2 States

The Deccan Herald published my review of Chetan Bhagat's '2 States' this last Sunday, 6th December. Here it is.

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Chetan Bhagat says he will only write for the Indian middle classes with their moderate understanding of English. He has even quipped that he could not say much about Salman Rushdie and he was more like Salman Khan. So it is that ‘2 States’ reads like the script of a timepass Bollywood movie, with Chetan Bhagat erroneously thinking that if he must eschew verbosity, he must also give up anything else that makes for good fiction.

‘2 States’ is told in the first person by Krish Malhotra, a Punjabi boy from a dysfunctional family in Delhi. At IIM-A, Krish meets Ananya Swaminathan, a Tamil girl from Chennai. They fall in love. The parents meet at their children’s convocation and alerted to something in the air, decide to be very nasty to each other, thereby putting an end to all hopes of a quick wedding. Rather than take the easier route of elopement, the young couple rough it out because they want to see their parents smiling at their wedding. Predictably, this leads to hectic parleys, tears, rude words and plenty of compromise. Krish relocates to Chennai to make it happen, successfully woos his in-laws to be and moves back to Delhi with his sweetheart to iron out the few creases that remain. Just when all the pieces appear to be falling into place, disaster strikes. It is back to square one, only this time Krish is an emotional wreck. But then he pulls through thanks to help from unexpected quarters and from there on it is not too far from a happy ending.

Throughout all this Krish the Punjabi says a lot that you may find rib tickling or offensive, depending on the orientation of your funny bone. On the other side of the divide, Krish’s Tam in-laws are not given a chance to say anything ‘funny’. Lacking as they do in a sense of humour, they are simply nasty whenever they are not quiet, which is most of the time. All this means that Krish’s brand of humour encourages and perpetuates the opposite of what is supposedly the ostensible moral of the story. Rather than promote the feeling of oneness among Indians belonging to different states and cultures, the book revels in the racial and cultural differences between them.

Maybe this is a reflection of the times, but the story also seems to celebrate unscrupulous deal-making. Do not worry if you have to maliciously lie or scheme, or be rude, sycophantic or hypocritical, but make the right deals and you will get what you want. Krish strikes deals with most people who cross his path – Ananya, her parents, his mother, his boss, anyone. And these deals compromise them in many ways, sometimes subtly, often openly. The only exception to the dealing appears to be his loathsome father. Okay, Chetan Bhagat may not want to use his influence to elevate his readers, but maybe he needs to rethink some of the messages he conveys through his books.

In any case, ‘2 States’ is a page turner in more ways than one. If you are a Chetan Bhagat fan, you may well like the story and finish the book at one sitting, stopping only to contemplate the profundity of his punch line. On the other hand, even if you are not someone waiting for the next Bhagat bestseller, there is little else to do with this little book, other than turn its pages quickly and see it through to its end.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to present a Carnatic vocal concert at the Christian Ecumenical Centre, Whitefield, Bangalore. The audience consisted almost only of visiting American students. I prepared a note on the evening's programme for them. I thought some of you may find it interesting.

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Welcome to this evening’s Carnatic classical music programme!

There are two broad styles of Indian classical music. There is ‘Hindustani’ or north Indian classical music and then there is ‘Carnatic’ or south Indian classical music. In each of these styles, we could have a vocal music concert featuring a vocal artiste accompanied by two or three instruments. Or we could feature a main instrumentalist accompanied by the accompanying instruments.

We are happy to present a Carnatic vocal music performance today. The duration of a full-fledged Carnatic music concert is usually three hours. We will try and show you its salient features in one hour.

On the stage you will see the vocal musician at the centre. To his left is a violinist and to his right is an artiste playing the ‘mridangam’. Behind the vocal musician, at an angle, is an artiste playing a ‘morsing’.

The violin is of course well known to you. It is curious that a Western instrument like the violin has become an indispensable part of Carnatic music. The mridangam is the main Carnatic percussion instrument. The mridangam may or may not be accompanied by a secondary percussion instrument. The secondary percussion instrument could be the morsing, which you see today, or a ‘ghatam’ or a ‘khanjiram’.

