'Classic Incantations': Message from Babelsberg

A message from the conductor of the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg regarding the project with A.R. Rahman.  When we started rehearsing for this project in September, the team from Babelsberg came to visit KMMC and hear the choir.  We had the privilege of meeting Mr. Klaus Peter Beyer and he spoke to the choir members about the project and about the history and ties between Germany and India.  He was very impressed with what he heard!  This video was shown at the press conference last week.

Ayayooooo

One of the things that will never cease to amaze me about India - There's never a dull moment. The minute you think.. "Ah! I can relax now" Something really crazy happens.

Let me start from the beginning. I know I haven't been blogging as frequently as before, and when I do.. the entry is 18 pages long. Well let me warn you - this is another one of those. Sorry:)

Student Concert
Venice was one of the most inspiring experiences of my life. I had a couple days to rest once I returned to India, and then almost immediately, had to start stressing about my students. I had planned a student recital for October 5. It was time to bring out the whip. It's funny how in the beginning of the year (this happened last year as well) the students are sooo excited to begin learning Western Voice, not really knowing what that entails and not at all prepared for the hard work, concentration, and work ethic it involves. Then once they realize it's not what they thought it would be, about half of them begin to lose enthusiasm, stop coming to class, constantly have "the flu" etc. etc. The other half on the other hand, really start to blossom into musicians. As a teacher it is so exciting to see potential - it's really what motivates me every day and it's what I love about my job. I don't know if all teachers feel this way, but I seem to have somewhat bipolar reactions to all my students during the day. Of course I try to be as neutral as possible when I'm talking to them; always a smile on my face, always trying to motivate and inspire. But in my head I'm thinking "You make me want to die. What is this life? This hour is a waste of my life. I wonder how much a flight to San Francisco costs right now...." And then when a student has clearly been working hard and understands the basics, I want to jump for joy and parade them around like a trophy. Is that normal? I don't know. It certainly gives me a bit of insight into my education though.
Anyhow, the recital went well. I was a nervous little mother duck in the back of the room mouthing the words. I think everyone was happy:)
Three of my students: Mugdha Hasabnis, Azaan Khan, and Rituraj Sen.
Photos by Claire Ronsin

Paris
One of my friends from UCI, Alicia, recently got married in San Francisco to a Frenchman she met a few years ago. I couldn't go to the wedding, but Sylvain's side of the family threw a reception in Paris. I, as well as two of my close friends from college went. It was a mini reunion of sorts, and definitely worth it.


Diwali
I came back from Paris last Thursday and immediately the Diwali celebrations began. I know I wrote about the experience last year, but this year... was....absolutely....crazy. To top it off, Archana, Vaman, and Sumeeth came in from Bangalore so I was excited to party it up with some familiar faces. Everything was going wonderfully... until Saturday. The city was ablaze in lights and color. It sounded like a war zone outside - all the neighbors were lighting crackers and fireworks. We hung out on the street with the neighbors and did our share of lighting crackers. Once we ran out we realized we were really hungry and decided to go to Royapettah for dinner. We got on our scooties and left. Apparently, five seconds after we turned the corner, a firecracker, which was lit by a kid from a neighboring slum, hit our thatched roof which immediately caught on fire. We had just reached the restaurant when Claire got a call from the owner shouting "The house is on fire! The house is on fire!" When we got back to the house, the entire roof was destroyed. Nothing happened to us or our belongings.... but if we had stayed on the roof for 10 more minutes we would have been hit. A neighbor took a video on his cell phone:




If you just watched that... don't freak out. No one was hurt and none of our valuables got damaged. But how crazy is that? Arch, Vaman, and Sumeeth helped us clean up the mess - (THANK YOU!) And by the end of the night we got the electricity back on, and cleaned up most of the mess in the house.

Needless to say, the owner was beyond pissed off. And now it's become a moral/financial issue: If you point the finger at the slum kid on the street, the only thing that'll happen is he'll be severely beaten by the crooked cops and thrown in jail. It's not our responsibility because it was an accident caused by someone else. The owner is technically financially responsible for the damage, but it was Claire and Viviane who covered the roof deck with a thatched roof. So what now?
We wait and see.
I have a feeling we will end up negotiating 50/50 but regardless, the fire caused about a lakh of damage. So 50,000 divided by three is not SO bad, but still... One of the moments in my life that will stick with me forever: the sinking sensation of coming home from the restaurant and seeing the black, charred roof on the street, seeing the house completely flooded with water, and thinking "there are no landlord/tenant laws here. We are responsible for this." - one of the first times I've felt proud to be an American.

