The Super Booker list was announced recently. Two of my favorite writers are there: Gabriel Garcia Marques and Milan Kundera. Gunter Grass, who was recently in India and stirred up a controversy when he said Subhash Chandra Bose was politically naive to have supported the Germans and the Japanies in the Second World War, is there too in the list. I haven’t read him so far but will do so in the near future.
The Super Booker Prize is sort of a lifetime achievement award given for an overall writing portfolio. It’s been just recently instituted.
Sadly, no Salman Rushdie
I was reading on the sachet of a Pizza outlet, “Hunger Helpline.” This hunger helpline can cost one anything between Rs.200-500. Whenever we call this helpline we pay around 400 and then feel stupid. It’s flushing the hard-earned money down the drain. And on top of that, stuffing your belly with junk food. No, I mean, I won’t call pizza an entirely junk food, but then you can’t even compare it to the home-cooked daal.
I have no idea why foods like pizzas have to cost so dearly. What must it take to bake a pizza and cook a topping? The cost of baking a crust shouldn’t go beyond Rs.5-6 and the topping, no matter how “rich” it is, shouldn’t cost more than Rs.10 (the non-veg type). That day when we ordered a pizza (yes, we too go through the insanity binges) and asked for an extra layer of cheese toping, they charged us Rs.65 extra and we paid without asking anything (you see it’s embarrassing to query about the price when you’re ordering expensive eatables — why do you order them if you cannot afford them? — they would comment). So even if they want to sell it with a 100% profit margin, a pizza shouldn’t cost more than Rs.40.
Similarly, a medium-sized milkshake costs somewhere between Rs.40-50. We can get 3 liters of milk in that much money.
Some people would argue that they charge so much for the outlets and the kind of ambience they want to maintain. Fine then, but what about people who order from home or buy from the window? They are not using the outlet’s space. They just buy and go away.
I think these food companies are big swindlers and something should be done. If not legally, then socially. We should not visit their outlets, or at least haggle with them the way we haggle with the neighborhood sabjiwala.
Recently I was telling Alka that gradually I’m getting disinterested in getting lessons from my guruji (read about him in part 1). It’s not that I’m getting disinterested in music; in fact the way I practice these days, I have never practiced so much in the past and if I had, my life story would have been different (for better, for worse, who knows).
I attribute his musical failure (failure is a subjective expression but this is how he defines his present disposition) to the way he treats music. It seems he is devoted, but he is not. It seems he loves music, but he does not. It seems he has profound knowledge of music, which he does. This is the only reason he is still teaching me. I keep telling myself that I need to focus on what I want to learn, and in that sphere he surely delivers. He’s not my ideal human being, but he knows what I want to learn, and he loves to teach me, as I can observe the glow in his eyes when I can sing a bandish to his satisfaction.
He often tells me that the notes are like wild stallions. It takes immense effort and dedication to tame them, but once you have tamed them, you can make them gallop or run in whichever direction, in whatever way. He knows when I’m wrong and rarely lets me get away with a wrong note and this is what I like. I need this perfection.
Presently I’m neither devoted nor dedicated and I realize that with massive pangs of guilt sometimes. For instance, it’s been more than four months, and I can’t even sing the seven basic notes without faltering. What makes the matters worse is, he has highlighted the errors in the songs I previously used to sing with great comfort and I have learned enough to detect where/when I sing a wrong note. So I cannot even sing the songs I love to sing. The desperation is augmented due to this.
Without resorting to hyperbole, my guruji is a genius in his own right. It’s amazing how he has learned so much, practically as well theoretically, while doing a fulltime job and raising a semi-urban family, and on top of that, coming from a background like that of Haryana. His promotion played a big part in curbing his musical forays. Just when he had started composing music for the state owned TV broadcaster, Doordarshan, he was promoted to the post of director and transferred to another state. For fifteen years he dabbled with files and other administrative paraphernalia. Reminds me of Kafka. Kafka did a job during the day and wrote during the night. I have no idea why my guruji wasn’t more persistent if he really liked music so much. He rues that his promotion shattered his ambition.
His promotion may have played an important part, but I think it was also his attitude that must have created hurdles for him. He has a big ego. I think ego is a useless and self-destructive emotion. He sees people in different lights and shades. He cannot accept people telling him what to do and how to do. Take for instance his schedule, which he never sticks to.
Once he was complaining that some of his students say he doesn’t come on time. “I’m nobody’s slave. I’ll go whenever I can, or whenever I feel like. If they don’t want to learn, they can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”
I don’t think in today’s scenario it is the done thing. When he says he’s going to take my class at eleven in the morning, I wait for him. Sometimes I re-schedule my work so that I can accommodate his schedule. Still, he is either half-an-hour early, or two hours late and for no apparent reason. I work from home so I can very easily re-schedule (although once I had to turn him back because I was chatting with an overseas client), but most people find it highly inconvenient. Being passionate is fine, but one should respect the other’s time.
