An interesting interview with Danny Boyle, about filming Slumdog Millionaire in Mumbai. I particularly identified with this paragraph:

AVC: Were there places it was difficult to get permission to film?

DB: There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. [Snickers.] And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently. The most extraordinary thing, you'd be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn't be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what's thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you. You have to remain optimistic, and that's clearly how people live their lives there. Against all the odds, they retain kind of a spirit which allows them to get through against insufferable odds...

Wit and Humour

Wondering what to post, I fell back on the amazing Wit and Humour in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Council 1921-1971, Volume I.

It is best to let such books fall open at random, so I did -- and found this:

Humorous Definition of 'Tiller of the Soil'

On the 24th of September 1956, during the Debate in the Council on the Madras Cultivating Tenants Protection (Amendment) Bill, 1956, a humorous situation erupted when the Minister (The Hon. Thiru M. A. Manickavelu) tried to give a "layman's definition" as he himself put it, to the term 'tiller of the soil' by saying: "As I understand, a tiller of the soil is a person who, with a very scanty dress -- he has no coat, no turban and no umbrella in hand -- takes a plough and ploughs the land. There is sweat on his brow."

The following exchanges then took place:

"Sri A. M. Allapichai: Is it a crime to wear coat?

The Hon. Sri M. A. Manickavelu: No, not at all, even a long coat can be worn (referring to the Member's long coat). (Laughter) So, the tiller of the soil is the opposite of one who wears a coat and turban holding a walking stick or umbrella in hand and goes round his field, comes back home, takes coffee and chews pansupari.

Dr. V. K. John: Is he too old or too young?

Sri. A. M. Allapichai: Suppose he applied his mind? Application of mind also is physical labour.

The Hon. Sri M. A. Manickavelu: Yes, Sir. He must very much apply his mind because if he wants to take away the weeds, he should not pull out the crops in the process. Mind also plays its part."

An excellent blog about modern South Asian art: Masala Chai

Power Holiday

In India, power failure is called load shedding. At the moment, we're having 1 1/2 hours of it every day; the Chennai suburbs three hours a day; the rest of the state five hours a day, for an indefinite period.

Today I saw in the paper a new (to me) word for it: 'power holiday.'

The government's explanation is interesting. According to The Hindu:

The revised system of intensive load shedding... has been designed to ensure that there are no unscheduled disruptions in power supply.

i.e., we're having scheduled outtages (I think this word is also local?) so that we don't have unscheduled outtages. Further,

... the main cause for the frequent interruptions in the supply is the under-frequency relay factor...inadequate capacity addition... poor rainfall ... substantial reduction in the State’s share of power from Central Generating Stations that are hit by the shortage of lignite and uranium... [and] ... sudden loss of wind energy...

Opposition leader, Jayalalitha's response to this was succinct: she was quoted as saying that the reasons cited by the government for power shortage are "strange and ridiculous."

Vogue India's latest

Boy, this is disgusting, from the New York Times: Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India


That bib is likely priced at about two months' wages for this lady. This looks like cruelty to me -- let them eat cake.

Old Tamil Movies

I had written a post, long back, about my first Tamil move: Pennin Perumai. There's a fun article in the Hindu, by Vijaysree Venkatraman, about revisiting the old black and white Tamil films from that era: What Old Movies Do.

I see that I should think of those old 'socials' with more respect. I still think Sivaji is a lot cuter than Gemini, though.

Ghatotkach, from Maya Bazaar

Update: Vijaysree Venkatraman kindly sent me this YouTube link: Vivaha Bhojanam ("wedding feast"), a song that I love, in which Ghatotkach, the son of one of the Mahabharata heroes, Bhima, and a demoness, eats an entire wedding feast by himself. I have been known to burst out with "Bhojanam Bhojanam, ha ha ha ha ha ha" on occasion, at the prospect of a feast. (This is the Telugu version, so it's vivaha bhojanambu. There's a Hindi version somewhere, as well). Do watch it, I don't think you can help laughing along with it.

Update: And here's the Tamil version: "Kalyana samayal saatham" (same visual, different language)

Inside Outside

Five years ago, our neighbourhood was so quiet that visitors invariably exclaimed that it was hard to believe it was in the heart of the city. The land across the street was a backwater, part of the Adyar River basin, bordered with thorny bushes, and home to mongoose, snakes, and many species of birds. Now it has become a giant construction site. Here is the view from my gate now -- the new studio of Sun TV, on seven acres of land. From the depth of its foundations, I assume that it will rise so high that the blue sky in the photograph will be completely covered. To the right and around the corner, still more huge buildings are rising -- two hotels, apartment buildings, IT parks:


and looking to the left:


Here is what you will see if you stand at the gate looking in (the watchman provided that pink chair for himself. I'm not too fond of it, but it looks endearing, compared to the hulking monsters outside):


It's still peaceful to look at, but the roar of five cement mixers outside and the construction of a huge building, which goes on for 24 hours a day, is impossible to block out.

