The Magic Wand

 Music and memories sit together in a way we do not understand. 

I think of those moments of my childhood staying with cousins, my ammumma - a generously built and indulgent grandma - two aunts and an equally indulgent uncle in a beautiful old family home in Marayil lane in a Kochi of yore now preserved in sepia.  

A warm summer evening and we move about listlessly amidst the adults, the cool black oxide flooring smooth as a river pebble.  My uncle has his office in a charmingly fashioned building in the same compound and, his work done for the day, has gone upstairs to play records on his player. In a corner of the living room in the family home where we all are, up by the ceiling, is a wooden box with a speaker embedded in it.  That speaker is connected by a tenuous wire to the record player in his room.  

Ammaman, as he was to me, plays a number of songs, largely Malayalam but Hindi as well, yet the memory that sticks with me is of one: the film Chemeen is considered a landmark in Malayalam cinema, as are its songs; this one has stuck with me, a soulful, slow, deeply moving rendition sung, unusually enough, by the inimitable Manna Dey.  It was his first Malayalam song and, though at that age I don’t quite understand the lyrics, his pronunciation is flawless (which is more than I can say for myself).

And that is how I first remember Salil Chowdhury.  I then remember the audio tape - a selection of his best music - that I had bought across the college campus at that little store with the unsmiling owner. And I remember his music in Anand - another landmark film in Indian cinema - with Rajesh Khanna singing by the sea and a song by Lata, Na Jiya Lage Na, that is as much raag-based as it is Rabindra Sangeet.  And the flute in Maya…..And Madhumati, Kabuliwala……And Rajnigandha…...And Choti Si Baat…..And Annadata with its mellifluous, gorgeously unusual Raaton Ke Saye, that I have heard a hundred times.  And so much in between.

If, over the years, I have been a diehard - what sort of word is that, by the way? - listener of RD Burman’s music, Salil Chowdhury has been the first change, for when you are done with chalk, cheese is welcome, if both are the finest there is.  And, like all great music, the more you listen, the more it grows on you.  

A musician friend and I once spent an hour listening to the music of our generation, much of it in silence.  He then shifted in his chair, stretched a bit and took a deep breath and sighed. “These Bongs,” he said, tapping his head, and there was reverence in that voice, “they are as brilliant as they are crazy.”  QED

If Salil Chowdhury had been around, he would have begun his 100th year tomorrow.  To a genius then, it is time to say Thank You.

This medley is an extraordinary tribute. Play on.

Life's Big Misfit

 A funny thing about the USB stick
It never fits into the port
I push and adjust and try every trick
While the laptop plays Valdemort.

And then, aha! I figure it all out
Turn it around with a smile
I push and adjust and use my clout
No luck. Am starting to rile. 
(Steam clouds gather
And lather).

Then I switch it distractedly around again
And try in last-ditch despair
It fits in perfectly with disdain
While ignoring my malevolent stare.

I am just not doing nothing enough

What if I kept aside those little things that have piled up
On the right on my table
And in the centre of my attention
That email reply
That request from a friend for a reference
The car jack I need to buy on Amazon
The preparation for a workshop 
And for a difficult conversation
The gym or a swim, for a hundred reps
Within those hundred secs
Tidying up that cupboard because someone wrote a book on it
A silly payment on the card for something
I never needed in the first place.  Agreed, I don’t do this often.  

Even those little things

We pile up to Chill With

That movie, reviewed as dark humour and gripping

With comfort food and an open packet of something

The holiday on an Instagram bucket list 

Not even mine

That has a to-do list of its own

Planning. Heating. Washing. Booking

Searching. Deciding. OTPing. Cutting.

Lifting. Scrolling. Messaging. Packing. 

What if when opportunity knocks

I ask it to go to hell

And instead spent the day in indolence

Waiting for the stars on a monsoon-drenched evening

To twinkle

And the half-moon to shine

So that I would sit under them

Doing nothing

And ask for tomorrow to be like today. 

The Idiot of the Month

Among my deeply intellectual pursuits is the effort to ensure a monthly nomination of an Idiot, a prized personality of this humanity-enriching tribe.  Sometimes I post about these, sometimes I don’t (in the fond hope of reserving them for a future book that will fetch me a monthly royalty as a result of one half of the population wanting to read about the other half).

