I was showing my grandmother (that’s me and her above) and aunt my kindle when my aunt asked me whether it was made by Apple. “Apple, apple,” my grandmother (who has never used a computer before) said, “I know that name. The man who discovered the first apple just died. I read about him in a magazine this week. He grew up very poor. His father was a coolie, and they did not have any money. He used to walk four-five kilometers for food. He started his work at first in a shed. And he once had cancer, but when he went back to the doctor, the doctor started crying. He had the kind of cancer that could actually become better, and that was even before he became famous. See, he had the ability to be smart even through such difficult circumstances. Sometimes, I wonder, why didn’t I have any children like that?”

Keep in mind that my own father is one of her unimpressive children.

I’ve been carrying around the paper that had this sad little story in it for the past four days now, but I’ve been traveling so much that I did not have a chance to post it. Now, I’m finally sitting in my grandparents’ house in Trivandrum and drinking coffee and listening to my grandpa do his morning prayers. The past few weeks have been so intense that I haven’t really taken a single day off, and it feels so good to be in a place where someone else makes food for me and buys fruits and offers to wash my clothes. Even these small tasks in Chennai take so much effort, because you’re basically sweating from the second that you step out of your bath.

Anyway, enough about me and back to the little story I read.

From the state scan section of The New Indian Express on Wednesday October 19, 2011:

“Two Girls Commit Suicide”

“Madurai: Two teenage sisters have committed suicide at Sellur here on Tuesday reportedly after being scolded by their father for talking on mobile phones for long hours. S. Chandra (19) and S Tamilarasi (17), daughters of Swaminathan, a ‘vada’ shop owner at Sellur, reportedly hanged themselves to death with their mother’s saree at their house.”

Who were they talking to, a boy (just one?)? How long is long? Were they using the same phone? Who had the idea to commit suicide, Chandra or Tamilarasi, and how did she convince the other?

I really wish I had known these small town girls, with their outsized sense of drama and outrage.

Now comes news of an amazing protest in rural Karnataka. I always wondered why people didn’t do this more here – if the authorities don’t give you a toilet like they were supposed to, just take a shit on their doorstep! Via the Times of India:

“Toilet protest to wake up authorities”
Basavaraj F Kattimani TNN

“Hubli: Kinnal villagers are planning to raise a stink over lack of basic facilities, especially toilets, in the village by launching a dirty protest to show their anger.

Fed up with the indifference of the elected representatives, some villagers on Monday put up boards in many places in the village asking people to not urinate in public places but do so in front of the houses of elected representatives.

Koppal is one of the backward districts in Hyderabad-Karnataka region. And Kinnal village in the district is the most-neglected one.

Absence of toilets forces people to use open spaces. Though the government has launched the Swachha Grama scheme in Koppal, it remains on paper.

Villagers Kenchappa Harapnalli and Bhimappa Koratageri told TOI that their demand for toilets has not been met despite several petitions. “We finally put up these boards.“ A GP member admitted that the villagers have been demanding toilets since many years, but to no avail.”

Today’s article is here largely because of the awesome headline. Seriously. It tells you everything you need to know about this story. Read the original here at the Times of India, Mumbai edition:

“MEN BEHEAD WIVES, WALK WITH HEADS”
(Yes, that’s right folks, that’s plural MEN, WIVES and HEADS!!!!)

“Guwahati: An autorickshaw driver killed his wife and walked the roads of Guwahati’s Hengrabari with her severed head and a blood-stained machete before being arrested.

Ranjit Das was charged with murder and produced in the chief judicial magistrate’s court, which remanded him in judicial custody on Friday. Ranjit’s wife Amiya Daimary Das worked as a staff nurse at the National Rural Health Mission. A week ago she was posted at Barpeta, about 170km from Guwahati. She returned to Guwahati on Sunday. Ranjit suspected her of an illicit affair. He beheaded her with the machete on Thursday. “I have enough evidence of her extramarital affair. She received phone calls from that man,” said Ranjit. He claimed he was going to surrender when he was arrested.

The couple have two sons: Ashim (9) and Bishal (4). Ashim went to live with his grandmother after his school closed for Pujas. Locals fear Ranjit killed Bishal and hid his body.

