph in front of one of his paintings. "I'm not that sort," he protested, as though we were asking him to pose as the MiD DAY mate. Prakash can be stubbornly reticent, and fervently abstract.

His talented actress-wife Bhavani happily stood against one of his paintings, and we bring you a very informal phone picture as a souvenir from the event.

Both Devaraj (b 1966) and Prakash (b 1968) hail from Karnataka, and have held exhibitions across the country.

Their show, curated by Giridhar Khasnis, is on at Time and Space Gallery on Lavelle Road.

Four early exits

2009-09-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Four young people I knew died recently. One was famous, the second was well known in artistic circles (and on the threshold of wider fame), and the third was too busy enjoying life to bother about fame, or even good health. The fourth was as unlucky as the other three, although she didn’t belong in the same class.

Raju Ananthaswamy had acquired a well-deserved reputation as a star singer and composer. I first saw him when he was a schoolboy, and even at that young age, he could sing with amazing sweetness. As he grew up, he performed on stage and TV, becoming a big name in Kannada music. He had his inconsistencies, but I haven’t heard another sugama sangeeta singer who could compose such complicated stuff and pull it off on stage so effortlessly. He had been in and out of hospital with a liver problem, and suddenly, one day, news broke on TV that he had died. He was just 39.

Raghav Shreyas was more intellectual, but hardly the stuffy sort. He was a classically trained mridangam player, and was simultaneously drawn to experimental music. He read widely, and wrote insightful art reviews for The Hindu. His passion was black and white photography. We were friends, but for a long time I didn’t know much about his versatile background. One day, he showed me prints of photographs he had taken of Bangalore’s Central Jail, parts of which had already been demolished. I was stunned by the artistry of what he had clicked. A little after that, he developed a tumour in his brain. His mother Vasanthi bravely helped him fight it, and it looked like he had almost come back, but he was suddenly gone one day. He was in his 30s.

Four or five days before she died, 26-year-old Navneet Wasu, sometime colleague at MiD DAY, mailed me an angry response to an article I had written. I had ridiculed actor Ambarish for smoking and gambling away through his term as information minister. It wasn’t so much about his smoking and gambling as about his irresponsibility in frittering away the opportunity to do something for his artiste fraternity. Navneet, who loved junk food and hated anything green on her plate, asked me bluntly, “What’s wrong with smoking?” Nothing, I replied.

I don’t know if cigarettes had any connection at all with their early passing, but I often think about my friends, and I’m not so sure I will say ‘Nothing’ the next time someone asks me that question.

The fourth to die this past year, Kasturi, was illiterate, and had a heart valve problem. The smiling, good-natured domestic help exerted herself to earn money to get her drunkard brother treated at a deaddiction clinic. She died at 24.

Sound and silence

2009-08-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

Didier Weiss is a name people in the sound industry recognise instantly. He is French, and lives in Pondicherry. He developed an unusually keen ear and passion for sound as a schoolboy, and that led him to a career in sound engineering.

African musicians who visited his studio in Paris used to call him ‘the magician’. He made his first recording in the days of vinyl, and when he was just 14. The regular sound engineer didn’t turn up, and 40 musicians were sitting around wondering what to do when someone suggested he try his hand at the console. He did, and the results stunned everyone.

A time came when he had to choose between Africa and India. His heart chose India, and he set up his consultancy here in 1999. Didier specialises in audio design. It’s not just film and music recording studios that require audio consultancy. Auditoriums and shrines are among his clients.

I had the opportunity of meeting Didier last week, and will tell you a fascinating story I heard from him. Among the studios Didier helped design is one in Chennai owned by A R Rahman. Music buffs may know little about what goes into the production of a good recording. Some of the back-end things that go into it, besides musicianship, are room dimensions, interior design, gear, the sound engineer’s knowledge, ability and intuition.

Rahman’s studio, it turns out, had superb insulation. Studios are insulated so that outside sounds don’t spoil what’s being recorded, and also because you don’t want the neighbours hollering at you… it’s possible they can’t stand your music, or you’re doing your takes at a time when the rest of the world is asleep.

When the certification experts came into Rahman’s studio, they said, “Ah, this is very very silent… a bit too silent.” You see, it was so dead (Didier prefers ‘dry’ to ‘dead’!) that the experts believed the music would get mastered at a volume too low, and the score would get lost when played at the movie halls, the quietest of which can’t avoid ambient sound.

And so the designers went back to add some sound to the quietness. They pumped up the volume on some speakers so that the hiss would fill up the room.

It was wonderfully educative to hear Didier talk. And the lesson for me was a little paradox: Perfect may be useless.

Strange case of Priya Krishna

2009-08-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

Priya is an unusual name for a boy, but this one is named after his mother. At 25, his declared wealth is, hold your breath, Rs 770 crore. He can’t drive, but owns swanky Mercs, Audis and Mitsubishis (we don’t know exactly how many, but it’s a big stable). He studied at a modest Vidya Mandira-kind of school. And he dabbles in politics.

Priya Krishna, son of Layout Krishnappa, would be a challenge to marketing wizards who believe this city’s moneybags look and behave a particular way. The wizards are convinced the affluent young professional swigs beer at the pubs, catches the latest Bollywood films at the multiplex, and devours the English dailies. Well, not Priya Krishna, or his equally rich peers in the real estate business.

Priya has quietly developed 10 townships. His friends say he is developing 10 more. He doesn't go near the pubs. His parents force him to go out and watch the occasional film, which he does reluctantly. He doesn’t hit the hot spots with his girlfriends (and here’s something we heard: Deve Gowda, leader of a rival party, is trying to give his granddaughter in marriage to him).

Where do you fit this guy into your media plan? And what of his friends? Bangalore's real estate lords read the Kannada papers, are fascinated by the crime shows on TV, and catch all the gory Darshan potboilers. Their Telugu-speaking counterparts would rather watch a Ram Charan Teja blockbuster than Love Aaj Kal. You can’t sell them your kind of fashion. They love politics and take their fashion cues from politicians, wearing “white and white” (white shirt and white trousers), and completing the get-up with white-coloured sandals.

You can’t sell chic accessories to them: they will only wear thick gold necklaces, bracelets, and rings. They love the Scorpio and the Swift Diesel, and will make a "big-ticket" purchase only when bitten by the itch to show off a little more. Their idea of a night out is to drive in a convoy, phone a starlet over to a resort, and discuss a movie project.

The marketplace has a logic laypeople hardly understand, but I often wonder. Are marketers within media going after people who look affluent but who, in truth, are in danger of being visited by the credit card recovery agent? Are they trying to please jobless riff raff masquerading as celebs? Are they giving away precious media space to shameless freeloaders?

Scams on your phone

2009-08-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

What irritates you the most about your mobile phone carrier? The "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" rigmarole when you call for help? Their sleight of hand with rates? "Value-added services" that quietly jack up your bills?

A reader came to us last week with an angry complaint about his service provider. He'd had trouble downloading ringtones, and was charged for something he hadn't got. The guys at the counter had been far from helpful; in fact, they had been downright obnoxious. Hundreds of such mobile user stories are waiting to be told

Personally, I am irritated by the text promos my phone company sends for its friendship chat service. These are awfully worded, and cause offence to the copy editor in me. I also know they're trying to lure me into something perfectly useless so that they can make some quick money. (But then, a colleague told me this service wasn't always as innocently useless as I thought. Two years ago a mobile chat service promoted by a newspaper was all the rage on the college campus because his friends could use it to chat, flirt, get a date, hook up, and more.)

But carriers ripping you off when you aren't looking isn't just the usual Indian cleverness at work. David Pogue, my favourite personal tech writer, has been, by his own admission, "ranting about one particularly blatant money-grab by US cellphone carriers: the mandatory 15-second voicemail instructions".

He writes in The New York Times that he is disgusted with canned messages that say things like (I have slightly modified this example to make it sound Indian):

"The number you have called is not available right now. Please leave a detailed message after the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press hash for more options." Pogue gives compelling reasons why these messages are outrageous: "First, they waste your time... Second, we're PAYING for these messages."

He calculates that those 15-second messages rake in about 620 million dollars (Rs 3,038 crore) a year for Verizon, one of that country's leading carriers. That's a lot of money about a tenth of Assam's budgetary expenditure for 2009-10!

Pogue is now spearheading a campaign against the scam. He is getting readers of his widely read column to send written complaints to the carriers.

"If enough of us make our unhappiness known, I'll bet they'll change," he says. He believes the volume of complaints will make the mobile companies stop their deceitful ways. There's much we in India could do about the mobile phone scams we live with. A mobile users' association that could lobby against unfair practices, even with a small percentage of Indian mobile users as members, could force service providers to listen to grievances with greater respect and seriousness. Pogue knows where his campaign is heading. He writes: "If they ignore us, we'll shame them. If they respond, we'll celebrate them."

Good luck, David. We will follow your campaign for hope and inspiration.

Kalam takes frisks

2009-07-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-23T00:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-04T11:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Who killed MJ?

2009-06-30T11:43:00.001-07:00

No, definitely not his doctors. Nor his rivals. Nor the sharks to whom he reportedly owed money. It is unlikely any of them would have wanted him dead that badly.

Michael Jackson began as a heart-wrenchingly sweet singer. Looking at his innocent early pictures, you wouldn’t imagine he would grow into the freak that many thought he became in his later life.

MJ’s music was nervous, frenzied, jumpy. It was almost atonal, and you won’t find much in his oeuvre that you could call mellifluous. His music and dance went together. One didn’t mean a great deal without the other.

The beats, many of which he mouthed out before his musicians put them down on paper and played them, are cut, broken, hyperactive. This may sound blasphemous, but like Pandit Kumar Gandharva, who sang in short bursts to make up for a single lung, MJ created an art he and only he could perform. It couldn’t get more idiosyncratic, more individual. MJ created his art from his neurotic twitches.

What happened in his early days – his troubled childhood when his father took up with his third woman, and his youth as a member of the family band, when he had to share a motel room with older brothers making out with groupies – wrenched him painfully out of his innocence. His love life was doomed. He came to be accused of child abuse. He lived in hell, and his art could never be respectable. It was street-like, it was exaggerated, it was fascinating.

All of this must have made him king of pop. Perhaps pop, when it needs to be as successful as it was with MJ, needs ‘freaks’. The largest selling artiste in history was also the unhappiest. He didn’t like his looks, he didn’t like his colour, and he tried to change all that with the help of modern medicine. As the police are now telling us, he had nothing but pills in his body when he died. No food. Just medicine. That’s a stark metaphor for his broken world.

MJ made a fortune out of being neurotic, and the pop world fuelled his success and made its own fortune out of him. It takes a small town Rakhi Sawant, dreaming of taking on the suave, English-educated stars of Bollywood, to create a freak who sells. She is today’s freak, checking out her grooms on television, creating hysteria for the moment when she ties the knot, and raking in some millions in the process. Who knows what emotional misery awaits her and the boy she weds on prime time TV?

So who killed MJ? Could it be those merciless accomplices, pop and commerce?

Lest we forget

2009-05-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

There’s much to rejoice, now that we have a stable government at Delhi. That the Congress was able not to give in when ally DMK tried to blackmail it is a good sign, and it’s an even better sign that prime minister Manmohan Singh was able to keep the avaricious T R Baalu out of his ministry. None of this would have been possible during the last term, when parliament was balanced so delicately that one miffed ally could have brought the government down in a jiffy.

We see wholesome praise being heaped on Manmohan Singh, who sailed through his first term as prime minister without a single blemish. The larger picture is that, for the first time in three decades, India is poised to take big, bold decisions. The economy is happy when it knows the government won’t drag its feet or go back on policy. If the stock market spiked the day after the election results, it is because of this confidence.

It may seem rude to spoil this mood of optimism, but we must remember some dark things about the Congress lest we allow them to ride roughshod over us, as they did during the Emergency. The rise of anti-Congress forces in the past three decades has sobered it down a bit, but that doesn’t mean it will turn saintly overnight.

Nehru, our first prime minister, set the agenda for the Congress. He loved Gandhi, but hated the religious overtones of his political actions. British-educated Nehru embraced the Western definition of secularism: it brought us acclaim from the world community and made us look nobler than Islam-obsessed Pakistan, but in later years, it also unwittingly made it easy for the BJP to sell its idea of Hindu nationalism.

Nehru rejected Gandhi’s village economics, and tried to graft the best of Russia and America in his five-year plans. We ended up with what came to be known as the licence raj, where the government had stifling control over all economic activity. Much of this changed with Rajiv Gandhi and later Narasimha Rao, both Congress prime ministers, but vestiges of Nehru’s confusion remain.

For all his democratic impulses, Nehru wasn’t opposed to dynasty. In school, we still study Nehru’s florid prose with great reverence, and don’t get even a glimpse of the incisive writing that Ambedkar and Lohia produced. That’s because we still believe in the glory of Nehru’s pronouncements. And who’d want to drag the dynasty down anyway?

Nehru left behind an ambitious daughter who was to lead Indian democracy into its darkest days. She used the police to torture her political rivals, and turned an already brutal police force into an unimaginably corrupt and partisan machine. Indira Gandhi encouraged sycophants who would say and do anything to please her. Her son Sanjay is remembered with dread to this day, and his son Varun Gandhi is the new terror on the block. Indira Gandhi gained strength from regional tyrants, one of whom turned against her and killed her.

The Congress continues to get into unprincipled alliances to this day, as we saw recently when Dharam Singh willingly accepted a scheming Deve Gowda’s hand in Karnataka. The Congress karma of cruelty and opportunism will return to haunt it, and we have to see if Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi can do anything to overcome it.

Dynasty has remained a big curse for the Congress. Throughout its history, criminals, contractors and feudal lords have gravitated to the party. They have managed to protect their interests, and also profited wildly, all by merely remaining loyal to the Nehru family.

So while we congratulate Manmohan Singh and the Congress on their victories, let us also remember to keep our eyes wide open.

Big fight losers

2009-05-19T00:12:00.000-07:00

One of the things people say when you complain about politics being dirty is, “But good people don’t get into politics.” This time, some real good people did try. Bangalore South had two highly educated, idealistic men trying to break in. Neither techie-turned-politician Krishna Byre Gowda nor budget airline guru Capt Gopinath could. Defeat is sobering, so let's take a look at what has become of Karnataka’s prominent losers.

CAPT GOPINATH: The Air Deccan founder bagged just 16,000-odd votes while the winner got a staggering 4.37 lakh. Gopi is now eyeing mayoral polls, but the Bangalore voter doesn’t seem all that excited by what big biz achievers can pull off in politics. Gopi’s loss also proves that media heroes invariably turn out to be political zeroes. A MiD DAY reporter stepped into his house as the results were being announced; not a single supporter was in sight. But all that shouldn’t take away from his spirit: he wants to be in public life, and his intentions are not selfish. Janardhana Swamy, a software engineer who quit his Sun Microsystems job and came down from the US, contested on a BJP ticket from Chitradurga and won. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that victory for Gopi: You need both good credentials and a strong party to win an election.

S BANGARAPPA: Four former Karnataka chief ministers are packing their bags to Delhi this time, but the fifth parliamentary aspirant has lost to chief minister B S Yeddyurappa’s novice son Raghavendra. Like Dev Anand in the movies, Bangarappa in politics believes he’s young, and for ever. People may humour them, but just can’t take their dude act seriously. Lesson for Bangarappa: It’s not enough to know all your voters by name. They now expect something for themselves before they decide to punch the EVM button next to your name.

AMBAREESH: This movie star didn’t lift a finger for his constituency through five years when he was MP, yet acted pricey when the Congress offered him a ticket again from Mandya. He was a central minister, but never went to office a single day. He loves to smoke, drink, gamble, and generally show off; over the years, voters have indulged him, but this time they also started saying he’s good at little else. Mandya’s hearty electorate has shoved him aside, and put an end to his swagger.

JAFFER SHARIEF: The former railway minister and veteran parliamentarian has lost from Bangalore North. All three constituencies in Bangalore have gone the BJP way, dashing Congress-friendly media predictions. The 80-plus leader tried to play the sympathy card, telling voters this was his last election. Voters said, “So what?” That line just doesn’t seem to work these days.

H T SANGLIANA: A folk hero, Sangliana quit the BJP to join the Congress a couple of months before the elections. With three Kannada films celebrating his exploits as a policeman, he was considered a sure bet. The grin on the faces of his critics will grow wider: they’re convinced he’s an oddball whose gimmicks don't work any more.

JANARDANA POOJARY: Best known for his loan melas, during which he twisted banks’ arms and gave away their money. A straightforward if eccentric politician, he was preparing to be a cabinet minister. A nameless BJP candidate has put paid to his dreams.

Doom-time boom

2009-04-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

Our reporter Imran Gowhar got us a story about a couple who tried to beat their recession woes with the help of black magic.

Dhananjay (28) sought help from a black magician when he found he couldn't handle his money problems. He had been sacked from a software firm, and started a business that hadn't really gone anywhere. Police have locked him and his wife up for going to a graveyard with a black magician, and causing "public nuisance". From being in a good job to ending up in police custody in just a couple of months must be devastating for anyone. This is a sad story, and we are hearing many sad stories these days.

When the economy was thriving, we heard stories of people giving up secure jobs and striking out on their own. They built enterprises that impressed the world with their ingenuity and daring. But we now mostly hear stories of anxiety and desperation.

Some young people have put off or cancelled their weddings because they feel they cant afford to run a family. Software firms have stopped issuing health insurance for parents of their employees, and the elderly have less of a cushion if they fall ill today. Some months ago, their children would have willingly admitted them to the nearest posh hospital.

We also see reverse migration: a work force finding itself suddenly unemployed and going back to where it came from. A cab driver told me he knew of hundreds of vacant houses in Electronics City: its residents had returned to their villages in Tamil Nadu because they just couldnt afford the rents here, and work was drying up. (The good part was that some of them had returned to cultivating their land when, propitiously enough, their villages had just been irrigated). This is happening globally: people moving out of the big cities to wherever they came from.

In the United States, 5,900 journalists, or about 10 per cent of all journalists in that country, lost their jobs. The worlds biggest newsprint factory, in Canada, filed for bankruptcy last week. More and more employees are being laid off in the software sector.

But some sectors are still doing well. Booze is selling like never before. Work for astrologers and others in the prediction business has shot up. The guru empires would have shown spikes in profit if they'd had to draw up balance sheets, but their accounts are unaudited and secret. And strangely, luxury goods are selling more than ever before. For instance, Mercedes sells about 3,600 cars a year in India now, and isn't overly worried about the downturn.

Many things can push humans to despair. Our theology talks of something called karma, of actions being triggered by our own past actions, but in the short run, it is difficult to understand why bad things happen, or for that matter, why good things happen.

Anyone who can give a plausible explanation for one's miseries and offer a straw to clutch at has a good chance of making a fortune, and acquiring a faithful following.

Neat docufilm about Rajkumar

2009-04-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

When India's most notorious dacoit Veerappan decided to release Karnataka's biggest movie icon Rajkumar from the forests, he asked him if he had any last wish in captivity.

Rajkumar's reply left him gaping in disbelief: "May I touch your moustache?"

That exchange is among the many delightful bits of trivia you will find in Maya Chandra's documentary Dr Rajkumar, Our Annavaru, screened at Badami House on Saturday.

Among those who spoke about the film were Rajkumar's son Raghavendra, who recalled more endearing things about his legendary father.

When he asked Rajkumar if wild beasts had troubled him in the dense forests, he got this disarming answer, "Humans are the biggest beasts, child! I wasn't in the least troubled by any animal."

Raghavendra said Rajkumar was always ready to share his joy, but would keep his pain to himself. He resisted surgery, saying, "This body is like a car. You meddle with it here and something else goes wrong there!"

In the last 30 days of his life, he got up early, walked around energetically despite chronic pain in his knee, and went about his day as if he were at the peak of his acting career. He was then 72. "I want you to remember me that way," he told his family, and went and slept in the drawing room. He would often shun comforts, such as an air-conditioned room, Raghavendra told the audience of writers, journalists, movie crew, and a couple of diehard, front-bench fans who cheered and clapped in defiance of the academic gravitas of the evening.

The documentary is well made, and delineates the life and times of one of India's most influential movie stars.

But it does tend to lean towards the eulogistic, as Sugata Srinivasaraju, assistant editor of Outlook said before the screening. He warned against using Rajkumar to promote Kannada exclusivism (which might be an oxymoron, since it is difficult to find a Kannadiga who does not know at least two languages!)

Maya Chandra brings the slickness of her corporate film craft to this documentary, and it works well in combination with the effusive affection of people she interviews. Among the many celeb fans is Amitabh Bachchan, who says suitably humble things about his association with Rajkumar (but what is glossed over is that, at one point, he was furious that Raj fans had blocked the release of Hindi films in Bangalore).

Vishu Kumar, director of the Karnataka information department and an admirer of the star like almost everyone in the audience, spoke about the negative perception about the actor that fan vandalism had created among non-Kannadigas.

The documentary, yet to be released commercially, is narrated by movie star Ramesh Aravind. Among its best parts are the interviews with Rajkumar's moviedom colleagues, such as Vishnuvardhan, director Bhagwan, and lyricist Jayant Kaikini.

Other delights include footage from some of Rajkumar's hit movies, and at least for me, the songs that Maya uses to bind together montages from his movies. Rajkumar brought the energy and rigour of theatre music to the movies, and three years after his death, my jaded journalistic heart soars every time I hear my favourite Rajkumar songs.

G N Mohan, who runs Mayflower Media House, was the moving spirit behind the event. As for the Veerappan moustache incident, Kaikini says in the film that it shows Rajkumar's childlike curiosity, and also his motherly concern: he asked, after he came back alive, when his captor Veerappan would be saved.

