The Wire

Probably as a result of watching umpteen movies while growing up and the trauma resulting from watching even those movies starring stellar actors like Vijaykanth, Ramarajan, Satyaraj and other such horror-heroes, by the time I turned 25 (that should be less than a year back!), I have become very picky about watching movies and television shows – to the point of being called snobbish by my own mother (- I wonder about this usage though, why ‘own’, do ‘rental mothers’ exist?). I have become increasingly as intolerant towards pretentiousness in art as in life. I have stopped treating movies as ‘just entertainment’ and thought of them as art. This of course does not mean I enjoy watching neo-realistic nonsense movies that think showing paint dry is art. Like I said I can’t stand pretentiousness anywhere and can stand snobbery only when it is mine So much for being just!
Anyway, this post is not meant to be a sample of my obsessive navel-gazing (and contrary to what people may assume by that term in the context of Indian movies, I am using it in the usual sense of the phrase!). I have said it before and I will say it again – thriller/horror and comedy are the most difficult genres in art. With the deluge of entertainment we are faced with every day, impressing people with art – especially movies and television shows is becoming next to impossible. I am very very sympathetic towards the creators of today and totally understand their helplessness, but as a viewer I can not help being underwhelmed by most of their efforts.
I can’t believe I have written almost 3 paragraphs as prologue, so let me start the topic here at least. In my quest for good movies/television shows/ books, I am grateful for any recommendation from people who share at least some of my interests in them. Two years ago, my cousin had spoken highly about a HBO show called ‘The Wire’. She had heard about the series and had ordered the first season through Netflix. She was hooked and could not wait for Netflix to ship the remaining seasons. So she purchased the remaining seasons, just so that she could finish watching them as soon as she could. Recommendations don’t come better than that!
I started watching ‘The Wire’ about 3-4 months back. This was when I had just finished watching the last season of Dexter – another awesome series about a ‘good’ serial-killer. The next season of Dexter was to start in November and I did not want to wait between episodes to know what happened next. I was thinking of ‘The Wire’ as a filler. And boy, I was hooked!!
The series is centered around Baltimore, Maryland. There are 5 seasons in total with each season focused on one aspect of the city. Each episode has multiple story-arcs and the narration shifts between them almost seamlessly. Rather than talk about the actual plot(s) of each seasons, I think I will just list down some of the features that I found impressive and loved. (With this constant urge to put everything down in bullet points, I wonder if I can really talk in paragraphs!!):

• I have never seen any movie or tv show with so many African-American actors in major roles as this show. And the roles they play are not the token ones they play in mainstream movies/shows nor are they the stereotypical portrayals (family loving, loud, gun-toting lowlifes etc). Of course the series has African American gangstas, but it also has the Greeks, Polacks participating in crimes and contributing to the ruining of the city. In that sense it is an equal-opportunity show!! Whatever the reason, I found this a very refreshing change.
• Memorable characters : It has been more than a month since I watched the last episode of Wire and I still cannot forget most of the characters. Full credit to creator David Simon to have created unique characters among the good and bad guys. Avon Barksdale, Omar Doolittle, Stringer Bell, Kima Greggs, McNulty, Daniels, Prybylewski, Lester Freamon, Bunny Colvin, Burrell – it is amazing how I am able to recall most of the character names without much effort after so many days. Excellently etched, completely rounded characters who, like real people are in equal parts good and bad.
• Language : The lingo is supposedly authentic street language and for the uninitiated, a little difficult to understand. I had to watch the entire series with the subtitles on. Although I watched the first few episodes by myself without troubling my parents, there were a few that I watched in the living room when my father was present. He was not actually shocked but sort of tired of only hearing colourful language and some form of the f word repeated at the end of almost each statement  by every character . Yet, the fact remains that the language spoken by the characters adds to the authentic and gritty feel of the show.
• Story, Editing, Screenplay etc. are just fabulous. I have not seen anything like this so far – not even in movies.
• Idris Elba : I consider myself fairly old fashioned in many ways. I rarely describe men (or women for that matter) as ‘hot’. I do describe many actors as cool and for me the actors I like most are those with a high degree of effortless coolth – like George Clooney (before Oceans 12), Robert Downey Junior, Samuel Jackson, Kevin Spacey (often, not always). I reserve terms like dignified and classy for actors like Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington etc. However right from episode 1 of ‘The Wire’, I could think of no word other than ‘Hot’ for Idris Elba, who plays Stringer Bell in the series. I am embarrassed to admit, but I still cannot think of any other word to describe this guy. Maybe it is his role of a cool, confident, suave and ruthless gangster that made this impression, maybe like my mother says, I have this weird (according to my mother) fascination for African American actors (only) or maybe I am just normal ) In any case, when Stringer Bell was killed in Season 4, a part of me died (and later resurrected after my mind consoled it that while Bell may be dead, Elba is very much alive!!). I admire this guy!!