Now, I have been watching this Oh-la-la Agarwal guy with considerable interest and am enchanted by his affable, spiritual and warmly affectionate personality.  In his engagingly empathetic moments, he refers to people who argue with him in touchingly endearing ways, using references to their parental lineage which, he insists, is unknown or to their failure in serious pursuits in the broader canvas of Life (such as comedy).

To make matters interesting, he has now grown a ponytail which, when it becomes longer, will resemble that of a donkey.  The bray of the two personalities – I have heard both with deep absorption, missing no detail however slight - suggests an affiliation closer than friendship in an earlier life.

He makes stuff that looks like scooters (the Agarwal guy, not the donkey): they are shaped like scooters, they have buttons in the right place and speedometers that show the latest buy-value of Bitcoin because they fluctuate randomly and are unhinged to any known part of the scooter. These scooter-like-thingies even emotionally bond with scooters and sometimes catch fire after being overcome with explosive mirth and someone said that you can even do wheelies on them using photoshop.

He (Ponytail Oh-la-la, not Donkey) has an enviable business model: someone buys this scooter-lookalike, does the mandatory puja, without which this thing-that-looks-like-scooters will be a psychological wreck and need a sedative, and then rides out to the service centre owned by the same Agarwal, where it is parked for the rest of its short life for people on Instagram to post reels and for a look-how-funny-I-am guy called Kamra to write stuff on that X thing so that Ponytail replies with deep affection and love, all the while coming up with new products that will stagger civilization (but will not work).  What unites Kamra and Ponytail, of course, is that both of them are comedians.

I know what you are thinking: Agarwal is my Idiot of the Month.  No, no, you have got it all wrong and I would be unfair to this affable, spiritual and warmly affectionate personality (the last thing I want is a reference in Larger Society to my parental lineage).  If you know anyone who has bought one of those things that look like scooters and have buttons in the right place and even a headlight that works only when you lift the back seat and if you know anyone who has invested in Ponytail Oh-la-la …….now that someone is the Idiot of the Month.

It is time to apologise.  Did I say that Ponytail reminds me of a donkey? That is most objectionable being egregiously insulting to the donkey.  For one, the donkey moves. And when there is output – we intrepid wildlife biologists call it dung – it is from the other end (of the other side).

The Flower and the Flutter

 Around the first week of October every year, something magical unfolds.  Ceropegia is a tiny little creeper, nondescript for about fifty weeks in a year, one that you could easily pass by if not a trained botanist.  

Then one day it blooms, a lemon-yellow delicate bloom of rare beauty, nestled amidst grass and cumbersome touch-me-nots, with soft petals and a furry leaf, hence ceropegia hirsuta.  There is no fragrance for humans to inhale, for this is a fly-trap flower that is pollinated with ingenious design (more in the fascinating article below)..https://deponti.livejournal.com/1344391.html

 

There are a precious few of them here at the base of Laburnum Hill, just three plants as far as one can search but in the forest yonder, there are more.  Over the years, I have associated this little creeper in its beauty and simplicity with the Mahatma for they share birth-and-bloom days.  And never has this plant been seen in abundance.  

Wild boars, I am told by Ananda, the knowledge repository, scoop up the tuber of this plant, as do humans on occasion and, for once, I am dismayed at the thought and hope they - boars and bores - fail, give up and let live-and-bloom.  But is there a story to tell here of commensalism between boars and this plant, where the boars dig in (literally) but the plant stays unaffected?  A story beneath the earth, the secret life of a plant that will grow no matter what depredation happens?  Or one that needs the boar’s excavation skills to thrive?  

We don’t know what we don’t know.

And in that distraction of thought, a butterfly comes into view - the Common Silverline, I later learn - resplendent in the warm evening glow, flitting by, pausing briefly on flowers for a last sip before twilight sets in, searching.....

But then, aren't we all?

Dog Eat Dog Turned Panda

 

The most interesting news from last week, of course, was that a Chinese zoo painted a couple of dogs and displayed them as pandas in the Star Attraction category.  As you can see, since this under-panda-is-dog event, the word ‘underdog’ has now got a whole new meaning (which is currently in Chinese and inscrutable).  