Budiya vs gudiya

2009-04-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

Young is a relative term. Modi thinks the Congress, at 125, is a budiya (old woman). Priyanka thinks Modi, at 59, is old. It's possible you'll find college students who think Priyanka, at 37, is not young enough to understand their angst: she just might get angry if they told her what they'd been up to.

This old-versus-young question is eternally old and eternally young, so don't expect politicians, born naturals at flinging mud, to come up with anything strikingly insightful when they discuss it. Thanks to India’s demographics, where 60 to 70 per cent are now under 40, the age debate has become an interesting highlight of the election drama. We used to hear of caste vote banks; since this time young voters will have a say in who will run the Delhi durbar, youth has become a vote bank.

Parties have decided it makes sense to say things that please the young. And they are saying incredibly daft things. Kumaraswamy (50), who lives by every word his 76-year-old dad utters, described fellow partymen defecting to the BJP as old bullocks walking to the slaughterhouse. He piped down after Deve Gowda reminded him that he was himself the son of a grand old man!

The Congress has always been led by experienced leaders (retainers of the Nehru family, if you are cynical). Its prime ministerial nominee, Manmohan Singh, is 77, not exactly a dude age. And Sonia Gandhi, at 63, is no gudiya (doll) either. The BJP, whose item number continues to be 81-year-old L K Advani, is promoting a retirement-age Modi as its 'young face'!

But then, there are young old people and old young people. Looking at their energy, who would ever think an Advani or a Deve Gowda was less capable of running the country than that bleary-eyed 25-year-old call centre exec and neighbour you last bumped into a year ago?

So let’s put all this confusion aside, and look at Raymond Kurzweil, famous for inventing a musical keyboard that sounds as true and expressive as the live instruments it seeks to approximate. In recent years, he has made a bigger name as a futurist who believes aging can be stopped.

At 35, when Kurzweil was diagnosed with diabetes, he did some independent research and arrived at a diet that he says has cured him of the condition. He is now 61, and is convinced that science will find a way to make him immortal. He bases his optimism on the exponential progress he has been tracking in biotechnology and nanotechnology. If he’s going to live for ever, what would you call Kurzweil at 61: young or old?

To come back to where we began, and to our mortal world… If you could see beyond the physical damage that time inflicts on us, you would realise that quite a bit of this age problem is in the mind. You could have young airheads and old airheads, child prodigies and geriatric prodigies. You could have a forward-looking Manmohan at 77, and a disgusting Sri Rama Sene lout at 22.

How the other half dies

2009-04-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

Our paper has been reporting on Bangalore’s gangland murders these past couple of weeks. The murder of Narasimha Murthy, alleged don of what is known as the ‘coolie mafia’, was the most brazen of those crimes, and took place in busy Chamarajpet.

A dozen men, led by a burly film financier called Kapali Ananda, flashed their choppers and hacked Nararasimha Murthy to death in full view of the neighbourhood’s strollers. It was a bad gangster movie coming alive.

Looking at photos of Narasimha Murthy, you could well imagine how he must have terrorised the poor labourers at K R Market. He was tall, beefy, and wore a load of gold to proclaim to the world his riches (and ability to pay his way out of any police trouble). He and Kapali had been old rivals, and had vied for control of the money generated from K R Market, Bangalore’s oldest, busiest and filthiest wholesale market.

The death of Narasimha Murthy, whom the Tamil labourers called Poone (‘cat’, because he had cat’s eyes), came soon after the murder of another City Market gangster, Gate Ganesha. Ganesha had earned notoriety in the same squalid setting, making enough money to be able to contest elections in his native Tamil Nadu. A rival lured his men, and persuaded them to do him in.

What exactly is the coolie mafia? Hundreds of lorries arrive at K R Market through the day, bringing fruits and vegetables from all over Karnataka and adjoining states. Poor, powerless labourers do the unloading. A coolie gets Rs 5 for every gunny bag he moves into a shop. The mafia allows him to keep Rs 4, and pockets Rs 1. At least 30,000 bags are unloaded in a day, and the gang ruling the market collects Rs 30,000 from these labourers alone.

The don pays off his cronies, officiously called ‘supervisors’, and takes home a cool Rs 25,000 at the end of the day. That amounts to at least Rs 7 lakh a month, and Rs 8 million a year. The don also collects Rs 10 from each wayside vendor as protection money. With so much ready cash rolling in, the gangsters are tempted to get into what they call the ‘meter baddi’ business. ‘Baddi’ is Kannada for interest, and ‘meter baddi’ refers to interest that mounts fast, perhaps like the fare on a rigged autorickshaw meter. Some venture into financing films as well.

All this can’t thrive without the tacit support of the police, and whoever happens to be the politician reigning in the constituency. Narasimha Murthy reportedly owed allegiance to a Congress leader, a past master at selling hope to the miserable lot labouring away at the market.

Behind these murky stories are the more human stories. The women in Narasimha Murthy’s family told him it was inauspicious on that particular day to have a haircut, but he didn’t heed their words. They are distraught, and convinced he died because he defied their religious beliefs. Kapali, who killed him, got his name from working at Kapali Bar, and selling tickets in black at Kapali cinema. And the boys caught in the gang wars have their own tales of despair and bravado to tell.

The Kannada film industry keeps cribbing it has no good scripts, and pays a ransom each time it buys remake rights from a Tamil or Telugu producer. Any film-maker with any interest in human drama would find in K R Market enough material for a whole series of Godfather films. Or Slumdog Millionaire, if you please.

Pubs, prudes, dudes

2009-02-06T05:01:00.000-08:00

Since we are discussing pub culture so hotly, and since we are so confused about whether it's good or bad, we could try answering an easier question: What's the opposite of pub culture?

Bar culture? Club culture? Lounge culture? Tavern culture? Ah, that's what the Page 3 sorts, with their grasp of the nuances of stylish drinking, would say.

Temple culture? Sadhu culture? Indian culture? That's what Yeddyurappa, Ashok Gehlot, Pramod Mutalik, and all those spiritually inclined patriots would say.

Arrack shop culture? Hmmm… that's the proletarian theorist for you.

Pranayama culture? Yoga culture? Yes, that should be the Sri Sris and Baba Ramdevs.

Sukh Sagar culture? Vidyarthi Bhavan culture? Darshini culture? Perhaps, if you were a middle class Bangalore convervative.

But what if you were none of the above?

Allow me my two-paisa's worth on this vehemently argued case.

Till after I finished my post-graduation, I had not tasted liquor. Today, I can sip some beer or vodka without feeling guilty. But I couldn't have done this ever in the presence of my father, who died ten years ago.

So have I grown from Basavangudi prude to Cantonment dude? Hardly.

Last week I was at Hampi, and friends scribbled an open invitation to musicians on the black board outside our cottage. At least half a dozen musicians trooped in, with the most amazing instruments, and matching skills.

An Israeli came in carrying a Persian violin, and we got a key flute player who became one of the lead players. Soon a guy with a cornet joined the gig, and a couple of drummers walked in with their djembes. The music had brought together complete strangers, and what ensued was sheer enchantment. Some in the audience were drinking, but not one misbehaved or turned unruly.

That must be the romance of the pub, and it is indescribably beautiful. Its warmth inspires the poetry of Omar Khayyam, Harvanshrai Bachchan, G P Rajaratnam. It brings forth song and music from aching hearts. It creates comfort in sharing.

I don't know in how many Bangalore pubs you can realise this ideal. We can be a money-minded, class-conscious and pretentious city, and spontaneity isn't one of our strengths. We have perverse laws that ban singing and dancing. And we can distort something that's natural into something ugly.

To desire good company is human. To want to drink with friends, if you are a drinker, is human. To want to sing and dance is human. Isn't it human then to want 'pub culture'?

But let me also tell you the other side of the story. Early last week, the honey-voiced bhavageete singer Raju Ananthaswamy died of a liver problem at 35. His addiction to 'drink culture', if not 'pub culture', did him in.

Two days later, a poet I know drank himself silly and decided to stage a suicide drama 350 km from Bangalore. His friends nearly fainted of exhaustion, trying through the night to get help across to him. And as you know, drunk drivers are killing far too many on this city's roads. That's what happens when 'pub culture' is misunderstood, that's what happens when 'pub culture' goes out of hand. Here's a bit of trivia: Marlowe, who wrote Dr Faustus, produced great drama with inspiration from pub culture, but did you know he died in a pub brawl?

A cure for cancer?

2009-01-12T23:40:00.000-08:00

I reported on a potential cancer cure for our January 12 issue. Here is the report:

A maverick Bangalore scientist is ready to ship out the first 60 units of a cancer treatment device he has been perfecting over the last 20 years.

Cytotron machines, designed and developed by Dr Rajah Vijay Kumar (44), are going to hospitals across the world, besides to cities in India, through this year, starting April.

The device uses what he describes as "a hitherto unexplored method of altering cell dynamics", and offers new hope for cancer patients.

Vijay Kumar's work defies conventional oncology, which believes cancers can be treated only with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Modern clinical practice is convinced cancer can only be managed, not cured.

Terror analogy: "The problem is caused by rogue cells," Vijay Kumar told MiD DAY in the course of a two-hour interview at his research centre on Bangalore's outskirts. "And these cells are extremely smart."

Vijay Kumar gives the terrorist analogy to describe how cancer strikes: misguided cells infiltrate and penetrate vital organs, and cause severe destruction.

The electronics and communications engineer has spent over two decades developing a machine that uses mild radio waves, similar to those used by FM radio and mobile phones, to correct malfunctioning cells and restore patients to health.

But not everyone is convinced he has a breakthrough on his hands. Dr M S Belliappa, consultant surgical oncologist, Apollo Hospital, said, "Cancer is a group of more than 100 different diseases characterised by the uncontrolled, abnormal growth of cells. These new inventions just relieve you of pain and don't really do anything more."

But patients are ready to vouch for the effectiveness of Cytotron.

Success story: Dr Parthasarathy Rengarajan (57), an ENT surgeon fom Mettur in Tamil Nadu, was diagnosed with brain cancer four years ago. He was tired of conventional treatment, and approached Vijay Kumar. "Within a week, I was feeling better," he said.

Dr Rengarajan was given Cytotron treatment and monitored for six months. He now goes for MRI scans once in three months and believes his tumour is benign. Three other patients MiD DAY spoke to had encouraging, grateful things to say about Cytotron. (See panel at the bottom of this page).

Five-year milestone: Vijay Kumar is aware the medical establishment will have hard questions, but is convinced he is on the right track. "We've seen patients survive deadly tumours for four years," he said. "Once we cross the five-year mark, we can declare it a potential cure."

Vijay Kumar has also had stupendous success treating osteo-arthritis, a disease that affects the bones and makes mobility difficult.

Medical textbooks say cartilage tissue, or what the doctors call "a terminally differentiated cell type", can't re-grow, but his centre has treated at least 300 osteo-arthritis patients who can now walk without pain.

Cytotron resembles an MRI machine, and the Centre for Advanced Research at K R Puram, where Vijay Kumar works from, runs three units. MRI machines use magnetic waves to detect abnormalities, and are widely used as a diagnostic tool.

MRI calibration

"We first calibrate the proton density of the therapeutic radio waves with the help of a basic MRI scanner," said Vijay Kumar. Once the calculations are done, customised radio waves are beamed on to the affected area.

"If a patient has two tumours, the frequency and modulation are calibrated separately for each," he explained.

A session lasts an hour, when the patient lies down and receives the radio waves under the influence of a specific magnetic field.

Typically, 28 daily sessions make up a cycle of treatment. The cycle is repeated after a review, if the doctors feel the patient needs continued treatment.

Himalayan meeting: Dr Ranjit, an ex-Air Vice Marshal who graduated in medicine from Pune, plans and administers the therapy.

"Dr Vijay Kumar is an old friend, and we met at an altitude of 30,000 feet," he said. The friends share a passion for mountaineering, and were fellow-travellers on an aircraft somewhere above the Himalayas.

Dr B S Ajai Kumar, consultant radiation oncologist and chairman of Bangalore Institute of Oncology, said, "Cytotron could be a path-breaking technology but we don't exactly know if the malignant tumour is completely destroyed. Though conventional treatments are painful, they are effective. These days people come up with innovative ways to treat health problems, but they have side-effects."

The use of radio frequency to destroy tumours is not new. Radio frequency ablation (RFA), for instance, is used to destroy liver and lung tumours, and it is minimally invasive.

"Conventional radiotherapy uses ionising radiation at the high frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum, and can cause collateral damage," Vijay Kumar said.

Cytotron, on the other hand, uses a more benign, non-ionising approach, and is said to have no side effect except fatigue. It does not require cutting of the body.

The Institutional Review Board and the Institution Ethical Committee have allowed the centre to conduct clinical trials only on terminally ill cancer patients.

"As of today, 62.2 per cent of terminally ill cancer patients treated are still alive, and 98 per cent have enjoyed a better quality of life," said Vijay Kumar. The centre has treated 130 cancer patients so far, all for free.

Dr Somashekar, consultant surgical oncologist, Manipal Hospital, sees only a limited role for Cytotron.

"There aren't many alternative therapies for cancer. Cytotron can be helpful in the initial stages but it can't help in serious cases. Radiation and chemotherapy are the only way to treat cancer at the moment. I'm not saying Cytotron is a failure; it can only be supportive," he said.

Scalene Cybernetics, which is funding the Cytotron efforts and of which Vijay Kumar is chairman, can currently produce 100 units a year.

Vijay Kumar's engineering solution to a medical problem brings promise to patients living out a dire prognosis.

The mild-mannered inventor believes word is spreading, and will spread faster once the 60 machines start showing results. Cytotron machines are going to hospitals in Europe, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Singapore this year.

(Additional reporting by Lavanya Srinivasan)

I had two lumps in my breast... Once treatment began, a lump shrank and became benign
Shashikala(45), who was diagnosed with cancer seven months ago

I feel fine, except for some weakness
Rashmi Priya (49), battling lung cancer, and under Cytotron treatment for a week

His left side was paralysed. He can now use his left hand
Chandrika, mother of Rohan Ganesh (4), brain cancer patient from Mysore

Indian Medical Association take

Dr Vishi Shanmuganathan, secretary of the Bangalore chapter of Indian Medical Association, told MiD DAY, "I've never heard about Cytotron... this is the first time I'm hearing about it. Without knowing details of how it works, I can't say much." He also said it was difficult to say whether cancer could be cured. "Even when people are undergoing treatment, it spreads. Cancer can be treated temporarily but there are chances it will come back somewhere else if not in the same place."

Who's Rajah Vijay Kumar?

Vijay Kumar graduated in electronics engineering from Bangalore University. In 1991, the University of Belfast awarded him a doctor of science degree in medical engineering. Vijay Kumar loves the arts, especially theatre. He acted as Mysore warrior-king Tipu Sultan's son in a school play, and is playing a serial killer in the Kannada film Ninagaagi Kaadiruve (I Wait for You), due for release in a month.

Vijay Kumar's success hasn't come easy. When he started independent research as a 24-year-old scientist, his peers thought he was crazy.

He first hypothesized he could heal broken bones with radio waves, but since there was no way he could conduct trials on real patients, he broke his leg on a crowbar.

"I could achieve total consolidation of the fractured bone in 15 days," he said. "Sometimes we have to experiment on ourselves to prove a point."

'Total consolidation' is a doctorly way of saying he was healed completely.

His prototype treated 12 other patients with confirmed non-healing fractures during 1987-88, and he presented the results at the Karnataka Orthopaedic Association.

That episode puts him in the league of doctors such as Dr Richard Bernstein, who have turned conventional medical wisdom on its head by experimenting on themselves. After years of trial and error, Dr Bernstein has arrived at a low-carb protocol, endorsed by many patients but considered controversial by mainstream doctors, for the treatment of diabetes.

iPod Touch: A review

2009-01-08T00:39:00.000-08:00

Some describe the iPod Touch as an iPhone without the phone. That is a pretty accurate description of the smart steel-and-black device. It also lacks a camera, one of the attractions of the iPhone.

Yet, the iPod Touch is a very advanced mp3 player. It is Wi-fi enabled, which means you can check out websites on it. You can buy stuff online. And then it has dozens of useful applications that you wouldn't find on less expensive mp3 players, such as on those made by Transcend or Creative, or even on the lower-priced iPod Nano.

Wireless Internet capability must be the biggest plus of the Touch, especially since it gives you ready access to the App Store, where you can download hundreds of useful and quirky applications. The instrument Apple gave us to test had some games, including one with James Bond as the theme, and last week, Wired magazine gave out its recommendations of the top 10 applications on offer at the App Store.

In short, what you can do with the applications on your iPhone, you can with your iPod Touch. You can turn your music player into a flute, play clever games, and browse Google Earth to find addresses. Most of these applications you can buy for between one and three dollars. And if you are curious about useless applications, there's one being promoted on their site right now. It's called iFart, and is described as 'a fart machine for all ages'!

When it comes to listening to music, the difference between a Nano and a Touch is that the latter has a built-in speaker, which means you can place it on your table and listen to it without earphones. As far as sound goes, the Touch is in the same league as the other Apple products, which is another way of saying it can beat its rivals with ease.

Apple's proprietary multi-touch technology is what makes the Touch a music player that's fit for snobs, but if you have a big appetite for stored music, you should choose the iPod Classic, which can keep 160 GB on a similar-sized instrument. If you settle for the Classic, you can't show off those impressive touch applications to your friends.

You can buy the iPod Touch for Rs 14,400 for 8 GB and Rs 21,400 for 16 GB. Let's put it this way: the iPod Touch is the rich man's mp3 player, and the poor man's iPhone.

Lessons from a crisis

2009-01-06T02:16:00.000-08:00

Ripples of the US recession are touching distant shores. Corporate India, which just five years ago was dying to fully hitch itself to the American economy, is now relieved it wasn't. It is apparent the Indian economy has managed not to collapse in these hard times only because it wasn't hitched to that once powerful and now broken wagon.

Those affected by the American stock market madness are asking uncomfortable questions. Why were pension funds invested in risky stocks and mutual funds? The American magazines are full of stories about pensioners having to return to work because they have nothing left to live on. Fortunately, India has escaped that tragedy.

In India, traditionally, provident fund, insurance and pension money remained safe from speculative investment. The people being thanked for India's relative economic security are conservative policy makers and strict RBI governors.

Here at least, we seems to be suddenly waking up to the idea that American excess isn't the way to go. The undoing of the American auto industry, for instance, is rightly being attributed its disregard for fuel efficiency. The Big Three, as Chrysler, General Motors and Ford are called, kept making fuel guzzlers, and it looks like they have now lost their battle to Japanese car makers who understand oil must be used frugally. In India, fuel efficiency has always been a concern, and although we do see big cars on our roads, automakers don't try to peddle notoriously fuel-inefficient monster cars such as the Hummer.

Paul Krugman, Nobel-winning economist and newspaper columnist, compares the American crisis to the dark days of the 1930s. That was the time of the Great Depression, when that country was gripped by a run on banks, loss of jobs, and soaring crime.

But we haven't seen such scenes this time around, or have we? "Instead of mobs in the streets… it was mobs in cyberspace clicking on mouses," said Krugman, in a Newsweek interview.

While workers lose jobs and investors go broke, the guys in the middle, the investment bankers who gave 'expert' advice, have collected their bonuses and retired to their penthouses and private islands… That's what a shattered America is saying. Obama is inheriting a severely injured economy, and not many believe he can make it fly in a hurry.

This is no time to gloat, as many at the lowest rungs of the employment ladder in India are losing their jobs, but the world may yet learn some lessons from conservative, old unfashioned India: Don't spend more than you earn. Don't borrow, but if you must, do it wisely. Don't gamble with your life savings and pension funds. And the hardest lesson: Don't trust the private sector for everything.

ತ ಸ satyan ಶೋ

2008-12-22T13:24:00.000-08:00

It was T S Satyan's 85th birthday on Friday, when his photo exhibition Long Exposure opened at Tasveer.

Satyan is one of Mysore's most famous names. R K Narayan created the fictional world of Malgudi from what he saw in Mysore; Satyan similarly draws inspiration from the leisurely and intellectually curious ethos of that city.

N R Narayana Murthy, Mysorean of a later generation, had a different vision of the world. His new worldview gave birth to Infosys, India's most celebrated information technology company.

The action in what was called Old Mysore (eight districts ruled by the Mysore kings) has shifted from Mysore to Bangalore, but Satyan's camera eye refuses to set its gaze on this breathless city.

His pictures of Nehru, such as the much reproduced one he took at Parliament House (and among the exhibits at Tasveer), catch people in moments of pensiveness and tranquillity. Not a single picture is interested in the frenzy of our new world. As an artist, Satyan is undoubtedly Old Mysorean; call him the R K Narayan of photography.

At Tasveer, you will see the Hindustani vocalist Gangubai Hangal smilingly sipping tea, three generations of women brooding on the stone verandah of their rural Karnataka home, a Kodava bridegroom surrounded by clansmen in traditional attire... Satyan's empathy for his subjects is evident, but some inoffensive humour does come through at times. You can detect a gently ironic eye, for example, in the image of a woman bathing in water gushing out of a spout shaped like a lion's head.

Satyan's pictures are all in black and white, and delight with their quiet beauty.

Ford Ikon diesel: A review

2008-12-18T01:24:00.001-08:00

Ford has just released a diesel version of its popular sedan Ikon. I test drove it for nearly two hours, first on Bannerghatta Road, and then on the Nice highway connecting it to Hosur Road.

If you've driven the Ford Ikon petrol, as I have on a couple of occasions when a friend gave me the wheel of his car, you will find no difference in the way the diesel is built. Everything's the same, including the 400-litre boot, sure to be useful when you go on long drives with huge suitcases, or drop your sister off at the international airport with all her Bangalore shopping. The diesel comes with nicely done beige interiors in fabric and rexine, and will appeal to those who like sobriety rather than flamboyance.