While I can go on and on about Idris Elba ‘The Wire’, a word of caution here. The series while wonderful is not for everyone. It is not a ‘wholesome entertainer’ meant for the family. It is dark, gritty and very realistic – which means that it does not end with all the cast members posing for a photograph with fake smiles pasted on their faces. The fourth season is particularly heartbreaking because it is about the school system and hence about how the children enter the criminal system – Kids who start out innocent and are constantly let down by the system, teachers who cannot be described anything less than God’s messengers who fight against all odds to try and keep the children away from the criminal life that their parents are pushing them towards, the politicians who see everything only as a means to stay in power. While one of the best seasons, this was the most depressing of all.
In the last episode, I was hoping for some miracles – hoping that all the children that we were introduced to in the previous system succeed in fighting the pressures of the world to succumb to the life of a criminal, hoping that they would realize their potentials and start believing in themselves. The ending is beautiful, sad and true to the spirit of the series. There is hope and there is despair. Some kids make it, many don’t. The last 10 minutes of the final episode is a montage of scenes showing the fates of different characters of the series and many of them mirror the lives of other characters at the start of the series – the (mostly bleak) message being that while the players change, history repeats itself over and over again and not always in a good way.
The only side-effect of watching ‘The Wire’ is that the bar is set very high, and it is highly unlikely for me to find any other TV show that is better than this one!! Highly recommended.

The Routine

Gal (Giggles, gives ‘cute’ looks!): Are you angry with me?
Guy (Appears surprised!): No.
Gal : Something is wrong, you are angry.
Guy : No, really, I am not.
Gal : I don’t believe you. You look serious.
Guy : There, I smiled, enough.
Gal (Now she is alarmed!): Now, I am sure. What did I do?
Guy (Still amused, not irritated): What do you mean - ‘What did I do’? About what?
(Giggling friends turn silent).
Gal : Why are you raising your voice? I knew it, you are definitely angry about something. (A little more alarmed!)
Guy (Thinks - “Friends are giving strange looks. Time to change tacks”). : I told you - No!! Hey, by the way, did you watch that interview with Kamal last night.
Gal: Why don’t you tell me what is wrong? Is it because I spoke to R today morning?
(Friends leave one by one, Gal’s voice trembles slightly)
Guy (thinking - Need to think of something soon) : Who cares about R? He is a rich guy, owns a car etc., obviously Girls will flock to him.
Gal (now with tears) : So you think I am one of them?
Guy: Oh come on. I didn’t say that!
Gal: So, that’s the way that is!!  Well, thanks for showing me your true colours today.
Guy: What did I do?
Gal: Nothing.
Guy (thinking - her smile is more dangerous than her tears. I seem to have screwed it up!) : Forget all this, this weekend is Abi’s birthday, what gift do we get?
Gal: I have not yet decided.
Guy: What do you mean ‘I’?
Friends return - No shouting, things seem to be okay.
Gal (ignores Guy, face lights up all of a sudden): Look who is here!! Hey R!! Long time no see!! Nice shirt!!
R (taken aback): Hey, what are you guys doing?
Gal: Oh nothing really! R, remember that module I was working on? I need some help with it. Can you help me? Please !!
R : Sure, I will come to your desk after lunch.
Guy: Hey, I can help you!!
Gal (ignores Guy, looks at R):  That’s so sweet!!
R leaves. Friends, watching this drama realize the next episode is about to start and slowly excuse themselves.
Guy: Are you angry with me?
Gal: No
And it goes on….
(Note : Heard the beginning of the ‘Are you angry?’ routine a few minutes back from a set of young people sitting near where I sit and my imagination took flight! Do I even have to add, that unless one is the ‘guy’ or the ‘gal’ involved, this routine is really annoying to those watching/hearing it??)