It seems that as you get older the space between high and low, happy and sad, tends to get bigger and bigger. The highs are really high and the lows are really low. 10 years ago my life circulated around a midpoint - a status quo - which was... well... ME. The older you get the more you realize how much else there is to consider when making a decision; and how many other people that decision will affect. In some ways I love that. But in some ways I want to be 16 again - where my biggest problem was wondering who I will ask to Prom.

Christmas Holiday

I’ve had such an intensely satisfying Christmas holiday – probably one of the best ever and it’s been an entire month of excitement. My mom and Veena auntie came to Chennai to check out my digs on Dec 6 and stayed for a week. We did the usual – visited my favorite haunts, went to all the shopping hotspots, met up with Vivek and had a delightful dinner at my favorite café, had dinner with a few relatives and ended the week with an adventurous overnight train ride to Bangalore where Veena auntie and we split ways. This was all during finals week and we booked the train for the evening of the last day of finals. I have to say, I had mixed emotions about the train. My immediate thought was, “Yay! Let’s go!”. Then the doubt began to settle in and my thoughts began circling with vivid images of derailing, dirty toilets, and terrorists.

Everything was obviously fine and even the toilets weren’t too bad, although if you looked down, you could see the moving track underneath. Ick. So we got to Bangalore, and stayed at Laxman uncle and Meena auntie’s house and I got to see Leena after her move back to the motherland. She seems well and Bangalore is where I discovered that I do indeed enjoy Pupushphul. It was a revelation actually, since I used to absolutely hate it as a child. Maybe it’s just one of those things that has to grow on you. We did the usual things, shopped, ate, slept. I ended up getting sick from the train and had to take antibiotics, but other than that, we had a great time. Then we met up with Veena auntie at the train station again and took the overnight train to Mangalore. This time I slept much better and it was nice and sunny by the time we reached.

I always have mixed emotions about going to Mangalore. It’s always such a bizarre experience. 1. Because I have to reach into the depths of my brain to pull out my fluent Konkani which starts out pretty bad and then by the time I leave it’s the language I’m thinking in. 2. It’s always weird seeing people you haven’t seen in a really long time. This time it wasn’t so bad because I saw everyone two years ago, but it’s like, you’re supposed to be closely related and then you go there and you’re like “So, what are you doing right now? How old are you?? What happened to who? How did I not know that??” 3. No for the last time. I’m not here to get married. No. No. No. No. NO. End of conversation. 4. I’ve discovered that there is a deep rooted anxiety that comes from pressure to ‘perform’ in a certain way with family. I don’t know what the boundaries are; what is good to say and what isn’t? What are topics that are inappropriate? Can I wear that or is it too revealing? Why do they always make me eat so much and then tell me I’m fat? Why are they so fascinated with my hair color?, is it ugly? Why is it that they always ask what I’m taking if I take my medication in front of them? Am I not allowed personal space or does that not exist here?

I was so happy that I got to see my dad’s sister Meerakka this time though because last time she was in Dubai. She is as perky as ever. And my cousin Vishwas is turning out to be quite the medic. I had to have my blood taken and he did it at the house professionally and painlessly.

All in all, it was a nice trip despite the fear of death on the train, antibiotics, my bad Konkani, and social anxiety. It was nice seeing my mom and Veena auntie. I have to say, I’ve only not been home for Thanksgiving once when I was living in Italy. And both times I was so homesick. So it was nice to have my family here shortly after.

Yay for the fam.

Oh! And I forgot the best part! Ma got to meet A.R. Rahman! We showed up at Panchathon promptly at 8 the night my mom was leaving and he sat down with us and chatted about the school and his goals, etc. It was really nice.

Monica

Last weekend was fantastic. Maya's college friend Monica is in India right now visiting her family in Delhi and she contacted me and asked if she could come visit and see Chennai. She came last Thursday and I picked her up at the airport in a ricksaw and we got back to my apartment and started planning the weekend. I couldn't really figure out where to take her because even though Chennai is a big city, there aren't really any tourist attractions here. I mean, how many shopping centers and malls can you take someone to? So what did we end up doing? Going back to Golden Sun resort of course. Why not?