Diesels are known to start off a little sluggishly, and that was the first thing I noticed when I started out from congested J P Nagar intersections, but once the car was comfortably into the third gear, the acceleration felt as good as in a petrol car. The slow initial pull isn't so obvious with just two passengers in the car, but becomes noticeable when you have four (four plus driver is what it's designed for).

The Ikon diesel, like the petrol, has a 1.4 litre engine which made its debut on the Fiesta, and for stark comparison, its capacity can be matched against, say, that of the German-designed Opel Sail petrol, a car that spelt luxury to Indian motoring buffs just five years ago. But, as an auto buff-friend pointed out, a petrol typically puts out more bhp than a diesel, and so this comparison should only be used to see the petrol-versus-diesel argument in perspective.

The Ford diesel would be miles ahead of the Sail in economy, but such economy comes at the cost of power. The Sail feels more luxurious, but few in these trying times would want luxury at such a premium (and besides, General Motors has shut down the Opel range). At its very best, the Sail can achieve about 9 km a litre inside the city, while the Ford Ikon diesel, from what its executives say, can double that performance with 17 to 18 km.

Economy is going to be the main attraction of the Ikon diesel. If you're keen on an Ikon, you might want to weigh the merits of the petrol against the diesel before you make up your mind. The diesel is slightly noisier and more expensive by a lakh, but makes up with its everyday wallet-friendliness. So if you're regularly driving long distances and are cost-conscious, diesel could be what works for you.

On the Nice highway, I touched 130 km, and the car felt steady and fully under control. Kiran N Gupta, the knowledgeable sales consultant who accompanied me on the drive, said he had hit 160 without any hitch. I didn't want to push the car, and my luck in Formula-style racing, that far!

The Ikon is competing mainly with diesels such as the Swift Dzire and the Renault Logan, and perhaps to a smaller extent with petrol cars such as the Chevrolet Aveo. The economic slowdown doesn't seem to have dented the prospects of the Ikon diesel. Kiran told me several buyers contemplating Rs 8 lakh-plus cars were now going in for lower-priced Fords. The Ford diesel stands out for its frugality, but overall, when it comes to spare parts prices and service, the Suzukis score with their affordability and accessiblity.

The dashboard on the Ikon looks utilitarian, and the AC cooled well even with five passengers inside (but remember, a test drive won't do to judge long-term efficiency). On the safety question, you may be disappointed that the Ikon diesel does not offer airbags.

The Ikon diesel could be a good choice if you're doing frequent long distances, and are looking for a car that's slightly bigger than the Santro and the Wagon R, and not so expensive to run. The diesel is Rs 75,000 more expensive than the petrol. But before settling on the diesel, I'd think hard which side of the fence I'd like to be on: petrol or diesel. And I'd also spend some time weighing slightly noisy economy against quiet indulgence.

Rock-raga jam is a sweet hit

2008-12-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

A rock legend met the Lolita of Indian classical music at Palace Grounds yesterday.

Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull played some unusual music with Anoushka Shankar, the talented and pretty daughter of sitar maestro Pandit Ravishankar, even as the audience kept an eye out for rain.

Anoushka kicked off the show with a couple of her father's raga compositions. She avoided the traditional alaap-jod-jhala elaboration, with its slow, meditative unfolding, and rushed straightaway into fast tempo compositions.

Don't hold that against her. Her illustrious dad has tried that very technique when faced with an audience more familiar with headbanging than concert-hall connoisseurship. He has been able to convert some from among such crowds into more sober listeners.

Perhaps Anoushka also will as she grows into her role as the inheritor of the Ravishankar legacy, but here she was doing some well-thought-out short numbers rather than inspired raga essays, and brought a youthful exuberance and innocence to the overall proceedings.

Her playing was good and showed some of the lyricism and sparkle of her dad's style; she excelled when it came to fast improvisation, but then, it might take a lot more than speed for her to become a rasika's delight.

Anoushka wound up after playing an unusual raga called Pancham se Gara, and set the stage for Jethro Tull, who made a dramatic entry and gave their fans music they had heard and loved through five decades.

The British band comprises, besides singer and flute player Anderson, guitarists Martin Barre and David Goodier, keyboardist John O'Hara, and a drummer, all of whom played with the kind of ease that comes only from constant concert experience.

Jethro Tull was founded about 50 years ago, and its musical emphasis has changed from time to time. Many of those changing influences were reflected in the songs they chose to play yesterday. Most numbers from the 1972 albums Living from the Past and Thick as a Brick had rock adrenaline as the defining element, and the pulsating intensity was emphasised by the aggressive, stylish flute playing of Anderson. But the band also played some very acoustic-sounding soft numbers, using instruments such as the bazouki, the harmonica and the congos.

The final session, when Anoushka came back on stage to perform with Jethro Tull, was mellower and more friendly to ears not accustomed to the Jethro Tull style. Irish cradle was among the softer numbers that provided a contrast to the band's more insistent songs. In one number, Anoushka played snatches of ragas such as Kiravani and Yaman, and Anderson came in and played some unison passages with her and the keyboardist. The band also offered, with some Indian flavour from Anoushka, a witty, thoroughly enjoyable reworking of a Bach movement titled Bouree.

Anderson spoke, sang, clowned, danced and played a variety of instruments. He saluted Sir Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who recently turned 65, but deserves similar applause for his own performing zest. The music he and Anoushka are playing on their Indian tour may not be in the same league as the music played by Ravishankar and Yehudi Menuhin, but it isn't kitschy pop either. Jethro Tull and Anoushka are musicians whose sophistication can't be denied, and they are determined to keep you entertained.

Go catch the lurkers

2008-12-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

The Mumbai massacre has left many questions unanswered, but we are going about as though we have already defeated the terrorists. Amid the gloom is this strange mood of self-congratulation among citizens, lawkeepers, and the media.

But everyone's pointing fingers at politicians. Heads in the government have rolled, and big ones at that. Home minister Shivraj Patil was the first to go, and then it was the turn of R R Patil, the Maharashtra deputy chief minister who famously said the attack, which has claimed close to 200 lives, was just one of those things.

Chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh took a stroll inside the Taj with his movie star son Riteish and Ram Gopal Varma, a director who has built his reputation on slick films about the underworld. All of which has proved to citizens that politicians are crass, insensitive, and selfish.

That is perhaps why the resignations of the two Patils have received such applause. But is all this political drama obscuring more urgent questions, such as 'Where are the other terrorists who made that boat trip to Mumbai?"

From all accounts, the group that hijacked a dinghy and a boat and entered Indian waters had more men than the authorities can now account for. Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told a press conference about 20 men had come in. The police have one man in their custody, and the commandos have killed a handful who had stormed the Taj, Nariman House and CST, but where are the others lurking? And what are they planning?

Citizens are outraged by the massacre, and the anger against politicians is intense. Slain major Sandeep Unnikrishnan's father shooed away the Kerala chief minister when he came visiting to pay his last respects to Bangalore, and ATS chief Hemant Karkare's wife snubbed the Gujarat chief minister's offer of Rs 1 crore as a posthumous reward for his bravery. Text messages against politicians are making the rounds. No one, but no one, is in a mood to humour politicians.

Rediff has compiled a list of questions citizens are asking, and it is so comprehensive the investigators should pick it up and use it as a check list as they go about their work. MiD DAY reported yesterday that the jackets Mumbai's policemen used were no good. They had failed during the tests, and had not been able to stop a single bullet fired from the test rifles.

Two of Mumbai's much respected policemen -- Hemant Karkare and Ashok Kamte -- died because their vests did them in. Another senior policeman, Vijay Salaskar, reportedly never wore a jacket because he knew it couldn't protect him.

We should also use this opportunity to expose the enemies within, starting with the corrupt purchase officers who order supplies that endanger the lives of those on the battle front. The gravy train in most cases leads all the way up to the cabinet of ministers. It's not just terrorists from outside who are killing the best of our countrymen; it's our own greedy people in positions of eminence.

Diabetes Day thoughts

2008-11-17T23:07:00.000-08:00

November 14 was World Diabetes Day. Diabetes is overwhelming India. We have the largest number of diabetics in the world, and no one knows why.

Every year, on this day, doctors and pharma companies talk about diabetes in the newspapers, but sadly, their advice isn't really making a difference. You can make out it isn't because the numbers are increasing, and corporate hospitals are opening centres exclusively for diabetics. These centres are actually big hospitals, all set to cash in on the epidemic. Officially, India has 41 million diabetics, and the national prevalence is between 9 and 14 per cent.

As Diabetes Day approaches, marketers invariably find ways to give their products a diabetic spin. Take green tea. It's a good product, and is considered an anti-oxidant (said to put the brakes on ageing), but can it treat diabetes? Every season, we read articles about its benefits for both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics. It is possible green tea has some peripheral benefits, but to promote it as a panacea for diabetics is surely an irresponsible bit of exaggeration? You will run into hundreds of such products, each claiming to magically help diabetics. Be warned that they all have an eye on the huge diabetic market, and may not help all that much in glucose control, even if they are good for non-diabetic consumers.

I do a bit of reading, mostly on the Net, to keep abreast of what is happening in diabetes research. Over the past year, I have stumbled across some startling reports. Doctors have found, for instance, that diabetes is a neurological problem, and that inflamed nerves in the pancreas could be the cause of diabetes. Just last week, an Australian research student found how insulin helps fat and muscle cells absorb sugar, and his peers say he may have found a missing piece of the diabetes jig-saw puzzle. A gastric procedure is ridding many Type 2 diabetics of their problem, but it isn't yet considered standard treatment. Many of these developments go against what our doctors routinely tell us, but you can't place all the blame at the doctors' doors because they have probably seen hundreds of promising discoveries just fizzling out.

Some researchers now believe doctors should aggressively start controlling blood sugars and prescribe insulin the moment a patient is diagnosed with diabetes. Is insulin better than the pills? A school of thought believes it is, but even doctors who subscribe to this school are prompted by patient reluctance to go with the pills.

The most surprising book I have read in recent years is Dr Bernstein's The Diabetes Solution, which postulates that the only way to deal with diabetes is to go low-carb and combine it with some exercise. This American doctor has his share of critics, most of whom believe that eating too much protein puts pressure on the kidneys. But he has a staunch following, and is a living example of what diabetics can achieve if they follow his methods. (He began his career as an engineer. When he realised his diabetes was killing him, he started experimenting on himself. He finally did an MBBS, and developed a dissident protocol for treating diabetes. He practises in New York).

Diabetes is a boon to the medical trade -- diabetics live for years and years after they are diagnosed, and spend heavily on doctors and medication -- but a nightmare to sufferers. Every now and then, we hear a cure is around the corner, but cynical diabetics believe the vested interests won't let it arrive.

Play review: Sadarame is boisterous

2008-11-13T22:51:00.000-08:00

Karnataka's Telugu-speaking Vaisyas came in for unbelievably devastating satire in Sadarame, the play that brought the curtains down on the Vodaphone Ranga Shankara theatre festival on Sunday.

The Kannada play, done in the company drama style of Gubbi Veeranna (1890-1953), tells the story of the charming Sadarame, daughter of greedy trader Bangaru Setty, and her adventures through a marriage and two subsequent suitors.

Spandana was perhaps best equipped to revive the play as its moving spirit B Jayashree is Veeranna's granddaughter and inheritor on his legacy. Trained at the National School of Drama, Jayashree had moved away from the costume drama of her grandfather's time to fashion a folk-inspired theatre idiom of her own. She must have been happy the theme of this year's Ranga Shankara festival company musicals gave her an opportunity to return to her roots.

The costumes (mid-20th century, Ravi Varma-inspired), the sets (painted backdrops, doorways with plastic flowers and creepers), choreography (black and white movie-inspired) and music (raga-based) harked back to a style of drama that had ended, at least in Bangalore, with the advent of modernist NSD-trained directors.

Bellave Narahari Sastry's (1881-1961) script is full of the most improbable situations (a king giving up his empire without a second thought, a prince being cheerfully married off a second time by a wife who has just risked her life to save him...). Its leaps of fantasy and defiance of logic leave you in a Chandamama-like thrall. The play owes much of its success to its rambunctious lampooning of the trader community. It's the old Chaplin formula strip, the rich of their gravitas, and you've got a hit on your hands! And just when you think Sadarame is taking the stingy Setty stereotype a bit too around and offers a feminist twist by portraying the community's women as smart, beautiful, and courageous, in contrast to the men, apparently crafty and rapacious, but daft actually. (Adimurthy is so dumb he says 'chatriya' for 'kshatriya' and 'vesya' for 'vysya'!).

B Jayashree usually steals the show in most of her productions, and here she played the thief and Sadarame's second suitor. Her rustic philosophizing, English-style singing and Chaplinesque dancing won her applause, but she had stiff competition from Dingri Nagaraj, who played the mean Adimurthy, the trader who bargains for and gets a kingdom in exchange for his sister's hand. With Srinivas Meshtru as his father Bangaru Setty, he brought the house down with some inspired clowning. Rohini Raghunandan as Sadarame and Amit Bhargav as prince Jayaveera handled the challenge of their singing roles with confident ease.

My one complaint was that the play got bogged down by slapstick excess, nd the situations became repetitive after the interval. Sadarame could definitely do with some sharp editing.

Much of the credit for the musical appeal of the play goes to Paramashivanna, who taught the troupe their songs, got them to rehearse for three months, and played the almost extinct leg-harmonium for the show.

It was heartening to see a star from the company drama era performing at a festival that had lots of young people in the audience.

Sadarame was made into a hit film in 1956, was recast as Miss Sadarame after the Gandhian theatre activist K V Subbanna rewrote it some five decades later. Going by the enthusiasm that greeted it at Ranga Sankara, this is one play that won't fade away in a hurry.

Tech review: iPod Nano 8 GB

2008-11-06T00:29:00.000-08:00

The new generation iPod Nano, which Apple has just released in the Indian market, has many things to commend it. If you are, like me, familiar with the iPod classic, you will be pleased with the many new features that the Nano offers.

I was particularly impressed with its battery life. I listened to music off and on for a total of about nine hours over three days, and it remained at the half full mark.

The battery on my older 30 GB iPod would show low in three hours, and wouldn't last beyond four hours. As an enthusiastic early adopter of the iPod, I had found that very disappointing. I once took it on a train journey to Delhi, and was out of music even before the train left Karnataka! You can be sure the Nano won't leave you friendless on a long journey.

The Nano claims music playback time of 24 hours when fully charged. The 8 GB Nano can hold up to 2,000 songs or eight hours of video.

The Nano's scratch-resistant aluminum and glass build is another big plus. My classic had a beat-up look within days of purchase, but the Nano has stood up to some rough use. I carried it around in my pocket with the usual keys and coins. Remarkably, the screen still looks new.

The first iPods had no video and colour, but the Nano has both. You can also store pictures, which display nicely. Overall, the quality of graphics can stun you the first time you set eyes on the screen, and the album covers look crisp and stylish in miniature. But many users complain the battery drains out quickly if you play video. And 8 GB isn't really enough if you're planning to store a lot of video. The video playback claim on a full charge is four hours. If you're buying the Nano, buy it for the music, and consider the video just a little something thrown in to sweeten the deal.

The Nano excels, as all iPods do, in the sound department. I listened to some of my favourites, and found the acoustics satisfying. The Bhimsen Joshi thumri Piya milan ki aas has a vintage spooltape feel, which means the middle frequencies are prominent. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Nano did not highlight the highs, as digital music players tend to.

I also heard the Kannada song Minchaagi neenu baralu (from the movie Gaalipata), which has a lovely string section of violins, violas and cellos. The Nano handled the dynamic range superbly, and the sound was full-bodied.

The Nano comes in nine colours, and the one I tested was gold, but I personally found the colours a bit toyish.

The bright colours could be Apple's way of reaching out to customers who'd like to match their accessories with their clothes, but I guess even rich brats will not be tempted to buy the entire chromatic range.

Another feature introduced with an eye on the young is what Apple calls the Accelerometer, which randomly shuffles your songs when you shake the Nano. The unpredictability of its choice is the fun part. Your photos and album cover art change from vertical to horizontal and back depending on how you hold the Nano. That's another of those nifty little things that add little to the iPod experience. But again, it could be something to boast about when one is with friends who own mp3 players from lesser companies!

I can talk about mp3 players with some authority as I have bought and used a Creative, a Transcend, and a Sony, besides a couple of nameless Chinese players. I would vouch for the Nano experience and rate it the best, but remember, it incorporates all the somewhat irritating anti-piracy features that Apple is known for. You can't transfer a song from the Nano onto another player or computer. This can be a bother if you'd like to move your music from your home to office, and perhaps share it around. Remember also that the Nano has no FM radio.

Another tip if you decide to go in for the Nano: the Apple stores won't budge on the list price (which is Rs 9,700 for an 8 GB), but you may be able to get a significant discount if you buy it from an electronics retailer.

Thumbs up
>>Full-bodied sound
>>Good battery life
>>Scratch-resistant aluminum and glass build
>>Accelerometer, which randomly shuffles your songs when you shake the Nano

Thumbs down
>>No FM radio
>>Toyish colours
>>No file sharing
>>Somewhat pricey

The classicism dilemma

2008-11-04T02:29:00.000-08:00

Kannada is now a classical language. It's time to rejoice, but perhaps we should also give some thought to what classicism means to those of us who have no connection with the scholarly life.

The Kannada we speak in Bangalore is full of English, and the Kannada we read in official documents is full of Sanskrit. Sadly, every time a new word needs to be created in Kannada, our official translators go for inspiration not to Kannada (or its Dravidian roots) but to Sanskrit and Hindi. If that's how we understand classicism, we are heading towards disaster!

Sankritised words mostly fail to make it to our spoken language because they are difficult to pronounce. Kannadigas in the more Westernised southern districts reach out for English when they encounter awkward Sanskritised Kannada. (Policemen trying to catch drunk drivers Anglicise their question and ask, 'Drinks maadideera?'. Please note that they never use the Sanskritised 'Madyapaana maadiddeera?' But why do they feel the simple Kannada 'Kudididdeera?' isn't good enough? Is it because such easy expressions are scorned by official circles and our morningers?)

Like English, which they say is torn between Anglo Saxon and Latin, Kannada is torn between its Dravidian roots and Sanskrit. Again like English, Kannada borrows generously from several other languages. Hindi words (but again quite a few Sanskritised) coined by the central government find an easy entry into Kannada, or at least into Kannada officialese, thanks to our officials' linguistic laziness.

Independence Day is swaatantrya dinaacharane. An eye hospital becomes netra chikitsaalaya. Why can't we say bidugadeya habba and kannaaspatre instead? To a Kannada mind, a word like saalnadige can conjure up a parade better than the heavily Sanskritised pathasanchalana. Why do we say dhwajaarohana when we can say baavuta haarisuvudu? Many people think there is no Kannada word for 'colony'. Have they forgotten keri?

The Kannada tabloids prefer the familiar Kannada word to the weighty Sanskrit one. They do not shy away from street language, often more picturesque and expressive than the bookish terms that officials think up.

The morningers paraphrase police hand-outs and talk of "miscreants" which in Kannada officialese becomes dushkarmi. Strangely, the newspapers have forgotten that wonderful Kannada word for trouble-maker: punda.

The Sanskrit obsession is very strong in government offices, but it is not just an establishment malaise. Even Udupi restaurants struggle for new names for dishes with familiar Kannada names. So the common uppittu becomes an erroneously named khaara bhaat. (Khara means spicy-hot, and bhaat in Marathi means rice, but no rice is ever used in khaara bhaat!) Similarly, what is called sajjige in Kannada is given the name of kesari bhaat. But why?

Kannada, like other Indian languages, owes a lot to Sanskrit. Cultural historians tell us how it has held its own against that mighty language.

Purandaradasa (16th century) knew more Sanskrit and classicism than anyone else (he is considered the father of south Indian classical music), but he wrote in a Kannada that remains delightfully accessible to this day. If there's one scholar who could balance the classical with the popular, it's him. He ought to be the contemporary Kannadiga's style guru!

(Parts of this article are borrowed from another I wrote in 2002).

Care for some pups?

2008-10-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

Iyengar bakeries predate Bangalore's darshinis and pizza outlets, but how the orthodox Brahmins learnt to make English stuff with yeast and eggs is an enduring mystery

Iyengar bakeries must be Karnataka's gift to the world. The Iyengars of Tamil Nadu don't run bakeries. The Iyengar bakeries in Chennai – a friend tells me that city has at least two dozen now – are called Bangalore Iyengar bakeries.

How this orthodox Tamil-speaking Brahmin sect got into the business of making English-style buns, puffs and biscuits is one the biggest puzzles in Karnataka's cultural history. A couple of bakery owners tell me they don't eat the cakes they make because they are vegetarian, and can't have eggs.

Among the Iyengars, only the Vadagalai sect is associated with the bakery business. All bakery owners hail from Hassan district, which has also produced a prime minister in H D Deve Gowda.

The Tamil spoken by Hassan Iyengars is Kannada-flavoured, and sounds suspect to the ears of their clansmen in Tamil Nadu. But if you were to hold a baking and confectionery contest between the two, the Kannadiga Iyengars would win hands down.

Every corner in southern Bangalore has an Iyengar bakery, although some newer enterprises, like Butter Sponge, have dropped the caste prefix. Most have names like L J (Lakshmi Janardana) and SLV (Sri Laksmi Venkateshwara).

