Illi Nodu 3

We Tamils are Hindians too. We bellow hoarse about how annoyed we are with Hindians who land in Rameshwaram and expect to be spoken to in Hindi. However when we travel to any place in the South we expect to be understood in our pristine, divine, classical, ancient tongue by the locals, who - after all, we say, only speak a minor linguistic variant. Much worse, the brethren invariably oblige. "That's not true of all us" you say, well its not true of all Rameshwaram visiting Hindians I will say. Then we can talk about percentages and relative weights of our - heh heh - anecdotal evidence (sheesh !)

"Kadubu bEku. undhA ?" I ask in my uncertain linguistic babytalk and the waiter pours sweet sambhar on my enthusiasm with "illai saar. Idli veNumA ?"

For a state which has its own flag, the part of Karnataka I visited was too all-welcoming. Particularly Mysore. So much so that I couldn't get a taste of the local cuisine. So most of my conversations went like this in pidgin:

Me: I'd like to have a local special dish
Waiter: Like what sir ?
Me: I don't know. You tell me
Waiter: Filter coffee sir
Me: bleddy water denier

Mathsya at Chennai Egmore has a Karnataka Thali which I strongly recommend - which should disabuse anyone of the notion that it is the same sambar-rasam-vegetable and vannila ice-cream (don't even ask how). I could not get even one such dish in Mysore. Or even in a smaller town like Hassan. Or in an even smaller town like Belur. But all of them served Tandoori Naans. //Cue for reader to draw sociopolitical insight//

In one very middlebrow place, the menu even listed Veg Au Gratin - pronounced as spelt. I ordered that just to make a point.


"This is a three dimensional painting", said our tour guide in the Mysore Palace.He was an amiable old man who knew what he was talking about. A dash of humour too (they check your bags, if you have a camera they send you out, if you have a bomb they send you in) in a Kannadized Tamil.

The palace is impressive in its grandeur and lives up to all the hype. But I see it has been taken over by school kids on excursion. Spiritual seekers en route to Sabarimala had for some reason decided to awe themselves with this opulence. But if I were to single one memory of the palace it would be this three dimensional painting.

Regarding 3-D I have a problem since early childhood. I remember magazine features with instructions like "Hold this page six inches from you at eye level. Look at this spot and move the page towards you. Then with your free hand hold your ear, hop on one leg and pass through this hoop of fire while whistling - do you see the image popping in front of you ?". Not once did it work. Worse still they don't tell you what is the dashed thing that is supposed to pop out. You don't even know what you are missing.

After a particularly depressing attempt I came across a footnote that said about miniscule percentage of the world's population is 3D blind - in the sense, everything is fine about their vision, but this popping up doesn't happen. I was elated about being being special. That was only briefly though as my anhedonia struck in as I wondered if I had squandered the possibility of 'being special' on such a triviality.

So when I was introduced to a three dimensional painting I didn't have much hope of enjoying it. It seemed a regular painting in a series marking royal celebrations. This one showed a bull-drawn decorated cart in the midst of a procession. "Stop" said the guide as I was at the left of the frame "and look at the bull. And walk to the other end of the painting looking at it". The bull obligingly looks at the viewer all the time. Eh ! I paced across, stopped midway, walked back, forth and what not. The bull's eyes and horns were transfixed on me. It just got grander. The next was a grand painting with a huge crowd of people including the King himself on an elephant. Except two people at either end of the frame - everyone else is looking directly at us regardless of where we stand. Excellent won't begin to describe it.

Keshavayya - is apparently the name of this wonder painter. I hope atleast the postal department issued the customary stamp in his memory before we proceeded to forget him.

Illi Nodu 2

I am presently at the age where the loco parentis is gradually reversing. That the pace of reversal can be accelerated has been continually impressed upon me. Based on varying emotional situations I have been likened to Shravana and to Emperor Nero - who played the lute and left for the office when the household was stalled because of a plumbing failure. When the latter situations seem to pile up in memory, in a bid to achieve domestic emotional balance - and at the same time quench our thirst for drinking in all of the world's variety- my parents and I go on vacations.

I am usually given a carte blanche in the planning except for one killer clause: any place as long as good filter coffee is available. That leads me to an inevitable digression.
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When people like something which I don't, I find it difficult to just walk away. I have to say something. Sometimes I am blunt ("I don't watch hockey...you start watching sports other than cricket then one thing leads to another and you end up watching golf") and sometimes just politely spooky ("Are you sure she is the one ?"). But with coffee I am yet to settle on a line of offense. A variety of Indonesian delicacy coffee is apparently made from a bean that is first digested by a rodent. So one can't argue with people who like the taste no matter what.

