If I don't watch out

My mom says I roam around all day with a bottle of Colin (Reckitt-Benckiser's brand of cleaning fluid: I use no other). This is true.

She also says I clean so much that someday I'll swipe her clean too and never even notice.

This cartoon was just begging to be drawn. I haven't drawn in a while, here goes nothing:

Wong Kar Wai: The one that got left out

Last night I found on Youtube a couple of scenes which were deleted from the final release version of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. I felt a little cheated (no pun intended!) when I saw this bit.

The two of them are in the hotel room, wondering how "they" managed to make love; and them finally doing it themselves.

[This link is un-embeddable]

Some of the charm of this film lies in the fact that Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan never really allow themselves to be "like them", like their unfaithful spouses. Their play-acting is endearingly sad, precisely because they never want to do anything more than pretend, rehearse. They have about them a formality which is highly stylised, like the entire film. Their pretences are ruled by a morbid curiosity which seems to arise from a troubled innocence.

No matter how I try to explain why their sleeping together was not hard for me to digest because of any moral considerations, I can hear the tone of disapproval in my own words. The decision to not do anything about the love that comsumes both of them is contradicted by their sleeping with each other. I think what I did not like about this idea is the lack of subtlety. It is a crude statement to hear her orgasmic gasps from the camera’s eye- view which peeps in from the outside of the hotel room window. It turns what is apparently a love born of great conflict and a shared hatred and sorrow, into something tawdry.

Even to me, even while writing this, it seems unfair to put such a premium on the love of these two being unrequited. Not unrequited in the conventional sense, but in the sense of, to put it more aptly, being unrequitable, and hence unrequited. Why, indeed, can’t they be like "them"? Surely the situation is different. Surely the circumstances under which their relationship began, and the reasons for which they love each other are not the same as those of their betrayers?

I’m reminded of the Harrison Ford movie Random Hearts (1999) in which he and Kristin Scott Thomas are in a similar situation, except that their spouses have died in a plane crash (which is why these two meet in the first place) and that the reasons (on her part, mostly) holding them apart are not quite the same as those in Wong Kar Wai’s film. In this case, the betrayers are dead, their affair was not known to anyone else, the survivors are in the green to hook up. But there is the guilt and the impropriety of beginning a relationship so soon after the tragedy, improper especially since Kay has an election campaign to run. It is the guilt that finishes them in the end, and the love that at least Butch still has for his late wife.

In both these movies, the couples choose not to pursue a love that would have made them both very happy, had it not been for the peculiar circumstances under which they had met or come to know each other.

In the Hollywood movie, however, the sex is not something you would even think twice about; perhaps it is some leftover Orientalist in me that wants to see the Asian couple as representing a love that is above the physical.

Somewhere I think the brooding nature of the general aesthetic of In the Mood for Love would have been ruined by a trial and error approach. If they were going to separate and decide not to be together anyway, what is the point of some frustrated lovemaking?

I really must see the film again; I started writing this on a whim and maybe it shouldn’t even be on the blog without more thought, but there you have it.

Who knows. Meanwhile, if I get so perturbed at one hint of sex, i run the risk of turning into a saffron-toting Shiv Seni, or worse, the deluded Jeff Bridges in The Mirror Has Two Faces!

Phaalse Hain Kaale Kaale

If you've never lived in India, or, to be precise, north India, somewhere not urban enough to exclude pushcart-toting vendors (various wallahs, as our English masters used to call them) from the landscape, you have missed one of the most sublime joys of the Indian summer. It goes by the humble name of phaalsa and is a tiny little bluish-reddish-purple bruised-looking berry that grows on trees in clusters.

I Googled phaalsa but as often happens with phonetic spelling, it didn't throw up much. Then I went to the ole' Bible at home, Amma's ancient copy of Nutritive Value of Indian Foods (1976 Reprint), by C. Gopalan, B.V. Rama Sastri and S.C. Balasubramanian (yes, apparently Tam-Brahms got together and made a joint effort!) first published in 1971 by the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, under the National Council of Medical Research. This book was part of her curriculum while she was studying to finish a B.Sc. (Bachelor of Science) in Home Science, and has long been my polyglot family's way to cross-translate names of fruits, and spices between Tamil, English, Hindi, Malayam and occasionally even Gujarati, Assamese, Oriya, Bengali or Marathi (my grandad spent some time in Orissa, Assam and Gujarat; the rest is stuff picked up from here and there over the years ).