For working couples and their children, the Iyengar bakeries were a godsend. Then the darshinis happened, Malayali Muslim bakeries arrived with their egg puffs, pizza outlets mushroomed, and Bangalore became, in the language of the metro supplements, hip and happening. The Iyengar bakeries haven't really vanished, but their '70s glory is gone.

Anil Kumble was reportedly fond of dilkhush and dilpasand, two sweets that most bakeries added to their menu in the late 1970s, when he was a student of National High School in Basavangudi. In an ad, the Test captain appears against a Mediterranean backdrop with a wine glass in his hand and some fancy dish on his plate. Mistaken branding! He would have been a more convincing brand ambassador for the Iyengar bakeries, with a veg puff and a glass of badam milk in his hand.

My bakery favourites are the special bread (called 'special' because it has sugar, as against 'ordinary' which is bland), the spicy khara bun, the unbearably sweet benne biscuit (butter cookie), and the sunflower yellow-coloured badam burfi (a V B Bakery speciality). I also used to like the apple cake, which I now understand is made from breadcrumbs and the previous days leftovers.

Iyengar bakeries offer good variety, but each item is a carb feast. The icing on their cakes, for instance, is too sugary. Their syrupy flavours are particularly attractive to the taste buds of school and college students, but many graduate to grilled sandwiches and gobi manchurian, which the Iyengar bakeries don't make.

The best time to eat bakery stuff is three in the afternoon, when the stuff comes hot out of the Iyengar ovens. The bakers would do most of their work manually, but machines have taken over now even for something as simple as slicing the loaves.

Growing up on bakery stuff is probably a nutritional disaster. I have frequented an Iyengar bakery since I was in school, giving them steady business for their breads, buns (sweet and stuffed) and what they call pups (puffs). The bakers, who won't eat what they make, remain young and fit, but I've greyed!

Journalism's proud moment

2008-10-21T01:38:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for economics. That's good news for Princeton University, where he teaches, but it's even better news for journalism because he's famous the world over as a columnist.

It is not every day that newspaper columnists are feted for their intellectual accomplishments. Krugman writes two columns a week for The New York Times, and is syndicated in many newspapers in India. That makes him the most prolific economics columnist in the world.

How many academics take the trouble to write columns? How many can quickly analyse developments as they unfold, and do it in a style that will not put off the non-specialist reader? University professors are too busy with their teaching and research to want to connect with a larger audience. Some are daunted by newspaper deadlines, some are lazy, and quite a few just can't write plain English.

Krugman has managed his dual role with great distinction: he writes for newspapers and simultaneously lectures on international affairs at the university. There's plenty academics and journalists can learn from him, and they can do it in the confidence that they might some day be considered for what many consider the highest honour in the world.

But to cut to reality... It would be foolish to compare Krugman to the average reporter who won't even revise his copy. The average journalist has earned the reputation of being a simpleton who cannot understand anything more complex than crime and municipal news. The idea that journalism and erudition can go together looks outlandish not just to outsiders, but even to some journalists! But that's not entirely the journalist's fault.

When Justice Manisana headed a board to fix wages for journalists, many newspaper managements, anxious not to pay bigger salaries, told him reporters and sub-editors ought to be compared with bank clerks, not college lecturers. People who ought to have known better expected little more than stenographer services from journalists. That was in the 1990s. Today, most journalists work on contract, and get higher salaries than those recommended by government wage boards.

Job seekers and interns at newspaper offices are unfamiliar with basic reporting and editing despite their spending years studying journalism. India has more colleges and institutes offering journalism than ever before, but something is seriously amiss: they just aren't imparting the right skills. To state the obvious, reporting and editing are the primary skills for any kind of journalism, all else is secondary. The exams ask students to define 'investigative journalism', 'caption', and 'headline'. Answering such questions is not the same as being able to deliver an investigative report, or write a caption and headline!

Reporting requires street-smartness and the ability to collate information from diverse sources. Editing requires an understanding of language and context. Print journalism calls for an advanced skill that is mostly overlooked: making copy simple, stylish and pleasurable to read. Ultimately, journalism is the art of making the complex comprehensible to everyone.

I recently leafed through the syllabus of a master's course in communication, and was surprised to find a module on how to cover international affairs. Ideally, if these courses were working, we would have had many Paul Krugmans in our midst!

Happy couple's time pass

2008-10-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

All's Well, staged at the Ranga Shankara yesterday, is a neatly executed sitcom. It is based on the works of T Sunandamma, the Kannada humorist who died in 2006.

Pramod Shiggaon has directed the play for Kriyative Theatre Trust, a group founded by Laxmi Chandrashekhar, who has opted out of teaching English and now acts on stage and in Kannada TV serials.

All's Well is an English reworking of a Kannada play scripted by Sundar.
Kapinipati and Bhagirati are an elderly couple preparing for Deepavali. Two of their children live abroad, and the other two live in Mumbai and Delhi. The couple look forward to celebrating the festival with two of their just-married children and their spouses.

The play draws on the stereotypical rivalry between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law to create situations characteristic of TV comedies such as I Love Lucy and Tu Tu Main Main. It also throws in a parallel father-in-law and son-in-law rivalry, and cruises along predictably to a happy ending.

All's Well is totally middle class in its setting, philosophy and expression. The humour is recognisable to those familiar with the Old Mysore (southern Karnataka) of a generation or two ago, and echoes the writing of A N Murthy Rao, Rashi and Beechi (but not so much Masti, who, even when he told a story in a light-hearted tone, plumbed greater psychological depths).

The gentle, lifelong mocking of the spouse's family is a convention that is no longer in vogue. (Urban working couples are gripped by angst and locked in more urgent quarrels!). The play's fuss about the ritual bath would perhaps look strange to the Mumbaikar who would rather drink and gamble to celebrate Diwali; it is also unlikely the Kannadiga who works at a BPO will relate to the relaxed banter. But don't hold that against the play.

The couple plan their revenge on their children's spouses … This is portrayed as innocent good humour, and in any case, they are liberals who wouldn't really want to interfere in their children's lives. Kapinipati and Bhagirati represent the elderly Brahmin couples living by themselves in Bangalore and Mysore, with their children away in the US. They bear no ill will, and talk of their offspring with pride, but their loneliness cannot be denied.

Kapinipati and Bhagirati end up dreaming (not metaphorically but literally: they doze off and dream) of situations where they outsmart their supposed enemies, but when they wake up, they realise that they are friends and family after all.
Laxmi Chandrashekhar as Bhagirati and Sundar as Kapinipati and Ananthu brought energy to the production, and their English dialogue sounded appropriately Kannada-flavoured.

The production had its moments, as when their Mumbai son and daughter-in-law break into a Mumbai movie-style gig before setting off for work, highlighting the incongruity of the Hindi "national" culture in an orthodox south Indian home. That scene was followed by the Kannadiga mother doing a devi stuti and attracting the paying guest, a musician, to do a pop-style fusion with her!

All's Well is the kind of play the more serious Kannada theatre buff might scorn. But it is neatly executed, and has the potential to charm Kannada TV audiences and tickle the fancy of this city's comedy-loving English theatre-goers.

The play is unpretentious if unambitious… what some would call time pass.

(This review appeared in print on October 6, 2008)

Trading places

2008-10-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

The world is watching in shock and bewilderment as capitalism collapses in a flop. Every day, television cameras bring images of investors gaping at electronic boards showing their fortunes plummeting.

The mood is gloomy, but if you were up to it, you might appreciate how the 'financial tsunami' is changing everything for people who believed they had all the answers. And it's happening overnight. There can't be a better time for connoisseurs of irony.

Friends (such as investment bankers) are looking like villains, and enemies (such as the public sector) are suddenly looking like good people.

Heroes of India's IT economy, N R Narayana Murthy included, are now arguing for more controls. A year ago, they would have laughed at the idea of the government running businesses. Who would have believed they would ever wake up to the dangers of letting private corporations manage the world?

At least two families, both with Bangalore connections, have killed themselves as the markets wiped out their fortunes. A man in Chicago, an IIT graduate, pulled out a gun and shot his wife, three sons, mother-in-law and himself. In Mumbai, another family got into a suicide pact to find a way out of the money calamity. Such is the extent of distress, and it is gripping the globe.

People who put all their money in the markets and enjoyed the good life are today worse off than the poor. They are killing themselves like farmers in debt. The class that mocked farm loan waivers is today out with a begging bowl, pleading for a government bailout.

So how did we reach here? A basic truth everyone forgot was that the stock market is all about gambling and speculation. Various factors contribute to giving it more respectability than it deserves. The government talking proudly about a booming stock market, for instance, sends out the signal that it can't just be a game of dice.

A Ficci survey in December last year predicted the Sensex would touch 25,000 in two years. And its respondents were CFOs, investment bankers, mutual fund managers, and asset management companies. You won't hear a squeak out of them today.

The small investor balks in disbelief when banks cite testimonials for safety from some "reputed independent agency". Many of yesterday's "reputed" financial institutions are worth nothing today.

ICICI Bank, India's most aggressive financial institution, is sending SMSes to tell its depositors their money is safe. Their vice-president is writing mail to its customers, asking them not to panic. In the normal course, you couldn't get past their call centre executive. But here they are, the big bosses, talking to you with their hands folded!

At least two camps are watching the capitalist misery with some satisfaction. The communists, who always believed America's free market model was flawed. And the Islamists, who believe their tormentor is justly being tormented.

Research flip-flops

2008-09-29T21:01:00.000-07:00

Last week we read about the Nanavati report overturning everything that the Bannerjee committee had said about the Godhra riots. How can two wise judges studying the same sequence of events come to two totally contradictory conclusions?

Interphone, the long-term study on mobile use, has run into a similar problem. Do mobile phones cause cancer? Do they cook the brain with their radiation? Do they impair hearing? The study had to address these questions, but it has ended in a squabble with its researchers not being able to arrive at any consensus.

The mobile is the most popular electronic device in the world today, and the scientists who ought to have enlightened us about its risks are now divided into three groups with differing opinions.

The study began in 2000 and ended in 2006, cost 30 million dollars (a good Rs 140 crore), and involved around 50 scientists working in 13 countries. It tracked 14,000 people. That, by any standards, is a stupendous effort.

A draft of Interphone's findings was circulated in June, and a final paper will be submitted this month. So what do we as mobile users take home from it?

Difficult to say. Single-country reports have already made it to the media, and some suggest, to everyone's amazement, that using a cell phone actually gives you some protection from brain tumours. The Economist reported that this conclusion was so counter-intuitive that the researchers had to acknowledge their methodology was flawed.

One camp among the Interphone scientists believes any increased incidence of tumours shown in the study is because of the recall biases. (The respondents were asked to remember how many times they had used the phone in a week a decade earlier, and for how long. The wisdom now is that the respondents could have gone way off the mark in what they remembered, considering how no one keeps track of the number of minutes they talk over the phone!). Another camp thinks it really has found increased risks of tumours and wants to call for precautionary measures. A third group isn't saying a thing.

Depending on who is giving out a media statement, you could soon read headlines about whether cellphones cause cancer or not. Generally, the media believe such medical stories have little significance, and push them to some corner on the inside pages.

But such stories relate to people's everyday lives. A diabetic I know started eating lots of oranges after reading a news report that said the fruit was good for those with blood sugar problems. He later read a contradictory report and stopped, but the orange eating would have done some damage by then.

Debates are raging about low fat versus high fat, carb versus protein, and such other choices. Some say coffee has beneficial effects, while others say it harms you. So how do you make out what's good for you? Trust your luck. Toss a coin!

Goodbye Paganini

2008-09-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, who died earlier this week, was a rare combination of violin maestro and clown.

One evening, as we sat listening to him at Bangalore's Visveswarapuram, a plane flew over the Ganesha pandal, making his music inaudible.

He stopped in the middle of his raga exposition and looked skywards. The sound of the plane didn't subside for a long time. The audience waited, slightly puzzled. It then dawned on them that Kunnakudi had captured the exact frequency of the plane, and was bowing out the sound from his violin! His face broke out in a huge smile, and his wiry frame returned to the raga with furious energy.

Kunnakudi loved playing such pranks on his audience. Like Paganini (1782-1840), the Italian violinist who stunned the world with his unorthodox technique, Kunnakudi could do many startling things with his instrument. For instance, while he played a serious Tyagaraja kriti, he could suddenly swipe his bow on a string to mimic the sound of a whistle or catcall.

Kunnakudi lived alongside some great violinists: Lalgudi Jayaraman, T N Krishnan and M S Gopalakrishnan... Lalgudi distinguished himself with his unadulterated southern classicism, while Gopalakrishnan gravitated to northern (Hindustani) classicism, and adapted some of its stylisation in his playing. (Gopalakrishnan's LP record of Bhavanuta is a good example of the path he chose: it has a traditional Karnatak opening, and progresses into Hindustani style elaboration in the later improvisational passages).

As far as I know, the three legends did not play film songs at their concerts. Kunnakudi always played some towards the end of his concerts. He played Rajkumar hits whenever he came to Bangalore. They sounded incongruous in a classical music setting. Some loved it, but those with more conservative tastes found it unacceptable. No one complained at the concerts though.

So was Kunnakudi a pioneer, an avant garde experimenter? I guess not. That last epithet can perhaps describe the veena player Chitti Babu, who created his own harmonic compositions using an ensemble of veenas. The veena is usually played solo, and the idea of a veena ensemble playing western style harmonies is in itself an innovation. Kunnakudi did not attempt such experiments, although his son Shekar is an accomplished member of the Madras String Quartet, which plays a divine mix of classical Indian and Western compositions.

Kunnakudi came from an orthodox Brahmin family, and his father was a scholar in Tamil and Sanskrit. On his forehead, he wore a vermillion mark on top of a vibhuti arch. His orthodoxy did not stop him from romancing the movies. He even produced a film called Todi Ragam. Earlier on, he had played the violin in the movie orchestras. Todi Raga wasn't a hit, and it appears its hero, the famous vocalist T N Seshagopalan, didn't much care for the experience either.

So where does Kunnakudi stand among his peers? The pace of his music was too frenetic to make him a connoisseur's delight. He was vigorous, he was good, he was entertaining, he was lovable, but when I feel like hearing a moving rendering of Mokshamu galada (Tyagaraja, raga Saramati), I play Lalgudi.

(Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan died in Chennai on Monday, September 8, 2008)

A day against pain

2008-09-08T23:56:00.000-07:00

September 11 is Global Day Against Pain. A Chennai company is using the opportunity to promote its already famous pain balm. In fact, the balm can do little to treat the kind of pain that this day commemorates.

Patrick Wall, considered the world's foremost authority on pain, did much of his work at Columbia University. The neuroscientist wrote at least three books considered path-breaking by his peers. He had a personal interest in the subject: he suffered from cancer, and it hurt.

I picked up Pain: The Science of Suffering, which Wall published in 2000, at a sale in Bangalore. It offers fascinating case studies. When a farmer's hand accidentally got trapped in an agricultural machine, he chopped it off with his other hand and carried it to a neighour. He later said he had felt no pain. Wall uses such instances to illustrate that pain is not a “simple signaling system” that switches itself on and off in response to injury. The mind plays a big role in the way pain signals are processed.

In 2004, my aunt was run over when she was crossing the tracks at the city railway station. I know she must have suffered the most extreme pain, but she wasn’t crying when I rushed to where she lay. She was unconscious, but drank some water. She died about an hour after the accident. Some weeks later, I developed severe pain and burning first in my legs and then all over my body. I had suffered no physical injury.

What is the connection between pain and the mind? Doctors, philosophers, scientists, and even lay people ask themselves that question. I owe my interest in Wall's book to the chronic pain that seized me in 2004. The problem took me to doctors and healers of all kinds, and to books such as V S Ramachandran’s Phantoms of the Mind. Ramachandran has cured soldiers and accident victims suffering from phantom pain (pain in a limb that has long been amputated) by tricking the brain with a mirror!

As I look for relief, it occurs to me that pain, or for that matter any illness, could actually be interpreted in multiple ways. The principle of "one truth, many paths" applies to the diagnostic sciences. Or if you were cynical, you might say doctors fit an illness to whatever limited tools they have acquired. For instance, doctors have said my symptoms were caused variously by diabetic neuropathy, nerve infection, fibromyalgia, nerve entrapment, and so forth. A healer from a wrestling family believes the pain is caused by poor blood circulation in my back.

Pain is the subject of much philosophical debate. Philosophers make a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is neuron-related, Meera Baindur, who studies environmental philosophy at National Institute of Advanced Studies, once told me. Suffering is not.

“If suffering were limited to the pain generated by neurons, we won't be able to say trees and plants suffer and so one has to be kind to them," she said in the course of an impromptu Gmail chat. “To shift ethics from humans to nature, we have to see what suffering is common to all creation.”

A Tibetan Buddhist doctor I know tells his patients their pain would ease if they could see it as part of the larger suffering of the world. Pain isn't just a physiological problem: it has psychological, philosophical dimensions.

Wall’s book puts it this way, “Pain involves our state of mind, our social mores and beliefs, and our personal experiences and expectations.”

The World Health Organisation came up with the idea of a Global Day Against Pain in 2004 to draw attention to the plight of cancer and HIV Aids patients.

To desire freedom from pain is perhaps as futile as desiring freedom from death. But let us hope the world will do what it can to treat the pain of those chronic sufferers. Pain is difficult to understand, but it is even more difficult to live with.

100 days of an airport

2008-09-01T23:57:00.000-07:00

The Kingfisher Sports Lounge, with its wine-red interiors, is a stylish little nook inside the new airport. Albert Brunner, CEO of BIAL, chose it as the venue to make a presentation to about a dozen journalists yesterday.

The airport has just completed a hundred days. It can't be easy building an airport and getting it going, and Brunner, by his own admission, has lost a bit of hair trying to do so. He represents the Swiss-led consortium that took up and executed the project. The Indian government holds a stake in the airport.

Among the things that brought the airport a bad press was the lack of adequate toilets. Brunner said the number had increased by 70 per cent, and took us on a tour through the new additions. The toilets are spacious, and have sparkling new sanitaryware. Not many guests had anticipated such a walk through, but then, you never know where journalism can take you.

Our paper has been covering the campaign for the retention of HAL Airport, and we have a story today about a shocking clause in the BIAL concessionaire agreement that seems to question the very sovereignty of India.

Soon after the old airport was closed, we tried to find out whether it was indeed better to drive to Chennai than to take a plane. We sent two reporters, both starting from Koramangala, to Chennai, one by plane and the other by bus.

Savie, who flew, reached a destination in central Chennai just 40 minutes before Sanchita, who took the road. That experiment has settled a debate. If you are travelling to Chennai from southern Bangalore, you would save about Rs 4,500 by just taking a bus. And you wouldn't lose too much time either.

Our reporters have come up with stories that haven't always been sympathetic to BIAL, but that doesn't mean we blame Brunner and his team for all citizens' woes. When the government didn't take up work on the trumpet-shaped flyover that connects the highway to the airport, he took it upon himself to build it, and he completed it in seven months. That should shame officials and contractors in charge of our civic projects.

If you've ever tried to do something on your own that requires a licence or permit, you will have a fair idea of what Brunner must have been up against. Officials think you are fair game if you are an entrepreneur, and harass you to the point of exhaustion. In projects of BIAL's scale, politicians come in at every point and make life hell till their demands are met. One of the complaints against the new airport is that it doesn't have a special lounge for MLAs. BIAL is building one now.

So who is to blame if BIAL ignores local taxi drivers and gets into profitable deals with new cab firms? Whose job is it to ensure connectivity to the new airport? Who carelessly signed away India's sovereignty? Who ought to have got MSIL to gear up to handle cargo at the new airport? Who ignored the problems of short haul passengers? The answer to these questions isn’t BIAL, but people who represented us. Had they insisted on safeguarding citizens' interests, everyone would have been happier.

Luxury stores inside the airport are offering discounts. The revenue for BIAL in the last three months hasn’t been up to its board’s expectations. The global economy is slowing down. Airlines are bleeding. But Brunner is upbeat, and hopes to have a second express terminal ready by July 2009.

Hundred days is a landmark, even if it is a minor one. Let us congratulate BIAL,
and wish them luck.

An ambitious guide to Indian music

2008-08-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

I had written this review sometime in 2000. Thought I'd revise it a bit and post it here.
Ram

Alaap
20 CDs + 1 book
Times Music
Rs 4,900

Alaap, Times Music and Aurobindo Society's 20 CD-project, attempts to break the uninitiated and the hesitant into the complex world of Indian classical music.

The offering spans 20 CDs and a 275-page book. Earlier introductions in the Indian market were not as ambitious. Music Today's introduction -- they call it a guide to music appreciation -- is spread over three tapes. HMV's introduction to Karnatak music is two tapes long.

Aurobindo Society deserves thanks for planning and executing a project this vast. Alaap took ten years to complete, and is undoubtedly the most extensive introduction to Indian music available today.

"The first thing that strikes me is that practically nothing in the project has gone according to plan. And yet, when I look back, I feel that perhaps there was a plan after all, though hidden from us... working itself out all the while," says Vijay of Aurobindo Society in his afterword.

He co-ordinated the Alaap project from Pondicherry, living through the exhilaration and despair of interacting with musicians, writers and record labels.

"Commercial considerations were kept on the backburner," he told a TV channel after the project was released on August 15, 1999, the birth anniversary of saint and scholar Aurobindo, and also Independence Day.

The project is not credited to any single writer or researcher because as many have contributed to its making.

Alaap is divided into three parts: The Quest and the Lure, where the basics of music, and the concepts of swara, raga and tala are explained, Hindustani Music, which outlines the countours of north Indian classicism, and Carnatic Music, a corresponding introduction to the southern style.

Among the best parts of the book are the reflections on swara. Alaap relates swara to the idea of self -- 'swa' is self and 'ra' is that which shines forth -- and says, "The human voice has always a small component of swara in its timbre... Even this natural swara of human voice, when trained in raga and tala, can produce impressive musicians."