There is another ancient, elegant instrument called the ‘tambura’ which is used to sound the pitch at which the music is performed. Today, if you peer carefully at the stage, you will see a small white box which is the digital avatar of the tambura.

Let us surprise you with a factoid. We’ve never rehearsed before. In fact, some of the artistes you see are meeting each other for the first time in their lives. And yet, here we are! This is possible because of the very nature of Carnatic music.

Carnatic music rests on a tripod of melody (‘raaga’), rhythm (‘taala’) and lyrics (‘saahitya’). It is an amazing blend of rigour and freedom, structure and innovation, of the memorized and the extempore. You will listen to several songs (‘kritis’) today. Each song has lyrics that are set to a raaga and a taala. The songs are compositions of various composers, the most significant of whom lived as near contemporaries in the 18^th century in the present day Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The songs are composed in Sanskrit and also in the South Indian languages of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

A Carnatic musician learns kritis by memorizing them. Considering the antiquity of the art form, written notation is a relatively new thing, coming widely into vogue only in the last few decades. It is still considered bad form to use written notation in a concert.

There are hundreds of raagas. For the sake of convenience, they are classified into 72 ‘parent’ raagas with seven notes ascending and seven notes descending. Each note is called a ‘swara’. These parent raagas spawn innumerable other raagas by subtracting or rearranging the seven notes. How to distinguish between one raaga and another is a matter of aural training and practise.

You will see the vocal musician keeping count with his palm and fingers. That is the taala. The taala is perhaps the most complicated feature of Carnatic music. Different taalas have different counts. The number of units packed into one cycle of a taala varies with a variation in the tempo. So a taala containing four units at a particular speed can also be exponentially packed with 8, 16 and 32 units. Or even more. But bear in mind that fundamentally, the time intervals between one count and another within the chosen tempo must be evenly spaced.

Conventionally, you are expected to sing a song in the same way in which your teacher taught you. So, songs do not give the musician much freedom to showcase his or her innovation, talent or training. This a musician may do by just taking up the raaga to which the kriti is set and elaborating on it. Or he may take up a line in the song and sing it in several ways, always taking care not to violate the taala. Or he may sing individual groups of notes, without the lyrics, again taking care not to breach the taala. You will see examples of each of these today. Remember that they are extempore, not rehearsed as such but practised over a period of time so that the pieces fit on any given day.

It is conventional for the main artiste to give the violinist an opportunity to showcase his talents. You will see and hear bits of violin solo during the concert. Those periods also serve as resting points for the main artiste.

Finally, there is a very popular feature of Carnatic music which is the percussion solo. The mridangam artiste plays a solo stretch of pure rhythm. If there is a secondary percussion instrument, it results in a lively dialogue between the mridangam and that secondary instrument, culminating in a home stretch where both seamlessly join together to create a pulsating effect. At the end of their performance, the main artiste picks up the song from where he left off and concludes it.

You can watch close-up videos of Carnatic music instruments and concerts on the internet. You can also learn more by visiting any of several Carnatic music websites. In any case, feel free to email karthik.sa@gmail.com with any questions you may have.

Thank you!

The Circle of Reason

I just finished reading Amitav Ghosh's, 'The Circle of Reason'. And I'm glad it's over. It was one of those books which I could neither continue reading with relish nor give up without guilt. In a sense, I was addicted to this novel, but it wasn't a pleasant addiction.

I like Amitav Ghosh because he doesn't try to be clever and is not eager to please. I feel his writing is naturally intelligent and not contrived. But even so, The Circle of Reason seems stretched at times. Maybe because it was Ghosh's first novel, published in 1986.

The book is divided into three parts: Satwa - Reason, Rajas - Passion and Tamas - Death and tells the story of Nachiket Bose, nicknamed 'Alu' for his potato shaped head. The story begins in the village of Lalpukur in Bengal and in true Amitav style, winds its way beyond India and into the East African port of Al-Ghazira. The narrative comes to a close in Algeria.

The blurb says that the novel follows the method of the raga in Indian music. A ponderous beginning, a livelier middle phase and a fast ending. Read the book and see if you agree with this parallel.

