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Letter from Cary, North Carolina
July 20, 2009
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Parvati, Chola bronze, 10-12 c., Tamilnadu |
Forty years ago today, I was sixteen and in boarding school in Delhi. We were allowed to stay up late into the night to listen to the Voice of America broadcast the first words from the Moon. Ever since I have been in awe of American technology, and my awe has only deepened with the Voyager, the Hubble, the Mars, and the Cassini-Huygens missions.
We had a TV station in Delhi back then in 1969. It was set up in 1967 if I remember right. The news anchor was the very lovely Salma Siddiqui, one of the most attractive women I have ever had the pleasure of shaking hands with. I have even kissed her, you would be surprised to learn, if only in my adolescent fancy. I once acted in a government family planning ad for TV. That was how I got
to meet Ms. Siddiqui. I remember her silk saree. I remember the color and the pattern. I remember her perfume. I remember her hands. And I remember that I was so awestruck that no words emerged from my mouth when I was face to face with her. This was well before Sanjay and Indira Gandhi gave up on such ads and hatched their fine scheme for cutting off people's
balls.
We had one TV set in the school library which was kept safe in a tall cabinet and well under lock and key, but there was no international TV hookup back then. Nevertheless the radio was more than sufficient to impart to us all the momentousness of the event.
Chandrayaan has been in Moon orbit for a few months now and it carries high-resolution cameras, but I have yet to see a single picture from Chandrayaan. The official Chandrayaan site (http://www.isro.org/chandrayaan) is a most dismal affair. It carries a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, including some bullshit
quote from the Rig Veda, but no pictures! Video and pictures from the Japanese and the Chinese moon missions are easy to find on the web, but as for ISRO, they may as well have sent a shoebox to orbit the Moon. What a waste!
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Parvati, Chola bronze, 10-12 c., Tamilnadu |
Of the three peach trees in our front yard, one has been truly prolific, yielding some 200 fruit. Abha baked a Peach Cobbler and it is the most magnificent dessert I have ever had. We finished the last of it today. Now I'll have to persuade her to bake us another which she is reluctant about because of my sugar and cholesterol. Earlier, a couple of months back, we had a bumper crop of mulberries,
shahtoot, which we plucked and ate standing right under the tree, and some of my shirts bear testimony to this date. Teetee has missed out on the peaches because he is in New Jersey at his mausi's. His hockey team is struggling on without him but he is too busy fraternizing with his cousins to express even a shred of remorse. How much I miss him! He's my buddy.
The four of us drove up to Tenafly, NJ, a few weeks back. Bui had to go through a three-day orientation at NYU. NYU is not a university like any other I have seen. It has no campus to speak of. Just a bunch of buildings spread out all over Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. You see the most fantastic people on the street. It's like another world altogether. She'll be living in a coed dorm.
When we got back, one evening, at the dining table, I told her that I need to talk to her about sex and drugs some day before she leaves. Both mother and daughter laughed at me. But I am serious and I have plenty to say. A little discouraged by their reaction, I am wondering if I might be better off writing an essay on the subject, my advice to a young lady on her way to college, then mailing
it to them. One might escape at the dining table but one can't escape an essay in gmail.
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Maithuna, Ferruginous stone, 12 c., Orissa |
Also while in New York I got to see another lovely lady I have been deeply in love with, ever since I first set eyes on her. I look her up invariably, always when in NYC. She lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the Chola Parvati, a bronze from Tamilnadu back in the 10th to 12th centuries. It's the loveliest statue I have ever seen. The artist or artists responsible for her have
botched up her left arm, but other than that she is just plain perfect. I will send in some pictures of her in a few days. She looks like she will move any minute and her left hip will fall and her right hip rise. Another statue I love is sculpted in ferruginous stone and comes to us from Orissa back in the 12th century. It is the statue of two lovers standing under a tree. They are about to
kiss. The woman's left leg is raised. It wraps around her lover's legs, wanton with desire. They have eyes only for each other. His right hand cradles her head drawing it towards him, and it is that hand I love. It holds her tenderly. It wears a ring. It looks alive. It is stone, yes, but it is alive.