Parting with dignity

The word ‘death’ evokes different emotions in different people. For most, the word spells doom, the end of everything good, for a few it is something that happens to others, rarely to oneself or to those close to oneself. Hinduism says that death is merely a stop where the soul changes bodies and not the destination itself. In spite of all these logical and philosophical explanations of death, few of us like going anywhere near it. We are either scared of the dead people or disgusted with the idea of touching a corpse. Still death also means business for some people. I am not talking about professional hit-men here, who make it their business to cause death. I am talking about people who work with the dead all the time - the undertakers, the coroners, the employees at a funeral parlour etc. Rarely have I read a book or seen a movie that portrays the life of these people. The only movie I remember watching  that has a main character who works as a graveyard keeper is the tamil movie - Pitamagan. But the story was not about the profession itself, and the graveyard keeper was portrayed more as an animal like person than someone who understands deeply about death (and I was perplexed by the suggestion that he grew up that way because he grew up in a cemetery!), but I digress.
I am not a great follower of Japanese cinema. My only foray into Japanese movies have been some of the movies by Kurosawa (and I will be looked at with disgust if I say that I switched off ‘Dreams’ - the movie that Kurosawa considered his most personal one, midway - somethings should stay personal, I think!!) and more recently one called ‘Confessions’. I also watched one or two of the anime movies (Tokyo Godfathers and another one whose title I cannot recall). I had watched some of the remakes of Japanese movies - The Ring, The Grudge etc. One conclusion I had drawn was that as far as the crown for ‘creepy movies’ goes Japanese and South Korean movies had a stiff competition. In fact after viewing the highly disturbing ‘Confessions’, I had vowed to go nowhere near these movies for a while.  But thanks to Roger Ebert, I had been holding on to this Japanese movie called Departures (Okuribito) for a while now. After more than a year of non-cooperation, my mother had also slowly softened a stance against watching English and other world movies that she did not understand. On a sudden whim, I played this movie yesterday and I found it to be one of the more rewarding movie watching experiences.
The movie opens with a poignant and a strangely funny scene of Daigo Kobayashi, the protagonist working with his boss Sasaki in what is called encoffinment.  The title and the credits roll and we are taken back a year or so in time. The scene shifts to a ongoing concert in front of a largely empty hall. Daigo works as a cellist in the orchestra in Tokyo. Soon after the concert is over, the manager of the orchestra comes backstage and tells the band that the troupe has been disbanded. Daigo decides to move back to his village with his young wife, where he thinks he will find a job while living rent free in the house his mother left for him.
On seeing an advertisement  to ‘assist departures’, he answers immediately assuming that the job would be with a travel agency. He is hired on the spot by the boss, who only asks him if he will work hard. Only after he is hired is he told about the nature of his job. At first Daigo is reluctant. On his first day, he is asked to act as a model for a promotional video, in the role of a corpse while his boss explains the procedure of encoffinment.
Daigo initially hides the true nature of his job as he thinks his wife will hate him for it. Things get worse when the first body that Daigo is asked to help with, is that of a two week old decomposed body of an old woman who died alone. He breaks down at home, unable to share his thoughts with his wife.Gradually however, as Daigo watches his boss preparing the dead bodies with respect for the dead and sees how the kin of the dead people end up feeling grateful for sending away their relative with dignity, Daigo grows to respect and later love his job.
The movie is about this journey of Daigo and later his wife towards understanding the beauty of death and the job of encoffinment. A small note about encoffinment. When I saw this word in the subtitles, I thought this was one of the standard spelling mistakes you find in subtitled movies - a word coined when nothing else matches the meaning of the original word. Seems like I was wrong. Encoffinment is supposedly a Japanese ritual that involves ‘preparing’ the corpse for burial. The Japanese method of disposing (for the lack of a better word) off the dead bodies is interesting. It appears to involve placing the corpse in the coffin and then cremating the coffin in an electric crematorium.
The encoffinment process itself, involves cleaning the body with sterilized cloth, putting on new clothes, applying makeup etc. - all this in front of the family and then laying the body inside the coffin. While this high-level description sounds morbid and even perverse, if you think about it (and you will when you are watching the ritual play out in the movie), it is about how a loved one is remembered in the end. Most of the scenes involving the encoffinment were without any BGM and my mother and I watched transfixed. Strangely the whole ritual seemed somehow pure, serene and extremely beautiful!! All credit goes to the director for composing the scene so well and to the actors for enacting it with so much poise! Apparently the lead actor Masahiro Motoki studied this art of encoffinment in preparation for his role!
For all the seriousness of the subject, there are small moments of fun in the film too. The opening scene that I talked about provides some unexpected laughs. This scene, later continued in the middle of the movie, culminates is a very unexpected and poignant fashion. In spite of the subject (or maybe because of it), the whole movie is really life affirming and positive. It views as death as a gateway to the next life and that was fascinating . Dialogues were very good (at least what the subtitles read!!) and I was wondering if the impact would have been even better if I knew Japanese. One of them stuck in my mind. The assistant at the funeral parlour has this to say about coffins -  ‘Our last shopping in our lives is done by others’ (or something to this effect).
For those interested in offbeat movies and do not mind subtitles, this is a must watch.

