SquareShooter

This has become a norm now, or has been for a few decades now, to complain about Carnatic musicians singing songs in unknown languages and how that is a reason for losing rasikas. When a friend took up this topic recently, I was trying to tell him how at some point many of us who were born in Tamil Nadu, and grew up there used to be multi-lingual. I come from a home that spoke  manipravala, Tamil so interspersed with Telugu, Kannada and Sanskrit words. Many musicians of that era were quite comfortable traversing this multi-lingual landscape and the issue of Telugu kritis or Kannada kritis may not have been an issue till we drew boundaries based on language. Thanjavur was an epicenter of arts, had the history of Nayaka kings and later Marathas embellishing art, architecture, music carrying on the great legacy of the Chola kings.  What I thought of as multi-lingual culture was not a mere conjecture became, got an evidence when I heard Indira Peterson last week...

He is an author of kids books, so I would have ignored it but for the title - The Penguin Annual Lecture. A writer if he is going to speak, especially on children's literature, I am keen to listen. I am out of touch with what kids read these days, and daughter considers me weird because I haven't even read Harry Potter. I asked her if she wants to listen to Jeff Kinney, author of Wimpy Kids and she immediately said yes. I can't say disappointed, for there was nothing in the whole programme that I could relate to except for the venue which is one of most familiar and most haunted in the last two and half decades I have spent in the city. First of all there was a whole lot of kids, unruly and screaming at the top of the voice. A few south Mumbai schools had also brought their students for the programme. Second, some DJ/VJ came up and did some reality/magic whatever show you call it, and I was bone dry. I had no emotions left, just stayed on even as I continu...

I was not a MGR fan, though even as a school girl made sure, I watched the last of the movies he acted ‘Madurayai meetta sundara pandian’. So, none of MGR, JJ movies I can recollect, and also didn’t think of JJ as much of an actress.  The year she became the propaganda secretary of the party, I saw her in person, as she was travelling to Vellore, and she was really stunning to look at. The vibrancy, the beauty of her image in that white saree with the red and black in the border, an open vehicle, stopping by and waving at us as we stood on the highway as she passed. After that most of us in the state saw to our utter dismay the treatment she got at MGR’s funeral and the ugly scenes in the State Assembly. Even today if you see those photos, and the videos you would know how dirty all those men around there were, conspiring to throw a lady who was personally picked up and mentored by MGR. For all the radicalism of the Dravidian parties, they remained disgustingly ...

Even as  the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, that may be called the home of Justice K.T.Telang’s indological works struggles to keep pace with the digital revolution, battling funds crunch for digitization of enormous volumes it possesses, a project to digitize all the published works of the great scholar was announced yesterday. Speaking at 23 rd Justice K.T.Telang Memorial Lecture at the Asiatic Society on Thrusday, Dr.James Nye, Bibliographer for South Asia, Univery of Chicago Library said he and some of his colleagues would be working in coming weeks to digitize all the published works of Justice Telang and make them available online. Heartwarming to hear Dr.Nye mention the project as a tribute to Justice Telang, whom he compared to the likes of Hemachandra the 11 th century poet, polymath Jain scholar. A quick search shows Archive.org has already taken most of Justice Telang’s works digital. Seminal contribution of Justice Telang includes his translation of Bhagavad...

I know this is not 1978 and we definitely are not going to travel back in time. But, it was impossible to skip the association of de-monetization of 2016 to what happened in 1978. Things were so poor then, as far as I could remember the talk in town was only about “aayiram rooba nottu sellaadhaame” (1000 rupee note is invalid), which meant people were not even bothered about higher denominations. None of the people we know had a thousand rupee note, and I guess not many of them had even seen one in their life. I do not know how the city life was then, but in a small town things were very depressing. We were fortunately an industrial town, so lot of trained and untrained labour jobs were there. Railway workshop also ensured inheritance jobs, and so most households had at least one wage earner. Unfortunately then most of those wage earners also had many children, dependents and so the wages were just not enough. Outside of the labour class, and among the SSLC, college educate...

Ratan Tata I am sure had no role to play in the scuffle that broke out between Bombay House security and media persons. But, I have had a long lasting crib about RT and his attitude towards media. I do not know him, nor can I claim to have interacted with him. In many years that I have been a business journalist, I have had opportunity to cover several of Tata firms’ Annual General Meetings RT chaired, industry events, though I can’t recollect many press conferences. There is however, one press conference of RT that I would never forget, though specifics of the event have faded from memory with years gone by …. That was a press conference, I think a Tata Tele press conference in 2001-02. What I distinctly remember though was the venue and the shocking way the media was handled – the Crystal rooms at the Taj Mahal, Mumbai. If my memory is right, it was a Tata – VSNL stake announcement with Pramod Mahajan participating in it as the then Telecom minister. There weren’t many tele...