One person who was impressed by the book was Anthony Burgess. You can read his New York Times review titled 'A Little Dementia in the Name of Progress' here.

Are you being served or smashed?

These days I play badminton.

It all started a couple of years ago at 'Nisargadhama', a property off Hosur Main Road. I was there with colleagues for a weekend of r & r. After a few doubles matches, a few of us convinced ourselves we were a smashing hit. Though in retrospect it appears utterly incredible if not insane (few things don't), the foursome, including yours truly, showed up at the hallowed indoor courts at The National Games Village, Koramangala, at 5.45 am four days a week for a year. Considering that all of us had busy workdays after the baddy sessions, and considering especially that three of us (not me) had to run up and down the stairs and corridors of various courts, all the while shouting 'My Lord!', this dedication to the sport was remarkable. When we weren't serving and smashing our way to glory, we definitely swished viciously, occasionally giving our partners a sound lashing, no doubt intended for the feathered projectile. Thankfully, the cuts never reached a thousand.

Anyway, those were fun days. They also helped reduce the prosperity of our paunches by a few inches.

People moved and our game came to an abrupt end. Sorry. I must clarify. People need to move a lot in badminton, so that's not why we stopped playing. People changed homes, moved to new ones away from Koramangala. And so it was match over.

For a year after that I survived on lots of pasta, dosas with butter and so on. In a perverse manifestation of Prof Sen's theory of capability failure, I became incapable of wearing all but one of my trousers. During the time when we were executing exquisite drop shots, I had to bore an extra hole in my belt every Monday morning. But now, with no forward lunges and backhand flicks, the buckle used to pop frequently under the strain. The turning point came when one such unhinged buckle caused mental agony to a five year old by clean knocking off her double scoop of ice cream from its cone.

So I decided enough was enough and scouted around for a place to play, reluctant to make the journey to NGV alone and play with unknowns. But in vain. So I headed back there, a good year and a half later, to throw my weight around. And what a weight it was! The legs didn't move, the eye didn't see, the forearm felt like it couldn't feel anything at all. After what I thought was a hectic first day, my doubles partner told me that if I came everyday, I would improve. Maybe he was thinking about the prospect of playing with me as his partner everyday and reassured himself thus. In any case, he has never offered to play with me since that day. I had made him run too much. But there are always those willing to suffer for others and I've found people to play with.

Helter-skelter we would run
And often
Into each other, oh what fun
Though I miss the earlier days
Now there's a singular solace
My trousers, they're back in place
(From 'Are you being served or smashed? And other poems'; Anon. 2009)

Foundation Extended

In my previous post I mentioned six books in Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga. I got that list from the first Foundation book I was reading. Later I looked up the Wiki entry on Asimov and his homepage at http://www.asimovonline.com/. It turns out that there are seven Foundation books. Here's the list for quick reference (with the year of publication).

1. Foundation (1951)
2. Foundation and Empire (1952)
3. Second Foundation (1953)
4. Foundation's Edge (1982)
5. Foundation and Earth (1986)
6. Prelude to Foundation (1988)
7. Forward the Foundation (1993)

SF Foundations

Till a few days ago, I had not read much science fiction. On my last visit to the local British Library, I picked up Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation'.

The 'Foundation' is one of two set up at either end of the Empire at the instance of the visionary Hari Seldon. Seldon uses the methods of 'psychohistory' to warn of the decay of the Empire and the onset of a long period of anarchy before the Second Empire is born. Seldon convinces his detractors that the only way to shorten the aeons of misery is by recording knowledge for posterity. And so a colony of scholars is settled on Terminus to compile the Encyclopaedia Galactica. Foundation tells the story of this colony and its leaders in a way typical of Asimov - unpretentious, uncomplicated, and crisp. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The only irritant was the use of 'Space!' as a substitute for 'Earth' or 'Heaven'. As in "In the name of Space...", or 'What in Space are you doing?'.

Another thing. As far as I can remember, there were only two women characters who figured in the story. Both were minor and insignificant. One of them, a maid, did not even say anything.

Foundation is the first of six books in the Foundation saga. The others are: Prelude to Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. I plan to read them all. Very soon.