Mora Saiyan

What a beautiful, simple love song this is -- Mora Saiyan Mo Se Bole Na (My beloved won't speak to me). I heard it somewhere, and tracked down this version, sung by Amanat Ali on the TV singing contest Sa Re Ga Ma Pa. I like it better than the original. The visuals are nothing, but what a beautiful voice he has, and how movingly he sings:

Ghostbusters

Someone living near us died recently in sad circumstances. As usual, I only found out about it from Mary, who came to me and said, "The watchman wants more light in the back garden. There's one place near the kitchen that's very dark and he's frightened." I pointed out that we have plenty of security lights, whereas our neighbours have none at all.

Then she told me about the ghost. It has not been seen, but it is assumed that there must be one, because the death was unusual. Mary's room is outside, and when she got up in the night she felt afraid. The watchman was afraid because one night he heard a sound in that dark corner, something like "HOO!" In fact, he hadn't come to work for the last two nights. I said that there were no ghosts, and added, unkindly, that if ghosts are afraid of light bulbs, the watchman could just shine his flashlight on the dark corner when he did his rounds. I said that if it did exist, it would surely go away again soon.

A couple of days later, Mary said that some neighbours had done puja to exorcise the ghost from their property. Since we were not so protected, it was more likely than ever to linger with us. Could we also hire a Hindu priest? He would drive the ghost into a gourd, and break it on the road -- as is done with evil spirits on Ayudha Puja. I wasn't sure -- R already grumbles about Ayudha Puja. But when I asked him, he said that he would authorise a certain amount of money to hire a priest, and if that would make everyone feel better, fine.

For a week or so I heard no more about it. One day I asked Mary, "What happened to that priest you wanted?" and she said vaguely, "Oh, it's so far to go, to find one." I thought the ghost scare was over. Then yesterday she told me, "I've found a (Christian) pastor. He will come and say prayers." I asked if that would satisfy the Hindu and Muslim watchmen; she said that it would.

Later: Well, the pastor didn't show. Mary was all a-flutter -- she said he was a thaalaivaar, the leader of so many churches. I guess he was too busy. We had to go out, and when I came back and looked in the kitchen I saw a tray kept ready, with a good china cup and a pot of tea, all untouched.

I feel sorry for her disappointment, but I'm sick of this ghost now. A month has passed since the death, and no one has been harmed, except for a little fever suffered by the brave nightwatchman. Let the spirit rest, I say, and be soothed in the dark corner of our peaceful garden, out behind the kitchen.

Some Faces

Trying to do a better job of drawing faces -- from photographs, in my new gray-white paged sketchbook:


(late) Kishore Kumar, one of the greatest popular singers in Hindi


Dilip Kumar, the ultimate tragic hero in Hindi films when my husband was a boy.


a young girl, drawn from the newspaper


A Maharaja of Patiala, from an old photograph. What a beautiful face -- more beautiful than my drawing. And dripping with jewels. The way one imagines a Maharaja should be.

Lost at Sea

I am honored that the literary/arts blog/ezine Qarrtsiluni has accepted my poem Lost at Sea for its latest issue, Water. There is a recording of me reading it as well.

Qarrtsiluni publishes art, photography, writing, video of very high quality, each issue organised around a general topic. Its founders, and a number of the contributors, are people whose writing online I have been following with great pleasure for years. Take a look.

Demolition Day

Photo by R. Ragu

The Admiralty House, one of Chennai's few remaining fine old buildings, is being demolished. From The Hindu:

CHENNAI: The demolition of the Government House here, the oldest building on the Government Estate, has begun.

On Monday, workers were breaking the roof of the heritage building, commonly known as the Admiralty House, with giant hammers. The demolition will be completed in 40 days, according to an official of the Public Works Department, the custodian of the Estate properties. Some other buildings on the Estate will also be demolished, including the old MLAs’ quarters. The official says that as the buildings are vacated, they will be pulled down. The department hopes to complete the demolition of all the identified buildings by the end of next month.

The exercise is being carried out to facilitate the execution of the Rs. 200-crore Assembly complex project.