The phaalsa is just as much a part of living in Lucknow as travelling in a rickshaw, Hazratganj, chikan and the bad shaayari that all kids learn in school here.


// The pictures were taken in my garden. The voiceover is my mom! Must try to record the real thing sometime!

Kundera Strikes Again

I don't know if I will ever be able to finish The Unbearable Lightness of Being, since all I seem to do is find "fortuitous" coincidences all around me and then blog about them!

But this is one for the books.

I was editing my Interests field in my Blogger Profile, and as it happened, most of them were written in my usual longwinded manner. So it became virtually impossible to let the one-touch search take its course. If one of your listed interests is, say, "music", all you have to do is click the word and you have a list of all the bloggers with the same interest. (Although, if you're looking, via Blogger, to fortuitously meet someone of the opposite sex with the same interests as you, you should REALLY be more specific!)

The only interest that would actually throw up some results was "Sign Language". I went through the list, only to find that there were LOTS of Virgo women (like me, hence the excitement, duh!) on that list! There was one Jo among them, and being called Jo myself by most of my friends, it struck me as coincidence enough to reach out through cyberspace to this woman in Bristol and just say Hi.

I happened to visit the link on she had given to her husband's blog, and no prizes for guessing what his profile picture was. [Well, it wasn't exactly Magritte's Son of Man]. It was his face, obscured by the iconic apple!

Kundera's characters are born of metaphor; he says one metaphor can give birth to love.

Well, considering how obsessed I am with this painting, I don't want to read this guy's blog in great detail, lest I find him irresistibly attractive :) !

I cannot remember where or when I saw this painting for the first time; by the time I saw The Thomas Crowne Affair, I was no stranger to it. It's not really a painting in my mind anymore, though. It is an image, somewhat fluid in that it works as a collection rather than one image (it can be only the apple, only the hat, only the tie, only the wall. Incidentally I was about to add "only the briefcase" but that is merely an addition I have made to my mental picture of the real picture). It has become in my mind a beacon of all those fortuities that hold my life together. It has dogged me for quite some time; or perhaps I have dogged it. It has been serendipitous for me in ways more than one, not the least being the somersault my stomach does every time I encounter it unexpectedy, like on an unknown Blogger's profile.

This painting is why I took one look at one particular edition of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and knew I HAD to have it (funnily enough, the other edition had on the cover a drawing similar enough to Picasso's Dog, a sketch that has been a symbol for the minimalist and impressionistic style of sketching that Appa and I like so much; similar enough perhaps to be seen as fortuitous in itself, as if the book called out to me. But it didn't with that cover. If anything, the title evoked more interest).

It has occured to me before, I must admit, but occurs to me now with only greater conviction, that love is often no more the result of some happy chance that some mild attraction made a great deal out of.

But to say "no more than this" is to demean love, and place no value in the pricelessness of chance, and the pristine beauty of happenstance, serendipity, if you will. To do that would be to turn the world into Zembla*, which I, for one, have no intention of doing.

// Now that I have finally put downscaled versions of all these pictures in the same place, they seem to look different from what I recalled of them; Kundera's Bowler hat doesn't really look like Magritte's hat; who knows, maybe even the coincidences aren't as real as they seem.

*Courtesy Wikipedia: William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: "making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design". It derives from Novaya Zemlya (or Nova Zembla), a cold, barren land with many features opposite to the lush Sri Lanka (Serendip). On this island Dutch 16th Century navigator Willem Barentsz and his crew were stranded while searching for a new route to the east.

When Richard Linklater met Milan Kundera

My best friend just got out of a four-odd year long relationship into which she had, as she does, poured her heart and soul, only to find that the guy she thought she loved had been lying to her all the time, not just about somebody else he was also seeing, but about tiny little inconsequential things, all of which added up to one big pile of white lies so tall that she had to quit, not being the kind who likes being with a compulsive liar.

She was talking to a friend on the phone the other day, and as phone conversations between interesting people so often do, this one was ending at five in the morning, and she observed that she could talk to her friend from sunrise to sunset (or sunset to sunrise, I’m just reconstructing roughly!), and then he cried, "Have you seen those movies?!"


She had not, in fact, seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (which by the way till I just looked them up on Wikipedia, even having seen both, I thought were called Before Sunrise and After Sunset,) so she got the CD of Before Sunset and saw it, not knowing it was the sequel. Anyway, I asked her how it was, and she didn’t like it. I asked why, and she said the man in the movie was obsessed with sex, and she thought that made the whole movie abusive.

