Raaleti poola raagalu

The chills haven’t quite left Delhi yet. I wasn’t feeling too clever, so I picked out a shawl to wrap around me this afternoon. An off-white one with a blue edge that always makes me feel special and cosy. A lingering sense of being sorry for oneself and a shawl – the connection was inevitable.





And just to have this superb song of Veturi’s on hand whenever I need it:

Aamani paadave hayiga
Moogavai poku ee vela
Raaleti poola raagalato
Pooseti poola gandhalato
Manchu taaki koyila
Mounamaina velala… aamani paadave hayiga

Vayassu lo vasantame ushassula jwalinchaga
Manassu lo niraasale ranchinchele mareechika
Padaala na yada swarala sampada
Tarala na katha kshanalave kada
Gatinchi povu gaadha nenani…
Aamani paadave haayigaa...

Sukaalato pikaalato dhwaninchinaa madhodayam
Divi bhuvi kalaa nizam sprusinchina mahodayam
Maro prapanchame marinta cheruvai
Nivaali korinaa ugaadi velalo
Gatinchi povu gaadha nenani…
Aamani paadave haayigaa…

Incidentally, what does ‘nivaLi’ mean, does anyone know?

Vadatu samskritam

Australopithecus was tagged a funny tag. The task was "to get the 6th picture from your 6th folder and to tell its story". Hah, I thought, my pictures are all in one sub-sub-sub-folder, so what is one to do if the sixth folder I open doesn't have pictures? Vela moment, I try it. And there is a jpeg image:


Some 6-7 years ago, I attended a course in Spoken Sanskrit. It was wonderful—very empowering. Unfortunately, the teacher dawdled over the easy initial part, then found himself short of time, so rushed through the more complicated syllabus at breakneck speed. It left a very incomplete feeling and I've always intended to refresh what I'd learnt, pore over the books and teach myself a bit more thoroughly. This sixth folder was full of scanned pages from a textbook I'd found online.

Dararein Dararein

[Psst. SPOILER]


Dilli 6 yesterday. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, it is confirmed, cannot hold a steady tone. Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) comes to Delhi to drop off his grandmother and discovers old Delhi. We see the scenes over his shoulder, sometimes unnecessarily explicated by his narration, and the film team manages to build considerable ambience. How authentic I cannot tell, but it holds. The vignettes are excellent; there are nice characterisations and some rather intuitive actors. Waheeda Rehman is a stalwart; Pavan Malhotra, Sheeba Chadda (who’s doing some nice work – I loved her performance in Luck by Chance) and Divya Dutta all etch their presence. Sonam Kapoor too fits in, even if her animation is much too filmi. [Incidentally, how long do we worship this Mani Ratnam creation, the carefree young girl who dances in the rain and breaks into abandoned jigs on railway stations? She’s getting very boring]. I liked the colour and the vibrancy of Ramlila leitmotif, the dynamics of these small characters, their stories… most of it, most of it. There is no reason why all this couldn’t have been left that way—filmmakers do feel able, even within Bollywood, to observe to no specific end. The Roshan character could’ve gone back to America, wiping off possibly a manly tear, and that would have been that.

Mehra of course isn’t happy with that. He must have an Ending, a bit of a shoo-sha—he must attempt to force-weave his threads, such as they are. Suddenly happy-happy people turn into unreasonable monsters and we get riots, what the film calls ‘pravachans’ on Aham Brahmasmi, that are, in the event, ineffectual. Then we get a slice of Amitabh Bachchan playing Dumbledore. By now it is clear that the storyteller has indeed run out of ideas on how to END this thing. The audience doesn’t care one way or the other—if they’re still seated it’s out of sheer manners.

I’m glad I did though, because the end credits were good. Underscoring ‘the god is in us’ idea, the temple now has a small grubby mirror hung up by a tree. Each character comes up and reacts to his or her reflection, and some of these were very well done. Everyone precedes poor Abhishek Bachchan in this sequence, setting some rather good standards. So he doesn’t even try—he smirks, pretty much like he always does, does a small ‘Me dude, You dude’ type thingy and fades away. He cannot act, paapa.

===

Links to previous posts: my reaction to Rang de Basanti and its music.

I chose love, and I'm here

Wasn’t Rahman cool at the Oscars? Nice punchy speech too—these Tamil industry walas know how to deliver an exit line.

Hear hear

Here.

Ay, there's the rab!

In which I react to Rab ne bana di jodi. So SPOILER ALERT.