But mere skill isn't enough: "...the musician who has consciously worked towards the acquisition of the full swara produces quite another impact -- a mysterious economy, an assurance of direction, a quality of unbelievable credibility in the tonal essence of the voice, an integrity that is larger and more significant than the raga or the tala or the technical skill of the musician. Such a musician transcends the plane of the raga and lives and moves on a level above it".

The fire of learning
Alaap then explains many concepts, such as the chilla.

The chilla is "one of the most austere and mysterious traditions" in the learning of Indian music. This "extreme step" usually lasts 40 days, and hence the name.

A musician who performs the chilla isolates himself from the world "to attain a greater excellence in performance, a mastery in technique and sometimes to find the swara".

This retreat can elevate a musician to a higher awareness and make his music more instrospective. "In some cases its effect can be so far-reaching that the student abandons all desire, even for music, and becomes a mendicant withdrawing from life... Many illusions about life and its meaning drop away from people who do the chilla," Alaap explains.

The most telling description of chilla comes from Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, founder of the Kirana gharana.

He is reported to have told Pandit Bhatkhande, the famous musicologist, that the chilla is like "lighting a fire under your life. If you do not cook, you will burn. It is better to get cooked so that everyone can enjoy your flavour. Otherwise, you will be a mass of cinders, a heap of ash."

Alaap devotes many pages to the passion that music inspires in the learner and the listener.

Ustad Faiyaz Khan of the Agra gharana used to recall how Unnao, a little village, "was paralysed for some time when, one winter dawn, a singer merely passed through the village, singing". The stranger's music, says Alaap, sent the inhabitants into a state of reverie and bliss, and no one was able to work in the fields or attend to domestic duties for days.

This is the magical, hypnotic power of music, the power that Aurangzeb was wary of -- he believed listening to music would make him effeminate and unfit to rule. It's the same power the Pied Piper uses to settle scores with the deceitful mayor.

Alaap, like most books on music, talks enthusiastically of the spiritual nature of the musical pursuit. But the idea that everything about music is sacred and good is, at least in this reviewer's view, stretched to the point when it sounds false.

Music is no automatic gateway to holiness. It doesn't automatically fill a guru with generosity and benign caring. Musicians can be petty, and musicians bitch.

Transcending the mundane

The guru's power enjoys the sanction of tradition.

Many gurus use this sanction benignly, treating their pupils like their children, feeding, nurturing and disciplining them into learning the art. One also hears of gurus who drive students to depression and madness, gurus who humiliate brilliant students for fear that they may surpass their own children, and gurus who cynically turn students with no musical potential into unpaid domestic help.

Much can be said for a down-to-earth approach to music instruction, at least at the elementary stages. Surely there is a world of difference between the chilla that a musician enters into of his own volition, and the distraught state that a guru wilfully pushes his disciple into?

Alaap explains many concepts well. Its glossary is very useful, thanks especially to the demonstrations on the companion CDs.

The varieties of graces, however well explained in words, become much clearer when you hear them sung or played.

You can read what a sthayi (octave) means in the book, and then play the CD to understand how different sthayis sound: five sthayis -- anumandra, mandra, madhya, tara, atitara -- are demonstrated on the veena by Jayanthi R Krishnan.

Similarly, you hear well-known names performing the dhrupad, dhamar, khayal, thumri, tappa, dhun, ghazal, bhajan, kirtan and jugalbandi. The various gharanas are illustrated with recordings of stalwarts. You hear samples of various instruments, including some rare ones like the esraj.

Fantastic galaxy
Alaap offers a fantastic galaxy of singers and instrumentalists - from Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Dagar brothers, Amir Khan, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Kumar Gandharva, Bhimsen Joshi and Jasraj to younger musicians like Zakir Hussain and Shubha Mudgal.

In the southern section, we hear veterans like Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Lalgudi Jayaraman, A K C Natarajan and D K Pattammal and youngsters like Unnikrishnan and U Srinivas. For both the Hindustani and Karnatak sections, Alaap has managed to get invaluable archival material from All India Radio. HMV has also pitched in with material from its rich catalogue. In addition, Alaap has acommissioned some original recording.

Some drawbacks: the voiceover (it's in English throughout) mispronounces words, changing the meaning of Sanskrit words: 'aadhaara shadja' becomes 'adhara shadja' ('aadhara' means base, and refers to the key note, while 'adhara' means lips!); similarly 'swarajati' becomes 'swarajaati' and 'jaavali' becomes 'javaali'.

Many musicologists believe the ragas are derived from folk tunes sung in various regions. That's how we have ragas named after regions (Multani from Multan, Goud Malhar and Goud Sarang from the Goud - meaning Bengal - region, the Kanadas from the Kannada-speaking regions, and so on).

Alaap does not talk about this connection with the non-Sanskritic traditions, preferring to leave the impression that the grand Indian music tradition came totally from the Vedic past.

The marga and desi interaction of Indian culture finds no mention anywhere, but such a study is important to an understanding of Indian music, which continues to thrive in its oral, unwritten, and in that sense folk, form.

The music of the 'classical' Jaipur gharana, for instance, is strikingly close to the music of Rajasthan's 'folk' singers. Many folk tunes are even now being codified and adapted into the classical repertoire. Raga Bihari, a favourite of Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur, is full of the swirling phrases that we hear in folk songs.

Alaap is huge in scale and sweep, and hopes to address an audience that may have been denied exposure to its cultural roots. An introduction such as this one has the potential to lure many of us into the wondrous world of Indian music.

The landscape we see on our journey may differ from what is described here, but we would still be grateful to Alaap for showing us the first turning.

Book on talas

2008-08-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

I got mail today from Revathi, my colleauge at Deccan Herald in the late '90s.

She has sent information about a book released this evening. From her description, it's a book that mridangam players and other percussionists will find interesting.

This is what I gather:

Laya Vinyaasam, a book on Karnatik taalas, was launched at Bangalore Gayana Samaja.

It gives insights into the science of numbers in Karnatik music.

Author and mridanga vidwan R Krishnamurthy, son of the late S Rajagopala Iyer, gave a lecture-demonstration.

Shakuntala Srinivas and Sukanya Narayanan showed how the book would help vocalists improvise.

Copies are available at Gaana Rasika Mandali, 351, 38th Cross, 9th Block, Jayanagar, Bangalore 560 069. Call (080) 26634365/22442731.

Lessons from a shoot

2008-08-26T02:48:00.000-07:00

If you have two weekends free, you can sign up for a filmmaking course. I did, and our batch of 22 students passed out on Sunday.

Of course no art can be learnt in two weekends. But what courses such as this one do is give you an introduction that you can build on. They also put you in touch with people with similar interests.

This particular course, which costs Rs 3,500, is favoured by software engineers, but our batch had a diverse mix of college students, animators, graphic designers, techies, sales and real estate executives, a human resource consultant, and a couple of NGO activists.

The course is conducted by ACTor Productions every couple of months. Siddharth, who has studied at Rajeev Menon's cinematography institute in Chennai, and Rabi Kisku, who has produced and directed a digital feature film, gave lectures. Both have an IIT background. They have now moved to full time filmmaking.

The boyish faculty was enthusiastic, and so were the students. Siddharth, with American campus gestures, spoke about lighting and camera angles, and quoted movie actress Suhasini who said cinematographers are often the smartest people on the sets. Rabi taught a couple of modules on direction and editing.

After two days of lectures, they divided our class into four groups. Each of us had to produce a three-minute film. After discussing a couple of other story ideas, our team decided to go with a song I had attempted to write and record. Our choice was a music video.

Baare sakhi, hoova kadiyuva (Come beloved, let's steal flowers!) had romantic nature images, and I suggested we should shoot it on a couple working in a city office. It would be ironic, I thought, to have them dream of stealing flowers, when in reality they would have to pay through their nose at a florist to get any. Similarly, they could sing grandly about crossing the seas when they couldn't even cross a puddle or a busy road.

We went and shot our film at a village called Raogodlu on Kanakapura Road. Inside Bangalore, we got some crowd scenes at Basavangudi and Jayanagar.

We learnt several things in the course of the shoot. The first was that an incompetent technician could undo everyone else's good work.

When our team played back the footage, it looked bleached and jerky. It turned out the camera guy assigned to us only knew how to shoot wedding videos.

That problem was solved when the organisers offered us a camera and a different cameraman for a reshoot. We drove up to the picturesque village a second time, and shot the film with a slightly different crew.

The lesson we learnt here was that we had to employ the same cast and get them to wear the same costumes if we wanted to mix and match footage from two shoots.

And we had to be wary of pretty frames. We tend to be impressed with almost everything we see through the lens, and end up capturing scenes that do little to tell our story. In the process, we lose precious time (and raw stock, if working with celluloid).

The most important lesson was that we had to do rigorous paperwork before we set out. On both days that we went to an outdoor location, we gave in to the temptation of composing and shooting scenes on the spot, forgetting altogether that we needed specific images to make our story go forward. Spontaneity helps, but if it isn't accompanied by planning, it can ruin a film.

And when we tell a story, we need our actors to do scenes that don't always show them in a flattering light. If everything turns out cheerful and pleasant, we end up creating something that either looks like an ad, or is too trite to hold anyone’s interest.

We also have to train ourselves to think in images and avoid the obvious. Matching our shots with the words makes the film hopelessly literal. (If the song talks of a horse, we don’t really need to show a horse on screen).

The student films were shown and critiqued on the last day. I liked the one about a day in the life of a telemarketer. Our music video wasn't disliked, but the irony hadn't come across sharply enough.

Is the CD on the way out?

2008-08-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

The CD celebrated its 26th birthday yesterday. It wasn't exactly a cheerful, forward-looking birthday, because many are convinced the glory days of the shiny little wonder are over.

The compact disc, as we know it, was born in Germany in 1982. It was released by Sony and Philips Consumer Electronics as a medium for music. It was later adapted to store other kinds of data. The CD took a long time coming to India.

In 2002, that's just six years ago, a blank CD cost upwards of Rs 50 in Bangalore, and not all computers had CD drives. The floppy drive was still much in use, and CDs were considered an expensive option. Today, you can buy a good blank for less than Rs 10, and an unbranded one for half that price. The floppy is dead.

The CD is used to store many kinds of data, but the music CD, many believe, will soon be obsolete. For many music lovers addicted to mp3 players and mobile phones doubling up as music players, the CD is already history.

Listening is constantly being redefined. If you asked my father's generation, owning a private music collection meant buying vinyl records. In the 1970s, the first cassette recorders made their appearance in India, and vinyl records began struggling for survival.

Around this time, middle class families were eager to ask relatives returning from abroad to fetch them a Panasonic or a Sony tape recorder. The CD is now ubiquitous, but the cassette still holds its own in the villages and towns. Lahari Recording Company, south India's biggest record label, continues to release both cassette and CD versions of all its titles.

The CD had many advantages over vinyl records and cassettes. It could hold 10 songs, or an hour of music, and play it all without a break. After the mp3 format made its appearance, the CD became so cheap and commonplace that it was sold at street corners. Loaded with songs in this compressed format, a CD could just go on and on.

For those of us who had heard music on the LPs, there was something about the CD that just didn't seem right. It did not match the quality of sound that vinyl could produce. Audiophiles call it warmth. The CD played everything clean, with no distortion, but it was clean in a surgical sort of way.

In lay language, the CD is made up of a sequence of closely aligned blocks. But however closely aligned they are, they are still separate, and so, experts said, digital could never match the smoothness of analog (tape or vinyl).

The convenience of the CD helped it eliminate the cassette in the West. "CDs were smaller, faster and digital, the perfect product for a new era of hyperconsumption and hyperspeed. But that era has come to an end," wrote Scott Thill in Wired magazine.

Now, observers such as Thill believe, the greatest challenge to the music CD is broadband, which enables people to share music without it ever having to be burnt on to a disc.

Thill believes CDs will go because they use too much plastic (for the jewel boxes) and too much paper (for the jackets), and so are environmentally unattractive. He also argues that technology will emerge to help people send and receive high-resolution music on the Net.

I don't know about the environmental bit, because concern for it hasn't really deterred the world from using cars. But I do hope the technological leap to high resolution happens soon, because I love the vinyl sound. Software wizards have developed plug-ins to make digital sounds resemble analog ones, but it still isn't the real thing.

Meanwhile, here's a useful lead for those interested in digitising their vinyl records. A company called Ion has produced a record player with a USB line out. This means you can play your old LPs on the turntable and record the output directly on to your computer. The Ion USB turntable costs about 100 dollars (Rs 4,000). That isn't a big price if you are longing to listen to vintage music but have no way to do so because nobody sells styluses for your old record player any more. Know anyone coming down from the US?

When the glamorous protest

2008-08-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

Fashion designers and DJs are hardly the sorts you would expect to see at a protest, but they came out on M G Road on Sunday to do what the affluent think only the riff raff do: shout slogans and create a hullabaloo.

The event provided us in the media some excellent photo ops. It isn't often that you get to see a street demonstration where well-scrubbed, stylishly dressed people strum guitars and sing songs. It was, all in all, good fun for everyone.

We all know what brought the glamour gurus out on to the streets: the night curfew that the police have clamped on restaurants and drinking joints, and an order against live music and dancing.

In the 1990s, when the software crowd started streaming into Bangalore, a frequent crib in newspaper columns was that this city did not have an exciting enough nightlife. Bangalore is often considered – and I believe it is – the most Westernised of India's cities. And this complaint sounded strange to many ears, including mine.

For those not complaining, it meant many new citizens had the inclination, and more importantly, the money, to drink and party every day, and could get quite vocal if they couldn't. There was no police curfew then, so the new settlers blamed Bangalore's "small town mindset", and believed it had yet to grow up to the psychedelic pleasures of the big city.

The crib mostly left the older residents of Bangalore cynical, if not angry. Their reading was that the brash new lot had no clue about the cultural life that had sustained old Bangalore – its lectures, concerts, literary symposiums, art and music classes... The new Bangalore knew nothing about Ravindra Kalakshetra, Sri Rama Seva Mandali or the Indian Institute of World Culture.

When Tamil Nadu had banned racing and drinking during MGR's time, hundreds of middle class Madras citizens regularly took the Brindavan Express to Bangalore and spent their weekends at the turf club and this city's watering holes. They will probably find it unbelievable that Bangalore is shutting its pubs and restaurants at 11.30 pm. And they'd be even more astonished to know who's forcing the city to go home half an hour before Cinderella's deadline. It's not the moral police, but policemen in uniform, armed with the law.

The police have their arguments: Crime soars if drinking and dancing is allowed beyond the deadline. Brawls break out, and drunk drivers crash. Live bands encourage immorality. Young people ruin themselves at rave parties. And so on and so forth.

Without getting into an argument about whether the city will sink into depravity if it is open beyond 11.30 pm, I am convinced we still have an irrefutable case to keep restaurants open late.

Thousands in this city work through the night, and need to feed themselves at odd hours. Not everyone has the luxury of a canteen. To deprive them of food is not just unfair, it is cruel. Software engineers, BPO employees, cab drivers, journalists, why, even policemen, burn themselves out working odd hours. They aren't spoilt brats itching for a fight. They aren't dying to get drunk.

For every Nikhil Gowda who goes out and smashes an Empire Hotel, there are thousands who just want to eat a hot meal and go home. Think of them, Mr Police Commissioner, even if you are unmoved by the DJs' demand for a nightlife.

Thoda pyar, thoda logic

2008-07-22T03:46:00.000-07:00

We at MiD DAY went out and watched Thoda Pyar Thoda Magic recently. The film is packed with tricks that its makers imagine would delight the kids.

I don't know about the kids, but most grown-ups who watched it with me thought it was cheesy.

Last week, thousands thronged to the house of a phenol manufacturer after he claimed a Sai Baba image had miraculously opened its left eye. Here was magic in real life.

Many of us who find an angelic Rani Mukherjee pedalling down from the heavens on a rainbow laughable can actually believe that a marble image can open its eyes, or a clay Ganesha sip milk, or a picture of Jesus start bleeding. We are, in fact, desperate for magic, which is why the house of A Babu has become a pilgrim spot since Wednesday, when the Shirdi seer reportedly gave his benediction.

The police always look for motive when they are called upon to investigate a murder. However strong our personal need for magic, we in journalism ask ourselves rational questions when confronted with stories such as this one. We wondered, "Who's the miracle helping?"

No one had reported instances of faith healing: the lame suddenly finding strength in their feet and walking, or the mute discovering words and talking. But one man was raking it in.

Babu was suddenly a hero, and we wanted to know more about him. We got the dope. He is a longtime resident of this south Bangalore neighbourhood. Some say he was a washerman who used to rob passers-by. Others say he is in heavy debt. He lives on a plot that belongs to a 500-year-old math. He is fighting a court order to stay put, and has roped in some 80 others to carry on the battle. Today, he is best described as an entrepreneur running a business selling a bathroom hygiene product.

Gavipuram is known for a 12th century Shiva temple. It is not posh and middle class like neighbouring Basavangudi. Its ups and downs and old trees remind you of a Bangalore emerging out of little village clusters. A little way up is a crematorium, and its expanses give this extension a macabre beauty. The perfect setting, you'd think, for wayside robbers.

When our chief reporter B V Shivashankar went to meet Babu, he found him an amiable conversationalist as long as they discussed the glories of Baba. The moment Shivashankar asked him questions about how much money he had collected, and what he intended to do with it, Babu became abusive.

A Marwadi businessman had placed bundles of Rs 500 at the deity's feet. Others had made smaller offerings. I don't know how many came out of despair, and how many out of greed. But we at MiD DAY thought it our duty to let you know that Babu's piousness vanishes the moment you ask him what he will do with the cash. You know he deals in phenol, but did you know that he spouts such disgusting filth you would want to use some of his hygiene product to clean out your ears?

Thoda Pyar and Thoda Magic was Mumbai trying its hand at a pop Christian, Hollywood-style parable. But who can dispute its message that we need a little love and a little magic? And in any case, we always have the Babus of the world to remind us that we need thoda pyar, thoda logic.

In praise of Jaggesh

2008-07-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

What's in a name? Oh, everything. Yesterday, the crew of an FM radio station got beaten up because someone didn't like the name of a show they were recording.

And what was the show called? Bendettu Bengaluru.

If you are a Bangalorean, and if you have Kannadiga friends who don't mind a bit of slang, you will probably have come across the expression 'bendettu'.

'Bendettu' is a mix of two words: 'bend' and 'ettu'. Bend is from English, and ettu is Kannada to take out, remove, lift. Bendettu means to straighten up something, and I suspect it comes from the world of tinkering. Cars that are dented need to be straightened up... they need the bendettu treatment. Get the drift?

Bendettu Bengaluru's producer describes it as a show that tries to find solutions to Bangalore's civic problems.

Now why should this name upset anyone? Members of the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike went to Vijayanagar, where the crew was talking to passers-by, and asked them why they had chosen a name that was insulting to Bangalore.

The terrified jockeys had no answer, and so these custodians of Bangalore pride decided to teach them a lesson.

We all know the Rakshana Vedike is excitable when it comes to Kannada issues, but how do you explain them going and thrashing Kannada radio jockeys doing a Kannada show with what one would think is a witty Kannada name?

Anyone with any interest in Kannada movies will have heard of an actor called Jaggesh. If you want to enjoy Bangalore's street language, you should watch his movies. I am sure he makes up his own dialogue. His clowning is good fun, but he stands out for his linguistic brilliance.

I know of no actor who has been able to tap into the rich, iridescent world of Kannada slang the way Jaggesh has. Rajkumar is too dignified an actor to mouth slang, and romantic heroes such as Vishnuvardhan don't even think it necessary to try to break out of their middle-class monotony. Upendra talks a lot, and tries to shock you with his iconoclasm, but you can hardly accuse him of good taste.

You've heard of the expression 'would-be' to refer to a fiance? In one of his films, Jaggesh plays on this word, and refers to his girlfriend as his "Udupi wife". He can turn any word on its head!

Jaggesh acted in a film called Bundal Nan Maga some years ago. I suspect he thought up that name himself. It's again like Bendettu Bengaluru. Bundal is probably bundle, short for bundle of lies. Nan maga means my son. If he could get away with a title like that, there's no reason a radio team should be harassed for the title Bendettu Bengaluru.

Jaggesh is now an MLA, and could lose his wit trying to say the right things for the consumption of the media and his constituency. Just imagine the artistic suffocation he would experience if someone went to him and demanded that he explain his word play.

He hails from Srirampura, close to the city railway station, a neighbourhood of working class and poor Kannadigas and Tamils. It was at one time notorious as a haven for criminal gangs. Jaggesh's language draws on the brash, clever, and often dark humour of people forced to live in squalor. In the hands of a great director, he could produce comedies of Chaplin's class.

Dr Siddalingaiah, the most famous Dalit poet around and now chairman of the Karnataka Book Authority, also hails from Srirampura. When a MiD DAY reporter called him yesterday, he suggested the Rakshana Vedike was hurt because of the title Bendettu Bengaluru.

In truth, Siddalingaiah is a sophisticated humorist, and can produce a great script for Jaggesh. If only he'd stop saying bendettu is bad Kannada...

Can an insult paralyse?

2008-07-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

Did 16-year-old Shinjini slip into depression and suffer a paralytic stroke because she failed to make it on a reality show?

Her doctors at Nimhans aren't convinced about that cause and effect, but her parents have been telling anyone who'll listen that she was fine until the judges of a dance contest on ETV Bengali humiliated her out of the show.

Modern medicine, or at least the regular allopathic practitioner, does not believe the body and mind are connected the way we non-medical folks believe they are. And although many doctors tell you in private that they do see a connection, they are loath to admit it in a professional setting because that would make their work so much more complicated, and they risk peer disapproval.

