Ennamo Vagaiyay Varuguthu Maane

"Three minutes." our tour agent was pretty straightforward, looking at me in between counting the people hurrying into the bus. "You'll have to ask a hotel or something, or do it on the side of the road."  Public toilets are not a thing in this part of the world, and at -2 degrees centigrade in the middle of a mini blizzard, I wasn't about to complain.  Manali is perhaps the most lively town in the Beas river valley. The buses that brought us from Bhuntar were too wide for the city streets leading to our hotel on Mall Road. We had to get down outside the city and transfer to these small 10-seater vans. Hurrying through the snow, I made my way into the parking lot of a hotel. Hotel Neelam . The area was slippery from all the water and hailstones. I carefully tied my new hiking shoes, which I had gotten for cheap from Kasol, and gently walked inside. 'Sa'ab, may I use your restroom? '  He motioned to the door. Without saying thank you, I rushed to ...

We overslept a bit. We were supposed to be up at 4:30am and to watch the day's first sunlight from inside the temple. By the time I came to, it was 5:30 already and my friends were all fast asleep. We woke up one by one and got ready by around 6:45. The huge Rajagopuram is visible in this picture I took. Hurrying to the temple, we saw the magnificent icon of Garuda first, flanked by murtis of Angada and Sugreeva. This huge Garuda is in a sitting position with his palms anjalibandham . The idol is always wrapped in a white dhoti from the waist down. We then proceeded inwards to receive Namperumal's darshanam. Passing through the many prakarams of the temple, we finally saw Namperumal in the company of his consorts, Lakshmi Devi and Bhumi Devi. They are a sight to behold. The legend of Srirangam Stepping outside the Gayatri Mandapam, we worshipped the vimanam , itself called the 'Ikshvaku Kula Dhanam'. The Rangavimanam  was the vehicle in which Narayana appeared to Brahm...

The train that we were on, the Tiruchendur-Chennai Superfast, pulled into Chidambaram station at the break of dawn. Our second-class compartment was mostly empty by then. Walking around the town of Chidambaram, we asked a shop about a place where we could freshen up. The man directed us to a lodge. The place he recommended declined us, but empathetically directed us to another. We booked a room there for around two hours to shower and get ready. Sannidhis in the Nataraja Temple  From there we headed straight to the south gopuram of the grand temple. Adorning the inner walls of this gate were reliefs depicting Indian dance. Thillai Chidambaram is Natarajar, the lord of the dance. We left our bags and footwear outside and walked in. Seeing the vimanas of the grand sabhas as soon as we walked in was a profoundly spiritual experience. We first worshipped Dakshinamurti , whose sannidhi is immediately in front of the south gopuram. Dakshinamurti is a bhāvam of Shiva representing wisdom a...

My friends Neeraj Menon, Siddharth S Jayan, Ashwin Pavithran and Basil Joshua Reji began a tour of various temples in Tamil Nadu today. Our journey began at Thiruvananthapuram North station, where we boarded the Kollam-Kanyakumari MEMU to Kanyakumari Terminus. The railway line south of Thiruvananthapuram is incredibly scenic.  The fields where Kalliyankattu Neeli once roamed. Taken around Nagercoil town station. The beach in Kanyakumari is a mere fifteen minute walk from the railway station. We successfully evaded auto drivers and walked to the beach. There, we changed into our bathing suits and went swimming in the meeting of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. The water in Kanyakumari is always a bright blue colour. The high tide today made for great swimming. No pictures, sadly, as all of us were in the sea together. Kanyakumari This bath was a purification ritual for us before our worship at the temple of Kanyakumari Amman on the seashore. This is an ancient temple in the Ta...

I took a seat in this concert with no expectation of a 'strictly' classical concert. However, the main vocalist of Carnatic rock band Agam  presented a kacheri  that was as traditional as any kacheri in the modern day could get. Just before the concert began, I heard from the row in front of me that Harish was a maverick and that his popularity was mostly with the new generation of Carnatic rasikas, comfortably disconnected from 'traditional' Carnatic music. He dismissed all such beliefs, proving that he is a Carnatic rock musician precisely because he is a Carnatic musician. Joining this outstanding vaggeyakara that evening were Sri Edappally Ajith on the violin, Sri Radhakrishna Kamath on the mridangam , Sri Vellattanjoor Sreejith on the ghatam and Sri Paravur Gopakumar on the morsing.  Harish began the evening by testing the new venue's acoustics on the pallavi of Vatapi Ganapatim Bhajeham. This was an auspicious beginning not only for Harish, but for the re...

