Tuning in to time

The tamboora landed up.

It was packed in a man-size cardboard box, and held in a cage of wooden boards hammered to perfection. The tamboora was a family heirloom, and I have ancient memories of the “songs teacher” strumming it, as he taught Carnatic music to my father, and then to my sisters, and me.

Btw, tamboora (a.k.a tanpoora) is a musical instrument, which is strummed to provide the background drone, with proper intervals, that helps give a resonance and richness to the music. With the invasion of electronics in music, one doesn’t have to pull strings anymore, and Tamboora is not seen much nowadays. Yet, there is something permanent about the look and feel of this instrument (you can’t picture Tyagaraja without it), and so my father’s tamboora, although down, was not yet completely out. My younger brother decided to help it on its journey of resurrection, and cargo-ed it to me, a couple of thousand miles away.

And when I received the caged box, I also got a call.

This was from one of my father’s cousins, and she, an elderly lady, wanted to know if I was game to come to Pinayur (pronounced Punayur, or P-NAyoor), a village somewhere out there. This was a place, god surely knows where, wherefrom her grandfather (who was my father’s grandfather too) hailed from, once upon a long-gone time. Some branches of the old family tree still had some roots out there, and a fraction of the old lands was being managed by some distant cousins.

And these cousins were planning to repair / reconstruct an ancient temple in that village. Now this is a long drawn affair that can take many years, but there are well laid out procedures for this. First, there is the ceremony of Balalayam. In this, the divinity in the idols is drawn out by the power of Vedic chants, and stored in holy kalash (water vessels). The idols then are no longer charged with the divine. Until the temple reconstruction is completed, worship is offered to ‘ceremonial icons’ or ‘pictures’ kept elsewhere. When the temple reconstruction is complete, the waters of kalasha are recharged in powerful vedic ceremonies, and poured on the idols during the kumbhabishekam ceremony, re-energizing the idols with divinity.. The first part, namely the drawing-the-divinity-and-storing-it-in-water ceremony was scheduled to be done on 27-28 May.

It would be a good opportunity to visit the place and meet some unknown cousins thrice removed, said my Grand-aunt.

Time called.

The Sun was blazing when we set out at about 2:45 pm, on Sunday, 27th May.

We zoomed down NH45 national highway, and got off on a fork somewhere near Chengalpet. Drove down towards Kanchipuram and got off into another fork somewhere, from where the roads went back to middle-ages. We crossed the dry river bed of Palar - another piece of geological memory that is waiting for waters to come back some day.

Some hills punctuated the landscape, and there was a ‘police shooting range’ out there. Looked as if it had been forgotten, if not abandoned. Or maybe it was because of Sunday. But the place sure looked as if it was an exhibit of Pompeii.

Time was around 4:30 pm, and the Sun was still up there, high and fierce. We managed to find village P-Nayur proper, and the homes of our hosts. Three modern cars were parked in the courtyard.

It was nice to be back in village settings. Felt good to be back to the place that my long gone grandmother reminisced about. 

I walked into the new home that had been constructed in place of the old one that had stood there during my great-grand-father’s time. The compound walls were of the previous vintage though. Kamu, the hosts mother, was 85 years old….She was overjoyed to meet me (first time we were meeting), and insisted that I looked just like my father used to at my age. We ate some hot uppuma-bonda-sambar-chutney, served on plantain leaves, sitting on a brick platform, beneath the shade of a spreading tree, just by the side of a nice little pond.

They had a small factory nearby, where mineral water sachets were being packaged. Ground water here is very pure, they said. It was treated and packaged and taken away in trucks to quench the thirst of city folks. Sales was good.

6 pm found us in the Brahmeshwara temple, few hundred years old. My hosts family have been natives of this village for eight generations. The next generation fellow is a software engineer and works for Oracle Consulting. He was there too, with his video camera. 

The temple had shrines for Brahmeshwara, Tripurasundari, Vinayaka, Murukan, chandikeswara. Electricity was playing truant, and one had to peer at the idols in the light provided by oil-lamps. Which is much better, really….I lisped a few hymns that I know…

Balalayam ceremony was about to commence.