People with an interest in the esoteric swear the waxing and waning of the moon can affect the mind. Medical literature dismisses the idea, and it is difficult for those of us who grew up on Western rationalism to contemplate such a possibility. But I had an uncle who used to feel restless as the full moon day approached.

Satyanarayana was the youngest of my father's siblings, and he was what people call mad. No one knew how he came to be that way. He had worked for a short while in the postal department in Hyderabad. My parents speculated he must have been shattered by something that had happened at his workplace. Love? Job rivalry? The kids were never told.

Satya grew his beard long and didn't pay much attention to what he wore, and would sometimes get violent. He wrote letters on post cards and tore them up, and sometimes shredded letters that the postman had delivered before they could reach the addressee in our family. He would launch into lectures that sounded whimsical and illogical to most people who did not know him, but since I had heard him for years, I could make out that one thought led to another, and the sound of one word was enough to trigger an apparently unconnected but phonetically connected thought. (I later learnt the literary critics call it the "stream of consciousness"). He often broke out into song. His favourite songs were those of the Tamil movie star Thyagaraja Bhagavatar.

We couldn't fathom why he did it, but Satya had the habit of walking away from home, and roaming the streets for days. How he managed to survive without money we never got to know. He would come back and quietly resume his routine, and wouldn't answer questions about where he had been or what he had done. On a couple of occasions, when he went away for long stretches, my anxious father would hire an auto at night and go looking for him all over Bangalore. My grandmother would sit at the door through the day, waiting for Satya to return.

Once, when Satya went away for a month, my father consulted an astrologer, who predicted that he would return from the eastern direction on a Friday. My mother's brother, who was a captain in the navy, happened to be driving into Bangalore from Madras, and noticed someone resembling Satya on the highway near Mulbagal. At first he didn't believe his eyes, but later stopped his black Chevrolet, reversed and drove back a mile or so. It was Satya! He brought him back home.

It was a Friday, and Mulbagal is to the east of Bangalore. My father became a firm believer in astrology after that incident.

Medical science knows a lot. Yet it is reluctant, and understandably so, to speculate about the mind. Hurt and humiliation work in strange ways. Some hurts may last a lifetime. Satya never recovered. But let's pray Shinjini does.

Fear in a barrel of oil

2008-06-25T01:59:00.000-07:00

We all know what's happening because of inflation. Everyday items are getting more expensive or scarce. The poor and the middle class are struggling to pay their household bills, while the affluent are cutting down on lifestyle spending. There's hardly anyone who isn't talking about the price squeeze.

The larger picture is gloomier. The Sensex is sliding down and interest rates are shooting up, prompting finance minister P Chidambaram to make brave efforts to calm the nation's nerves. Yesterday, he appealed to oil-producing nations to stick to a price band and help the world pull back galloping prices. (Not that anyone's going to listen.)

The damage is there for all to see. Inventories in manufacturing are building up, and jobs are being cut in almost all sectors. Airlines are pruning their schedules, and even companies with deep pockets are scrimping and scrounging.

In India, inflation has crossed 11.3 per cent and put the Manmohan Singh government on the defensive. Things are not so bad in Europe, where inflation is at 3 per cent and the US, where it is at 5 per cent. Yet, the West is more worried than India and China, and is contemplating the terrible prospect of oil soaring to 200 dollars a barrel in the near future. What does it all portend?

You might think we still have some things left to smile about. Costlier petrol means we stop burning it so merrily. More citizens start using public transport (a majority in India always do, in any case, because they can't afford cars!). We build smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, try to find alternatives to fossil fuel, invest in research. And in the process, environmental concern pays off not just for the planet but for our household economies as well.

But what the West sees is a chilling vision: a change in the world's power equations.

As oil prices rise, some countries make windfall profits, while others descend into wretchedness. Countries that suddenly make a lot of money behave like the noveau riche, and can boorishly start fighting at the smallest provocation.

That's why America expects wars among oil producing countries. What scares the West the most is the prospect of oil prices making life miserable beyond endurance, and forcing governments the world over to reverse the trade liberalisation of the last 30 years. That's real bad news for the West.

A Newsweek report says the Americans, known for their wasteful ways, are cutting down on driving this year for the first time since 1991. The magazine also estimates that the more the Europeans spend on fuel, the less they will spend on furniture, clothing and white goods.

Banking giants expect an "increase in corporate failures". Citibank's equities economist in Europe is quoted as saying, "We expect … a lot of M&A. You might well see flush emerging-markets firms swooping in to buy up ailing Western firms on the cheap."

Newsweek interprets "emerging-markets firms" to mean companies such as the Tatas. As India slowly establishes control over the world automobile industry, it will also gently participate in tilting the balance of power away from the West.

High oil prices may mean a richer Iran, and that isn't something America likes either. America fears that a stronger Hizbullah would mean an end to culture and civilisation as now understood in the English-speaking world. As Newsweek puts it, "Western ideas about civil society, the environment and women's rights could be displaced with new sets of values."

The oil price hike may already have changed what you eat and how you spend your weekend, but just you wait! As the Americans say, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"

When the humble rise

2008-06-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

Now that we have a new government, let's shake hands with some of its heroes.

Bangalore is perhaps India's most anti-poor city, and so there's some poetic justice in Katta Subramanaya Naidu becoming Karnataka's IT and BT minister.

Naidu, once a tea shop assistant, has risen to become a VIP who will now attend cocktail parties hosted by the affluent software crowd and, would you believe it, formulate policies for their advancement. Being a non-IT and non-BT Bangalorean, I take childish pleasure in the thought that some of India's snootiest people will have to walk into Naidu's office respectfully and seek redressal for their problems.

But let's not image even for a moment that Naidu is going to transform the city into a more compassionate place. He made a blinding statement about his prosperity when he married off his daughter last year, and is as interested in the spoils of real estate as his party colleague R Ashok. So Naidugaru, welcome, and may you prosper.

B S Yeddyurappa, who began his career selling limes on a bicycle, now rules the destiny of this state. That is a triumph of democracy and makes us proud. He has single-handedly built the BJP into its present position of somewhat delicate strength.

Yeddyurappa has already declared he will not tolerate corruption, but the talk is that he has handed over some innocuous looking envelopes to his friends in the media. He secretly hopes the media will crown him the best chief minister of India, like they did his Texas-educated predecessor S M Krishna. But he lacks the corporate sophistication of Krishna, and so could end up as a successor to Deve Gowda, whose snoozing pictures made it regularly to the news columns in the English language papers. Watch that space.

Since power came to Yeddyurappa after what seemed like an impossible battle, he may not really want trouble at Bababudangiri, which the Sangh parivar is trying to turn into another Ayodhya. He has abandoned all talk of Hindutva and is chanting the mantra of development, which dovetails neatly into the interests of his best friends in the party, the Reddys of Bellary.

Many feel Yeddyurappa's significant other, or his caste lobby, or the Reddys could eventually be his undoing, but as of now, it's a network that's wired all right.

Last but not the least, the Reddys. Children of police constable Gali Chenga Reddy, they shot to fame and wealth after they invested in a mine in 2004. They export ore to China, and routinely place orders for the most expensive cars and aircraft in the world. With help from Sriramulu, a municipal leader (now minister) who dresses in the flamboyant style of the Telugu movie star Chiranjeevi, they have established complete control over Bellary district.

A report says Janardhana Reddy's business turnover is a staggering Rs 20,000 crore (which adds up to more than the net domestic product of a handful of north-eastern states put together), so it's a wonder he found the time to dabble in politics. He and his brother are in the cabinet today.

Thank you for taking the trouble to get into public service, sirs.

Minor bun engine fun

2008-05-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Unless you are a YouTube regular, you wouldn't have heard of this man called Buffalax. His real name is Mike Sutton. He's American, 24, and a connoisseur of kitsch. He has attempted to decipher a couple of Indian movie songs, and come up with stunning nonsense verse.

Here's what Buffalax does: He plays a video over and over again and makes up his own words for what he hears, or mishears, on the audio track. He has zeroed in on at least three Indian songs by popular heroes: Prabhudeva, Chiranjeevi, and Daler Mehndi, subtitled their videos, and posted them back on YouTube. He does not translate the songs; he hears the sounds and finds English approximations for them.

It is astounding how words in one's language sound to someone from another language. Take two lines from Prabhudeva's Tamil song: Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?/Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo? (Are you the moon in the pale college sky? Are you the moon that pierces boys' hearts?) And here's what it sounds like to Buffalax's American ear: My looney bun is fine Benny Lava/Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!

Needless to say, Buffalax has earned fame for his scramble efforts. Nonsense verse is described as poetry written for humorous effect, "intentionally and overtly paradoxical, silly, witty, whimsical or otherwise strange." Buffalax has some competitors on YouTube, but most are tasteless, and lack the consistency that makes him king of video whimsy.

I watched the song first with Buffalax's lyrics, and quite a few of his lines sounded true to the sounds Prabhudeva and his heroine mouth on screen. My designer-friend Suresh Kumar, an avid film buff, got me the Tamil words, and I heard the song again with the original words. The lyrics sounded perfectly Tamil! It appears our aural perception is similar to our visual perception: our brain can arrive at contradictory conclusions from the same inputs. The context is the thing!

Absurdly enough, the English words in the Tamil song sound like completely dissimilar English words to Buffalax. For instance, he hears April-May eppodum as Fill me up with doom! As the song progresses, the words get sillier. The woman sings: Who put the goat in there?/The yellow goat I ate!

Wired, the widely read tech magazine, profiled Buffalax and found out that he takes up to six hours to 'buffalax' a song. Since I sometimes struggle for hours to do the three Ayyo Rama wisecracks I have to deliver every day, six hours for a song, I would say, is quick work! So is it all just good fun, or is it offensive? Is Buffalax implying that his language and culture are better than ours?

What Buffalax picks to spoof is what the more serious sorts would scorn. Much of popular culture can be spoofed wonderfully, and Hollywood, for all the awe it inspires, can be made to look ridiculous if only you have the intelligence to do so. The Chiranjeevi video Buffalax has subtitled is already a spoof (I hope!) of Michael Jackson's Thriller, so is popular culture everywhere a recycled burlesque?

Personally, I am offended by the Lingo Leela, the Appukuttan Nair and Sister Stella spoofs that have ruled our FM radio waves. They RJs carry on as though they, and their audiences, are superior because their accents are not coloured by Kannada or Malayalam.

It's disturbing to see the privileged mocking the disadavantaged. But on the other hand, a poor man laughing at the rich, or a Dalit lampooning a Brahmin, has a healthy effect. Chaplin and R K Laxman never crack jokes at the expense of the distressed.

I couldn't help but laugh as I watched Buffalax's videos, and I found his style delectable. I suspect it's his teasing way with words. I'm not sure he's racist or bigoted, but I'd say a good response to him would be to take a hit pop song from the US, and fit absurd Kannada or Tamil words to it!

Watch a Buffalax song here: My looney bun is fine Benny Lava (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw)

How's business, doc?

2008-05-13T10:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, a doctor complained to our reporter Sanchita Sen that the Indian Medical Association was making a fortune by endorsing Tropicana and Quaker oats, but wasn't willing to share the royalties with its branches.

Sanchita scented a story and perked up. When she filed her report, we asked ourselves two questions: Is it true that IMA Delhi is greedily keeping all the booty for itself? The second question bothered us more than the first: Is it ethical for India's premier doctors' organisation to suggest that one brand of fruit juice, or one brand of toothpaste, is better than another?

We did some calling up. A representative of the IMA in Delhi justified receiving money saying, "We have our own expenses to worry about." We called back IMA's Bangalore office-bearers with a simple question: Are you objecting to the ethics of endorsement or are you asking for a cut? It turned out they were more interested in the cash, although individual doctors did tell us the system of stamping products with "Recommended by the IMA" disturbed them.

Doctors are considered worthy of the greatest respect because they are believed to have the patient's interest at heart. But consider this: since the 1980s, pharma has transformed itself into the most profitable industry in the world, and has consistently outperformed traditionally more rewarding sectors like commercial banking. It has aggregated so much in profit that it funds thousands of university departments worldwide, and hires the brightest of talent emerging from medical and management schools. And these brilliant minds work towards formulating what a doctor reads, understands and believes.

Jacky Law, a journalist covering pharma, quit in 2004 to write a book on what she had seen of the trade. Her efforts yielded the book Big Pharma, which concludes that modern medicine has lost its way, and that "a relentless pursuit of profit is crowding out the public good".

Law reveals startling facts: Developing drugs is difficult, but once that is done, a company typically spends just $5 to manufacture a product that generates $100 in sales. Pharma spends up to 35 per cent on marketing, and yet delivers unbelievably high profits to its shareholders, sometimes to the extent of over 40 per cent a year.

You have probably seen Amitabh Bachchan endorsing Chyavanprash, and Wasim Akram and Naseeruddin Shah pushing blood glucose meters. Those are straightforward advertisements, but it emerges pharma giants have other insidious ways of raking in their millions (billions, actually).

Law reveals that the football legend Pele gave interviews encouraging men to discuss their sexual problems with their partners as part of a contract with Pfizer, manufacturers of Viagra, that wildly successful pill for erectile dysfunction. Shane Warne similarly received a secret packet to discuss in the media how he had quit smoking, and was furious when a fan took a picture of him clandestinely enjoying a smoke! And who were Warne's benefactors? Manufacturers of Nicorette "stop smoking gum"!

The dirty tricks department employed by pharma is more active than its peers in other industries. Take an example. Over the years, studies have emerged to scare huge new masses of people into taking statins for blood cholesterol levels (the cut-off point has come down from 280 mm per decilitre to 240 to below 100).

I frequently visit an online forum run by followers of a dissident diabetes doctor called Dr Richard Bernstein. He is one determined doctor who has taken on the establishment, and delivered what many believe is an effective, alternative approach to diabetes care. Of course he is unpopular among mainstream doctors. Need you ask?

I have personal reason to be sceptical about prescriptions. Ten years ago, I was told I had to take a pill every day, for as long as I lived, for my blood pressure. I took it for some years, and stopped for some reason I can't now recall. The last couple of times I visited a doctor, I was told my BP was normal!

Doctors are fallible, but they can't all be venal? I fervently wish modern-day healers who stumble on uncomfortable truths would speak out. Our lives are in their hands.

The novelist and the nawab

2008-05-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

You can be sure Salman Rushdie’s remark about marriage, just two days old and already all over the media, will get into the quote books. The novelist told writer Kathy Lette of Elle magazine, “Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage.”

Not many people can claim Rushdie’s expertise in matters of matrimony, considering he’s been in and out of it four times, but was that remark just “blather”, as a girl blogger described it? Perhaps. The world's funniest and most cynical quotes happen to be about marriage, and with this proclamation, Rushdie could unwittingly join the ranks of the bitter and the facetious.

Rushdie is among those who can joke about marriage. Not everyone can. For couples who’ve been through the matrimony wringer, being funny about marriage is as difficult as being funny about death.

Thoughts of marriage and death relate to a fear of the road ahead, and evoke demons that won’t go away easily.

Wajid Ali Shah, the nawab of Avadh, who was exiled by the British, makes the marriage-death connection poignantly in his famous thumri, Babul mora. The British portrayed him as a king given to song and debauchery, and threw him out of power. They forced him to leave his beloved city of Lucknow.

He wrote: O father, I'm forced to leave my home/Four men have arrived to lift my palanquin/My loved ones become strangers/And the inside of my home becomes unreachable/As I leave my father's home to go to my husband’s country.

Char kahaar mila/mori doliya uthave (four men gathered and lifted my palanquin) is the line that makes the marriage-death connection, and Wajid Ali Shah then extends the metaphor to other anxieties of leaving.

The four men who lift the wedding palanquin could well be the four men who carry the corpse to the burning ghats. The bride is gripped by the agony of having to leave behind people and places she loves dearly; she speaks in the language of one on the deathbed. And, of course, it is possible that these emotions sound fuddy duddy to those of us who grew up on Diana trivia and the wedding razzmatazz of Hum Aap ke Hain Kaun.

Rushdie said it would be nice to have weddings without marriages. He was kidding, of course, because weddings don’t address the demands of sex, companionship and children. It’s wishful thinking that you could have the ceremony without the trauma (and dare we say it, the joy) of living in a relationship.

Akka Mahadevi, the 12th century mystic, celebrated marriage in her exquisite poetry, but she was talking about a groom who only existed in her mind. She wanted nothing to do with flesh-and-blood men, and she considered herself betrothed to Channamallikarjuna, or “lord white as jasmine.”

Last week, MiD DAY ran a story about how weddings are collapsing because couples who hitch up online have unrealistic expectations, and feel betrayed when they see a side of the spouse they hadn’t imagined existed.

One story was particularly telling. A couple, married after an Internet courtship, started bickering when the woman realised her husband had lost his toes in an accident. She felt he had misled her by sending her photographs with his feet covered, and started insulting him for his “handicap”.

Would you blame this on the Net? The foolish desire to wear wedding finery? Or is it that just about anything can wreck a marriage?

The Independent reported that Rushdie was recently nuzzling an actress for a video shoot. Other papers have reported his romance with an athlete. After Wajid Ali Shah went to Kolkata, he spent his pension lavishly and contracted marriages with several pretty women. Both the nawab and the novelist got away without too much damage, and kept their sanity and creative urge.

So what’s Rushdie trying to say? Drape yourself in your splendid Kanjeevarams, but don’t imagine marriage is a katcheri?

Uh, it’s all very confusing, Sir Salman.

Fame vs anonymity

2008-04-30T02:52:00.000-07:00

An up-and-coming movie actor told one of our reporters he had received an official invitation but hadn't gone to watch the IPL matches for fear of being mobbed.

He's acted in a dozen films, and it is possible a handful of Kannada film buffs would have recognised him, but it was a bit presumptuous of him to believe he would be hounded by the fashionable crowd that treads into the VIP enclosure of the cricket stadium. His "fear" sounded like wishful thinking. Or PR.

Anonymity, and the ignominy of not being invited to a glitzy event, is something the actor dreaded. It later turned out the IPL had sent no invitations to the Kannada movie industry. An embarrassed Charu Sharma, who handles Royal Challengers Bangalore's media relations, told our reporter that mistake would be corrected, and invitations sent out to the Kannada stars. As we all know, the league is banking heavily on support from the celluloid world.

"The gulf between the information we proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast," write Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, in their witty book Freakonomics. They paraphrase it with journalistic ease: "…we say one thing and do another." Our movie star actually wanted attention, but he told us he needed anonymity!

Freakonomics talks entertainingly about what the academic would call behavioural economics, and provides well-argued, statistics-supported answers to questions such as "Why do drug dealers live with their mothers?" and "How can your name affect how well you do in life?" Its take on anonymity and fame, like everything else in the book, is dazzlingly insightful.

Yesterday, our senior reporter Savie Karnel brought in another story about a girl who had come down from Assam to work in Bangalore, and how her boyfriend had harassed her and broken her spirit. He regularly took her money, thrashed her, stalked her, and drilled into her she couldn't do a thing as he knew the cops. The girl believed she had no hope since she was an anonymous "outsider" while her boyfriend was a Bangalorean.

Migrants from villages and small towns believe big cities liberate them from settings where everyone knows everyone, and worse, everyone knows what everyone is doing. But then, in situations like the girl's, the same anonymity turns into a huge handicap.

To understand the need for nuanced degrees of anonymity and familiarity, you must read the fascinating study on dating websites that Levitt and Dubner talk about. They estimate that in a year, some 40 million Americans "swap intimate truths about themselves with complete strangers." The study, conducted by two economists and a psychologist, found, among other things, that 28 per cent of the women claimed they were blonde. Since that number exceeded the national average of blondes, Levitt and Dubner conclude it indicates "a lot of dyeing, or lying, or both."

The study also found that not posting a photo was a sure way of failing on a dating site. "A low-income, poorly educated, unhappily employed, not very attractive, slightly overweight, and balding man who posts his photo stands a better chance of gleaning some e-mails than a man who says he makes $200,000, and is deadly handsome, and doesn't post a photo," the book observes.

I cannot claim any personal knowledge of impersonation and subterfuge, but I can tell you what happened when I started writing under a girl pseudonym some years ago. I had hit upon the attractive name of O Priya, inspired by an Ilaiyaraja song, and held forth on many music-related matters in the magazine section of the daily I then worked for.

As luck would have it, a Bengali gentleman started calling up the office asking to meet O Priya. My colleagues fobbed him off a couple of times, but he was persistent, and they threw up their hands and put him on to me. It turned out his intentions were completely honourable: he wanted O Priya to write about his wife, who had just opened a music school in Bangalore. I wrote about the school, and he was appeased, but my article appeared without a byline. And to my indescribable relief, he gave up the idea of meeting the gorgeous Ms O Priya!

29 April 2008

Three swingers and a poll

2008-04-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, as Karnataka’s big parties announced the names of their candidates for next month’s elections, ticket aspirants waited anxiously to see who had made it and who hadn’t.

And as you may already know, those whose names didn’t figure on those lists have started sulking and throwing tantrums. Simultaneously, criminals and policemen are donning khadi and getting into one or the other of the state's three major parties.

All of which is good entertainment, and of course the election season is always a good time for connoisseurs of drama. To add to the excitement, star campaigners are descending from all over India to do their bit for their parties.

Arun Jaitley of the BJP was in Bangalore last week. He made a suave presentation at the Taj West End to a gathering of journalists, who’d received invitations the previous day from velvet-voiced PR girls. (I was unlucky and got a call from a sober male voice).