Ramaswamy's Legs are Short

Most of my friends remember the rhymes they were taught in nursery school. I don't. But one rhyme has stuck in my head. The sisters at the convent in Kolar taught me that one. It goes this way:

Ramaswamy's Legs are Short,
But His Nose is Long!

And this must be sung a la "Old McDonald had a Farm" (of which I know only two lines)

Thankfully for Mr. Ramaswamy, I don't remember the rest of the rhyme.

Les Incompletes

Most people I know finish one book and only then pick up another. And this is so even if they do not like the book for one reason or the other. Till a few years ago I was like that too, labouring through books I did not like because of a self-imposed rule that the book in hand must be read cover to cover before any other book is taken up. 

But what with so many compulsions in our lives from which we cannot get away, where you must willy-nilly do the bidding of others, I felt that in this matter at least I will discard that rule. I will read a book only until it holds my interest, no later. My point is that if I feel like picking up a book from where I left it, I will do it anyway, naturally and without the stress of constraints I place on myself. This practice has resulted in a vast collection of incompletely read books (I took care not to say half-read). 

Mind you, these books I left unfinished are by no means badly written. In fact some of them are classics. It is just that my eyes lit up at the sight of better goodies. To name a few of these unfortunates in recent times - Dickens' David Copperfield,  Marion Zimmer-Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, and a few volumes of Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar. 

But the point is, will I go back to them? Will I recommend them to a friend? Yes and yes. Maybe that's why I take them for granted.

Belief and Beyond

I have started 'Belief and Beyond', a new blog focussed on religion, mythology and philosophy. You can follow it here.

Chuck de (size 8 please)

I suppose it was just a matter of time before we had our very own thrower of heeled missles with a politician as the target of choice.


Earlier today, Jarnail Singh, a journalist with the Dainik Jagran, was angered by P. Chidambaram's answers to his questions on the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) giving a clean chit to former Congress minister Jagdish Tytler for his alleged role in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. So he chucked his shoe at PC who successfully took evasive action. Singh later said that perhaps his method of protest was wrong but it could not take away from what he protested against.


However, in this matter Singh is not king. That title must go to Muntazar al Zaidi, the 30 year old Iraqi journalist who lobbed both his shoes at President Bush during the latter's farewell visit to Iraq. Zaidi was defended by twenty five lawyers and was sentenced to three years imprisonment as against a maximum of fifteen years in the cooler that Iraqi law prescribes for an act of aggression against a foreign head of state on an official visit. Zaidi acquired something of an iconic status and even inspired games like this one.

But if we consider the consequences a shoe thrower may face for his action, it takes much more gumption to choose a Wen Jiabao or an Ahmedinejad as a target.

On Feb 2, 2009, a human rights activist hurled his s**e at Premier Wen as the Premier addressed a gathering at Cambridge, England. While Muntazar accompanied his hurl with shouts of 'dog', the Cambridge trainer-chucker called the Premier a dictator. Watch the video here. Skim through the comments and like me, you may be shocked by the kind of hatred that is out there.

In March, President Ahmedinejad of Iran was campaigning for presidential elections in the town of Urmia when a shoe was sent flying his way. Reportedly, the President's convoy harmed an elderly petitioner en route and riots broke out as a result. The shoe was chucked by an angry rioter.

By the way, our own Jarnail Singh, who PC famously said should be handled by the security personnel 'gently, gently', has been awarded Rs.2 lakhs by the Shiromani Akali Dal for his act of defiance. If only Jarnail had the presence of mind to throw the other shoe!

Bangalore's carnatic music season

Come April, many areas of Bangalore will host a series of carnatic music concerts as part of the 'Ramanavami' season. Typically the concerts begin around 6 pm and end three hours later. Historically, there have been two big venues for this series. The more famous of them is Fort High School, Chamarajapet. The other is in the courtyard of the Sheshadripuram College. The concerts go on for a month. Entry to the Sheshadripuram concerts is free; at Fort they are ticketed.