The government has selected a German-based architectural firm for the Assembly project. As per the present proposals, there will be two blocks – one housing the Assembly complex and offices of the Chief Minister and Ministers and the other accommodating offices of various government departments. While the first block will have ground and six floors, the second is likely to be a high-rise building, having a maximum of 20 floors. The government is planning to commence the construction of the proposed Assembly complex by September.

Till recently, the Government House building was occupied by the different wings of the Police department such as Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID) wing, the Economic Offences wing and Narcotics Intelligence Bureau-CID. The wings have been shifted to different places in the city. In the mid-1990s, the building, as a makeshift arrangement, even served as the headquarters of the Police department when the government undertook renovation of the DGP office building on the Marina, which is yet another heritage landmark. Till Independence, the Government House was the residence of Governors. For sometime, it also functioned as the MLAs’ hostel.

S. Muthiah, historian, wrote about the importance of the heritage monument on several occasions in The Hindu. In his column on October 29 last year, he wrote that after the French left the Fort St. George’s buildings in a shambles, Governor Thomas Saunders of the British East India Company in 1752 rented a house belonging to the wealthy Mrs. Antonia de Madeiros just across the Island from the Fort. On August 28, 1753 the Government of Madras bought the house for 3500 pagodas to serve as the Governor’s garden house. Only in 1947 did the Governor’s residence move to the present location in Guindy – Raj Bhavan.

Blogday

Goodness gracious, it's my blog's birthday again. The fifth. Happy blogday to me.

And thank you, those who still come around and take a look once in a while.

More Climbing

Jillu Madrasi told me about this YouTube video, about a man who has invented a better way to climb a coconut tree. Wonderfully simple, effective technology:

The Sun

April is National Poetry Month, and every year Knopf sends me a poem a day during April. (Though it's a bit late, they'll send you one too, if you send a blank email to: sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. They'll keep you on the list for next year, too.)

I received the most wonderful poem yesterday, by Dan Chiasson, from his book Natural History:

The Sun

There is one mind in all of us, one soul,
who parches the soil in some nations

but in others hides perpetually behind a veil;
he spills light everywhere, here he spilled

some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended.
He is in charge of darkness also, also

in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination.
People fucking flick him off and on,

off and on, with their eyelids as they ascertain
with their eyes their love's sincerity.

He makes the stars disappear, but he makes
small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars,

in the compound eyes of skyscrapers or in the eyes
of sighing lovers bored with one another.

Onto the surface of the world he stamps
all plants and animals. They are not gods

but he made us worshippers of every
bramble toad, black chive, we find.

In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes
a clocklike tick-tick when he flies, but he

is not a god. The only god is the sun,
our mind—master of all crickets and clocks.

Numbers

I just finished reading an article in the March 3 New Yorker, “Numbers Guy – Are our Brains Wired for Math,” about the work of Stanislas Dehaene. I was particularly interested in this paragraph:

Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19, and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.” … Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numberals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen….

I have a hard time with Hindi numbers (partly, of course, because I don’t use them often) – anything over 50 is confusing for me. From 10 onward, the numbers are irregular – for example 10+1, which logically would be das-ek or ek-das, you have gyarah, and every decade has its own oddities. 21 is ikis instead of ikbis (ek+bis – 1+20). And what about the 50s? Pachaas, 50, is followed by ikaavan, rather than ikpachaas (1+50), and then baavan (52), and then trepan – not trevan – so even within the decade it’s weird. Sheesh.

Tamil, on the other hand, is very logical. Except for 90 and 900, once you know the system you can count anything. Eleven is 10+1, not a special word like 'eleven.' After 20 (iruvathu, i.e. 2 tens), you have 20+1 , 20+2, etc. Simple. (Aha -- I just noticed that there is some variation between p and v, just as there is in my Hindi example above -- e.g., 20 is iru-vathu, while 30 is mu-p-pathu -- so the Santhi rules for joining letters together are coming into play in both cases.)

Is this understandable? I’m putting it in a cumbersome way. And I'm sure my spelling of the words for Hindi and Tamil numbers is atrocious.

The article made me wonder if Tamil children pick up counting faster than Hindi-speaking children – the system is more logical, so there’s less rote memorization required of small children. At the same time, Tamil is more polysyllabic than Chinese, so Chinese children might have an advantage over Tamil children, but not as much of one as they have over English-speaking children…

What do you say?