Time Flies

There is only one thing that never lies besides King Harischandra (of course, since if such a person even existed, he is long gone by now, so the present tense does not apply; also I am not sure if the King would want to be called a ‘thing’ (damn, I should stop this ugly habit of writing between the lines!!)) - the Mirror. So while our actors try to put on a bold face (and a rather stiff one, thanks to all the Botox), in front of their fans - the women wearing lesser and lesser clothes every passing year to divert the attention from their faces and the men hiding behind large sunglasses to hide their eyes and wearing impossibly warm suit buttoned up till their chins to hide the creases on their necks, at night, when they are all alone or with accepting (compelled to otherwise) spouses, the mirror tells them the truth. While we love to talk about how age is just a number, we usually say that to others who complain about old age. When we start growing old, we start complaining too and it is at that time, we realize that age is not just a number!!
Coming to think of it, I think every person’s life (or almost every person’s life) can be divided into two parts. The first where one  always wants to grow up and the second where one is wistful about getting what one wanted earlier ! It is one of life’s little ironies that the first half with a dream that can be realized is shorter than the latter with the impossible dream (unless of course you consider going completely loony as a return to childhood).
You may ask why all this talk of old age etc. at this point. (And may I humbly point out that ‘You’ are only one of the thousand plus readers of this post who may come up with this question!!). Is it because the blogger is growing old too? Does she struggle with the pangs of middle age (or old age)? Does she find herself frequently checking the mirror for signs of old age? The Answer? None of the above. This blogger is still at the prime of her youth, even if you may think otherwise looking at her or her experience. The reason I am writing this is because I am reading this book called ‘Time Flies’ by Bill Cosby and while I was reading the book, I was wondering how poignant humour can sometimes be. Before I start waxing eloquently about the beauty of growing old etc., a few lines about the author and the book.
My library is a very strange and enchanting place. In terms of size it is smaller than our kitchen (which is larger than many other kitchens!!). While most of the racks are filled with the popular paperbacks, organized by either author or genre - when the author is not popular enough (according to my librarian at least!!) - there is one rack that is full of books that do not fall under these categories. It is here that I often strike gold. So last week, I had gone to the library promising to get just one book for my mother, I started wandering (figuratively of course, since in my library, there is hardly enough space in each ‘aisle’ for one person to turn). I saw this book with Bill Cosby’s picture on the cover. The face - I did not recognize, but the name-I did.
I had heard the name Bill Cosby before (along with names like Bob Hope). I sort of remember reading somewhere that he is a very popular American comedian. I had not seen any of his shows, so I started reading this book with no preconceived notions on what to expect. I am glad I picked up the book!!
Time Flies, as the name indicates is about Cosby’s take on growing old. He had just turned 50 at the time of writing this book. The book is full of hilarious personal experiences and thought provoking comments on mankind’s fear of turning old.  For example, Cosby talks of getting his trifocals and getting intimidated by them, wondering which part of the lens to use, without knowing where the person he is looking at is in the room!! . This is one of the most hilarious episodes in the book (at least of what I have read of it). Other episodes are on his memory lapses, changed food habits where he is forced to eat celery stalks and other vegetables, his reduced athletic abilities, his struggle with his ever increasing girth and reluctance to wear a bigger sized dress. The part where he describes how he tries to fit into his size 15 shirt although his size has increased to size 17 1/2 is bitingly funny!
Besides his personal experiences, Cosby also talks about how as a country, Americans dread growing old and do all sorts of funny things like using beauty products, undergoing painful surgeries, herbal supplements etc to ward off the imminent old age. While this was probably true only for Americans at the time this was written, I think this is becoming a norm across nations - at least among those who can afford it. I remember this particular line he had written about a woman he knew, who applied the pollen of some flower on her face regularly - a sneeze from her would pollinate an entire garden!!
I may find fault with the Americans and America for a lot of things, but one thing I really like about them, is their ability to laugh at themselves. This is something that we probably lack as a country. We like laughing at people as long as we are not even remotely related to the targets of the joke.  Cosby’s sense of humour is different from the others that I have encountered and importantly, it has a sense of warmth along with all the humour. Cosby does not talk from a pedestal and the personal experiences, while being funny, also convey the confusion that a person would face at seeing himself change, without his noticing.  Middle-aged or not, it is easy to relate to Cosby’s writing. There is a lot of compassion and love in Cosby’s writing. And underneath all that self-deprecation, is genuine bafflement at seeing the man in the mirror change!!
I don’t know if my increasing interest in books/movies on humour is to do with my growing age. I do know that my ability to find humour in almost everything around me is definitely due to it. I also like the fact that unlike before, where I would find only a certain type of humour funny, I am able to understand and laugh at different brands  of humour - PGW, Douglas Adams, Fry and Laurie, Friends, Everybody loves Raymond, Seinfeld, Simpsons, Dexter (yes, it is gruesome, but also has dry humour!!),  movies by Tarantino and Coen brothers (same as Dexter ) etc.  (although I still don’t find Akshay Kumar and Govinda funny!!). I am learning to go beyond tolerance and have learnt to accept faults in others (and in me) with passing years. If these are perks of growing old, I would not mind old age at all