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Pallavika, Ferruginous stone, 12 c., Orissa |
Last year I had exchanged a couple of messages with Shubhra Guha, a musician in Calcutta, whose Hameer and Kamod had me mesmerized. Ms. Guha had directed me to Gita Desai in NJ, who had some of her recordings on CD. I wrote to Ms. Desai and found out that she had made a movie called "Yoga Unveiled" and was working on a movie called "Raga Unveiled". I learnt from her that
she had perhaps the last shots of Ustad Bismillah Khan on film.
Last week I ordered "Raga Unveiled" and it is right here sitting on my desk. It's a 2 DVD set that runs 4 hours and 20 minutes. You can watch a trailer at http://www.ragaunveiled.com/, and you can order it from there for $37.99. I have watched all of it, some parts over and over again, and while it is not all I had expected
it to be, it is still a magnificent movie. The most unfortunate part of the production is that the movie has been very poorly edited, and poorly edited in at least two or three different ways. There are too many talking heads. Subhash Kak, a vedologist or some such, for example, is given an inordinate quantity of time but has rather little to say.
Some motifs recur over and over again. While they may be considered clever once or twice, repetition renders them tiresome. The movie attempts to be encyclopedic and that too is tiresome. Yes some instruments are struck, some are plucked, yes some have more bols than the others, but so what? Why talk about the dholak and cymbals when they have so little to contribute to the heart of the matter.
The most disconcerting parts of the editing are gratuitous transitions. These are real hack jobs. A person is talking. The voice carries on uninterrupted, but the person's image and attitude morph from one gesture to another for no reason at all. And this happens repeatedly. It is as if the editor is trying to tell us that while she may have no feeling for the music or the art or the context,
she is alive and doing her job. You are watching a great musician talk when the editor puts in a trite comment by way of a meaningless transition. She does it over and over again, and does it every fifteen seconds. It's like gilding a lily, and worse, destroying it utterly in the process. Really the movie needs to be recut and reedited. If it were cut in half, if all the bores were cut out
or cut down, if someone were there to slap the editor's hand every now and then, it could be a masterpiece.
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Ganapati, Sandstone, 12 c., Uttar Pradesh |
Bismillah Khan saheb is there, a genius, and such a magnificent man, but there is nothing of his music. It is always such a pleasure to hear him talk in his very Banarsi way. We have a CD of him in which he talks at length, and sings and plays by way of illustration. There are some wonderful interviews in the movie. Shubha Mudgal talks very well, but there's nothing of her lovely singing voice.
Arti Ankelekar Tikekar is a most animated and entertaining talker, as much a pleasure to listen to as Bismillah Khan Saheb. I have had the pleasure of meeting her very briefly in St. Louis. Another person a real pleasure to listen to is Birju Maharaj. He is another of those mulitfaceted geniuses, like Bismillah Khan. I see him play the tabla for the very first time. I wish a little bit of his
kathak had been included on some excuse or the other. All the great musical godesses of Maharastra are there: Padma Talwalkar, Ashwini Bhide, Prabha Atre, Veena Sahastrabuddhe. But Kishori Amonkar is missing. I wonder if it is because she is such a difficult person, as I have heard people say.
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Bodhisattva, schist, Gandhara school, 5th century |
Zakir Hussain is such a very engaging speaker, but never seems to smile. Ashok Ranade, Kumar Bose, Purbayan Chatterji, Kumar Mukherjee, Lalita Ubhaykar, and a few others, are all very engaging speakers! Ustad Amjad Ali Khan tells a most charming story about his father Hafiz Ali Khan saheb. When the elder Khan saheb was awarded the Padma Bhushan by Dr. Rajendra Prasad, he asked the President
to do something to preserve the purity of Raga Darbari. He said people were beginning to take too many liberties with Darbari, and he fully expected Dr. Prasad to do something about it!
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Shiva, Kartikeya, Parvati, Chola bronze, 10-12 c., Tamilnadu |
But the best part of the movie, and one one wishes we had more of are the performances. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi gets a good amount of time. I wish there were still more of him. But Gangubhai Hangal gets no time at all. There is no Rashid Khan. Amir Khan saheb is there. I heard Manjari Ansari for the first time. Very nice. Ashwini Bhide performs, as does Padma Talwalkar. Zakir Husain and Kumar
Bose perform. Kumar Gandharva is there. And I am missing many here.
For all its flaws this is a movie worth watching, and worth watching many times over. There is nothing else like it. I would like to ask Ms. Desai to do a "Nritya Unveiled" next, but with some other editor, one with decency enough to let great art speak for itself.
Arun
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