Of Lost Wax and Found Beauty

I was a mere five hour drive away from Madras and yet I felt as if I had time-traveled into another world and era, to a place where South India, as I saw it in my mind’s eye, still survived, gentle, calm, awash in devotion and tradition. I was in and around Thanjavur and the Kaveri River delta, and why was it a surprise that I felt this way, because life here seems to belong to another age, to move to a different rhythm. This land, this river, this city, these environs, had, for several centuries, been the jewel in the crown of the great Chola Empire. The winds of history have tempered its eminence, and this region is now quietly content to lie in fame’s shadow, to surrender its position of celebrity to the younger, brasher, livelier, more prominent and influential seat of authority to the north, Madras.

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Strange Bedfellows

I have observed the fusion of Carnatic music with many things: Hindustani music, Jazz, Bollywood, Pop and Rap, but a few days back I witnessed its foray into an unlikely arena: athletics. I listened, by turns enthralled, excited, puzzled, annoyed, distressed and vexed, as the music went through bouts of wrestling, racing, jumping and gymnastic contortions, a veritable Olympic multi-event that shook the very foundations of Carnatic music and propelled it into a brave new world.

More....http://kaminidandapani.typepad.com/my_weblog/2013/08/strange-bedfellows.html

A Tree in the Forest

One day, navigating the traffic-choked madness of Lattice Bridge Road, he tells me that it is his life's dream to get his boy into XYZ School. All problems would cease, he told me, his voice suffused with wistful longing, and life would shine brightly forever after, if he could, somehow, anyhow, get his son in there. For G, XYZ School is the portal to a world that he and his forebears before him couldn’t, and perhaps didn’t, ever dream of. A world with an endless series of portals opening out into a universe of infinite possibilities. So that his child might step into that world, G tells me he will work around the clock, deny himself even the tiniest of pleasures, tighten the belt still further, do whatever he can to somehow scrape together the money for the tuition. Because it will all be worth it in the end.
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Meanwhile, in a Small Sliver of South India...

Last evening, my husband and I were at the Asia Society in New York, to attend a reading and performance by William Dalrymple and Vidya Shah and her orchestra. This event was arranged in conjunction with the Society’s current exhibit on Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857. The evening was, for the most part, interesting and entertaining. Dalrymple’s narrative, drawn largely from his book, The Last Mughal, was studded with entertaining anecdotes that brought his characters to life. Vidya Shah complemented and supplemented his stories with songs and poetry from the great and little-known poets and songsters of that era.
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The Highway Poet

Somewhere down the serpentine labyrinth that is the organization chart of the National Highways Authority of India is a little box that is an offshoot of the Department of Highway Safety. This box is the proud bearer of the title “Couplets and Proverbs Division (L&T K-W)”. It has a single employee, a long-haired, dreamy-eyed, thickly bespectacled youth, the nephew of the Chairman of the Department of Highway Safety (S-India). This young lad, who had been a gentle, sweet-natured child, the kind parents pointed out to their boisterous offspring as a shining example of what they ought to be like, created a major commotion in his family when he declared that he wanted to study Literature in college.
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A Few Thousand Words

Flanked by its belt of defensive jungles is that city
Whose doors are never closed to those who seek the prize
Lovely like the pericarp of the many-petalled lotus
The navel of the dark-hued Lord.....

'Tis the Witching Hour of Night

......They were duly surprised - and suitably impressed - when I announced, on a recent Saturday, that I was going to attend part of an all-night concert. At 2am, the dark heart of the witching hour. That I was not so uncool, after all. That there was yet hope that I might be transformed into one of those ultra-hip New Yorkers who teeter about in impossibly tight clothes and high heels. Read more here

A Trip Down Memory Lane

My life is a strange paradox. On the one hand, I am gloriously, happily busy, doing things that I love, but, on the other hand, my laziness and disorganization have reached record heights. Ideas for new posts are scribbled on bits of paper that vanish without a trace. What seemed like a brilliant idea while drifting off into dreamland feels tame and lame in the harsh light of day. An overflowing pile of unwashed clothes beckons, demanding action, as does an empty pantry. There is family to tend to, friends to catch up with. Spring - beguiling and fickle, garbed in bright, sun-splashed colors one day, in damp, sullen gray the next - is knocking at my window, urging me outdoors.

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Nurturing Nature

.....And in-between the two is a lovely, secluded valley, an ecological paradise that teems with a staggering variety of birds, butterflies and insects and a mind-blowing array of animals including elephants, bison, wild boar, sloth bears, leopards, tigers, and the rare, indigenous Nilgiri Tahr and Nilgiri Langur. There is an equally stunning diversity of trees that form the mixed deciduous forest all around, interspersed with dense bamboo groves and open grassland. More...

Sleepytime Stories

At 9pm on most days I am likely to be eyeing the finish line of a long day - long, alas, usually in hours, not on things achieved. Make it 9pm on a frigid February weeknight in New York, and that likelihood turns into a certainty. And yet, there I was just yesterday, out in the West Village of Manhattan, my bedtime a distant prospect, bundled up against the arctic wind, trying to make sense of a crudely hand-drawn map.

