Ennamo Vagaiyay Varuguthu Maane

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...