Now, we in India are trying to beat China in most things and have only succeeded in population so, in my usual thorough dedicated way, I immediately decided to check if we have done the dog-into-panda routine with those cheetahs in Kuno National Park and whether, after the rains, the paint has washed away and they have gone back to being oversized domestic cats that run very fast because they were fed growth hormones left over from WWF wrestling matches.  My diligent research showed that, as always, the answer is like the answer to the question “What is India’s population now?” or “What is our national debt?”, which is, We Have No Freaking Clue.  So for the time being, I will assume they are cheetahs since they run like cheetahs and don’t say meow (at least loudly) and haven’t tried to rub themselves against someone’s leg when he isn’t watching, giving him the fright of fourteen lifetimes.

But back to dogs-and-pandas or dogs-cum-pandas or dogs-that-were-pandas-but-are-now-bow-wow again or whatever.  I love this idea totally and will actively campaign for more such things in life in general.  For the following reasons:

Near Random Rubble, the farm, lives a goat with strong opinions on people who wear clothes (its owner generally doesn’t and Ramappa can attest to it). It has a robust set of horns (the goat, not the owner) that are clearly made of some evil metal like wrought iron and are sharper than my thankfully-now-dead aunt’s sarcasm (I speak, with deep feeling, of both creatures).  The sinister nefarious plan is to have this goat painted and anointed with headgear to be the cutest calf out of Walt Disney and then left near those noisy retarded pubs in Indiranagar with the result that the word Butt - hereinafter used in verb and noun form - will be in substantial evidence, followed by the fastest evacuation ever recorded in peninsular India after the Rashtrakutas.  

I have also thought of painting up all the street dogs around my place as pandas so then WWF - not the wrestling scamsters but that NGO with the panda as its logo that keeps asking you for money - will round up these blokes, feed them bamboo bark (note the ingenious pun) and keep them around.  Until it rains, that is.  When, of course, we paint them again, this time as penguins.  

As you can see, I dream big in the race against China and am hard at work to explore possibilities that will one day leave pandas wondering if they could become dogs for a change.

Curator Pilav

Among the words fashionably in vogue now is ‘curate’. This means it gets my malignant attention. 

Earlier, a curator was an old fuddy-duddy in a museum, whose only skill as an archeologist was that he knew seven different ways to dig his nose. Then things changed (though his nose remained the same). I read some years ago of a nude museum somewhere in Europe that advertised for a Curator and got more applications than the population of Belgium.  Imagine the ad: “Wanted, Curator for Museum of Birthday Suit Art.  Previous exposure required.  Dress code: none at all”.  The job profile involved going through heaps of photographs, (which task if you did in regular jobs would get you locked up) and passing comments that – it being Modern Art – nobody including you would understand, all the while having a great time and getting paid for it. 

But back to the word Curate.  Nowadays, people curate anything – fashion, cakes, watches, handbags, furniture, veggies. This means that they choose what you can buy - at their price.  The other day I was staying in a biggish hotel and walked downstairs for dinner, only to discover that it was curated by a Chef Somebody.  I was looking for rice, dal and dry veggies, but was told that I could have Zaphrani Pilav with mustard-apple sauce and tamarind baigan (mustard baigan and tamarind apple sauce.  It does not matter.)
“But why can’t I have rice and dal?” I asked with some petulance.

The Chef – that Curator chap – was hurriedly called, so he came by with a big smile (in big hotels, they are trained to do jackshit, but with big smiles).

He was (and remains) the fattest human I have ever seen.  The many layers of his stomach rolled over and – this is fascinating -  his belly button (that had dispatched a reluctant shirt button into outer space) was within whispering distance of his knees.  And if that doesn’t impress you, he had a triple chin on his double chin (ie, subsect of main set – pls refer Set Theory for photographic description).  
As he ambled slowly towards me, there was steam from his nose, so there was probably someone inside, feeding coal to keep the engine moving.    
“Sorry Sir, today’s dinner is curated,” he said, as if that explained everything including global warming.  
“But I want something light, a little rice?” 
“Sir, you can have the Zaphrani Pilav with mustard-apple…..”
“No, no.  I want something light like plain rice.  You know rice?  Stuff that is boiled in water? Pressure cooked?  White in colour? Grown in a paddy field?” This was a weak attempt at sarcasm, which, of course, is completely lost on fat curator chefs.

He gave me a big smile and ambled off never to be seen again.  After reading about half the book that I’d carried down, I went back to the room and ordered baked beans and bread from the Room Service menu.

The baked beans was tinned and therefore utterly ghastly but the bread was good.  Nothing, not even the salt, was curated, so, on the whole, all’s well that ends well