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...