If listening to live music concerts is a vital ingredient in the learning process for the student of carnatic music, I did a fair share of listening at these two venues. In retrospect, as a kid I listened to so many stalwarts at these venues that attending concerts today does not hold much attraction for me. K. V. Narayanaswamy, M. D. Ramanathan, D. K. Jayaraman, D. K. Pattammal, N. Ramani, T. V. Sankaranarayanan.....the list of greats goes on and on. Even as I write these lines, I feel thankful to my mother for guiding me to these concerts without forcing me into them.

I remember listening to these concerts with rapt attention with just the right amount of fooling about. My cousin and I used to quietly play or be taken to the stalls to nibble at some goodies. At Fort, we met friends and family, sat on the wooden chairs outside the pandal, and then scrambled in when the downpour began (usually the monsoon arrives midway through the series). If we were in Sheshadripuram when the rain came, there were very few places to take shelter, unlike in Fort High School.

I've not attended these series in years, except for the odd concert. It is too much trouble to drive through maddening traffic only to listen to disappointing stuff. This time, I may attend a few concerts at both places; feel like doing that. I hear that most of the big Chennai artists have become too expensive to afford, especially for Sheshadripuram which does not charge any entry-fee. A pity, but then it may give some promising local talent an opportunity.

The full list of this year's programmes at the Fort High School is available here. I will try to put up the list of the programmes at Seshadripuram. I was unable to get that online.

Out of the question!

These days, the quiz bug has bitten me and a few friends. With lunch, we also chew up year after year of the Karnataka Quiz Association's (KQA) 'Mahaquizzer' question banks. Which takes me back to the times when I did a decent amount of quizzing.


I was in Std VIII when somebody sponsored this quiz in Chowdiah Memorial Hall. Every school could send as many teams of two as it wanted. My school sent 24. Yes, that's right. 24 teams. 48 students. With yours truly at the helm. Unbelievably, none of the 24 entered the final round; we were all eliminated in the written prelims. After this hiding, the feeble hearted gave up seeking answers to even existentialist questions like 'What's your name?'.


Some of us quizzed on undettered, even giving our teams fancy names. Two of my friends and I set the stage on fire during the prelims of the Std X inter-class event with the name 'Thunderboys'. In the finals, before we knew what was happening, we were bringing up the rear, prompting an unprecedented, mid-event change of team name to 'Blunderboys'.

When I walked into my first quiz event in the National Law School, Bangalore, as a member of the audience, I heard questions like, 'What do you call the plastic-protected tip of a shoelace?', 'What is the name of the canal connecting the nose to the upper lip?' and so on. After that, I thought it wise to forage for glory elsewhere and did not quiz even once in Law School while I was there.

It was safer to quiz in Sasken. In 2002, we were right at the top till the rapid-fire round, at which point we lost our wits and with them, the first place. I remember that quiz for the most innovatively named teams. The one that got the prize was called 'Quizbul Mujahideen'. Come to think of it, with a name like that, they could not have had much competition coming their way.

I am sure one of the most looked-forward-to events in quizzing these days is KQA's 'Mahaquizzer', the solo written quiz held simultaneously in several cities. If getting 'Mahaquizzer' is not easy, not to worry. The interesting questions give you a good enough kick. This time, the event is to be held simultaneously in ten cities, Guwahati being the latest addition to the venues. The tentative date is May 24. For all the 'Mahaquizzer' papers from 2005 to 2008, visit http://members.tripod.com/~asimha/.

The Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew

I was a member of the British Council Library in Bangalore when I was in Class X. I do not know when I let the membership expire. I took a membership again recently. Of course the biggest change between then and now is the location of the Library. Then, it was on the first floor of the Koshy's building on St. Mark's Road. Now, it is tucked away in a dead-end street off Kasturba Road, occupying the ground floor of a multistoried office building.

Last week I picked up a Matthew Bartholomew omnibus containing the first and second in a series of fourteen books, with the fifteenth due later this June. The books are murder mysteries set in Cambridge of the Middle Ages. Matthew Bartholomew is a physician teaching at Michaelhouse, a college forming part of the nascent University of Cambridge.