The Killing

My cousin visited us yesterday with her 6 year old daughter. This niece of mine is a hyperactive kid and my mom has named her ‘terrorist’. She is the kind of kid who is constantly devising means of wreaking havoc wherever she is at that moment. She was unnaturally quiet and I thought it was probably because she was sleepy (as it was around 9 pm). We were chatting while my niece was rolling around on our bed. My cousin had mentioned a while ago that the kid’s class teacher had earlier complained that she was not  attentive in class and was not doing very well in studies. She later found out that the kid had a vision problem and got her to wear spectacles but the class teacher had not stopped complaining. So I asked my niece if she was being a good girl in class and if her teacher had stopped complaining. I was not thinking of anything when I asked the question, but the kid seemed a little shifty while responding. I took it simply as a sign of her feeling sleepy.After some time, my niece fell asleep.
Now two seemingly unrelated topics that we spoke about :
My cousin who seemed to be waiting for this told us that she (the kid) was very upset that day because of what happened at school. Apparently that morning after the first period, my niece felt uncomfortable wearing her shoes and removed it. She stuffed it in her bag and was going around in her socks. Her class teacher who taught English, noticed this and asked her where her shoes were and this girl said that she had not worn shoes to school that day. The teacher admonished her for this, wrote a note for the parents in the kid’s diary - things seem normal till this point. What she did next is strange - she complained about this to the principal, who then called my cousin and her husband to complain. Since she (the principal) was able to reach only my cousin’s husband, she started yelling at him for sending the kid to school without her shoes and for being an irresponsible parent. My brother-in-law was annoyed and at first protested saying that he was sure the girl had worn her shoes to school and on learning that it was the school’s principal who was yelling, controlled his temper and promised to be more careful.
As all good fathers do, he later chided my cousin for being careless. My cousin asked my niece why she had hidden her shoes and later lied to the teacher. The girl was in tears. My cousin gently told her that no matter what, lying was a bad thing.
As we were talking about this, she mentioned something else. In the recent exams, my niece had scored over 90 in Maths and Social Sciences and over 60 in other subjects except English where she had scored a paltry 45. This was strange, to say the least. She also recounted her recent experience in the PTA meeting at school, where the same teacher complained to my cousin in front of the other parents that my niece had torn a page off her English textbook and that as punishment her teacher had refused to return the book to her.
This happened in one of the most popular schools in Chennai. Although all of us felt that the teacher and the principal had behaved irrationally, for the sake of the kid, I advised my cousin to have a heart-to-heart chat with the teacher and see if things could be resolved amicably.
While I thought that my niece was wrong in lying to the teacher about her shoes, I also realized that all these problems probably had a common root. My niece seemed to be afraid of this teacher and that probably caused her to lose interest in the subject too.
Does this seem familiar to any of you? Most of us have had experiences with a certain teacher who hated us for no reason. I have seen a few in my school days. They would pick on one particular student and constantly tease him/her, insult the student, even destroy their morale sometimes. More often than not, the student ends up hating the subject in retaliation. In my case, my nemesis in school was a sports teacher. He hated the fact that I existed and tried to hurt me whenever possible. This probably explains my total lack of interest in any kind of sports. My aunt who was a teacher has even told me that one of her colleagues who often used to target a certain student in her class, confessed that she hated the sight of him and had no idea why.