I was among those who sat at the hotel’s opulent banquet hall and heard the BJP stalwart’s eloquent briefing. He had facts and figures ready, and reeled out numbers without as much as glancing at his notes, but what was most striking was that he spoke no ideology at all. No Hindutva, no talk about fighting corruption or Congress misrule. All he said was that Karnataka should vote for stability.

Jaitley delivered his speech like a CEO at a board meeting, such was the corporate polish of the event. But then, come to think of it, this season could well mark the advent of elections without any ideological fervour. Also, the three big players have slept with one another in the last five years, and cannot really take the pativrata tone without sounding foolish. So if you were the pragmatic type, you would say, “Ah, good, no bullshit!”

But consider the tragedy. The Karnataka assembly has 224 seats, and since the last elections did not deliver a decisive mandate, the Congress, the JD(S) and the BJP were forced to share power — and the spoils. As everyone knows, they got into opportunistic alliances, praising their partners when together, and abusing them when the good times ran out.

In 1977, after Indira Gandhi lifted the Emergency and announced elections, the rest of India sent non-Congress leaders to Delhi as MPs but Karnataka went against the tide. Again in 1978, the state voted a Congress government to power.

But the Congress joy ride jerked to an end. In 1983, Karnataka got its first non-Congress government when the Janata Party took over with Ramakrishna Hegde at the helm. The ideologies of Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia (and his Kannadiga ideologue Gopala Gowda), the CPM, and the RSS had come together to form an alliance to defeat a satiated and arrogant Congress. The Karnataka voter has thus always remained inscrutable, and unpredictable.

In 1984, after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, an emotional Karnataka sent 24 Congress MPs to Delhi out of 28. Hegde dissolved his government, owning moral responsibility for his party's poor performance, and called for elections right away. Voters stunned the nation by taking a U-turn and sending his Janata Party back to power at the Vidhana Soudha. In the process, the Karnataka electorate won for itself the reputation of being wise and discerning.

One of the heroes of that inspired anti-Congress movement was Deve Gowda, who you saw, these last four years, in the role of the shrewish wife in serial marriages with the Congress and the BJP. Yes, it has been a disgraceful fall, but he is again rubbing his hands in anticipating of a hung assembly, and looking forward to more fun and intrigue.

So friends, Kannadigas and countrymen, this is going to be a battle among three big parties, and it is a battle over the millions they can rake in from real estate and mining. Happy voting, and God save you!

An angry man called Jyoti

2008-04-15T05:24:00.000-07:00

Obits are being written all over India for Jyoti Sanyal, the journalism guru who died in Kolkata last week. I had seen him every day for three years when he was in Bangalore, and for someone in his fifties, he looked young and fit. When I heard the news of his passing, I wondered how someone like him could have had a stroke. “It was his temper,” said C K Meena, who knew him closely as a colleague at Asian College of Journalism.

Meena (now a columnist for The Hindu), Vishweshwar Bhat (editor, Vijaya Karnataka) and I taught at ACJ when Jyoti was dean (1997-2000), and we often watched him rage against the ugly style that rules our English language newspapers. He certainly was an angry man, but the anger was more ideological than personal. He shouted at students who turned in clumsy copy, and flung insults that left them reeling. But a trainee just had to write one nicely worded story for him to fall in love with her (He mentored the boys with equal concern).

Jyoti blamed the bad English of the Indian newspapers on two influences. Indians, he believed, thought in their own tongues, and then translated their thoughts into English, which is why they don’t find expressions such as “I am having two brothers” wrong. Second, he was convinced the merchant language of the East India Company had overwhelmed Indians and left them incapable of clarity of thought and expression. Jyoti called it “baboo English” because it used “scraps of commercialese such as same/the same; the said letter; aforesaid letter; duly noted, and Kindly instead of please, and so on.”

When I first heard about Jyoti’s insistence on English that sounded like English and not like an Indian language, I thought he was one of those literal school-teacher types, obsessed with textbook correctness, and unable to look beyond it. I had discovered the kaleidoscopic beauty of Salman Rushdie’s prose, and had earlier enjoyed the bold Kannada-coloured English of Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura, and arrived at the position that Indians writing in English ought not to feel apologetic about bringing in their own cadences and idioms into English. But I soon realised Jyoti was bristling against something else altogether, and at one point he acknowledged my argument that English would be enriched, and not impoverished, if we applied our native imagination to it.

Looking back, Jyoti seems like a Naxal of the newspaper world, incensed not so much by personal injury as by the absence of a just system. And he carried himself around like an ideologue with his own idea of fashion, wearing oversized goggles, puffing away on a Wills Filter, and outfitted in jeans and cowboy-style zip-up boots.

When we published an obit for Jyoti in MiD DAY yesterday, we headlined it ‘Enemy of the cliché’. Ashish Mukherjee, the author, had almost ruined his chance of getting an ACJ seat when he said he wanted to become a journalist and fight for some great cause. Jyoti believed Ashish had “airy fairy” ideas about journalism, and decided to turn him away, but changed his mind at the last minute. Ashish came down from Delhi and and turned into one of Jyoti’s fervent disciples. He went back to work for Indian Express and CNN-IBN in that city.

Jyoti’s students now populate newspapers and TV channels across India, and are conscious they have the responsibility of carrying forward his crusade against shoddy writing. On their blog (http://acjbillboard.blogspot.com), they have been sharing stories about Jyoti. Elsewhere, Ravinder Kumar, editor of The Statesman when Jyoti wrote its style book, describes him as a man of style and great substance.

Here in MiD DAY, we bought copies of his book Indlish for all our journalists as soon as it hit the stands a year ago. We didn’t know it then, but our preference for it over The Economist Style Book had pleased Jyoti, and he had felt vindicated that a newspaper was trying to put his ideas into practice.

Jyoti didn’t teach me anything overtly, perhaps because he felt it would be indecorous to instruct a colleague, but I watched him at work, and picked up -- Ekalavya-like! -- writing and editing techniques that have proved invaluable in my journalistic career. I know this is belated, but thanks, Jyoti!

Giliyu panjaradolilla: A translation

2008-04-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

Giliyu panjaradolilla (The parrot's no longer in the cage), by Purandaradasa, contemplates death with a bird metaphor. I haven't heard Karnatak classical musicians, or even Hindustani musicians, singing this composition. But B V Karanth, the theatre legend, made a lovely tune for this song, and it has a folksy lilt that makes it singable even to those not classically trained.

I attempt a translation:

The parrot's no longer in the cage.
The cage's suddenly bare, alas!

Sister, I took your word,
and got myself a little parrot.
When you weren't around
the cat snatched it and ran away.

The parrot that chanted Rama Rama,
the parrot with a soft body,
the parrot nurtured with love
is suddenly silent, alas!

It lived in a house with nine doors
and lots of people for company.
The pillar broke, the image fell
and it flew skywards, alas!

The parrot that played in the palm,
the parrot that danced on the wrist,
has flown away to be with
Ranga Purandara Vittala.

The parrot's no longer in the cage.
The cage's suddenly bare, alas!

Star gazing over Hogenakal

2008-04-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

The Tamils are proud of the sound zha, as in Tamizhan. They believe no non-Tamil can get it right. Debates over phonetics used to break out at a newspaper office in Bangalore, where Tamils and Kannadigas worked in equal numbers. The Tamil proofreaders asked the Kannadigas to say "Vazhapazham!", certain that their colleagues would flunk the test. After a while, the Kannadigas arrived at a smart answer. They said, "Okay, before we try that, we'll give you a simpler test. Just say 'Gopi'!"

Now you may think this was no contest. But no! The Tamils invariably got one of the syllables wrong. They would say "Gobi" or "Kopi", much to the delight of the Kannadigas.

Thanks to Hogenakal, Kannadigas and Tamils again look like sworn enemies, but let it not be forgotten that they enjoy their share of fun and games. At the same time, spring from the same Dravidian roots, and but they have evolved into temperamentally dissimilar siblings.

In the movie industry, barely educated and real estate-enriched Kannada producers believe the best stories are manufactured in Tamil Nadu. They look out for hits in Tamil, and promptly import them into Kannada. But is it true that the Tamils write better stories? No, if you ask the Jnanpith awards committee. Kannada has won seven of these highly regarded literary awards, while Tamil has won just two. But the Tamils write better movie scripts. They know how to dramatise a story, how to exaggerate in a cinematic way, how to package it all with comedy, dialogue and song.

The Tamils take their films seriously, and are so impressed by good deeds on screen that they do not hesitate to hand over their collective destiny to their celluloid heroes. The Kannadigas are a more sceptical lot. An Ambarish here and a 'Mukhyamantri' Chandru there may win a stray election, but will never be able to lead a party to power. Perhaps the only movie star who might have become chief minister of Karnataka was Rajkumar. His contemporary MGR rose without any serious challenge to take over the reins of Tamil Nadu, but Rajkumar remained unmoved by the temptations of electoral politics. Would Kannadigas have voted him to power had he entered the fray? We'll never know.

Since the Tamils consume their popular culture earnestly, they can also produce more extravagant films, flashier ads, and catchier songs. The Kannadigas challenge that assumption once in a while, and deliver big hits, but these don't make a mark beyond our borders. The Tamil film industry has an audience in many parts of India, Karnataka included, and abroad. Many Kannadigas are as familiar with Rajnikant and Vikram as they are with their own stars. (My Kannadiga aunts are big fans of Kamala Hassan and could ply you with endless Tamil movie trivia!). But, on the other hand, the Tamils steadfastly refuse to patronise Kannada films in Chennai.

To come back to where we began, and to generalise, the Tamil thrives on hyperbole, while the Kannadiga prefers understatement.

Kannadigas, at least the ones whose knowledge of Kannada extends beyond popular culture, believe they excel at literature. The best minds in Tamil writing seem to gravitate towards the Chennai movie industry, while the best in Kannada writing remain dismissive of popular movies. Can you imagine an Ananthamurthy or an Adiga writing a screenplay for Rajkumar or Ravichandran?

Tamil rhetoric, inspired by Dravidian politics, is wonderfully heady, as Rajnikant knows. And it's wholesome family entertainment to watch the stars come out on both sides and make grand speeches. But do you know any better about the Hogenakal row, now that you've enjoyed the tinsel spectacle? Someone tell us what it's all about, please.

Raag Anuraag: CD review

2008-04-01T23:53:00.000-07:00

The difficult art of talking music

How do you explain a complex music to a lay listener? Well-known singer Parameshwar Hegde put his students to work on this challenge, and the result is Raag Anuraag, a two-CD introduction to Hindustani music.

The album opens with some comments on the nature of Indian music and quickly switches to short renderings of popular ragas. The sweet-voiced Amrita Rao sings a composition in raga Madhuvanti, and you soon get an explanation of how it is different from raga Patdeep and raga Bhimpalasi. Similarly, the CDs introduce other clusters of ragas with the help of compositions sung by Hegde's students.

The general observations soon give way to a more advanced discourse, and it looks like the collection assumes you are already an insider to the world of Indian classical music. Unless you know a fair bit of music terminology, you may not fully understand the commentary from this point. But the album still reaches out to the lay listener by connecting classical compositions with film songs.

For instance, you understand that Bahut din beete beete, sung by almost every Hindustani khayal musician, is based on raga Puriya Dhanasri, the same raga that Kannada film song Nambide ninna nada devateye (Sandhyaraga) employs. Similarly, the Lata Mangeshkar hit Rasik balma is used to illustrate raga Shuddh Kalyan.

Raag Anuraag shows how Hegde, a disciple of Pandit Chandrashekhar Puranikmath and Pandit Basavaraj Rajguru, has prepared scores of students committed to carrying on the tradition. An academy named after Hegde is quietly spreading the art in Bangalore, besides organising concerts by musicians from all over India.

If you've heard Hegde's music live, you will have heard most compositions featured in Raag Anuraag, and you might want to pick up the collection just to have them on your shelf. Also, Hegde's students show promise, and some are musically mature beyond their years. Raag Anuraag is not as ambitious as the multiple-CD Alaap (Times Music) or the three-cassette Music Today introduction to Hindustani music, but it still offers a quick peek into the treasures of a great tradition. But it would be unrealistic to expect Raag Anuraag, or any such introduction, to turn a newcomer to classical music into an instant connoisseur. That calls for some sustained listening, and some interaction with the more knowledgeable.

Hindustani music is a difficult art, but it needn't be esoteric and incomprehensible. It can be appreciated with some help, and it is heartening that Parameshwar Hegde Music Academy has taken upon itself the responsibility of reaching out to the curious lay listener.

Raag Anuraag
Rs 200
Parameshwar Hegde Music Academy, Bangalore
Phone 93412 48257

Othello in a T shirt

2008-03-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

AMIT Budhiraja and Rinku Sachdeva had everything: good jobs, a nice flat, money to splurge, and a future that beckoned with promise. Or at least that was what the world thought. It is now obvious they were leading tormented inner lives before Amit killed her and hanged himself on Sunday.

The media will cover their tragedy extensively because they worked in the high profile sectors of software and finance. People will say wise things, such as, “What purpose did Amit achieve with this murder and suicide?” and “It only shows what life really is like behind all the IT glamour.”

Amit’s case is similar to that of Gururaj Kishore, also a techie, who killed his girlfriend Tanya because he thought she had become intimate with other men. He stabbed her repeatedly and dumped her body in the ghats near Sakleshpur last year. He was arrested a day after the crime, and is now in jail. So, are young people in the IT sector more likely to commit ‘crimes of passion’ than their counterparts elsewhere?

It is possible that jobs in the new “flat world” (Friedman’s coinage, to suggest the collapse of barriers and the levelling out of opportunities) extract more out of the young, ruin their balance, and drive them to desperation. It is possible that new job descriptions and super smart managers nudge young people along the path to overachievement, and self-destruction. Conservative India may look down upon, and secretly envy, the “permissive” abandon of the new workspace, but do these murders really show the dark side of our American-inspired IT dream?

Just a day before the Infosys employee smothered his wife with a pillow, a man stabbed a friend to death because he had sprayed Holi colours on his wife and behaved indecently with her. This happened in a working class neighbourhood in southern Bangalore, and among people who worked as painters
and carpenters. So what has “IT culture” to do with what happened to Amit and Rinku? It could happen anywhere. And it could happen to anyone.

Perhaps great writers, more than anyone else, can help us glimpse the complex psychological intrigues that go into the making of such crimes. The story of Othello, for instance, shows what ensues when a man is consumed by suspicion, jealousy and rage. The wily Iago, unhappy for professional reasons, fuels Othello’s doubts and incites him to kill his beloved wife Desdemona. Othello, initially justifies his action, but when he realises he has wronged an innocent woman, pierces himself with a dagger and kills himself with her body in his arms. (We know very little about what happened inside the minds of Amit and Rinku, but the verifiable details of their last moments echo the sad climax of Othello).

Othello is a black general in the Venetian army and Desdemona the daughter of a white senator. Shakespeare's keen eye grasped the subtle strands that weave a tragic story. Some writers saw in the play a lesson for white women who fell in love with black, Muslim men. Salman Rushdie interprets Desdemona's murder as a despicable, misguided “honour killing”. The police will tell us what they can piece together of the Amit-Rinku story, but will anyone ever know what really
precipitated the end? Failure of marriage? Frustration? Loneliness in a relationship? Shock of betrayal? Incompatibility?

Some couples cope with these, and even recover. Some are damaged beyond repair, but accept their fate and move on. A few go mad. That’s when the wreckage of love hits the headlines.

MiD DAY, 25 March 2008

A day with S P Balu

2008-03-10T23:34:00.000-07:00

One afternoon, three years ago, I got a call from ETV, asking me if I'd like to be a judge on a popular music show hosted by S P Balasubramanyam.

I wasn't sure how I'd do it, but I was flattered, and agreed. A programme executive called me up and asked me for my profile. I dabble in many things, so I mumbled about this and that, unsure what I should say. I was vaguely familiar with the format of the show, but had never got around to watching it in full, and was very nervous.

S P turned out a very gentle host. He calmed my nerves and made me feel important. The sets were huge and glitzy, and they had cameras swinging from tall cranes. I was suddenly in the middle of all this showbiz action, sitting next to a legend who'd sung some 39,000 movie songs in five languages. I was also sharing the jury honours with Vidyabhushana, the swamiji who had returned from sanyas to marry and become a fulltime singer.

The singers were confident and sang well, but what was most impressive was the way S P conducted the show. His mother tongue is Telugu, and he hardly gets to speak Kannada when he's not on this show, yet he handled the language with aplomb. And his charisma was unbelievable: he knew how to point to the contestants' flaws without hurting them, how to highlight their strong points and encourage them to do better, how to talk to the live audience and get them to cheer the singers…

And his knowledge of songs, composers and lyricists was enyclopaedic. He referred to songs in other languages that came to his mind when he heard something, he spoke about the ragas they were based on, he discussed diction. Overall, here was one host who knew everything there was to know about the subject of his show, and he was superbly articulate. Caleb, the bass guitarist who accompanies S P everywhere, later told me he runs similar shows in Telugu and Tamil, and switches from one language to another without a glitch.

Being a hack with a hobbyist interest in music, I was a complete disaster on screen in contrast to the two luminaries with whom I sat, but I was tongue-tied for a different reason on a more recent FM radio show. The occasion was the release of an album for which I'd made the tunes, and the host, a girl who spoke incredibly fluent Kannada, asked me questions that had me stuttering for answers. I just wasn't able to quickly think up words for what I wanted to say. But she neither played the album nor did she want me and the other musicians on the show to speak particularly about the music.

She asked, "What qualities would you look for in a cow that comes to a beauty show?" It was Sankranti time, and of course the question was timely, but I am a city type, and just gaped for an answer. She spoke with high energy each time she went on air between the latest movie songs, and I shook her hand in genuine admiration at the end of it all.

You can't fake it if you are talking physics or astronomy or politics. But music? Ah, you can be a professional RJ and talk music day in and day out, and yet not say a thing about it!

Preta shabdam nasti

2008-03-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

Once the 13-day death rituals are done, the priest helps the kartru (the one performing the rituals) bid a final goodbye to the departing relative.

The pinda (rice balls) is cut into three parts, and each is symbolically offered to the just dead soul, his father and grandfather, or, if the dead relative happens to be a woman, to her mother and grandmother.

Finally, the priest says, "Preta shabdam nasti". The dead soul is no longer an unappeased spirit (preta) that could haunt the family; it is released on its onward journey.

So it was for Subru yesterday.

Dead, with no ID card

2008-03-03T21:48:00.000-08:00

Optimism is in the air. Chidambaram has just announced a budget that's making farmers, salaried people, and even captains of industry happy. Very rarely do you find such diverse groups nodding their appreciative heads in unison, but elections are around the corner, and our clever finance minister has waved a magic wand!

It may seem churlish, when the mood is so upbeat, to talk about death. But death was what my uncle was grappling with, and death was what he succumbed to last Sunday. I have no intentions of spoiling the general cheer, and will only talk about some aspects of the grim act of departing that may amuse you.

My uncle was 86 when he died. He was fit and active till he was 85. When he retired from HAL three decades ago, he looked a very handsome 30, and didn't sport those grey streaks many of us do by the time we are in our forties. He took regular walks, and could do difficult yogic postures, such as the mayurasana and shirsasana, till last year, when he had a heart attack.

Subru (short for Subramanyam) prided himself on his health, and believed he would live till he was at least a hundred. Just five days before he died, he was outraged that a nurse had called him grandpa. He scolded her a full 15 minutes for making that mistake.

He was also very proud of his English, and knew such words as "inveterate". I remember he once told someone not to go out in the sun. "You'll get skin affection," he warned. He had coined the word "vomission".

Subru had no children. Ten years ago, his wife lay on her deathbed, ravaged by diabetes, almost blind, and with a failed kidney. He believed every disease in the world could be cured with exercise, and Amritanjan. Which was why he did not pay much heed to what the doctors were telling him about her critical condition. He asked her to rub the pain balm wherever it hurt, and rationed a month's medicines to cover many months. He was very frugal, but I know some others who are more distinguished in that department.

Ten years ago, when his sister and mentally ill brother were bedridden and desperately needed attention, he was busy playing rummy and taking his regular walks. He knew bits of Sanskrit verses, and quoted one that said God takes care of orphans. He believed he would never be one. In the last two months of his life, Subru wasn't able to walk, but still felt it was beneath him to hold a walking stick.

He was in and out of hospital three times in the last six months, and each time he was hospitalised, I believed he would have someone to care for him round the clock. But, every hospital expected an attendant to stay with him, and that meant more work than having him at home.

For someone so frugal, he had done something unusual. He had booked himself his post-death ceremonies at an organisation called Aryavartha, and paid them a fee. I went to their office in Banashankari two days after he died, and they said they couldn't help unless I brought them the ID card they had issued him. Asking him where he's saved the little card is a little difficult, considering his present address, but Aryavartha steadfastly refused to look in their books.

So it looks like the one time uncle Subru spent some money generously is going to go in vain. Clerkdom reigns, and not just in government offices. And elsewhere, we have Chidambaram extolling the virtues of the private sector!

(MiD DAY, 3 March 2008)

Tips to see better

2008-02-16T10:32:00.001-08:00

I can't vouch for these claims, but here's someone who believes defective eyesight can almost always get better, and without glasses:

Good Earth bars

2008-02-16T10:12:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered Good Earth "meusli bars", and I love them! They are made on a farm on Bannerghatta Road, which I gather is owned by the movie legend Waheeda Rehman.

The bars are made from dates, raisins, almonds, cinnamon, orange peels... The taste is grainy and moist, and may remind you somewhat of the unde eats last generation grandmothers used to make. A bar costs between Rs 9 and Rs 15.