In A Plague on Both Your Houses, the first novel of the series, even as the town is threatened by the Great Plague in 1348, there are a series of brutal murders in Michaelhouse. Even as he struggles to contain the 'black death' in the town, Bartholomew begins to ask uncomfortable questions about the murders. His amateurish curiosity and an almost stupid courage lead him to larger conspiracies and pits him against powerful enemies who will not hesitate to kill him. That is, if the buboes do not get him first.

http://www.matthewbartholomew.co.uk/camb.htm is the homepage of author Susanna Gregory. It gives the reader interesting information about medieval Cambridge and a context to appreciate the stories better. Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cruwys, a Cambridge academic who researches into marine pollution. She worked in a coroner's office previously.

Catch that note!

A large chunk of my Sundays is spent teaching Carnatic music. I have nine students now. Five of them are boys, aged between five and ten. Two girls and two ladies make up the rest. All the boys started their carnatic music lessons with me. Everybody in the female group had trained under other teachers before.

I must confess that before I started teaching music almost two years ago, I did not think much about music; I just sang. It is only now, thanks partly to the uninhibited curiosity of the children, and partly to my own wish to hear the students sing like I want them to, that I often think of music.

I do not know why some people sing more through their noses than from their throats, or why some ragas are more easily taught than others, or the rationale behind carnatic music's intricate system of taalas. How is one to hold a magnifying lens to the spaces between notes and observe and grasp the subtlest of melodic movements, or worse, even silences?

Then there is a whole range of cultural issues: the lyrics used in carnatic music compositions are not secular and cosmopolitan; they are by and large religious, or at least mythological. How am I to explain to children the meaning of these compositions? When translated, they seem like nonsense to the youngster, and may well turn his interest away from the art form.

Today, my understanding of the physiological, mathematical, aesthetic and scientific aspects of what I sing and teach is very shallow. I believe that a better understanding will help both the teacher and the taught.

Curiosity kindled

A few months ago, I was tempted to get myself a Kindle, Amazon's ebook reader. I saw the price tag of just over USD 300 well worth it to optimize shelf space at home and further domestic harmony.

But then I read stories on the Internet of how the ebook reader market was still nascent, there was more to come, and so on. I felt my research about the rival product offered by Sony was inadequate. So I deferred my decision to buy.

Now the Kindle 2.0 is out, launched by Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Stephen King, who has written 'UR', a novella which will be available first on the Kindle 2.0. Kindle works wirelessly in USA. In Europe, it works with the Internet. It is yet to be launched in Asia, and there is some confusion if the Kindle will work in our continent at all.

The Economist has a couple of informative stories about it in the Feb 12th issue. Go to www.economist.com and search for 'Kindle'. For a practical view of the whole thing, visit http://www.pcworld.com/article/159926/costjustifying_the_kindle_2.html, a blog on PC World by James Martin.

As for me I think I'll wait for the Kindle 3.0. But I doubt if it can be a substitute for a plush, leather-bound volume of Alice in Wonderland I am reading right now.

Bangalore's first flyover, laid a decade ago, connects the area housing the Town Hall and the Bangalore City Corporation buildings with the beginning of Mysore Road. True to criticism that the causeway is underutilised, not many vehicles ply on it. But the flyover's underbelly is a study in contrast. Teeming with people and vehicles at all times of night and day, this is City Market, a hub for local and out-of-town buses and goods carriers.

If you are courageous enough to take your eyes off the autorickshaws, trucks and buses that jostle for room and threaten to squash you in between, you will see some of the oldest buildings and institutions of Bangalore.

There are the remains of Bangalore Fort, a structure fortified by Haider Ali, the commander of the armies of the former kingdom of Mysore and then its de facto ruler. Its walls are crumbling and whatever stands is plastered with cinema posters and moss. Across the street from the fort is the Fort Venkataramanaswamy Temple (Kote Kovil to Srivaishnavas and Kote Venkataramanaswamy Devasthana to other locals), a temple whose flagstaff bears bullet marks from the time of the Siege of Bangalore by Lord Cornwallis in 1790-91 (during the third of the four Anglo-Mysore Wars).

Next to the temple on the perpendicular is the palace of Tipu Sultan (Haider's son and the 'Tiger of Mysore'). It is a protected monument but is in a sad state of disrepair, needing an urgent facelift.