The thought that the unreasonable hatred or dislike of a certain person can turn a 6 year old towards lying, to temporarily escape from the teacher’s wrath (as she probably thought that her teacher would blame the parents instead) and also develop a hatred towards a certain subject, deeply saddened me. My mother still cannot forget the taunts of a certain science teacher in school, due to whom, she lost all interest in the subject that year and consequently scored badly in that subject alone - an event that subsequently changed the course of her life.
Due to some unavoidable circumstances, my niece has to spend an hour or two all by herself at home in the evenings, since both her parents work and my aunt who usually takes care of the kid, is away from Chennai for a short while. I was telling my cousin to ask her to keep the door locked and not open the door for strangers. Although I was afraid to voice my fears, I told my cousin to be very careful with the kid and to warn her about lurking dangers around her. My cousin was telling me later that she was trying to tell the kid about good and bad touches from different people and that she had explicitly instructed her to report any mischief by others immediately. I was reminded of my music teacher in school, who would call the girls in the class to her room and ask us to be careful with the Art teacher. She would ask a few girls if he had touched them. I remember finding it disgusting then thinking that this lady was trying to take away our innocence and was corrupting our minds. Now I think she was only trying to look out for us, probably because she had seen and/or suspected something afoul. It was a government school and the politics played there are worse than the politics we see in our organization. The best she could do was to warn us in vague terms to be ‘careful’.
I was thinking about these things again and again yesterday night and in the morning. What kind of our world are our kids growing up in? I have just returned from a visit to my niece and nephew in Singapore and the thought that these perfect beings will grow progressively less innocent and more imperfect in order to survive in this world sends shivers down my spine. I would not want them to learn what bias means or what hatred means. I would not want them to know that in the real world, there are sheep and there are wolves in sheep’s clothing and externally they appear the same. But then how will they survive in this world? In the first incident, more than the teacher’s behaviour, I was deeply disturbed by the fact that the 6 year old kid could sense the teacher’s dislike and proceeded to lie over a small thing. I can see her gradually moving from the innocence of childhood to the deceits of adulthood. In the latter case, much as I would want her to trust every person she meets, the fact that I am seeing more and more reports on child molestation - with the minimum age limit of the victim going down every day- I am wondering if losing her innocence is the price to pay for her safety.
We lost our innocence too, but the age of losing our innocence seems to be going down of late. Kids are forced out of their innocence and childhood by the deluge of infotainment in the media, an overdose of sex and violence everywhere. Nothing seems to entertain or satisfy and the craving for more of everything seems to be the order of the day. While I look on, the children are oblivious to what they are missing. So is it a trade-off between innocence and survival? There are no easy answers. Meanwhile I feel really old and tired already.

Just Relax..