Another thing is he never tries to be melodic. He becomes emotional, but he is so sure of his grasp over the notes that he sings them with an imbued ruthlessness. It sounds crass sometimes. He even sings while he is eating something, and unless I turn my head away in time, I can see the masticated eatables lurking within his teeth and on his tongue in their full glory; I find this disgusting.
Of late he has started this phrase: “Randis sing this type of songs.” Randi is a derogatory term used to address a female who sings as well as works as a prostitute.
When I talked about an established female singer and about her style of singing he said, “Oh, she is a mere laundi,” which, again is a derogatory term for a female singer who also works as a prostitute. I find such references very offending and they consequently make me respect him less. In order to learn from him properly, I need to respect him because even though I’m not yet a master of my art, I respect my art, and I respect people associated with it, even if they are prostitutes.
These are small things, but they are all adding up, and somewhere, I think they have affected his life as a musician. Believe it or not, if you are negative about other people and with ideologies that do not tally with yours, it begins to take it its toll. A bombastic person can be a good musician, but can never be a successful musician. He perhaps gets a high by bringing people down in his own tiny world.
I can do three things. I can ignore the things I don’t approve of, mind my own business and keep learning what I can learn from him; try to change him by gradually, routinely conveying my thoughts; stop learning from him.
I have ruled out the third option because I do want to learn from him and it will be difficult to get a teacher so learned. At seventy he still wants to make it big and this is a positive sign for me. At least he hasn’t allowed his senescence to take over his desire to be recognized. I cannot ignore his crassness because I cannot be nonchalant about someone who is teaching me how to sing. So the only option that is left for me is to change him a bit. I have never, ever tried to change anybody. Advise, yes, but change, no. But this time I think, if I want to keep learning from him, I’m going to have to make him see things in a different perspective.
It’s not funny, but I didn’t know he was alive. I thought he died long time back. In college I studied English literature as a subsidiary subject and perhaps in the second year we had Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The entire class had no interest in the book as we were either concerned about our main subject — mathematics — or other activities. Then our teacher told us he once married Marilyn Monroe and we all got interested. I didn’t find the play engaging. May be I couldn’t relate to it.
You can read more about this news here.
This is a really stupid review of Bride and Prejudice. The movie is not good I must admit, especially after seeing Chadha’s Bend It Like Bekham but this reviewer sounds nasty just for the heck of it. Just sample the beginning:
The pitch meeting for the new British movie “Bride and Prejudice” must have been a killer: “Jane Austen’s novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ - you know, the dead chick that wrote that Gwyneth Paltrow movie ‘Enya,’ ‘Emma,’ whatever - done like a Bollywood musical, only shorter.”
This amply tells you with what mentality the reviewer has initiated the review. I wonder how such inept writers get published in publications like these.
There was time I used to love horror movies. I still find them fascinating but most of the horror movies produced now are tedious repetitions. The Hollywood has totally squeezed horror out of the genre by excessively displaying blood and gore. They incite disgust and repulsion instead of fear.
To an extent I like reading/writing horror stories too. I have written many horror stories. The last one I wrote was…damn it! I can’t find it neither in the laptop nor the PC :-(. I sent it somewhere as a competition entry but didn’t get any prize.
We have this book called The Giant Book of Terror which is an anthology of some excellently written horror stories. There is a story I like the most but I don’t remember the title (and the book is stacked somewhere deep in the cabinet). It’s about a family that is driving to visit a beach area where they used to come to spend their vacations. The whole world — although they think that like them, some people are still left — has been taken over by some alien bugs that use humans as hosts.
They infect anybody who comes in their contact. Their presence is all-pervasive: even in the voice the radio host.
The idea of alien bugs invading earth is not a new concept — I have seen it many times in the movies. The horror part is the family that goes through the transition: from hope to hopelessness. The horror is in the melancholy of the narration.
They go to the beach and the town adjacent to it has already died. They visit the empty hotel and even the room they used to stay. Every nook and corner of the past is deserted. The horror in the story is the realization of beautiful time that is never going to come back. The horror of hopelessness is the profoundest horror one can experience. Eventually, amidst great grief they accept that nobody has been left unaffected. Very quietly husband and wife decide that their family would not become hosts to those parasites. They stop their station wagon somewhere. The husband tells their eldest son who is seven years old that they would go on a walk and talk for a while. They talk about the past…how beautiful it was and what all possibilities awaited them in the future. While the kid is excitedly talking about all he wants to talk about, the husband shoots him in the head and there is a loud bang. He knows that the bang must have been heard by the bugs. When he returns to the station wagon his wife is waiting there with an expressionless face clutching a few-month-old baby. They look at each other. They know that now it’s their turn. The story ends here.
Day before yesterday we saw Page 3…a movie that chronicles the artificial lifestyles of page 3 frequenters. Near the climax of the movie, the protagonist, who is a journalist, covers a police raid. They arrest a big business tycoon having group sex with small children. As it normally happens, the tycoon not only manages to get himself released, he also gets the publication of the coverage stopped. He also gets the journalist fired.