In a similar incident in Bihar’s Darbhanga on Thursday, Heera Yadav (30) beheaded his wife Rina Devi (25) with a chopper and roamed the streets with the chopper and severed head. He told police his wife abused him and his mother for which he killed her. TNN”

What’s great about this story is that in the Chennai edition, the ToI printed this story as “Man beheads wife, walks with head,” and discussed only the Guhawati incident. It was only in the Mumbai paper that they made the connection between the two beheadings + promenades and came up with this gem. Also, the evidence the autorickshaw driver cites to prove his wife’s affair is slim. Very slim.

Close readers of my blog (translation: my husband, hi!) will notice that the tagline has changed. The change came about for two reasons. First, it seems I don’t have enough urban musings to fill up a blog (i’m busy!). Second, I read a lot of news in Chennai, and I *love* it.

English journalism here, in addition to being incredibly widely read, is often highly idiomatic, sometimes comically written, and extremely serious in tone even about the silliest topics. My favorites are the tiny articles buried in the back of the city pages, which are great, sometimes poignant windows into life here.

Here’s a perfect article from today’s Hindu, about a pervert from Ambattur that’s been harassing the Chennai Corporation. Emphasis is mine:

“Police help sought to track prankster”
by ALOYSIUS XAVIER LOPEZ

“The Chennai Corporation has sought the help of the police to track down a prankster, who had made hundreds of calls in the last few days to its toll free election helpline.

“The man used filthy language and spoke repeatedly with our personnel, who were manning the 1800 425 2011 helpline,” Corporation Commissioner D. Karthikeyan said on Thursday.

According to officials of the District Election Office, the man was unwilling to stop his pranks even after the personnel warned him. The toll free helpline is for answering calls pertaining to the Corporation elections, which are scheduled for October 17.

“What dress should I wear to the election booth? He would ask. When we answered that he was free to wear any clothing of his choice to cast his ballot, he asked that if he could go wearing his undergarments,” a Corporation employee said.

After disconnecting a call, the man would call within minutes again and ask annoying queries which were in no way pertained to the elections, a Corporation employee said. He also allegedly came up with a marriage proposal on the toll free number.

The man, who called from a mobile phone, has been traced to a locality in Ambattur and police are investigating.

He called several times and made work a nightmare at the election control room for the employees over the last few days, said an official of the civic body.

The optimum use of the toll free number by voters is being hindered by such calls as the officials had to answer his calls most of the time, the official added.”

I’ve written about dance on this blog before, but I was recently asked to review a couple of dance performances for the New Indian Express. A copy of the edited version of the article is here. My unedited version is included below. Weirdly, even though I really enjoy writing about dance, I’m not sure I want to review much more, primarily because I don’t want to be mean to anyone in a public forum, especially not after they’ve just made themselves vulnerable in front of an audience for an hour and a half. (even if I do secretly think that some of them should not be on a stage at all…) Luckily, all four dancers I reviewed last weekend were very strong, and if I had a problem, it was with the setup of the entire show. It didn’t give the dancers enough freedom to just dance! My review below…

“Natyarangam’s dance festival runs from August 12th through the 17th in the Narada Gana Sabha’s main hall, with two performers each night. This year, the organization has organized the programs to make a point about storytelling. Each dancer is supposed to depict both a contemporary Tamil short story, and a story from the Puranas that shares its theme, the point being that the differences between “contemporary” and “traditional” are arbitrary – that everything new is found in the old too.

I am not sure if I agree with them, nor do I think that the stories they selected for their festival actually bear out this hypothesis. Judging from the crowds that came to the show though, the audience clearly likes this setup. But does it make for good dance?

On the first night of the festival, two immensely talented couples performed, the Bangalore based Anuradha and Shridhar, and the young couple Parvathy and Shijith Nambiar. Anuradha and Shridhar gave a spirited performance, so vivid that even a child could follow the twists and turns in their stories. The couple’s strength as actors is such that at times the bits of dancing seemed irrelevant to their story telling. Shijith and Parvathy had a more sedate, less theatrical production. Their piece was marked by a series of gorgeous tableaux vivants, where the two dancers, posed just so or exited slowly, framed artfully by the lighting at crucial points in the story.