***

When I was a child, I was given a book called Thumbelina. The story of a thumb-sized girl and her adventures. There is a mole in the story: big, fat, ugly. Also rich and wanting to marry her. Hemmed in, Thumbelina is forced to contemplate marriage with him, till she escapes and meets a prince whom she falls in love with.

I hated the mole. Not for being ugly or rich or cruel, but for wanting to marry a girl against her will, in spite of her will. Inarticulately, even as a child, I was disgusted with such coercion that is not quite rape but something a little more insidious, equally vile.

Shahrukh Khan’s character Surinder in Rab ne bana di jodi is that mole. A small ‘ordinary’ man, a mofussil babu, oiled, slicked-back hair, ghonchu clothes and a very unbecoming moustache. He marries pretty, vivacious ‘Taaniji’ in emergency circumstances – she must, as her fiancé and father have died in quick succession; he wants to.

Taani tries rather gallantly to come to terms with her new circumstances. Her new husband is nice – leaves her alone for the most part and demands very little from her. He then senses she needs a little more excitement and deceives her by playing another man, ‘Raj’ – a younger, more vibrant man, more audacious, more fashionable, more expressive, more acceptable. But even as he plays this other role, he runs into a contradiction within himself. He wants her to love Surinder not Raj. Mind, he will do nothing to win her love – not throw in sparkling conversation, not dress less dowdily, not be more loving; he will merely sit mutely, chewing his food across the table from her every night, loving her in a smug, self-righteous way, willing her to choose him.

She does eventually – for a reason more stupid and facile than many that Bollywood routinely uses to advance its plots. She does because she wants to see ‘rab’ in someone, sends up a prayer and opens her eyes to see her husband walking towards her in out-of-focus, slow-motion. And presumably because heroines in Bollywood movies do not normally leave husbands who don’t attract them for men that do. Or perhaps because all a woman ever wants (as Taani says, speaking for all of us) is a man to love her ‘beintehaa’. By this illumination, what I am to do with my ever-growing scroll of ‘What-I-Want-In-A-Man,’ I don’t know. Or maybe, just maybe, because Aditya Chopra thought he had a title he liked and thought up a silly story to fit it.

The most perturbing aspect came with the end credits. A series of snapshots of the couple’s honeymoon in Japan – Taaniji (she is still Taaniji) is with Surinder, and there is no sign of Raj. She is smiling hugely, affectionate, clinging to her bashful, mustachioed and badly-dressed husband, and, Suri’s voiceover hints coyly, there is sex involved. In short, she is broken in.

I find myself puzzled at Aditya Chopra. Why de-sex, so de-glamourise your hero? To what end? Why hold the mundane over the exciting? Why root for blah? Was this or was this not the man who tortured Esha Deol and Aishwarya Rai into skeletal forms, so they could enhance movies from his stable? Why speak then for the sort of middle class Indian man who won’t step up to his wife, but expects her to step down to him?

To add insult to injury, Chopra makes a bad masala movie. The songs are horribly treated, all the basics of ‘build-up’ lie by the side, there is no chemistry, no attempt at chemistry. Very weak and so annoying.

The old man and the sea...

In today's Deccan Chronicle.

Camelicious

More on Pushkar...

+++

Pushkar came with a lot of hype. The biggest camel fair in the world, untold lakhs of visitors, the colour, the dust, the melee... I was not going to the mela, which took place 5-13 November, but my visit would overlap the last day and some of the excitement rubbed off.

On the road, even several kilometres short of my destination, the fair made itself felt. Long trains of camels blocked traffic, bought for no doubt handsome sums of money and being led to their new homes. As we neared the town, the madness started to show. Buses, jeeps and cars roared by us, raising dust and chock-a-block with people—turbaned men sat on the roofs, adventurous lads perilously hanging on to a foothold, and only slightly more safely seated, women wearing colourful saris, ghoonghats and huge smiles, clearly having the time of their lives. Road after road into the town was shut, or converted temporarily into oneways. As we stopped to seek new directions, now that the old ones had fallen through, we were yelled at by policemen: “Chalo, chalte raho! Hamari vyavastha kharaab hoti hai.”

Hungry, tired, grumpy and rather grimy, we reached the resort eventually. It took a vigorous wash, lunch and a cup of tea to brace us for another dive into the crowd. But we were on foot now and, as we walked to the centre, very much mainstreamed. Some parties were leaving—bearing bags of many shapes and sizes, invariably chomping on a last-minute purchase of ganna. I also found very quickly what the single most-bought item of the fair must have been: a handmade garden rake with long handle and smooth stylishly curved bamboo fingers. I also discovered what the colour of the season was for turbans—a nice striking fluorescent green.