Now, I’ve seen this movie once, about a year ago, and after watching the prequel, and I have no recollection of having made any such observation. In fact, I really liked the movie, and I thought it was a beautiful story, not incredibly original, but then people’s stories rarely are.

I told her maybe she should watch it again when she was happier! She’s not usually one for sop in movies (which is not always true about real life), while I, I think would die without the quantum of magic and coincidence in my life that I need, to keep me going.

I suppose her reaction to the movie just goes to show again, what I have suspected for a while; whatever is on your mind superimposes itself on what you do; Milan Kundera is right. I’m half-way through his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and I know exactly what he means when he says Tereza would always be sentimental about Beethoven because he was playing on the radio when she first met Tomas, the man she would fall in love with, at the restaurant she worked at. "One cognac, please", Tomas’ order, and his first words to her, are not just his words then, they are a message.



Kundera writes,
[in Part Two: Soul and Body, Ch. 9, pg 48 of Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition]

" …Tomas [felt]…uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of…improbable fortuities.
But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

[in Ch. 11, Pg 51]

"…If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty."

It may not always sound so great, apparently; as my friend superimposed her anger and feeling of being betrayed onto the film, I remember the time I was watching Ido Tadmor on stage recently (April 2008). I was there by myself; I am so used now to finding no one to accompany me on my adventures in Delhi's cultural circuit that I don't even bother asking any more. I sat there in the hall, strangers all around me, not a familiar face in sight (unless you count Manish Arora whom I spotted there!) and it was as if he danced only for me, an art form that was formless, fluid, born of emotion, desire, experience, and not of a need for structure. Where there is no form, your mind can shape an experience into whatever it pleases, with or without your knowledge, whether you like it or not. I was sad that day; maybe sad is not the word, but I was mighty confused, and terribly lonely. The guard that we carry around with us is rarely let down easily; sometimes it is raised higher amongst strangers, sometimes we create strangers out of our friends. Maybe it's just me; but I know my voice changes in genteel company, I talk differently in different situations, and along with that manner of speaking comes a manner in general, I dress differently, I walk differently. I sat there in the auditorium with my guard up, a mile high, and feeling stiffly that this dance thing was going to be a damp squib. Then I looked around, still lonely, and seeing no one familiar or friendly around, I realized that since it didn't matter anyway what I did there that night (no one would recognize me) and there was anyway no one to whom I could confess that I was lonely, I might as well enjoy the show. So I tried, I really tried to grasp what was happening on stage; as it happens the opening song was not to my taste, but the next song was beautiful, his movements suddenly took on new meaning, the tune was a sad one, or so I thought. I'll never know, unless I hear that music again when I am happy. It was beautiful in the way an ancient building up in the mountains is. You feel a wrench, knowing its day of glory is passed and you can never see it in the form in which it was built, but that very sense of history and kahani [tale] behind it makes it the more beautiful. It a is a beauty tinged with sadness, like #20, Barakhamba Road.

I came out of the hall that day taking home with me an experience I will not forget soon; it was the beauty born out of the weight of my own soul, perhaps, that created that experience. I almost began to cry sitting there amongst strangers, not a familiar face in sight; I pulled myself together then, not seeing the point of a public catharsis. My guard went up again, and it could have been banal again, some new-age dancer, some arty-farty stuff; but no. It was beautiful even after I became myself, for in that brief moment I had lost myself to something outside of myself; little knowing that in reality, even what I saw was not merely what I saw, but what I read into what I saw.

Intermediate Technology

There ain't no such thing as Basic Infrastructure.
Infrastucture, by definition, is complicated!

Over twenty years ago, around 1981-2, in Kanpur, a decrepit town in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, when my dad still held a pilot's license, he and my mother met a couple of slightly older, much more worldly folks called David Drury and Asifa Kanji, who had been married a few years, while my parents were fresh out of honeymoonland. I believe the story goes that Appa was giving joyrides down at IIT-K and they met there, victims, I guess, of mutual curiosity, and one thing led to another and my folks invited home two extraordinary people who were to my dad, I can only imagine, one suspiciously well-read Yankee and one terribly intelligent and lovely young woman of unascertainable extraction.