The Cook: Part 1

Shankari Mani had been married for 31 years. Most of those years had been lived in an independent house on a tree-lined street that overlooked a park in Sivaganga Colony. At the time of her marriage, she was a qualified chartered accountant, an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer, a decent club-level tennis player, a barely tolerable singer and a terrible cook.

This is part one of the story. Parts 2 and 3 are also up.
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Infinite Beauty

On the last Tuesday of January 1913, on a clear, cold winter’s morning in Cambridge University in England, a 35 year old mathematician of rapidly growing fame and esteem opened a letter. The letter, thick and unwieldy, bore the grime and wear-and-tear of a long journey, and a ragged line of stamps, unfamiliar and exotic. It started with the words, “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum............” More

Love Thy Neighbour

.... just yesterday, I discovered a - if you will pardon the geographical metaphor - whole new continent, a New World that was not new at all, but one that had developed and bloomed over several centuries, unbeknownst to me, a neighbor, yet a stranger. This is the world of Christian Carnatic music. More

I Fleetly Flee I Fly....

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn goodbye.....Only for several weeks, dear readers. I will be away for an extended period of time this time, back in Croatia again, to teach once more at the International Vocal Arts Workshop.

The last (and first) time I went there, two years ago, I had no idea what to expect. I was filled with the excitement and anticipation that come before an adventure that is a glorious mystery, a journey into uncharted waters. I was nervous, and terrified that I would not live up to what was expected of me, that I would not enjoy myself, that I would spend my days wondering, "what am I doing here?"

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Another Time, Another Place

Many moons ago, in a now nostalgically-remembered era when cell phones and iPods were a rarity, when people wrote and spoke in full sentences and looked each other in the eye, when food was merely food, when men and women could agree to disagree politely without shouting each other down and when human beings walked around being themselves and were not defined by a thicket of labels, in that long-ago time, I was a pawn in a corporate American arena. More....

The Street Wall Journal

Then there were the movie posters, many that bordered on the obscene, with buxom, doe-eyed heroines with outlandish monikers like Silk Smitha (she of the Thundering Thighs), Nylon Nalini, Polyester Padmini and poor, plain Cotton Kamakshi. Cutouts, some almost as high as a hundred feet, soared to the skies with movie heroes and political leaders (always only the ones in power) swaying precariously from their perches, a perfect symbol of their unstable, hanging-by-a-thread status. Pimples? Piles? Fistula? Sleeplessness? Toothache? The walls of Madras pointed you to the people who could help. More.....

A Junkie and a Monkey

Here is the Ramayana on drugs. It is a far cry from the black and white world of the evil Ravana and the squeaky-clean Rama, the pious Sita and loyal Hanuman. A Ramayana where a lustful Ravana, burned out on angel dust, kidnaps Sita, his mind clouded over by passion and desire. Where Rama and Lakshmana, wandering, frustrated and helpless up and down India looking for Sita, dull their pain with endless joints and pipes. And then Hanuman enters the story, a "hardcore ex-con tattooed" Hanuman who rallies his drugged-out monkey army with a big, happy substance abuse recovery-house reunion. What follows is a war - of monkeys and junkies, everybody high, everybody in a fog, in a fuddle, on cocaine, on LSD, a tangled disarray of tarnished minds and bodies. A war of relapsed junkies, and only Hanuman has the cure: the Sanjeevani herb. More

Bali: In the Island of the Gods

It is this last one, Bali, that I was privileged to visit recently. I have long wanted to go to Bali, ever since my father traveled there, almost three decades ago, and came back raving about this lovely little island with its soaring volcanoes and silent, dark lakes, the fertile, sun-splashed rice fields and the lush forests alive with the sounds of gibbering monkeys, the famous beaches and beautiful women. But what attracted him the most were the temples that graced every part of the island - on the roadsides, by the sea, in rice fields, next to rivers, in caves - many of them little more than simple shrines, adorned with a humble offering of freshly-plucked flowers and a few grains of rice. The people, he said, were gentle and always smiling, following rituals, practices and a way of life that seemed timeless, evergreen. I was smitten. More....

Vignettes from Sivaganga Colony

Early every morning, just when Sivaganga Colony is stirring awake, the peace and quiet are shattered by a raucous cry that reverberates through its streets. It sounds like the anguished wail of some unidentifiable animal, but it galvanizes the housewives into action. More...

The Lady of Many Smiles

Let us reflect for a moment on the lot of a widow in India in the 1930s. There were few worse fates that could befall a woman at that time. It was a form of living hell, a mockery of a life lived in the shadows, one of shame, guilt, sorrow and humiliation, utterly stripped of dignity and joy. The widow was shorn of all adornment and color, and had to dress in old rags, without even a blouse to protect her modesty. Her hair, that symbol of beauty and luxuriance, was shaven off, roughly and crudely. She had to depend - for food, shelter, just the basics - on the usually undependable and non-existent kindness of family members. She was looked down upon as the harbinger of bad luck, a dark cloud, ominous and inauspicious, choked by the miasmic vapors of calamity and doom. She was considered lucky just to be alive.