Kalasha patra-s (vessels) were kept in rows, and the ceremonies began. The priests started chanting Varuna Sooktam, Vedic hymns extolling the God of waters…

The sky darkened, and it started to drizzle. 

I looked up at the sky and let the rain drops sting my face. 

Somewhere in my mind, the old Tamboora was playing again.

Postman’s knock

My friend Posty recently did his annual-trip to his village.

Posty and I did our graduation together, and stayed in the same hostel in Trichy, many years ago. Posty is not the name that his parents bestowed. This was a nickname that he got in college, and as is the case in most cases, this name has stuck. And he got this nickname because he ran a mini post office in his hostel room. We could buy stationary, letters, stamps and stuff from him - 7 X 24 hours - service with a smile.

And that friendly smile of his remains his great strength,  as he now straddles the world of business as one of the top honchos in the advertising world of India.

Posty went to his village last month.

Its a small village with a name that sounds like Srivachur, and is near Trichy somewhere. He goes there every year, to offer worship to the family deity - amman - a Goddess. And when he goes there, he also takes a supply of stationary, notebooks, pens, pencils, sharpeners, erasers etc for giving away to his village folks - for them and their kids…

This year, he went during some festival time, and there was a long queue of pilgrims at the temple. As he ambled along the queue, he got chatting with one of the temple attendants - Selvam, an elderly gentleman. Posty offered him some notebooks, pencils etc, as he did to other village folks, and Selvam accepted the gift quite happily. As they chatted along, Selvam told his story to Posty.

Selvam lost his wife many years ago, when his daughter was as yet a child. He brought up his daughter, and got her married. She had a daughter too, and then suddenly she was affected by some dreadful disease. She suffered badly for a few months and died. Her husband was so deeply affected by this tragic event, and was indeed so attached to his wife, that he couldnt cope with life. He committed suicide.

That left Selvam with a small baby grand-daughter. He brought her up, and she was now going to school. The kid was kind of adopted by the whole village, and was perfectly at home with the neighbours as well, and someone or other took care of her even when he was busy at work in the temple….He was very happy to receive the gift of notebooks etc from Posty, and was sure that his granddaughter would be overjoyed.

Posty was rather struck by this story, and asked Selvam how he managed to cope with all the trauma that he had to experience in life…

Heres what Selvam said…

“Sir….I have been working in this temple since the time I was sixteen years of age. And the Goddess of this temple has given me a boon. A great boon. She has blessed me with the gift of forgetting. I do not carry memories. I do not remember my ’yesterdays’.  The Goddess has given me peace…”, said Selvam, sharing the boon of his Goddess with Posty.

Posty was quite knocked over. His pilgrimage had been blessed. His Goddess had given him what he came for.

He had gotten a glimpse of silence of mind.

Choice of words

One of the monuments of Chennai is the Hindu newspaper. Quite like ‘morning coffee’. A habit.

And over the years, the paper appears to have developed a certain kind vocabulary and reporting style, making it distinctive, quite like ‘kumbakonam degree coffee’….

A friend of mine had this to say about this strain of beans….

“There is something that’s been nagging me for many years. At least ever since 1996 or so. It’s about the HINDU. I started reading the HINDU’s online edition as soon as it started. It’s clearly the best newspaper website in India. No annoying pop-up’s, no surreptitious downloads either. When I read it late afternoons at work, people actually think I’m reading some technical document

I’ve always been bothered by quaint language that it continues to use, and even quainter style that it adheres to. For example, why are sentences so long and paragraphs so big? Everytime I read an op ed and come to the end of a para, I groan at the sight of the next one. It feels like ’school homework’ or worse, ‘imposition’ . That is in spite of the content sometimes being quite first rate. Do they have perhaps a diligent sub editor who graduated from the University of Madras recently in 1929? Despite all the technical virtuosity of the on-line edition, the editing is quite something else.

Also, the choice of vocabulary. That’s straight from Chaucer or Ben Jonson or something. Among all newspapers having on-line editions on Planet Earth, the HINDU alone must use words like ‘beauteous’. My Random House dictionary, thicker than a pillow, does not even have an entry for it. The online dictionary says it is chiefly literary. Why does the HINDU use it? Is it perhaps more environment friendly? Or is it more ‘refined’?