One of the more memorable things Uncle Dave (yes, he's UncaDave to me) did during that stint in Kanpur was write some wonderful songs (well he finished his Ph.D. on the side, but who cares!). One of these, one of my favourites, was called (or has been called in retrospect) Talkin' Memsahib Blues.

As Arlo Guthrie would say,

"It's called, ya know, Talkin', 'cos it's a talking kinda song, ya know. And it's about this memsahib, ya know, so it's called the Talkin' Memsahib Blues. That's why it is that it goes by that name"

and so forth.

[I finally transcribed the lyrics from the CD that was made from the original tape recording from the 80s and found its way to us because we met David and Asifa last year (I met them for the first time, and finally heard live so many songs I had growin up listening to) after so many.]

Talkin’ Memsahib Blues

[D.D.: I'll try, we'll see what happens, it's the first time I've done the whole thing.
Ok, this is written from Asifa's point of view alright, this is her talking through the song.]

Ah yes, those happy hours I spent
When we heard about our research grant.
Six hundred a month is chickenfeed
But in India that means Memsahib,
Servants - cringing, crawling minions,
Gin and tonic on the veranda.

Well we made our home in Kanpore town,
The very finest place around
If you like dacoits, filth and thieves,
Flies and small-scale industries.

You mean you dragged me half way 'round the world to live in Cleveland?
Wouldn't you really rather study tourism in Goa?

Well I suppose if you have gone crazy m'boy
You'll need someone to take care of you.

Well we soon moved out from IIT
To the Bima Vihar Colony.
New red brick but just next door
Was the engulfed village of Lakhanpore,

The super-boonies:
Calling a goatherd to get your grass cut;

The milkman: the milkman brings the milk right to your doorstep
In the buffalo!

But life was never dull, you see
We had no lack of company
Toads and mice and fleas and slugs,
Lizards and birds and Kamikazi bugs-
Mega zillions of them
Dying gloriously in your food, your tea, your shoes, and your toilet-paper.
And like all fanatics, it's impossible to reason with 'em

To clean house, wash clothes and get to the station
You have to be a Master of Industrial Relations.
Bring your laundry in on Tuesday,
Pick it up again on Doomsday.
"Oh, you mean you wanted it this week?
I'll absolutely, certainly and pukka positively bring your clothes tomorrow.
Or the next day."

When the washerman quit and we fired the maid
My own two hands were all I had.
In my fondest memories I clearly see
The joys of Intermediate Technology
Like cooking dinner for fifteen people on a one-burner kerosene stove
Or whipping clothes off the line during a Monsoon downpour

Or turning on the tank so you can wash the pot to boil the water to put in the cooling jar to brush your teeth with.

I was choked to the gills with fear and trepidation
When the old man went out and bought his own transportation,
The old Lambretta he could barely get to run ,
And the author of the traffic code: Atilla the Hun!

Roads that look like they were recovering from recent mortar attacks.
We share the street with hand-carts, elephants, tempos, buffalos, camels and bicycles.
Kanpur has a zoo,
But the road is closer.

I'll give you a very useful driving tip if you're out that way, by the way:
Don't ever pull up too close behind an elephant at a long stop light.

Like life I could go on and on,
But what's the use?
And still I wouldn't trade that year for most I've had,
For a first time 'round, weren't too bad.

But you aren't about to hear me ask for a second round!

All in all, one good thing you've got to say about living in Kanpur:

It feels so good when you stop!

Funny how certain memories centre themselves around certain people. When you are a musician, you realise how possessive a singer can get about 'her' song. I've been pianist for so many people, and I've learned some beautiful songs this way. They always remind me of the person who sang it 'first', as it were.
Cry Me a River is not Ella Fitzgerald, Twist and Shout is not the Beatles, I Feel the Earth Move is not Carole King, There You'll Be is not Faith Hill. In fact, Joni Mitchell can never just be just a singer I like; even if I had not sung her and had the best solo time on stage I'd ever had!
I feel like I'm getting stuck these days; my cd player had too much jazz, borrowed from friends, and too much stuff of my own that keeps getting recycled over and over again. As usual, my older brother (Baba) is my source for new music. Much as it makes me the ickle pipsqueak, aka small fry, etc. I don't care, I got to get it somewhere! Being in music fulltime (or should I say halftime, since the other half is supposed to be literature) is tough, man! You snooze, you lose! Now that it's finally dawned on me that I'm no prodigy (no, the there's hope yet theory doesn't work here) it's upto me to LISTEN! You can only write what you know, right?
Eh he. I'm listening to the UK top ten singles off youtube.
This may not actually help with composing, but then I can cut myself some slack, eh?