Foreword Minecraft is 15 years old! I can think of no other phenomenon that belongs to the children of the 2010s at such an emotional level. We grew up playing it, though some of us were too poor or too strictly raised to be able to buy the original version. I myself played it for many years in trial mode: playing in one world, in survival, for only 90 minutes until Mojang demanded that I pay, at which point I would be forced to delete everything I had made. I was elated once when a bug in Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition allowed me to use cheats in a world and extend my play time, and also enter creative mode. To me, this game has two disciplines: the crude and bitter realities of survival mode, and the godlike powers of creative mode. This month, I bought Minecraft with the winnings from a quiz (another pastime of mine). Both family and friends have come forward to condemn this as a poor financial decision. But I do not regret what I have done, even a little. Minecraft is worth much mo...

Alliance Française de Trivandrum recently screened the French arthouse production Chien de la Casse by Jean-Baptiste Durand. Short (1hr 33m) as it is, the movie is pure artistry, packed with philosophy and meaning. I've never brought myself to watch French movies before, and this was a good experience and an outstanding introduction to the world's oldest cinema industry for me.  The movie is set in a village in the French Riviera whose name is mentioned only once ever. The main characters, Dog and Mirales, have been thick friends since the age of twelve. Their life is confined to their small village and their gaming and drinking parties, other than playing with Mirales' dog, Beefcake. Dog is aloof and disconnected from the world: he isn't very outgoing, doesn't talk until prompted and doesn't know where Quebec is. Mirales constantly taunts him for his lack of general knowledge, calling him un imbecile heureux (a happy idiot). Mirales himself is a low-key drug d...

Yesterday, the Indian music community lost one of the greatest Hindustani vocalists of the era. I think it is impossible to talk about Hindustani music today without talking about Rashid Khan; to borrow an expression, it would be like going on and on about the Ramayanam without ever saying the word 'Rama'. He entertained and inspired two generations of singers, instrumentalists and rasikas and his death at a tender 55 has come as a shocker.   There was a phase in my life (2017-20) when I listened almost exclusively to North Indian and Pakistani classical and semi-classical music. On those journeys, I came across many great musicians, and Rashid Khan was perhaps the greatest khayal singer on that list. Yaman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSEuCJSnu94 A khayal piece. An amazing Tarana (thillana, as its rough equivalent is known in the Carnatic system) begins at 16:30. Puriya Dhanasree:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VB7jujlb5o Half an hour of great khayal. Another Puriya D...

 I imagine that many posts here will be about Carnatic music and technology in the days to come, and so a redesign from my old "public diary" style felt necessary. The title, Ennamo Vagaiyay Varuguthu Maane , is from a Ghanam Krishna Iyer composition beautifully rendered by Sanjay Subrahmanyan , music by T S Sabesha Iyer. It roughly means ''O deer (deer-like girl), some strange feelings have conquered me." This is my exact mental state when it comes to making any decision, writing any article or just sitting somewhere on a fine sunny day. Although for me, those feelings are far less romantic than what Ghanam intended when he wrote the song. The layout is also a lot simpler, reminiscent of the good old days of the Internet in the early 2010s and late 2000s.

One fine September afternoon in Trivandrum. Own picture. As I wrote earlier on this blog, Carnatic stalwart Sangīta Kalānidhi Sanjay Subrahmanyan performed in Thiruvananthapuram at the Padmanabhaswamy Temple's annual Navaratri concert last week. These concerts, one for each of the nine evenings, are held in the Navaratri Mandapam in the Kuthiramalika Palace, near the temple's eastern gate. He was performing on the sixth, for which Maharaja Swati Tirunal has composed the Kamavardhani kriti 'Saroruhasana Jaye'. Only the compositions of Swati Tirunal are performed here. I was slightly late to the show. The city's traffic held up the bus I had boarded, and I could only reach the temple by 18:05. I felt embarrassed: concerts like those at the Navaratri Mandapam are not meant for people without a sense of punctuality. In fact, Prince Rama Varma had written on his blog that no one would be allowed to come late. There is also the rule that patrons cannot leave before the c...