Chewiness sets Good Earth apart from your regular chocolate, and I am sure the ingredients are much healthier than the sugar and soya lechitin that you find in those aggressively marketed chocolate bars. But I would still hold back from declaring Good Earth is for everyone: I read regularly about the dangers of carbohydrate for diabetics. Meusli may have less carbs than milk chocolate, but still, you would be well advised to check your nutrition allowances before you gorged on these bars.

(On a related note, have you noticed that Cadbury is now trying to grow its market for chocolate in the towns and villages? In their TV spots, you even find cows and folk music, till now considered too unglamorous to sell "upmarket" products. One ad for Cadbury's chocolate drink Bournvita, aired repeatedly on kids' channels like Pogo and Cartoon Network, shows a Rajasthani folk singer holding his own against a city slicker-dancer!)

And thanks Good Earth for the nutrition information. Some of India's biggest chocolate makers still don't think it necessary to provide such information on their products.

Gaalipata vs Aa Dinagalu (Background score)

2008-02-12T11:19:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a strange twist of events, I got to see Gaalipata (Kite) and Aa Dinagalu (Those Days) on two subsequent days. One is a lighthearted caper, the other a taut Godfather-like take on a 1980s gang war.

Something about the background scores... Gaalipata's (composer: V Harikrishna) comes across as too busy, and even noisy. The climax overdoes the song themes with the chorus, and scales melodramatic peaks. But Ilaiyaraja's score for Aa Dinagalu is a subdued contrast. It becomes just another hue in the dull watercolour atmosphere that director Chaitanya creates. You don't notice the background score even when a big orchestra plays along. The violins and the cellos create Monet-like smudges, and if you happen to prick your ears and pay attention during the final scenes, you just might relish the detail in the impressionistic abstraction.

Chaitanya takes you back to the Eastman colour era, and Ilaiyaraja's paintbrush smears gently enhance the period without drawing attention to themselves.

Ilaiyaraja is a master, and can sometimes afford to be self-effacing!

Auto love

2008-02-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

I saw this piece of wisdom painted on a Bangalore auto:

Love maadidre romansu
Kai kottre Nimhansu

If you fall in love, it's romance
If you're ditched, it's Nimhans.

(Nimhans stands for National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences. It was earlier just called 'mental hospital').

Chocolate hero's journalism lingo

2008-01-25T09:42:00.001-08:00

MinchAgi neenu baralu (watch it here) is the latest hit on FM radio and TV channels.

It's from the movie Galipata (Kite), which features director Yogaraj Bhat and hero Ganesh. When they were completely unknown, they stunned the industry by delivering Kannada filmdom's biggest hit, MungAru MaLe (Monsoon Showers).

It is not often that I heed RJs' recommendations, but I really loved this track.

Jayant Kaikini's words break away from the standard movie vocabulary, and invoke images from journalism (the hero "subscribes" to his girl's dreams, and "reports" from her heart), and finance (he is a "debtor" because he steals poetry from her heart, and has become a "shareholder" in her memories).

The orchestral arrangement, built on a bossanova beat, is neat and uncluttered. Just listen to the lovely, understated '60s European-style violins. I gather the string section was played by V S Narasimhan and the amazingly versatile Madras String Quartet.

Was composer (P Harikrishna) inspired by the antara of the R D Burman hit Rim jhim gire sawan (from Manzil) when he composed the opening line of MinchAgi neenu baralu? Possible, and in any case, Sonu Nigam's singing style harks back to the "golden years" of Hindi film music, and to the whispery, romantic idiom developed by Mohamad Rafi. The other songs on the album didn't impress me as much, although they do experiment with orchestral colour.

MinchAgi neenu baralu also brings to mind Ganesh and Yogaraj Bhat's previous hit Anisutide yAko indu (Sonu Nigam). The acoustic guitars are foregrounded in both songs, and the words and the old-worldly melody paint a similar, dreamy landscape.

Hari has been around as a keyboardist for many years. He used to work for Ravichandran, a mindless but occasionally successful film maker, and sequence and arrange his tunes. For Galipata, he has turned out a trendy album that places him alongside Harris Jayaraj. In fact, Hari doffs his hat at the Tamil composer in some interludes.

If you watch the video, let me know if you catch how Ganesh picks up some of Rajesh Khanna's famous mannerisms (the circling wrist, the skyward nod...)

For those who don't understand Kannada, I attempt a translation of MinchAgi neenu baralu:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MG10RlcjXg

Minchaagi neenu baralu nintalliye malegaala
Bechchage nee jote iralu kootalliye chaligaala
Virahada bege sudalu edeyalli besigegaala
Innelli nanage uligaala...

Here's my translation:

When you come as lightning
it rains where I stand.

With you warmly by my side
it's winter where I sit.

When loneliness comes visiting
Summer scorches my heart.

Oh, how do I survive these seasons? (Pallavi)

I subscribe to your dreams.
Just wait, I'll come
pay up my subscription dues.

I report live from your heart
but the moment I see you,
I forget all my words.

Mind if I call you
the lute I want to play?

In any case, I'm a bit of a sinner! (Charana)

I borrow lines of poetry from your heart.
No wonder I'm a debtor.

I break in and take away your memories.
See, I'm a shareholder too.

I won't leave you in peace
Oh no, not so soon.

In any case, I am a bit of a thief! (Charana)

It's over

2008-01-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

We immersed the ashes at Nashik, a four-hour drive from Mumbai, and returned to Bangalore on January 8. The rituals are over. Yesterday, we had the Vaikunta Samaradhane, and about 180 guests game. She looks so serene and herself in Shreedhara Murthy's portrait.

Amma no more

2008-01-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

Indira R Swamy, my mother, passed away on January 6, in Mumbai.

She had taught English, first at Kanakapura near Bangalore, then and Amravati in Maharasthra, and finally at National College, Jayanagar, again in Bangalore.

She was always gentle and cheerful, and I had assumed she would always be around.

She has departed, after battling cancer courageously, and we must learn to accept her absence.

iPhone first impression

2007-12-30T05:10:00.001-08:00

The iPhone hasn't officially come to India, but several dealers in Mumbai are already selling it.

Someone I know has bought one for about Rs 26,000, but I've also seen a big retailer advertise it for Rs 17,000. I got to hold the gizmo in my hand for a while, and of course I gaped.

If you've read the reviews, you already know that the iPhone puts a touch screen in place of the conventional keypad. That is a delightful Apple touch and would make the purchase worthwhile for many. The touch screen clears the clutter and makes use so much easier.

I haven't used the phone long enough to be able to review it in detail. The buyer has some complaints though: it doesn't allow him to forward messages, and the absence of Bluetooth makes it difficult for him to transfer phone numbers and songs.

My first impression is that it's a phone that's ahead of the competition in style, but friends tell me you can get a more powerful device, say in Nokia or Sony Ericcson, for the same price.

But considering you get iPod quality sound (and that in itself would clinch it for me), I am not inclined to vote in favour of iPhone's rivals.

Would I buy it? Difficult question. I use a beat-up, cheap Nokia which I drop frequently. It is hardy, and hasn't once ditched me. It works efficiently, and doesn't hang. On the minus side, it has no mp3 player, radio or camera.

I'll wait for people to tell me their iPhones survived some serious knocks. I might then, and only then, give in to my iPhone aspiration.

Carctol, medicine for cancer

2007-12-29T19:33:00.000-08:00

I happened to visit Jaipur last month after reading about a herbal formulation called Carctol to treat cancer. The Guardian has done a piece about this medicine and reports it may have cured some 800 patients in the UK.

'Cure' is a word that leaves oncologists livid, yet a highly regarded oncologist in that country swears by the healing powers of this Indian herbal formulation.

I flew to Jaipur and met Dr Nandlal Tiwari, who runs a busy practice in Jaipur, and sought his help for my mother, who is now in hospital in Mumbai. We managed to give her the capsules for a couple of days, but she is now too weak to take anything orally, so I don't really have a personal testimonial for the medicine's efficacy. I only wish we had come to know about it earlier, but such is life, and I hope my mother comes around to be able to take the capsules again.

Just thought a note on Carctol might help those looking for ways to battle cancer.

Carctol official website
The Guardian article on Carctol

Box therapy for phantom limb pain

2007-12-27T05:03:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a fascinating book, Phantoms of the Brain, by the famous neuroscientist V S Ramachandran.

When I came across this link, I jumped at the opportunity of hearing him speak:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/12/25/simple-3-idea-eliminates-intense-pain-and-paralysis.aspx

Phantom limb pain haunts soldiers and accident victims whose limbs are amputated. They experience severe pain in limbs they no longer have, and even more paradoxically, feel their phantom limbs are paralysed.

But the problem is not confined to war and accident amputees: women who have their uteruses surgically removed are known to experience phantom menstrual cramps and periods.

In the course of his experiments, Ramachandran discovered that a simple box fitted with a mirror could solve one of medical science's biggest mysteries.

Patients who saw a simulated image of their paralysed phantom limbs were able to establish control over them. Pain sufferers found the problem going away! No medication, no surgery, just the brain rewiring itself and taking care of a ghost problem.

Watch this video. It shows how our most complex health problems could have simple, inexpensive solutions, if only we knew where to look.

Sugarfree ice cream

2007-12-26T10:43:00.000-08:00

Amul makes sugarfree ice creams for the calorie consious. It also describes the product as a "diabetic delight".

I asked a shopkeeper in Mumbai, right across the hospital where I've been spending a lot of time, if he had any. He is an Amul retailer. He said he didn't.

Why?

"People here expect to get a packet of sugar complimentary when they buy ice cream. Isliye bandh kardiya," he said. Mumbai had given a new spin to "sugarfree".

I believed him.

Song from MungAru MaLe

2007-12-24T01:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a song from the hit movie MungAru MaLe.

I tried my hand at translating araLutiru jeevada geLeya, the female (Shreya Ghoshal) version of the more popular anisutide yAko indu (Sonu Nigam), and I post it here for your reading pleasure.

For those unfamiliar with the Kannada movie scene, MungAru MaLe is the biggest grosser ever, and is well into its second year at PVR Cinema in Bangalore. I saw the movie some six months ago, and liked it.

Jayant Kaikini, who wrote this song, has published critically acclaimed poetry and fiction. He edited the Kannada monthly magazine Bhavana for a while, and had earlier worked with a pharma firm in Mumbai. He has been writing in Kannada for decades, but the movie guys have only now discovered him! Good for them.

My brother-in-law in Mumbai had this song on his system, and so I got to pay close attention to the words. Okay, it may sound strange when read in translation, and without the guitar-embellished tune, but still, I hope to capture at least some of its romantic breeziness.

The situation: The hero and heroine have fallen in something that seems like love, but she is engaged to be married to someone else, and is not sure she wants to break the engagement, so...

Pallavi

Keep smiling, soul friend,
in the drizzle of friendship.

Don't wither, flower of friendship,
in the bondage of love.

Keep your thoughts in your heart.
But play on, friend, I love your silent song.

Charana
The bird sings its melodies
without announcing its name.

The champak perfumes the air
without asking a soul.

The breeze and birdsong aren't bothered
their closeness can't be described.

Why then should we worry?

Let's not give our closeness a name, friend.
Let's keep it just this way.

Charana
How charming these feelings
that lie beyond words!

Disappointment can't weigh down
a heart steeped in joy.

We may part ways at life's fork,
but the moon always walks with us.

In him I only see you.
May this bond live on, friend.
Let's keep it just this way.

The Kannada original

AraLutiru jeevada geLeya
snEhada sincanadalli
bAdadiru snehada hoove
premada bandhanadalli
manasallE irali bhAvane
midiyutirali mouna veene
heege summane

hakkiyu haadide
tanna hesaranu heLade
sampige beeride kampanu
yArigoo keLade
beesivu gaaLiya hakkiya haadina
namTige hesarina hangilla
namagEke adara yocane
beda geLeya nantige hesaru
yaake summane

mAtige meerida bhavada
sthimitavE sundara
nalumeyu tumbida manasige
baaradu besara
baaLa dAriyali bEreyAdaroo
chandira baruvanu namma jote
kAnuveu avanale ninnanu
irali geLeya ee anubandha
heege summane

Time travel

2007-12-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

We all know our brethren in advertising window-dress the truth, but what I saw yesterday still took my breath away.

In my mailbox was a message from Naukri, the online job portal, and it said, "Ramakrishna, ur appointment letter." By now I know enough about Internet marketers to be sceptical about any communication from them, but I couldn't resist clicking on the message.

And inside, lo and behold, was an impersonal exhortation that I send my resume at once.

Even before they solicit my resume, they tell me to collect my appointment letter? Uh, sorry Mr Head Hunter, but such time machine excursions leave me dizzy.

Hello! Airtel vs Vodaphone

2007-12-21T06:14:00.001-08:00

A neighbour has just quit Airtel to join the telecom department of a Middle East country. He came to say goodbye.

"So how's your company doing after Vodaphone came into India?" I asked.

The thinking inside Airtel, he tells me, is that Vodaphone is going to be a formidable rival. Since Vodaphone has an international network and deep pockets, Airtel is bracing for a long battle. The long term prospects, he said, weigh in favour of Vodaphone. (For the uninitiated, Hutch is now called Vodaphone in India).

I told him I had used a Hutch connection for a while, and then decided Airtel was best in the Karnataka circle. "Yes, it is No 1 for Airtel," he said. "Not Delhi, as many people think."

Airtel in Karnataka was reportedly run by a top class team, and staff from other states often went there to learn processes. "But things aren't the same any more," he said.

Vada verse

2007-12-20T06:38:00.000-08:00

Tejas picked up this song at school:

Idli vada sambar
Sachin vada sixer
India vada winner
Pakistan vada loser

Chord of misery

2007-12-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

Last week I was introduced to a musician who shares his surname with our Test captain Anil Kumble.

The Kumble I met had just had spine surgery, and was depressed. He works as a sessions artiste (he plays the keyboard at studio recordings) and also as a concert accompanist to singers. In the course of a long chat, he told me something I instinctively believed.

Kumble has developed diabetes in the last four or five years, and his family hasn't been able to figure out why. He has always exercised well: walked 2 km to the Lal Bagh lake and done 40 laps on its stone steps. And he has eaten well: no footpath food, no wedding hall food, just plain home food. At 50, he looks young, with not a grey hair, but feels psychologically mauled.

And the worry, he told me, concerns the use of chords. He is a self-taught musician, but he doesn't understand how the left hand ought to work. He has consulted pianists and other music teachers and asked them question after question.

"One just wanted money to drink, another said he hated Indian music," he said. "And no one had any answers."

Kumble has bought books worth Rs 10,000, which he has stacked up in his tiny house, but is none the wiser. "Where is a seventh appropriate? Why should I play this chord and not that?" he asked, like a child insisting on one proper answer to a homework sum.

He believes his obsession with trying to understand chords pushed him towards diabetes. "I am sure I brought it upon myself by worrying day and night about chords," he told me. "I simply went crazy."

A friend told me Kumble plays well, and is needlessly weighed down by his inferiority complex.

But I could empathise with him. I told him he was asking a philosophical question to which there could be no final answer. One composer may use a diminished chord where another uses a seventh. Who is to say who is right? It's art, it's aesthetics, and it's anxiety!

Fat is healthy

2007-12-18T06:15:00.000-08:00

In Mumbai, salespeople at shops selling children's wear have a gentle way of referring to what others may describe as plumpness.

Try asking for a shirt for an eight-year-old, and the salesgirl is likely to ask, "Patla ya healthy?" Patla is thin, and its opposite, healthy, would be obese in the rude language of medical "experts".

An imagined conversation between two buddies in Mumbai:

"Hey, you're looking very healthy?"

"Yeah, blame it on the beer!"

Parsi fascination

2007-12-18T02:41:00.000-08:00

I first came to Bombay when I was 14 or 15. An uncle worked for an antique store inside the Taj, and lived in a rented flat in Bandra. I remember being fascinated by the journalistic offerings of this city: the film magazines, the tabloids, the society glossies. And I remember reading quite a bit about the Parsis: about their contributions to this city, their religious practicies, their history in India...

Thirty years on, I hold the latest Outlook in my hand, and with it comes a supplement called Mumbai City Limits. The lead article is again about the Parsis. We have the lovable wit Cyrus and the pink-looking model Perizaad Zorabian adorning the cover, and the essay inside covers the ground I am familiar with. The Parsis' numbers are said to be dwindling, but they consistently make for good copy, and the journalistic fascination with the community hasn't faded a bit.

I wonder why the newspapers don't carry articles about, say, the Marwadis, the Iyengars, the Sanketis, the Babburkammes. India is full of castes and communities with their own proud lists of achievers, yet magazine editors zero in only on the Parsis.

Is there something in the Parsis that particularly tickles journalistic curiosity? Is it their attire, their death rituals, their insistence on marriage within the community?

Granted, the Parsis have done exceptionally well in business (the Tatas, the Godrejs, and the Wadias hail from this community of Persian immigrants), law (you have the Sorabjees and the Palkhiwalas, almost always described by the media as 'eminent jurists'), but surely, communities such as the Iyengars can boast an equal number of achievers?

Two recent Tamil films, Anniyan and Hey Ram, lavished attention on the Iyengar lifestyle. The biggest Kannada hit in recent years, Mungaru Male, captures some Kodava rituals. But for magazine editors in Mumbai, Parsis remain all-time favourites.

Death by spending

2007-12-16T00:13:00.000-08:00

A friend told me the tragic story of a senior policeman who shot himself recently.

The sensational story made the headlines, but no newspaper could give its readers an idea of what really had pushed him to pull the trigger on himself. My friend told me the inside story.

Policemen wield a lot of power, and the general impression is that they make quite a bit of money on the side, but their salaries are a pittance.

Daya Nayak, the "encounter specialist" who has officially killed 55 gangsters, is a hero in the popular imagination, and the Kannada movie industry saluted his bravery with an eponymous film. (I recently saw some parts of it dubbed in Hindi and playing on Sahara One). But his salary, a newspaper reported, was Rs 12,000 a month. Not exactly the kind of money that would let you live a life of middle class comfort in Mumbai. Daya Nayak was suspended on the charge that he had made a fortune by illegal means, and he is now fighting a departmental battle.

To come back to my friend's story, this inspector working in a central Bangalore area was constantly under pressure from his wife to spend, spend, spend. Weekend parties, clothes, stuff... He had apparently borrowed heavily. Just before he died, his wife was pressing him to send their daughter to the US so that the girl could spend some time with her husband. The son-in-law was doing a course abroad, and had some days free between terms.

Bangalore can be terribly unkind to people who are not affluent. The inspector didn't have the money for the fare, and couldn't bear the pressure of being told he wasn't being a dutiful father either. He took out his service revolver, and put an end to his misery.

Big bad pharma

2007-12-14T22:26:00.000-08:00

Doctors admit there has been no major breakthrough in diabetes research since the 1920s, when Dr Banting and Dr Best discovered insulin. As the diabetes epidemic takes a grievous toll across the globe, pharma companies thrive. Which is why patients who read up a bit about their condition become increasingly sceptical about big pharma.

Has diabetes become too profitable to cure? Many believe so. And quite a few believe big pharma is busy blocking any new initiative that shows promise of helping diabetics (and in the process eating into their billion-dollar profits).

I have had some personal experience of how big pharma works. A weekly magazine asked a friend to do an article on diabetes for a special supplement. Thanks to my outings on the Net, and my consultations with doctors outside the allopathic mainstream, I was able to put her on to some leads. Her article turned out comprehensive, in a journalistic context. Along referred readers to doctors with unorthodox approaches to diabetes treatment.

She filed her story, and waited for months to see it in print. After a while, she got to know that the pharma company that was to sponsor the booklet had threatened to pull out if the magazine ran this article. Since it was a question of a good deal of money, the magazine had ditched her and gone with the pharma giant.

The booklet, when it appeared, said the same old things, with the pharma company patting itself on the back for its concern about public health. In truth, it had used its money power to armtwist the magazine and block any reference to unconventional approaches that might have helped diabetics.

What causes diabetes?

2007-12-13T22:38:00.000-08:00

No one knows. Doctors traditionally point fingers at the pancreas, and say diabetes sets in when the beta cells in this organ wear out. They also say diabetes is incurable, which flies in the face of their own experience with gestational diabetes, a condition common among women about to give birth. That variety of the disease vanishes once they recover from the stress of childbirth. It is difficult to medically gauge stress, and to understand what someone is going through psychologically, so doctors completely ignore the emotional factor when they formulate theories and treatment plans.

In the last year or so, we have been hearing of bariatric surgery, in which doctors staple the intestine and reduce the amount of food it can hold. This is done to help obese people. Doctors are amazed this surgery has accidentally cured many patients of type 2 diabetes.

They have no clue how it happens, but are now offering it as treatment for diabetics. The surgery has many arguments going against it, but it has proved again that the origins of diabetes could lie elsewhere, and not in the pancreas.

We have also heard another theory this year: that diabetes is caused by neurological inflammation. Scientists found clusters of damaged neurons near the pancreas, and when they treated those in rats, the diabetes went away. Researchers seem to be able to cure diabetes routinely in rats, and diabetes in cats often "goes into remission", but doctors always say humans are not rats.

Gary Taubes, a journalist who deserves the Pulitzer for poring over medical tomes and research papers to expose fatal flaws in dietary research, believes fat does does not really make people fat. In his recent book Good Calories Bad Calories, he reports that given a choice, diabetic rats prefer to eat low carb. They bite into protein and fat, and shun carbohydrate. Lab rats apparently rid themselves of diabetic symptoms once they started out on a carb-free diet.

All of which gives hope that researchers will one day find the cure for this wretched, insidious disease. Epidemic is a word newspapers have started using when they talk about diabetes, and the problem is indeed sweeping the world, but in my experience, mainstream doctors know little about it, and peddle old dogmas with supreme confidence.