We read every year of malnutrition related deaths in Maharashtra, children who are infected by out of date iron supplements at noon meal centres, poor pre-natal and post-natal health care for rural women. It is not that rich and famous in the cities don’t face this, but there are enough and more clinics and hundreds of crores worth of nutritional supplement that get sold to compensate for the carbs and white they will cut from their diets to stay slim and fit. I lived my early days, till I moved to Bombay with my first job in 1990 in a small town, with close connection to villages, though not much of nature. There have been certain cheap, but highly nutritional food that was available for the poor, without much fuss they consumed them. Source of iron, anti-oxidants and many medicinal value is the moringa or murungai tree, drumstick tree. The leaves are cooked with dal and eaten, the flowers may be some had recipes to cook them, and of course the staple veggie of the sa...

Essar Oil has sealed definitive agreements to sell its flagship asset, refinery business along with retail network and related infrastructure of Ports to Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft, international trading firm Trafigura and Russian Investment fund UCP  for an enterprise value of approximately $13 billion. This is a landmark deal for India, which over the years tried to attract investments in the refining sector without much success. As long as the petrol and diesel prices were controlled, the market wasn’t lucrative for any foreign player. The Rosneft deal first came up when both petrol and diesel prices were deregulated giving a level playing field between the private and public sector refiners to market their products within the country. While Reliance, the only other private player in refining company built, expanded its refineries with export focus, Essar by far sold much of its refined petroleum products within the country through public sector refining and ...

A week ago, there was a news about connecting Borivili and Thane by a ropeway, and wait where would it rest on or go through? The hills of Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Sounds crazy and those of us who know what SGNP is have been left in a state of shock. First you have plans to cut through the “Park” for a high speed train service, next you want ropeways and what next? Open it up for “development”? Mumbai and its ecological hotspots are under threat, constant threat and in some ways the space crunch the city faces is also due to its geography. But, the greatness of this city is also about its geography, the sea one side, the forests and the hills on the other side, bringing abundant rains, feeding many small rivers and filling up many natural and man made lakes. There may be a million climate change naysayers, but for me having lived here for 25 years, the climate change is a reality. It doesn’t rain like that anymore …. not the predictable torrential monsoon showers an...

I am not an engineer, cannot assess value of construction, cost of projects etc., But this bit of news in the morning paper caught me by surprise. “The tender for hill cutting is worth around Rs 2,000 crore. The first two parts of the tender, said to be around Rs 550 crore, was repackaged owing to change in engineering works and design for combining the cutting and diversion of the Ulwe river. This part is currently under tendering process. The other two parts have been finalised.”  From TOI’s repot on ground work having started at the Navi Mumbai Airport site. Is it normal to include a whopping 2000 crore rupees to cut a hill to make way for the airpot? How much would that add to our “airport maintenance charges” or “user charges” per ticket? Does cutting the hill not yield any granite? Does 2000 crore include the value of granite to be mined? Or is it just the cost to cut and dispose the quarried stones? It is not unusual for big ticket projects in India being h...

Tyagaraja  “Naa jayammunu joochi nammare devuni” Last August, senior musician O.S.Thyagarajan was performing at Mumbai’s Shanmukhananda Sabha. One after other Tyagaraja kirtanas flowed. It was blissful, but was a surprise as well. It was not specifically a Tyagaraja festival, but one was delighted. Just a few days before that an article appeared that tried to portray a composer, revered as a Saint by singers of many generations now not in the right spirit. The writer had tried to show Carnatic Music is inherently casteist and how it is proved from what Tyagaraja himself had written in his famous Gowlai Pancaratna Kriti, ‘Dudugukala’ in one of the Caranams. Coming soon after the publication of that article, perhaps many in the audience would have been grateful to OST for making his whole concert a homage to Tyagaraja. OST brought out the greatness of Tyagaraja in all his true colours. When he sang ‘Sattaleni dinamulu vaccena’ in Naganandhini, Tyagarja’s lament on the nat...

I got a lesson in how not to tell stories to our children about our past, about our puranas, itihasas and our festivals recently. My cousin who grew up in Kerala, went to school there apparently commented that what a state it is to celebrate a fall guy. How insensitive, arrogant it is I thought when I heard his mother say this, and immediately told her, don’t we celebrate Narakasura on Diwali. There is a problem about how we look at our festivals, and how we narrate our puranas and itihasas to our children. For long I have been irked by, should I say the western way of looking at every festival as “victory of good over evil”.  We have no clear good and evil, for an evil can transform to good, a saintly soul can turn a sinner. I am still angry at what my cousin had said, for his parents now live not very far from the Thirukatkarai temple, the Lord who graced Bali. When we were there last week, Onam utsavam was in full swing and we had darshan of Thirukatkappan as Nar...

I had to write this as a follow up to the Slander post that I wrote in June. Sunday, September 4th Raghuram Rajan will leave Reserve Bank of India, handing over the reins to Urjit Patel. By now many questions would have been raised on the choice of Patel, markets reacted, and Prime Minister’s detractors taking their usual potshots at the Ambani connection. But, in all this the man who went against Rajan, first mainly on him being not fully Indian has endorsed Patel. Subramaniam Swamy has no problems with the fact that Patel didn’t “officially” become a citizen till 2013 when he had to assume office as deputy governor of RBI. The charge against Rajan was he held on to his green card, that was akin to being a US citizen for Swamy. But, Patel having worked with the government in various capacities since 1998 opted for Indian citizenship only in 2013 is immaterial. Patel was also educated in institutions abroad, from London School of Economics to Oxford and Yale. ...