It had been more than a year since I last visited my sister in Singapore. In between, there was another cute addition to the family. So in addition to my dear little niece, I also had my tiny nephew to look forward to in this trip. Things were changing at work too and the likelihood of getting into a shepherding role was looming large and I thought it was the right time to take a break, forget all about work and office and get away from the madding crowd.

So we made plans - my parents and I, booked the ticket on Tiger Airways - the TNSTC (Tamilnadu State Transport Corporation) bus that flies. The cheap guys actually charge you for every checked in baggage and also for seat selection or even reserving overhead compartment space for cabin baggage. However, they had no idea of the genius of Indian brains when they formulated their rules. As a result, we paid for a single check-in baggage and smartly utilized all our cabin baggages and the usually-not-weighed handbag allowances to carry a mini-grocery-store to my sister. My darling niece had already requested (actually, ordered) us to get her a ‘Barbie’ or ‘Hello Kitty’ mobile phone and after hunting around in multiple stores, my dad had success in finding it in one of the platform shops in Mylapore.

Tiger Airways is called a budget airline and we were never allowed to forget that fact. In the Chennai airport, our check-in baggage was not even scanned. And actually it is an insult to TNSTC buses to compare them with the Tiger Airways flight, however my conscience was also telling me that you usually get what you pay for and so we settled uncomfortably in our seats. Once the plane took off, I saw a strange guy trying to put his head on my lap. I was shocked, but only for a minute, for I realized that the guy in the front seat had merely pushed his seat back and thanks to the spacious seats, he was almost on my lap. So I decided to do what any other sane person would do - I pushed my seat back to scare the guy sitting behind me!

I frequently criticize or make fun of people on their English but I didn’t try any of that on the flight. The flight attendants spoke in a language that sounded vaguely like English. The Singaporean accent is kind of strange to untrained ears. It is nothing like the American, British, Australian or French accents. To get some idea of how this language sounds, imagine trying to speak with your mouth full of marbles - much like Eliza Doolittle is made to do in the film version of ‘My Fair Lady’. Consonants seem to be hurrying on their way out tumbling over the previous guys and causing general mayhem!! After a while I gave up trying to understand the announcements and instead concentrated on my ‘Thuppariyum Sambu’ novel by Devan.

Since this was not the first time we were travelling to Singapore, all of us had become a little careless. As a result, we had forgotten to note down my sister’s address and happily put down the name of the town where she stayed in the ‘Address’ box in the immigration form. True to my unerring instinct to pick the slowest moving queue, we ended up in one all the while hearing passports being stamped in rapid succession in the nearby lines, while the ‘uncle’ in-charge of our queue seemed to be taking some sort of sadistic pleasure in reading the details in every passport and immigration form one tiny alphabet at a time and relishing each second of our agony. He took a full 2 minutes to read through my immigration form and then looked up slowly to tell me that what I had written on it was the name of a town and not the address. I gave him what I thought was the smartest possible answer - that I did not know the address, and added helpfully that my sister would know it, since she lived there!! Uncle thought for a while (seriously, I wished I had a fast-forward button for this man to make him move at my speed) and said that I had to at least write down the phone number of my sister, which I did on my form and then on my parents’ forms too.

We had already decided that we would not go sight-seeing on this trip and that our main source of entertainment would be the kids. So we kept our promise, the first half of it at least. However, we did go out often and each such outing caused a larger hole in our pockets (figuratively of course, since we were carrying the demon called Credit Card with us). I realized in the end that what used to be only luxuries once have sort of become habits - like perfumes, watches, clothes etc. and where once we shopped to meet our daily needs, we now shop for the pleasure of shopping - to quench an insatiable thirst, which only increases with every dose of shopping therapy. Needless to say, I safely had these philosophical thoughts almost always after returning from the store. But still, better late than never, right?

I have said it before and I will say it again - the public transport system was amazing. All places in the country are well connected by buses and trains and a single pass worked in all of them. People walked quite a lot. I spent more hours walking in these 10 days than I would have done in 3 months in Chennai. In spite of the high number of apartment buildings, cars, people etc., Singapore seemed to be wonderfully green - there are trees everywhere and it was quite a pleasant sight. The apartment complex that my sister lives in is what are called housing board apartments. These are supposedly highly in demand in the country. The apartment community is a sprawling area with open gyms, play areas, tracks for running, walking etc and a lot of well maintained lawns and plants.