"Stop it woman. Not a drop of that infernal liquid" said Captain Haddock to the Syldavian airhostess who attempted to pour water into his drink. That would fairly match my description towards coffee. Where I come from, that is a rarity. And in my family - a genetic impossibility. My parents need two coffees before breakfast - which in my father's case is another coffee - before they can brace themselves for the day. I force-sniff asoefotida and the like when I make coffee for them. While on that: the ruse staring at the world's face that I am annoyingly alone in recognizing, is the perfume seller's trick. When you sniff coffee beans, everything else just HAS to smell better. It is that simple. Although once, my mother, after a lot of sniffing finally decided to buy the box of beans.
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Coming back... I dangled Coorg and a coffee-plantation-unwind-vacation before them in a tantalizing manner. But what would have been a gas-mask holiday for me was averted by a parental aversion towards temperatures south of mid-morning mistless Madras mArgazhi. Mysore - and the alliteration ends here - and temple thereabouts like- Halebid, Belur, Sravanabelagola, Melkote - were decided as the targets.

My interests in temple trails coexisting with a history of chronic (and at times annoyingly vocal) agnosticism has perplexed many. That their perplexion perplexes me is a topic for another day. As the world likes to pigeonhole, many have supposed I am architecturally inclined. I have not resisted the tag because then I would have to explain myself or worse still- introspect.

(To be continued)

Illi Nodu 1

"My boy" said the editor biting into his cigar and letting a puff of smoke envelope his person. He rocked a bit on his reclining chair and toyed with his suspendor straps and continued "we need something new here"

" First things first" I said in way of an ahem, "your 'my boy'ness is misplaced. You see, you aren't exactly the blow-hot blow-cold, talent managing rag runner. You are like a publishing consultant guy who will give me inputs. That is all"

"Grhmmph" he replied to my curtness, as his smog thickened.
"And could your dress be any more clichéd ? Next you'll want me describing your whiskers and liquor cabinet, so we are switching to dialogue mode rightaway",I sai..

Editor: Grhmmph..
Me: Well ?
Ed: There is so much about you that the literary public should know
Me: Maybe, but this is a family blog, not a tabloid
Ed: No no.., what I mean is you could say write a travelogue
Me: Pah..I can't even bring myself to read one. There isn't a more pompous literary genre. Been here, done this..I mean, who cares showboat !
Ed: Grhmmph
Me: Plus, They'll want insights. A trip to the Himalayas and all you can write about is snow ?? Mount Kailash's visual appeal should get you to post about "idolatry, structural immanence and the irrelevance of qualified monism". Else you might as well not write. Instead quote an Ogden Nash and get a laugh or two as comments.
Ed: If they want insights, I say give them
Me: Why, so they can comment "very true" ? I am going to break my rule for a moment
I drew close, mopped my brow and whispered to him
Me: The truth is, I have no insights... I can at best try to kid about a trip
Ed: No good. Travel is too weighty to kid about. And what will you kid about ? Funny driver, unaware locals, train delays, bungling hotels, 'you should've been there' unfunny family humour...you name it, it has been blogged about
Ed: How about a series ?
Me: Eh ?
Ed: Yeah, that's perfect. It's about time actually. Start off and have them hanging on "to be continued"...you have them drawn to the next. And - I know you worry about this - if you overpromise and underdeliver - you can always say: that is how life is
Me: I can do that ?
Ed: Of course you can. I understand you are unfamiliar with the French cinematic waves.
Me: Okay what do I serialize ?
Ed: Doesn't matter, as long as it will be continued.
Me: I will write a series about my recent travel to Mysore etc.
Ed: Be earnest though..no "funny by half" business
Me: You can't handle inextricably intertwined ?
Ed: Hah..Do your worst
Me: Rest assured, I will.

(To be continued)

Mamihlapinatapai

DAE: So, it's been a while, how are things...

Me: Writer's blog I guess

DAE: Very funny. You know that's not what I meant (crooked grin)

Me: Oh ok....well nothing much actually. We are mamihlapinatapai'ing

DAE: Oh I see

Me: No you don't.We do.Tee hee

DAE: Ugggh ! Grow up will you

Linguistic Suicide

Quaint stories are indeed pretty
But with them you only get so far
Just for a moment stop being witty
And write a story that's rated R

Regular readers of this blog would know that my sentiments towards the Hindi language aren't exactly what one would call 'fond'.Gobind Ballab Pant shakes his head in disgust. And it took some explaining (to myself too) to establish that it was only socio political and nothing purely linguistic.But of late I have been trying to question these things about my 'beliefs'. I try to sift out some which were perhaps not quite true but just forceful self-reiterations (please do not try this at home).