Opposite the palace is Victoria Hospital, the first port-of-call to lakhs of poor people unable to afford private healthcare. Then there is Bangalore Medical College opposite the temple, an institution that is alma mater to generations of doctors. Round the corner is the Kannada Sahitya Parishat, a once-venerable institution promoting Kannada language that has lately lost its shine.

The flyover separates all these buildings from Bangalore's oldest mosque, the Jumma Masjid, whose tall minarets rise up to the sky and present a majestic view to the few motorists hurtling along on the flyover towards the city centre.

Most of the sites I have mentioned find a place in tourist guidebooks and websites about Bangalore. However, it is unlikely that the cosmopolitan Bangalorean of today has ever heard of them, leave alone visited them. Even among old Bangaloreans, 'Kalasipalya', that area comprising City Market and surrounding localities, is synonymous with goods lorries, buses, rowdies and filth.

One of the buildings in the area that does not figure in tourist maps is the Government Girls School. It is on the right side of the road as you come down from the temple towards the flyover. By the time you have realised it is there, you will have passed it.

The school is the official centre for the carnatic music exams conducted annually by the state government. Once a year during the summer, the old classrooms and rickety desks bear witness to candidates who sing and play on a variety of instruments. Their talent and ability vary widely but their enthusiasm and sincerity are uniformly high.

My wife and I went there a few weeks ago to enroll for the exams scheduled for this April. As we entered I observed that this was a girls school; I didn't know that till then. I also saw that the overwhelming majority of girls were Muslim. That day we saw two long lines of bright, laughing girls waiting to have their teeth examined by a mobile dental van of a private hospital.

We were directed to the computer room on the first floor. There we saw a Hindu gentleman at a desk. Along the walls in front of him there were PCs set up on creaking tables. At each PC was a huddle of Urdu speaking girls, chattering subduedly, while one of them typed away god-knows-what. When we told the computer teacher - that was who the gentleman was - of our purpose, he called out to the girl nearest him. Young Nilofer walked confidently up, and told us exactly where to sign, where to paste our photos and when to expect intimation of the exams. Nilofer knew everything there was to know about the procedure prescribed for the forthcoming carnatic music exams.

As we completed the formalities, I struck up a conversation with the computer teacher. He said that most of the PCs were unusable because they were virus-ridden. Even otherwise their configuration was outdated. The school did not have funds to upgrade. Another school nearby had done better. A corporate donor had given that school PCs with more contemporary configurations. Girls in this school found it difficult to type anything sensible, so badly infected were the systems. I murmered my sympathies.

As we thanked them and left, we thought we should do something more about that computer room, for Nilofer and her friends, than merely nod in sympathy. Just as somebody else was doing something about their teeth.

Three Europeans and the Forgotten Buddha

I picked up the book attracted by its unusual title, The Buddha And The Sahibs. Until then I had not read any other book by its author, Charles Allen. The book opened up for me a historical perspective of Buddhism in India that I had not imagined existed. From Charles Allen, I read of how the Buddha was all but forgotten in India and how a few Englishmen rediscovered him and his religion not only for themselves but for the rest of India as well, and most often by chance than by design.

I am now reading Pankaj Mishra's "An End To Suffering - The Buddha In The World" which also contains an account of how a few eccentric Europeans who had no interest in Buddhism per se, and who in fact were not even aware of such a person as the Buddha, were instrumental in resurrecting knowledge about the Buddha and Buddhism.

There is the French botanist Victor Jacquemont who camps at Simla soon after that hill-station was settled by the British in 1820, and who writes detailed accounts of the Buddhist religion practised in the inner Himalayas in what is present-day Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh. Jacquemont does not realise at the time that the Buddha is yet a mysterious figure not only to Europe but the rest of India as well.