Although this was a movie, such things happen on a daily basis. Blogs can be potent tools in the hands of such journalists whose work is curtailed by powerful politicians and business people. Had that journalist been publishing a blog, she could have published the photographs there with all textual details, and that too without the editing scissors.
Recently a blogger cost a locks company (Kryptonite) millions of dollars by demonstrating on his blog how the lock can be opened by simply using a pen (read the story here). Had this company been maintain a PR blog, much of the damage could have been contained.
Intellectuals (if they can be called so) should be the conscience of civilization, and not a nuisance. It seems ignoring Islamic fundamentalism has become a fashion amongst them. To protest against the recent shooting of SAR Geelani by unknown gunmen, a few human rights activists and intellectuals got together in the capital. Multiple protests were staged immediately after the news of the shooting. Geelani was one of the four accused convicted and sentenced to death by a trial court on December 16, 2002, for terror attack on Parliament on December 13 the previous year but he was acquitted due to lack of evidence.
As an action there is nothing wrong in getting together and protesting if there is a human rights violation. In fact this indicates a healthy and vibrant democracy where people are aware of their rights and can take a stand. If the police is involved in the shooting, then the guilty cops should be punished…but there is this strange, vicious pattern in all this. I never see these human rights activists protesting against terrorist acts. How many of them hit the streets when children were taken hostage by Chechen terrorists? Or when India had to release dreaded terrorists to get the hijacked plane released in Kandahar? Why don’t pictures of slain journalists posted on fundamentalist websites prompt these human rights activists to get together and organize candle light marches? Why is it only when a suspected terrorist is “tortured” by the state that they feel a need to demonstrate their social conscious? Even people like Chomsky are not immune to this tendency to continuously ignore Islamic terrorism (well, he blames America for inciting terrorism, which, to an extent is true but in totality is not true — the Islamic fundamentalists have a problem with the world in general). Read his articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and nowhere you’ll see him berating terrorist attacks by the organizations like Hamas. On the other hand he’s full of chastisements against the Israeli government.
The rot is not only limited to Islamic fundamentalism. Last year in India, human rights activists protested against the hanging of a man who had raped and then murdered a minor girl. The appalling issue was not their view on death sentence in general…they were actually trying to portray the man as a victim of state injustice. It was unbelievable. These human rights activists never protested when the minor girl was raped and murdered.
There has to be a balance somewhere. Social and political activism should stem forth from truth and not from personal vanities, prejudices and political correctness. I have no problem with people getting together to protest against the shooting of an innocent citizen — let there be thousands of such protests — but there let there be protests when fundamentalists strike and kill innocent citizens.
I‘ve been sick again (twice in two months) and when I’m sick glimpses of enlightenment hit me like tiny pulsars. The difference this time is that I’m back working in just two days. A little dizzy, but all senses alert and spirits up. In these successive sicknesses I’ve drawn three conclusions:
- Be as productive as you can be when you are hail and hearty
- Organize yourself
- Taking long-term care of your health is much, much more important than meeting the project deadline
In the morning I came across this article regarding a person who lead a quintessential jet-set life. He helped companies be successful and made a mess of his own life. It’s a strange coincidence that after recovering this is the first thing I read.
My guruji (my music teacher) scares me sometimes. His is exactly the old age I never want to reach. In the tears that often swell within his eyelids when he sings one of his favorite compositions I can see a story of shattered dreams. It seems music was his life but he could never live that life. Today he is totally unsatisfied and irrevocably sad. The way I live my life, sometimes I see myself in him.
He has great talent, and that is why I’m learning from him, and that is why I’m scared of the stage he is at.
What astounds me is his knowledge, both technical and theoretical. There is no raga he doesn’t know. Ask him the notes, the aroh (ascent and the avaroh (descent) of any raga and he knows them by heart. He never falters while traversing through the intricate lanes of the thatas and their derivative ragas. When he sings, you can hear every single note, clearly pronounced, even the mudkis he has been trying to teach me for the past couple of months (unsuccessfully!).
Sadly, he is the crassest singer I have ever listened to. You really have to wade through the roughness to get to the core of his performance. Sometimes it seems he has no aesthetical respect for music. He is more concerned about the technical and the theoretical aspect. What I believe is, music is 5% knowledge, and 95% “you”. He says every note should be sung with immense confidence. He applies so much force that every note sometimes explodes from his mouth and soon it is reduced to a melodic cacophony I believe every note should be sung with confidence, and with lots of feeling. I think what you feel is the real soul of your music.
He gave up on his singing early in his life when somewhere he realized he couldn’t reach certain notes. He devoted more and more time to learning music rather than practicing music. The way he talks sometimes, he had big dreams — he still has them but in the hopeless sense. He doesn’t want to swim, and he doesn’t want to drown. There is a flicker of a lost dream that brings a wayward sparkle in his eyes often that reality of age very soon transforms into tears. He is 70, I guess.
I’ll write more about him in my next post.
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