Robert, Shasta, Monica and I took the bus to Mahabalipuram which was quite an ordeal. We managed to find seats, but not in the same place and we were all smashed next to sweaty smelly men playing the equivalent of arm rest fighting with our knees. The Golden Sun resort is about 10 kilometers before the city and normally if we were anywhere else in the world we would have probably just waited till we got to the city and then taken a cab to where we needed to go. Not in India - rules don't seem to exist and we're definitely getting the hang of it. As we approached the giant sign for Golden Sun, the four of us stood up and ran toward the front of the bus yelling STOP!!! The driver calmly slowed down and we jumped off before it came to a halt. Laughing hysterically at the absurdity, we ran toward the resort just as the sun was setting. We got our rooms, put our stuff down, got into our bathing suits and jumped in the pool. We had a great north Indian dinner, drank a couple Kingfishers, alternated between the ocean and the pool, and happily came to a compromise with the seemingly 75 year old "lifeguard" on duty who made sure we could swim before retiring for the night. Totally prune-skinned and exhausted, we went to bed late, fully planning to wake up early enough to see the sunrise.. Of course that didn't happen. Instead, we woke up at around 10 ish, ate breakfast, nursed our hangovers and took one last dip in the pool before we had to check out. Robert and Shasta ended up staying at the resort for another night, but Monica and I took a cab into Mahabalipuram so she could see the temples and caves. A couple hours later we took the bus to Pondycherry which took about an hour and a half and were met by Pushkar (who used to work for KM but left about a month ago). We were just planning on wandering around Pondy until we found a place to stay, but Pushkar had graciously booked us a room in the Sri Aurobindo ashram next to the promenade. To stay at the ashram for one night, it was only 100 rupees. 100 rupees! Even though I am suspicious about the source of the various bug bites I got that night and the possibility of head lice.................... 100 rupees! We dropped off our bags, and then went to this wonderful French restaurant called Le club near the sea. The ashram was situated in the French part of the city - cobblestone streets, colorful shops, smart cars. We really could have been in Europe. The restaurant was beautifully lit with lights strung around all of the trees and hanging from the thatched straw ceiling. I started with a cream-based seafood soup then moved on to steak with mushrooms and pommes frites. Crazy ey? After dinner we took a walk along the promenade and then headed back to the ashram to make the 10:30 curfew. Despite us being blanket-less, I slept quite well. In the morning we woke up pretty late, went to Fab India, and then had breakfast at a place called Rendezvous where I had eggs, chorizo, ham, grilled tomato, potatoes and black tea. Heaven.

Next on the itinerary was to meet Pushkar in his hometown: Auroville. What a strange city! Founded in the 60's, this socialist community was supposed to be a spiritual experiment in creating the "ideal". I looked it up and found this:
"Auroville belongs to nobody in particular.
Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.
But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
Auroville will be the place of an unending education,
of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity."


There is no religion in Auroville but anyone wanting to practice their own faith is of course allowed to do so. Instead the community has adopted a sort of general spirituality that focuses on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo to attain enlightenment. Because of these views, and because the city was founded in the 60's, you can imagine how many hippies migrated from all over the world to participate in communal living. The four main languages of Auroville are English, French, Hindi and Tamil and even though I was there only briefly, I managed to hear all four of them in addition to Russian, Italian, and Spanish. We learned that the soil of 143 different countries was brought to the city and the layout is a circular design around a central banyan tree where they built the Matrimandir. Pushkar took us on his motorbike to the Matrimandir and it is just breathtaking to look at. Not only that, because he is a member of the community, we actually got to go INSIDE which visitors are not allowed to do. The inside of it is just another world altogether. It feels like you're in a spaceship. As soon as you walk in, you have to sit down and put on socks which are provided for you. Then you walk up this HUGE spiral slope that twists a couple times up to the very top where there is a an ominous looking heavy door. We opened it cautiously and stepped inside to a room ten times as large as I thought it would be with soft white carpet, white walls, giant white pillars that seemed to disappear into the ceiling, and white towels purposefully laid out in a circular pattern. In the center lay a massive crystal ball held up by four gold triangles. We chose our towels, sat cross-legged and meditated for ten minutes and left. Despite its futuristic and deliberate design, the energy inside was surprisingly neutral. We left the Matrimandir and had a nice lunch of tofu lasagna and quiche at the visitor's center, and then headed back to Chennai. I slept the whole time on the bus.

The next morning I was summoned to Rahman's studio at 7 am and recorded yet another demo for the same "eastern European short film" that I recorded for before. But this time I pried a little bit more and found out that this demo that I've nonchalantly been recording for the past 2 weeks is actually for a short film by Shekhar Kapoor (Elizabeth, The Four Feathers)! And after about 11 hours of recording and revising and re-recording, Rahman sent the demo to Shekhar and he accepted it. Woohoo! Monica came to the recording session and hopefully she wasn't too bored. She left at around 4 pm. I had a really great time with her.

Unfortunately I can't get the recording until the film comes out, but perhaps I can somehow weasel my way into getting the demos that were rejected. We'll see.

What a weekend!