In his letters to his father, Jacquemont writes of the remarkable Hungarian, Alexander de Koros. Like many nationalists of his time, de Koros tries to trace the origins and establish the independent identity of the Hungarians as a people, separate from the imperial Austrians. He believes his roots lie in Central Asia and sets off on his search. He travels through Egypt and Iran and ends up at Kashmir, from where he moves towards the Tibetan side of the Himalayas and lives there in isolation for nine years under the assumed name of Secunder Beg, studying Tibetan manuscripts and learning the language. Eventually de Koros supervises the publication of a Tibetan dictionary in Calcutta.

de Koros stays on in the Himalayan region longer than he may have wished to because of his chance meeting with an English veterinarian, William Moorcroft, who is managing the East India Company's stud farm. Moorcroft is paranoid about the possibility of Russia's influence over the region and sees Koros as a man who could help in understanding Tibetan language and culture. With that understanding he hopes to lay the ground to preempt the Russians and prevent a possible takeover of Tibet by Russia. Therefore he convinces de Koros to stay on in the Himalayan region bordering Tibet and even sponsors him to an extent.

Jacquemont, de Koros and Moorcroft all die in India without seeing Europe again.

You can read more about these gentlemen in "The Invention of 'Buddhism'", the first chapter of Mishra's book.

Of Straight Faces and the Silk Route

I believe BNH is a man who reserves his warm smile for a select few. Maybe this impression is unfounded or self-serving. Unfounded because I have not taken the trouble to empirically gather data that corroborates this belief. Self-serving because I count myself among the select few. What I am driving at is that BNH can keep his face straighter than most others can keep their own mugs.

So it was with a straight face that he asked me the other day if I had read any Shashi Deshpande. My reply was not very enthusiastic. And then we moved on to other authors and books, and tomato omelette and sabudana vada. Since we discuss books often I did not even think again about this exchange. Little did I know that this question was thrown in a carefully careless way. Little did I suspect that a more formidable power had engineered my interview that day, and that BNH was but a willing accomplice in a benevolent conspiracy.

All was revealed at the right time. On January 23, the aforementioned formidable power, whose name may only be initialled here as SVR, presented me with a Crossword plastic bag containing "China - A History" by John Keay. The bag did not contain any Shashi Deshpandes. It could not have. I had told BNH I was lukewarm to that author's writing. And he had told SVR. Who is his better half and my English tutor, proofreader and lexicon. And she had done the needful in her infinite wisdom. Thinking back, I recollect dimly that BNH did give me a subtle hint of what to expect as he instructed the waiter at Emgee's, "Cheeni kum! Cheeni kum!".

Anyway, I now have what promises to be an engaging read about a fascinating country. I have not read many books on China. In fact, I have not read any except Paul Theroux's "Riding The Iron Rooster". Ever since I took out a subscription to The Economist a few months ago, I have read with great interest articles on China that appear in that magazine. I'm sure Keay's book will give me the backdrop against which I may better appreciate the current events in that country.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I saw this movie last weekend without a clue of its recent release or the wide acclaim it has received so far. 

Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, it is the story of a man who is born old and 'youngs' as the years go by, aging in reverse to die a baby. It is a kind of Forrest Gump as time-traveller. Though the story may appear outlandish, especially in the last half-hour of the movie, it is definitely worth seeing. 

Benjamin Button received nominations for Best Picture (Drama) and a few other categories in the recent Golden Globe Awards. It lost the Best Picture award to Slumdog Millionaire. Nor did any of the other nominations yield an award. You can visit http://www.benjaminbutton.com/ to learn more about the movie. 

The movie is said to be based loosely on a Scott Fitzgerald story of the same name. You can read the story for free at http://feedbooks.com/book/3431. If you prefer reading it piecemeal, one chapter at a time (of eleven chapters), you can do that at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Fitzgerald/jazz/benjamin/benjamin1.htm.

 

   

Pakistan civil society joint statement

Monday's (5th Jan) edition of The Hindu carried the text of a joint statement by a cross section of Pakistan's civil society groups and individuals. The statement gives us an insider's perspective of the dangers facing that beleagured country.  

For now you can read the statement here: http://www.hindu.com/nic/joint_statement_pakistan.html   

Post 26/11, news channels launched online fora for Indians to suggest what could be done to fight terror. But apart from such scattered individual views, I'm not aware if a similarly cohesive and coherent public statement was issued by an influential section of moderate Indians during the days following the Mumbai terror attacks. If you've read any, please let me know.