Telling two stories in an hour was a lot to ask from the dancers, and the glimpses of footwork in the show left me wishing that the dancers had more time to spend just dancing for us, instead of rushing through the plot points. Anuradha danced briefly on her own, and I wanted more time to appreciate the strong, straight lines of her arms. Shijith and Parvathy’s assured duet at the end of their piece left me similarly hungry for more.

On the second night of the festival, the luminous dancer Bragha Bessell performed two stories about women punished for men’s lust, one contemporary and one from the Ramayana. Her depth as an actress shone through both. She opened with her back to the audience, partially obscured by a white shawl, and even so, was able to convey the intense pathos of the young woman who had given birth out of wedlock. The scene of Indira watching lustfully as Ahalya blithely went about her chores was vivid, with Bessell masterfully switching between the two characters. Bessell’s eye for details is as precise as any novelist, and watching her characters wash their feet on entering a home or cool a cup of milk before they drink it is a pleasure, and allows the audience to fully enter the world of her characters.

A. Lakshman, who followed Bessell, is a spark on the stage – sprightly and bright in his movements. The Tamil story by Ashokamitran that he was asked to depict was a comic one about a recalcitrant cow, and would have presented a real challenge to any Bharatanatyam dancer. But Lakshman and his orchestra were game – with perfectly timed sound effects, faux Gujarati accents, and even a pratfall, they managed to bring the comic spirit of the story alive onto the stage.

Some of the most exquisite pleasures of a Bharatanatyam performance involve watching a dancer delve deeper and deeper into a character, riffing off of the lyrics of the song to show the inner workings of a character’s mind. Unfortunately, the structure imposed by Natyarangam on the dancers – asking them to depict two complex stories in an hour – may have forced them to sacrifice some of this character development in order to just get through the stories.”

Every year Mohiniattam dancer Gopika Varma puts on a festival at the Ananda Padmanabhaswamy temple in Adyar where she invites dancers to present programs of pieces composed by Swati Tirunal, the Travancore king-turned composer. The program is usually a mixed bag, with many younger dancers who struggle through the new Swati Tirunal pieces they learned to abide by the program’s rules.

But this year’s festival was enlivened by the inclusion of the luminous dancer Bragha Bessell, who performed for an hour and a half on Sunday evening. Bessell is a student of Adyar K. Lakshman, but is more well known for her abhinaya, which she learned from the renowned Kalanidhi Narayanan. Bessell is easily Narayanan’s best student, although far from her best known. This may be because Bessell does not have the characteristic look of a dancer; she is short, without the striking doe-eyes and endless limbs of Priyadarshini Govind or the lithe figure and effervescent energy of Alarmel Valli. But Bessell’s immense talent in abhinaya ensures that every performance of hers is a transporting experience. In each piece, she melts away to be replaced by any of the multiple characters that she takes on through the program. In Sunday’s program, she played a devotee transported with devotion on seeing the lord, a young coquettish girl telling Lord Padmanabha to wait until she is old enough before he flirts with her, a young maiden enticing Krishna to the jungle, and an older woman, consumed with pain, because her lover did not meet her as promised. Bessell’s dance speaks, and it speaks precisely and exquisitely.

Dancers often translate abhinaya as “miming” or “expression,” but it is actually much more than that. Abhinaya is the narrative thread of a dance piece, and a distinguishing feature of Indian classical dance forms. In many Western dance forms, dancers’ movements might convey a mood, but in Bharathanatyam, a dancer depicts and interprets the lyrics of the poems that she dances to, line by line. A Bharatanatyam dancer is both an actress and a dancer. But a dancer faces a real challenge today in connecting with her audience. The songs sing of love and of love spurned, a common topic in movies and music today, but the poetry of the songs is decades, sometimes centuries old. The tropes of lovelorn maidens that it describes seem archaic, and naïve of feminist self-respect.

Bessell’s skill is such that she overcomes this barrier. Like the best of movies, she draws you into the period drama that Bharatanatyam is today, a world where gentle lovelorn maidens are so overwhelmed with the sadness of separation from their lovers that they cannot bear the rays of the moon, and are consumed by jealousy by watching a pair of deers cavorting in the forest. It is absurd, but in Bessell’s hands, it is all absurdly beautiful.