And so the pure linguistic question came up and I was sifting through memories to see what went wrong between Hindi and me. I never believed in this 'relative ease of learning' that is widely touted as Hindi's usp. For instance, you have to know the words for the numbers from 1 to 100 in order to know the words for the numbers from 1 to 100. My knowledge was in spurts. Till 13 there was Madhuri. Pachpan thanks to 555 detergent jingle. Chappan thanks to Nana Patekar. It went nowhere.

Learning Hindi from films and BR Chopra mythologicals is not as easy as they make it out to be. I first went to Bombay armed with two expressions: "AyushmAn bhava" and "mein maa bannEwAli hoon". Yet I did continue to depend on pop sources because even the traditional streams are not based on a building block approach to language learning.I remember learning bigger Tamil words through the neat mathematical additions of smaller words. Naturally I assumed that is how the Hindi world worked. And boy was I wrong.

As an early teen discovering the Hindi language and hitherto unknown parts of... English and Tamil too, I had a wry smile worked up when I struck up on the word khudkushi. Khud- self and Khushi-joy. One can't help but put two and two together. I could trade the knowledge of this word to my Hindiflunking brethren to boost my flagging middle-school popularity to an unassailable high, I thought. That my hopes were dashed perhaps the Freudian explanation for the virulent antipathy I nurse.

For all those spelling bee kids who ask for context: The sentence I heard it in was: woh ladki nahi mili tho khudkushi karEgA kyA ?

NammAzhwAr, Javed Akthar and your humble blogger

I have this intense need to understand words in songs. As none of you knows the real reason, I can dramatize a flashback: My foray into learning singing was cut short when my teacher wouldn't accede to my demand for explaining the lyric: pilachinapalukavunalukakurA.

Cut to today. I have been quite taken by Amit Trivedi's latest song : Iktara
And to iron out the niggle of not being able to enjoy the song fully I googled up lyric translations done for the benefit of the Hindilliterate rest of us in We, the nation. The word manvA personifying 'mann' at the head of the song was quite interesting. Not sure if that is something Javed Akthar cooked up or it is a prevalent usage - it ties into the beckoning I am familiar with (in a not so previous jenmam I used to respond to PrabhuA).

Interesting particularly because it is a personification that used to exist in poems in Tamil.
In the very first poem of the thiruvAimozhi, nammAzhwAr's last line reads:

துயரறு சுடரடி தொழுது எழு என் மனனே

The third person masculine usage manan (as in மனனே) is a personfication of the more common third person neutral 'manam'. And that throwaway piece of trivia I labored to connect made me like the song even more.

So much so that I am going to foist a translation - reasonably fitting the tune my publicist brags- on you unsuspecting faithful readers

ஓ என் மனனே நீ கொஞ்சம் கிறுக்கு பயல்தான்
உனக்கு மட்டுமே தெரியும் உன் எண்ணம்தான்
உனக்கு மட்டுமே தெரியும் உந்தன் எண்ணம் -கிறுக்கனே
ஏன் காட்டினாய் கனவுகள் இரவு பகலாய்

துளித்துளியா கனவு மழைக்கும்பொழுது
விழிகள் தன்னை நிரைக்கும் பொழுது....
துளித்துளியா கனவு மழைக்கும்பொழுது
விழிகள் தன்னை நிரைக்கும் பொழுது

பார்ப்பதெப்படி
நடப்பதெப்படி
தெரியாத பாதையில்

இசைப்பதெங்கோ ஒரு ஒரு-நாண் யாழ் எங்கோ
இசைப்பதெங்கோ ஒரு ஒரு-நாண் யாழ் -மெல்ல
முணுமுணுக்கும் ஒரு ஒரு-நாண் யாழ் எங்கோ
இசைப்பதெங்கொ ஒரு ஒரு நாண் யாழ்


கேட்கிறேனே நினைவிழந்து நானும் ஏதோ கதையை
முழுநீள கதைதான் என்ன யாரறிவார்
பிறிதொருவனுக்குள்ளவளாகி இதையும் அறியவில்லை நான்
வேனிலா, கணப்பொழுதா-இது சாஸ்வதமா
//யாரறிவார் யாரற்றிவார்//

துளித்துளியா கனவு மழைக்கும்பொழுது
விழிகள் தன்னை நிரைக்கும் பொழுது
துளித்துளியா கனவு மழைக்கும்பொழுது
விழிகள் தன்னை நிரைக்கும் பொழுது
பார்ப்பதெப்படி
நடப்பதெப்படி
தெரியாத பாதையில்


(இசைப்பதெங்கோ..)

Persistent Random Blogbrowsing

...is not a good thing.




Anyway, to twist a Gounderquote:



பிச்சைக்காரனுக்கு insecurity பிச்சைக்காரனே