P.S. Wow, talk about cross reference. I've been hearing Vinicius de Moraes sing lots of Bossa Nova on repeat on my winamp and now I found Ella Fitzgerald's Cry Me a River done in Bossa Nova style! I'm not uploading the link because it wasn't so great. There is also a french version, called Pleurer Des Rivières but, Francophile that I am, I wouldn't recommend it! I also found a Spanish song called Te Lloré Un Río which is listed on Wikipedia as a version of this song, but there's no connection, really; even the title translates "a river cries to you" (although I have less faith in Babelfish now that the "altavista" in the url is gone. It doesn't look the same now. I feel betrayed!)
P.P.S. No, I'm not embedding any videos for this arbit. post!

Bugs, bugs and more bugs. Blogging is an obstacle-course!

Blogger has a lot of bugs. This is rather maddening.

To publish this post took me over two days, because it required digging out all the literature for all these events (both what I pick up at venues, as well as hyperlinkable info online). Plus, my computer has a nasty habit of rebooting of its own accord; something which extensive troubleshooting has put down to overheating, which cannot be remedied unless some major renovation (adding a fan above the PC) or reordering (putting the PC under a fan; yeah, right; it would be easier to install a wiring extension and fit a new fan!) happens.

In addition to that, the UPS is just a bypassable useless appendage in the circuit-it does nothing-at least it used to beep its head off, though not staying on for a proper shutdown; it would just turn off; but now it doesn't do even that.

I often edit in MS Word, or am writing in MS Word anyway (not necessarily for the blog), so Word is supposed to be my friend. But guess what? I hear (on troubleshooter groups etc.) that it's a sin to post from Word to Blogger, because it adds all sorts of useless confusing formatting. So the html just goes for a six.

Then when I started using GoogleDocs (GD) I thought they would be a saviour (the desi cyber cafe in Delhi I go to-it's called Phonewala, in Amar Colony five minutes' walk from college, charges 15 bucks an hour-is so sasta [cheap] there's no A/C, it's a furnace, it has Windows 9?, god only knows 95 or 98 and MS Word 97. So the only way to standardise formatting, etc. was to use GD). Well all I can say is, there ain't no such thing as Standard Formatting-it stops right up there with A4 size paper. The freakiest of the freaky screwups have happened to me.

(For instance, the bullets in a bulleted list were all of the same size and type [duh!] in my original, but in GD and that old MS Word they were of different sizes. 0_0. I mean, what? Are you kidding me??)


What is up with line breaks in Blogger? And does this damn server have amnesia or what? Drafts that are saved never look the same when you revisit them. Hell, neither do published posts. Line breaks vanish into thin air. But that I can still stomach. When I found a nice solution (not the most elegant, but under the circumstances) I tried it, and it worked-to replace all the "^p" marks with "<br>". I was happy, but should have known better. Like the mosquitoes that get immune to DDT after a while, I think I've caused Blogger to mutate into this weird creature that EVEN EATS UP THE "br" MARKS in Edit Html Mode!!??!!

As it happens, and as Murphy would have it, I happen to be a stickler for formatting. It irks me no end when something looks off.


Oh did I mention the Internet connection? It's BSNL Broadband, and there is something just so wrong with it, nobody even knows what it is. It's like those Victorian novels in which there's always one girl who is puny, pale and of a weak constitution. Nobody knows what it is. Or the older age group people who have mysterious aches and suddenly suffer from excruciating pain. (I think I should write a paper on the first mentions of AIDS and cancer in literature. Muahahaha [that's a diabolical laugh, in case you didn't know already. Think Skeletor.]) So what happens is, it's gets disconnected arbit.ly on its own. (Ah yes, you think, the PC and its Internet have a certain kinship, oui?)
The way to get it working (aka the workaround [yes, spending too much time in help forums!]) is to turn the modem on/off/on/off a couple of times, disable/ enable the connection a couple of times, pray, curse, yell at family members who have no clue what to do, try the "Repair" option on the connection (it will always show, at least once, that the Repair operation failed, that the ISP address could not be verified or some such thing) till it says "Completed".
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
In spite of all this.
Oh, and it shows as connected even when it's not, so BEWARE!