In her most adventurous piece that evening, ‘Chaliye kunjanamo,’ she showed a young woman trying to convince Krishna to come and frolic in the beautiful woods, by describing all the delights there. Bessell is the only dancer that I have seen who can tell a joke on stage and get away with it. In the piece, she imagines that she approaches the river to pick up water in her pot, but decides the water is too deep and asks Krishna to go in instead. She watches him step in carefully and then – bam! – pushes him into the water. Her eyes and mischievous grin as she watches Krishna step into the water are exquisite – the power of her acting skills such that the audience sees not only the woman, but also the Krishna that she is watching, and the river spread before them both. And when her maiden steps out of the river after a swim with Krishna, she wrings her pallu and the bottom of her sari carefully, the kind of precisely observed detail which makes her women and their torments and delights come alive to the viewer.

Bessell performed on Sunday to an audience composed almost entirely of dance aficionados and her students, who flock eagerly to each of her all-too-infrequent performances. If the sabha system worked more effectively at nurturing talent, a dancer of her caliber would be the top billing for the December season. As it stands, I think she performs just once or twice during most seasons.

 

 

…annoyed at the president, but then I saw this. Awwww!!!

Chennai, Puducherry reel under sweltering heat

We returned from a trip Bombay on Tuesday and we walked out into heat so intense it was like stepping into something solid. It makes everything and everyone move slowly, like the air here is made of molasses or something equally viscous. This actually mirrors our political situation: we in Tamil Nadu are waiting for the election results on Friday, and until then it seems like everything is in limbo. Electricity has been pretty bad, with at least an hour without power during the day and sometimes an hour or more gone at night. One evening I came home at sunset, and found my landlord on my terrace (my apartment is actually on the terrace – so you can just imagine the heat) feeding her young daughter her dinner because the electricity had gone out and this was the only place in the building with any breeze. I asked her whether she called the Electricity Board. She replied what was the point of complaining when there was no-one in power to take care of things.

When I read this article below, I liked the picture it painted of life here, not entirely inaccurate, of days spent entirely locked in the house away from the sun’s rays, and evenings spent entirely in pursuit of refreshing natural drinks. My reality here involves a little less thronging though.

Chennai, May 8 (PTI) With the onset of ‘Kathri’ on May 4, signalling the hottest days of the summer season, Chennai city and its suburbs continued to reel under sweltering heat for the fourth successive day, today. The temperature today shot up to 42 degrees Celsius at Nungambakkam and suburban Meenambakkam. The temperature has been crossing 37.7 degrees Celsius in the city and its suburbs for the past few days. To beat the oppressive heat, people stayed indoors while those who ventured out thronged fruit juice and tender coconut shops. As evening set in, people thronged the Marina Beach to escape the heat. In neighbouring Puducherry, most thoroughfares were deserted as the mercury soared to touch 40.2 degree Celsius. Stalls selling tender coconuts, juice and ice cream parlours did roaring business. People thronged the seashore, the Bharathi Park in the heart of the town and the sprawling century-old government botanical garden at Odiansalai.

I suppose this is a strange day to start blogging again. After breakfast, we learned here that Osama bin Laden had been finally killed. He was hiding out in a mansion on a hill 35 miles from Islamabad. We watched the crowds around DC and New York celebrating on television at the office, and although I was very affected by the news, it felt strange to be celebrating the death of a man in this way. I was also worried – for the state of US intelligence if we missed him on a mansion a stone’s throw from the Pakistani capital, and for what will happen now to the troops in Afghanistan. Apparently, a twelve year old suicide bomber killed people in Kabul yesterday and the Taliban is planning a renewed offensive on the Afghani government. Does the US just pack its bags and leave now that OBL is dead?

Oh, and it’s also my first anniversary. Of what must appear to outsiders to be the strangest marriage ever, with my husband and his work in one country and me and my work in another. Here in Chennai, when people realize that the arrangement did not come about because of visa restrictions or economic necessity, they’re shocked that he agreed to this. Frankly, so am I. Here’s to a wonderful marriage that defies all expectations.