The mela grounds were now slightly depleted, for the camel trading is most frenetic during the first three days. But dromedaries still stood tethered, as well as horses. Campfires had kettles on and men sat in the huddles so evocative of Rajasthan. A camel is judged on many parameters, I discovered. The eyes must be large, but the face small. Big teeth but small face. Long, thick neck, short tail. Small genitals. One at this fair would’ve cost on average Rs 18,000-20,000. The quality camels of Jaisalmer cost up to Rs 60,000.

Hawkers, food, milling crowds—it was a first-rate mela. But distressing too, because police loudspeakers were incessant in their announcements of missing children. One in particular came across over and over, the policeman sounding increasingly harried—an unclaimed child of three or four who’d been in the makeshift chowk for over five hours, crying, his heart fit to break.

The real action, however, was at the lake this day. The Karthik Poornima is when the moon turns into amrit and descends into the lake. In the best tradition, a dip washes your sins away. About two lakh people were there, we were told later.

The next day, the people had magically disappeared. Hung-over, bleary-eyed and anti-climaxed, Pushkar was left to clean up after the party.

Ajmer and Pushkar

Within the space of a month, I have succeeded with two much desired pilgrimages—the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin and Ajmer Shareef. I feel lucky and it feels very significant to me. How, I don't know. Just significant.

Both were good experiences, somewhat more cultural than spiritual, but good.

***

I was hampered in Pushkar/Ajmer by my companions. It was work, they were professional travel escorts and they couldn't help it. My weakness, I think. When I'm with people, any single other human being, no matter what their capacity—driver, guide or escort... I tune in, or try to be in a place where mutual access of thought is possible. I cannot cut them off, cut myself off from them, ruthlessly staying in my own mental space, pursuing my own train of thought. Their fault also. They were unprofessional, opinionated, pushy... and ordinary.

***

At the dargah, however, it was far too important for me, the haazri, and I did retreat into myself. Qawwalis were sung in one corner, another troupe sang in worship in another part. People milled around, moving into the shrine, sitting about gossiping. Around the musicians, people sat, listened, left some small notes and, when they felt like it, went away. Living music. The qawwali as it is at its core.

My guide annoyed me considerably here. 'Are they singing well?' he asked me. 'Sur mein to ga rahen hai,' I said. After all, I wasn't about to compare these singing parties to the King and his set. 'Actually,' he went on, leaning conspiratorially, 'these people are nothing more than beggars.'

***

It is curious though that such a holy place should be subject to such frenetic money-grabbing. 'Khwaja ki amanat Khwaja ko de do'... says one man inside the shrine imperiously, repeatedly. ख्वाजा की अमानत है क्या? सभी कुछ!

I learnt a new word— 'lapka', a tout. Lapkaism is rampant in Ajmer and Pushkar, apparently. Cars with foreigners particularly are chased on bikes, pressured to go this hotel, or that guide. I heard tell of one woman, an NRI, who came to Pushkar recently. The pujari whose hands she fell into assured her her problems were because her father's soul was tormented. One thing led to another and before she knew it she had performed a series of rituals that set her back by Rs 25,000.

Under siege

Some of you know this already. When I have something on my mind, it tends to show. I am beset by mice in the office. Small ones, I admit; cute even, if viewed in a dispassionate, distant way but they're destroying my peace. I daren't slip into deep concentration, because the minute I do, one will shoot out from under my chair, or come right up to me, unseen. At other times, I jump at all moving things—it's wearing.

They scurry around at will. I daren't leave off footwear and sit with my feet up because the once I did that, one came round on top of the desk, compromising my escape plan severely.
For some reason, wearing socks helps ease my jumpiness. They weren't around for two days before this and I relaxed, assuming my complaints to the office manager had worked, that they must've de-rodented the place. Not so. No fewer than three sightings yesterday.

But I'm getting better. Loud throat-hurting shrieks have simmered down to strangled gasps and loud expletives. Soon I shall be swinging them about by the tail.

What is the up

Sheetal's laptop is in danger of 'imminent failure'.
Sheetal is terrified.
Sheetal has researched: it is not a crank alarm.
Sheetal needs to back up a) hard drive, b) personal files.
Sheetal needs a lot of DVDs.
Sheetal then must put machine through a repair process, which might work or not.
Sheetal has no peace till she does this.
Sheetal did not need this.

Dhoni again

Peter Roebuck appraises the next leader of Indian cricket.

Roebuck says Dhoni is not a philosopher. But I think he is. His commitment and his detachment are so exquisitely balanced, he might have been Partha once, listening intently to a sermon from his charioteer.