The good thing about GD and Blogger is the "autosave", which has saved my life on many occasions. In fact, my MS Word setting used to be to create AutoRecover versions every one minute, but I guess that has been returned to default by some freak accident caused by all the other screwups that happen to my poor comp. Yesterday when my comp rebooted yet again I found my file corrupted. The one I had been working on all day. By some stroke of luck, there was an extension-less file called "~WRD2284" on the desktop next to the icon for the corrupted file. With great trepidation I opened it as a .doc file and it WORKED!! Whew!


Anyway, this was a rant which was spewed in original on Blogger in the Nemesis-like "Create" window. So hopefully I won't have any problems here. Oh before I forget (there is no WAY I'm coming back to this post to re-edit it!), how come one can't save a new post within a little gap after an autosave? the SAVE NOW button doesn't light up!!

Au revoir, this has been a good vent! Bootless, but good!


P.S. Sorry for no links to the troubleshoot pages, but I'm tired now! If you're a Blogger user, just go to Help and then select Google Groups. That should do for most problems. Be sure to look for Known Issues if it's not a high-funda [advanced] problem.

P.P.S. I DID have to return to this post. Bloody hell. The line breaks were chewed up again!

Richard P. Feynmanspeak

"There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity
living things masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe."

A Cultural Education: Delhi-Jan '07 to Apr '08

20th January, 2007

Theatre at Kamani Auditorium

presented by National School of Drama and Sanskar Rang Toli

Premchandki Kahaniyan: two day theatre festival of Premchand’s best

directed by Devendra Raj Ankur

2nd April, 2007
Music at India Habitat Centre
presented by The Delhi Music Society, Artsahimsa and the India International Centre
Laura Goldberg (Violin), Amy Lieberman (Soprano) and Steven Masi (Piano)
Bach, Beethoven and Debussy
followed by songs from The Great American Songbook (1935-1945)

27th April, 2007

Various vocal musics at M.L. Bhartia Auditorium, Alliance Française

presented by Alliance Française de Delhi and others

Delhi Chamber Choir and Delhi Opera Ensemble, conducted by Gabriella Boda-Rechner and Situ Singh Buehler
Debut concert of the Delhi Chamber Choir

Madrigals, motets, folk adaptations by Morley, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Durufle; also operatic pieces by Delhi Opera Ensemble.

13th August, 2007

Acoustic music at IIT

presented by Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth

Ziskakan, band from French Reunion Island comprising band members Gernard Clara, Mishko M'Ba, Pascal Manglou, Jean Rassiga, Rouben Savariaye

Band singing in native (French) Creole, to bass, guitar, tabla, drum, dholak, keyboards, conga, sitar and a special sea-sound instrument called creon.

29th August, 2007

Classical string quartet at Shri Ram Centre for the Arts

presented by Max Mueller Bhawan, Goethe-Institut, Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth

Signum Quartett

Schumann, Haydn, Jörg Widman

14th October, 2007

Music, Dance and demi-theatre at Max Mueller Bhawan
presented by The Neemrana Music Foundation and India International Centre
The Delhi Opera Ensemble led by Situ Singh Buehler, conducted by Gabriella Boda Rechner; also the Sadhya Ballet Troupe
Autumn Festival: two days of Classical music,
Second Day: Offenbach, Donizetti, Mozart, Puccini, Verdi
followed by songs from musical theatre, including J. Kander's (Life is a) Cabaret, J. Bock's If I Were a Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof and Andrew Lloyd Webber's All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera.

1st December, 2007

Music at Central Park, Connaught Place

presented by Seher, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Ministry of External Affairs

SAARC Bands Festival

featuring Strings, Advaita, Soulmate and many more

10th December, 2007

Theatre orchestral music at Purana Qila

presented by Fondazione Cariparma, Commune di Parma, Fondazione Monte di Parma, Ministero degli Affari Easteri, Embassy of Italy Italian Cultural Institute, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Delhi Tourism and others

Festa Italiana

Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Parma //(sorry if this link doesn’t work, it’s a Google-generated translation from the Italian) conducted by Donato Renzetti featuring Silvia Dalla Benetta (Soprano), Leonardo Lopez Linares (Baritone)

Verdi, Donizetti, Puccini, Rossini

c. 20th January, 2008
Film at India Habitat Centre
presented by Breakthrough, Federation of Film Societies of India, UHURU, India Habitat Centre, Alliance Française and others
Tri Continental Film Festival 08: Asia, Africa, America
India premiere of A Jihad for Love (2007), Arabic/ French/ Farsi/ Hindi/ Urdu/ Turkish film by Parvez Sharma, about sexuality in Islam.

c. 25th January, 2008
Theatre at Kamani Auditorium
presented by Dash Arts, The British Council, Indian Council for Cultural Relations and others
Tim Supple (Director)
A Midsummer Night's Dream, a multilingual English/ Tamil/ Malayalam/ Hindi/ Sinhalese/ Bengali/ Marathi/ Sanskrit acrobatic adaptation.