People are health freaks and irrespective of the time of the day, there are people running around in shorts or shorter shorts. I was feeling good about myself till I went there and starting thinking that I was abnormally obese. Interestingly, there were restaurants all over the place and people seemed to be eating at all times of the day. And yet, they remain super slim and that remains a mystery!!

Another remarkable thing was how little eye contact people made there. 9 out 10 people had mobile phones/PDAs or iPhones in their hands and earplugs in their ears. In fact in one station, I was looking through the door as the train was halting and I thought that people looked like zombies or automatons with their lost-in-thought expressions and lips that never smiled. Singapore Indians (mostly Tamils) were easily identifiable with their gaudy clothes, jewellery and heavily made up face.

My 3.5 year old niece kept us constantly entertained by pretending to be our teacher and insisting on teaching my mom and me Chinese (although I strongly suspect that Chinese has more words than just ‘tse’ or something sounding like that!!). She would sing entire songs in familiar tunes using this single alphabet and insist that it was Chinese. Rebels were not entertained and I was constantly told by my teacher that I would get a smiley on my palm if I behaved well and a star otherwise. But as she did not know how to draw a star I always received only smileys . She learnt to sing ‘O Susanna’ and part of ‘I am a barbie girl’ and would insist on singing it 10-15 times in a row without getting bored!! My 8 month old nephew would hold long conversations using the ‘aa’ syllable alone for hours together as long as his nanny or mother was holding him.

All good things must come to an end and the same happened with our trip. I wonder about this concept of time. When I come to work on Monday, Friday evening seems light years away (and now don’t ask me how time can be compared with distance. I am emotional, try to understand!) and yet when I was with my dear niece and nephew, Friday seemed to come a millisecond after Monday morning . Anyway, the honeymoon is over. I will be meeting with my flock soon and my new role as a shepherd will start immediately after.

When Lips don't meet

Warning : This post is about music !! And the title is not a gimmick!

I was listening to this album by Sikkil Gurucharan the other day and quite unlike the other times, I was paying some attention to the lyrics and to the swarams in between. Something was different about this song - not just the tune, which was very different from anything I had heard before, but something else, which was nagging even my not-so-knowledgeable mind!! I then heard the line ‘nInE harikEsha rAgjni’ and something clicked. I was not yet sure though, but paid more attention to the lyrics. Soon after I reached office, I did a Google search for the song and realized that my guess was right!! And I am such a shallow person that this made me very happy!! I heard this song again today morning and this post is a result of that!

This song is in a rare ragam called ‘Niroshta’ which literally translates to ‘No lips’ (Ushta = Lips in sanskrit). It was composed by a genius composer called Harikesanallur Muthaiah Bhagavathar. The ragam is so named because it does not contain the 2 notes - Ma and Pa (both requiring the lips to meet) in the scale.This by itself, is quite interesting, since we are talking about removing the 2 notes in the middle and calling this a ragam. Taking the Western Classical equivalent, this is like composing music in a scale that has neither the perfect 5th which is supposed to give some stability to the song, nor its neighbour, the 4th note. In simpler terms this is like a dosa or pizza without the center!! In spite of these limitations, the ragam is quite pleasant to hear and that is remarkable!

The beauty of this song is that the entire song is written such that the lips never meet, i.e., the labial consonants m and p are not used. Apparently the consonant v, as also the vowels “u”, “U” and “o”. “O” and “au” are also not used since this will cause the lips to meet . This is like being asked to write a short story or an essay in English with the constraint that the alphabets ‘e’ and ‘a’ are never used, i.e., extremely difficult. There are some interesting anecdotes about how the song was composed. Apparently Bhagavathar wrote this when he saw the Mysore Maharaja ill and had swollen lips*.Shri TN Seshagopalan has supposedly composed a ’tillana’ in Niroshta (which I have not heard), but this is supposedly the only song in this ragam.

There are a few other such experimental compositions in CM but this is the only one that I can recognize easily because I have finally managed to follow the ragam Like I had mentioned in another post, in spite of the fact that I can never make someone else understand my excitement or happiness on hearing a piece of music, I never stop trying!!

* http://www.rasikas.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=534&p=9887