Gravy

I was wondering what to make for lunch today, and I had a sudden craving for one of my father's favorite foods: bread and gravy. He grew up poor, born in West Virginia, and moved around the midwest as a child by his father, looking, apparently not very successfully, for work. My father sometimes described himself as a hillbilly, or 'mountain William,' though he had been away from the hills for many decades by the time I knew him. He loved what now looks like poor people's food: bread and gravy; fried cornmeal mush (perhaps that's polenta to you); scrapple. Stodgy comfort foods, which eke out small amounts of meat.

We generally don't have meat in the house -- our kitchen is no-egg vegetarian -- but I lapse on occasion. I had had a roast chicken delivered a couple of days ago. So I stripped the meat off the bones and boiled up the carcass, made a roux of flour and butter, poured in the hot stock, added salt and pepper, and made a thick gravy. I poured it over the white Wonder-type bread that my staff takes with morning coffee and afternoon tea.

While I cooked I thought about my father, and remembered our family's only trip, when I was quite small, to Fairmont, West Virginia, where he was born. We met his very elderly Aunt Veedie, who invited me to choose one of her crocheted doilies as a gift. I horrified my parents by selecting the only one that was not plain white -- the yarn was heavily splotched with purple and yellow. But Aunt Veedie was pleased, saying that she called it her Aurora Borealis doily.

Two slices of white bread smothered in chicken gravy, and it was so good.

Coconut Stem Cluster

One of the stems cut down by the coconut tree man. Destined to replace this one, which broke away from its sheath.

Coconut Medicine 2

Today the ingredients of the poultice were assembled: turmeric, moth balls, rock salt, Sam's Fortified Neem Powder. The tree man supervised their mixing, put the medicine in a bag which he attached to his holster-basket, and began to climb. First he slung the longer rope -- partly covered with black rubber for extra traction, perhaps an old bicycle inner tube -- around the trunk above his head, tied the ends together to make a ring, and kept a smaller ring of the same material around one ankle. he jumped up onto the trunk, pulling himself up with the large ring, and rested both feet on the smaller one.


In this way -- throwing the larger ring upward and bringing up his feet -- he continued up the trunk like an inchworm. The palms' crowns must be about 30 feet high.


He climbed up to the base of each crown, cut down the lowest ring of leaves with his machete, along with whatever coconuts were ripe, dried-up leaves, and stem clusters from which coconuts had already been harvested. Finally he applied the medicine around the coconut stems and came back down. Each tree took about half an hour, and he charged Rs. 50 -- a little more than a US dollar -- per tree. He also carries away the cut leaves, which are made into rough brooms or coarse woven mats for thatched huts.

What strength he requires, to climb those tall, branchless trees and to do so much tending, without any more support than two rings of rope!

Coconut Medicine

Our cook, Mary, is the in-charge for our three coconut trees. She tells the gardener when to cut the ripe coconuts down, and monitors their quality. A couple of days ago she told me that the coconuts have become dry -- she brought a pot full of halved fruit, to show me the white flesh.

I suggested that she call the coconut tree man. He had come at about this time in 2006, when the coconuts were falling before ripening, and did the trees a lot of good by climbing up to the crown and applying a poultice made from rock salt, mothballs, sambrani (a kind of incense), turmeric and edible camphor, bound with oil.

The coconut tree man in 2006. He has a heavy black rope slung over his shoulder, and wears a cone-shaped basket for his machete. The gardener is mixing up the poultice.

The prescription for dry coconuts is different. In addition to camphor, turmeric and salt, he wants something called vepampunakku, which he says is available from nurseries. Sadly, the nursery which I used to go to, the enormous and serene Saundarya, has long gone to development, and most nurseries are in the suburbs. (For that matter, the coconut man himself lives in the Srinivasapuram slum, which is about to be emptied and its inhabitants transported to a distant project – what will we do then?)

Mary discovered from him, and told me, that vepampunakku is a paste made from the seeds of the vepam tree, and that we have one in our garden –a smallish slender tree. She said that the fruits are also medicinal, but that the crows eat them all.


If anyone knows more about the vepam tree, or vepampunakku (and where to get it!), I’d be interested to hear about it. update: Now I feel silly: vepam is neem, it turns out. So that's why it's in our garden. Though I don't know why it's so scrawny -- neem is a big, spreading tree. Even its shade is supposed to be healthy. My gardener rode his bicycle to a nursery in Adyar and bought bags of "Sam's Nutri Neem-Plus 100% Pure Neem Powder, Fortified with Turmeric, Castor, Pungam and Illupai." Rs. 25 per kg. I still don't know what pungam and illupai are...