1st March, 2008

Music at India Habitat Centre

presented by Indian Council for Cultural Relations and others

Release of new album Public Issue by Sushmit Bose; Dylan-esque walkin'-talkin' ballads from the album; also two impromptu Baul songs

featuring vocals and rhythm guitar by Sushmit Bose, Deepak Castelino on banjo and classical guitar, backup vocals by Rukmini Sekhar

7th, 15th March, 2008
Music and Film at Alliance Française
presented by Organisation Internationale de la francophonie, Semaines de la Francophone India, Embassade de France en Inde, Alliance Française and others
Francophonie Weeks
7th March: Film Festival; Festival Vivre ensemble at M.L. Bhartia Auditorium

Zim and Co (2005) directed by Pierre Jolivet, about an ingenious young man dogged by trouble.
15th March: Alliance Française de Delhi Golden Jubilee Choir

17th, 19th March, 2008
Music at Max Mueller Bhawan and India Habitat Centre
presented by Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Goethe-Institut, Hungarian Information and Cultural Centre, Auswärtiges Amt, German Federal Foreign Office
Capital City Minstrels and the Remscheider Vokalensemble //(sorry if this link doesn’t work, it’s a Google-generated translation from the German)
conducted by Gabriella Boda-Rechner and Werner Rizzi
Viva la Musica - Songs Beyond Borders
Orlando di Lasso, Claudio Monteverdi, Thomas Morley, Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Brahms, Max Reger, Gerhard Schwarz //(not found online!) , Johann K. Bachofen //(no info found online!), Fritz Werner and others, including Rizzi's own Wundernacht
also songs from India, Morocco, Venezuela, Hungary and Israel.
Eröd Iván's Viva la Musica as encore.

17th April, 2008

Dance at Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre

presented by Embassy of Israel

You: a choreography by Israeli dancer-choreographer Ido Tadmor

Featuring singer/dancer Michal Amdurski and pop musician Ohad Hitman

23rd April, 2008

Flamenco at Kamani Auditorium

presented by Embajada de España en Delhi, Indian Council for Cultural Relations

La Compañía María Pagés

Of memories

I was looking, still, for The Elusive Curio that has dogged my footsteps snd haunted my days and nights. I opened the plastic bag that housed the remains of my many years of solitary play in Barbieland.

Wow, that's it?

There were a million memories in there, the American Bazaar in Lagos where we bought lots of random Barbie accesories, which reminded me of the My Little Pony Shetland and stables bought secondhand there, and that quintessentially American shiny plastic carnival-balloon [it's called metallised nylon, thank you Wiki] that floated above my head all the way home.

At some point a few years ago - I cannot for the life of me remember when - there was a big chance that we'd have to move out of 3/42, Vishwas Khand, Gomti Nagar, Lucknow, that had been my address long enough for me to feel lousy about it. The toys were the first to go. It was time to put them away anyway - Baba I suppose was already at college, and I had outgrown them too. So I packed up everything. My stuff I wanted packed and ready, not lying around creating a nuisance for everybody.

Well, whadya know. We didn't move. I'm glad every day that we didn't need to. Who cares if this is not our own house, if it's somebody else's and we just rent it. We've spent ten years here.

So the Barbie bag was no little Pandora's Box.

That's how love is supposed to be, isn't it? I thought.
You open a bag you had forgotten years ago, and you feel that bittersweetness. You know it's gone, but so what? It didn't last forever, so what?

Forever is here inside me. Whatever else I have or do not have, I have this. The memories are mine.

Even love has no room for hysterics or maudlin [sic.].
We live.
I live.
Every day is a new algebraic sum of my life. It hasn't failed me yet, been positive ever since I can remember.

Move over Godot,

Je suis comme ça. Je fais tous les deux. J'oublie tout de suite et je n'oublie jamais.