 He took out his grey earpods and stuck them in, deep. He was now seated in the train, in a car that by its looks seems to have been coupled onto the others ages ago and repeatedly dragged from each end, back and forth, for hundreds of miles, every day. The unreserved cars on the Intercity were packed with people as usual, but fortunately, no one could be seen standing anywhere and a few of the three-seater chairs had only two occupants. He could eventually find a seat, and retired to his favourite music. Indian classical. Not many people are into that. Especially not people his age.     The train hesitated to leave Trivandrum Central. It was already two minutes past five-thirty and the crowd was not in the mood for a languid, laidback journey. Youths, probably here because one of their friends' sister got married, stood in the vestibule after realising how late they had arrived to secure a seat. The crowd clears after Kollam, someone consoled them. Proud government ...

Source: MD Madhusudan, Wikimedia Commons. My parents and I visited North Kerala last weekend merely to listen to Sanjay Subrahmanyan, undoubtedly my favourite artist, who was performing at Thureeyam . For those unaware, this is an annual music festival organised by the Sampujya Krishnananda Bharati Swamigal of the Anandabhavana Ashramam of Pothamkandam, Kannur. Many great musicians have performed here, and this year's iteration Involved TMK, Jayanthi Kumaresh and Hariprasad Chaurasia, to name a few. The evening of the 15th of July, Sanjay was joined by his regular team of S Varadarajan on the violin and Neyveli Venkatesh on the mridangam, and on the ghatam by the illustrious Tripunithura N. Radhakrishnan. He began with a medium-paced padam in Gambheera Natta, 'Hara Hara Shiva Shankara', which rasikas may know from his Tamizhum Naanum concert in 2019. The piece soon escalated into the next speed. The percussionists got to show their mettle as he stepped it up yet another...

The old man took his umbrella, turned around and walked away. The boy looked on at the figure hurrying somewhere in the rain and thought a hundred things. They were light years away from one another when they met and now they were moving yet many tens of meters away, the boy thought. Their lights, propagating through the ocean of lives, met for a brief instant, likely never to meet again. But what is separation? Many tens, hundreds of meters, light years the man must now have walked. He felt he himself had walked that walk once, in another life, another time, another pocket of reality. The rain fell on their earth incessantly, washing away the last starlight of a conversation. The boy then recalled how their meeting had begun. The man wanted to board a bus and he had to tell him that there was no stop anywhere nearby. A taxi, too, was impossible to come across. He told him as well as he could the way to the nearest stop. The man then sat and undid his satin black umbrella, coercing the...

I got into the College of Engineering, Trivandrum in October last year. Three months of academics have passed, and the first semester of my B. Tech program is about to end. College has been a new experience for me. It's like school in that it's a bit demanding and not like school in that the penalty for not working is... nothing. There's an air of freedom. No one will kill you if you don't do homework, but if you don't do homework and walk into class, that's not okay: in other words, you should commit yourself to the work you are doing completely. Moving in on my own into a house with two other people has been a never-before, too. There's all sorts of new responsibilities and new opportunities. I'm learning to take the bus on my own, a first, because I never took buses back in Kochi. The metro took me as far as I needed. These days I do all my laundry by myself, and for lack of a washing machine, I do it all by hand. Since I live in a house, the landlady...

I was prophetic in saying many years ago that authors tend to forget about blogs that they write with no concrete intention in mind. This very blog is only updated in fits and starts, when I remember such a thing existed on some occasion. I think I have come to an important junction in my life and one that deserves to be written out about here. School ended last month. It was a place I found myself secure in. I am currently in that liminal space, where I think we all find ourselves in between big phases in our lives, pondering over big questions, wondering what to make of our lives and what we have made of it already. It's frightening, energising, and enlivening all at once. I have so many things in mind right now—I'm spoilt for choice. I had decided long ago the things I should do once I become an adult—learn to drive, start going to the gym, seek a guru in music. I'm also deciding what to study in college at the moment. I have two broad ideas in mind; one involves a purel...

One may think of this as a continuation of my earlier poem, When the sparrows learned to sing again . He stands in the way of a King. The gulmohar, a foot thick, towering-tall, has promised to speak to us today. Does he want to hear? "Fie," he cries. "Begone, I would hear no such thing, for what does the gulmohar know of the mountains, or the sea, Or the cold that descends unto one in the hills here east." "The tree is no scholar," I say, "but it is to you that he cries. Unto you he calls, confesses; unto you does he bring words of great meditations." He obliges. "What is spring to the land of the axe-wielder?" The gulmohar is enraged. "I spit at your seasons, the four creations of your masters. Here, there is only rain, and no rain. The river is a quiet one, but today, she cannot but tell her children, the waterfowl, of the Malabari spring. There are two, one comes and goes, leaving the laburnums a golden yellow. The second comes ...