All along, I thought ‘beauteous’ was a put down for a woman, like ‘handsome’. Then I did a Google on ‘beauteous’. I found in the very first page of hits some music critic of the HINDU describing kambodi ragam as ‘beauteous’. I would have thought even in the HINDU it went out with NMN (the effervescent music critic of the 80’s) and the artersian well. That was until I ran into Gowri Ramnarayan’s liberal use of the word - for Kaikeyi, Sita etc. Weren’t they supposed to have been beautiful? Why then say ‘beauteous’? Makes me feel like they made it to Miranda House (college) thru the Waiting List.

This is just one example. There are many others. I find such usage quite amusing though quite distracting when I want to get thru something. I’d love to have an insider’s view on these matters.”

***

 Insider’s view anybody?

Life Science

She is a few years
Past seventy.

Which is a whole lot less
Than being a few years
Past eighty…

She is battle worthy still
And has just returned
From her latest war of health.

Her knee
Had been bad trouble
For a few years now
And
The consulting specialist
(Surgeon) 
Was quite incisive
In his prescription;

Cure
Clean and quick.
 
“We’ll replace it” he said;

“I do 365 knee replacements
Every year” he smiled,
Making it sound
Like a walk in the park
Painless and free.

She went under the lance.

But of course it cost a fortune,
And she is in no little pain
As she struggles, hobbles around
And, by the way,
She damn near died too
The day after the surgery
When her oxygen levels dived
And little angels came,
To try and take her away.

But she is back
From the other zone
And the money on surgery
Has been well spent.

Her crutches
Bear no grudge.

She has emerged fresher
From the fight
And sure feels younger
By more than a few years.

She is indeed happy
To have had a change
To have gotten
A fresh page to write,
A new phase to fight
A new knee
With a new kind of pain.
 

Morning after in Mars

The phone rang
And lightning struck.

It was a whiplash
From Venus.

“How dare you…”
she began…

and “Dont you dare….”
she ended,
unfinished…

I hate this Net.

Can’t keep no secrets
in the solar system no more.

The Venus View

I really have to lose
some weight,
she says;

and he replies
you dont have to.

no, i really do,
just look at my arms
so thick
she says, making
a face;

no, says he,
you are in fact thin
slim as a stick.

naah, you lie,
you always lie,
you are a liar, says she;

(pauses)

my thighs are so fat,
        I know I have been overeating,
says she
her eyes closing that conversation;

He will be turning fifty soon
but is still no wiser;
‘what is it about women’,
he wonders,
as he listens to his niece

who just turned eleven.

When the Sun is your dial…

Sometime in the 1920s, a young boy from a village in South India, landed up in Delhi and made it his home. Being one of the first ‘Madrasees’ of Delhi, his was an extended family that was a kind of first-stop guest-house / waiting-room, for any number of acquaintances dropping in from South India for whatever reason. His own family was nice and large, three sons and six daughters…Working for the Government, he went on to become Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General, and retired sometime around 1960…

Before he retired he bought a Rolex watch.

That and his Navaratna ring were on his hand every day, as long as he lived. The ring went to his youngest son…

This post is about the watch. 

His eldest son’s son (let us call him ‘Ram’), who did inherit some of the ambition and drive of his grandfather, has worked his way up in life ( and is high and climbing still), has changed several jobs, seen many continents….Drives a beauty of a Toyota….

For many years now, Ram’s mind has been recalling his granddad’s Rolex and he started making discreet enquiries….Some years ago, he came to know that it was with one of his Uncles, who was in USA. Ram, during his many trips to US, met up with his uncle and made several attempts to acquire that watch. But the Uncle, for his own good reasons, was unwilling to part with it, for love or for money….’It is my family heirloom’, he said and didnt even bring out the watch from whatever safe he had locked it in…

It may be mentioned that Ram never wore a watch. For some reason, any wrist-watch that he wore, stopped working….He has no idea why….And so he never wore a wrist watch…

But the Rolex in his mind clicked on….

As destiny would have it, his boss (in his current job) recently bought a nice expensive watch when he went to Singapore….He is a man of taste and does this kind of thing often… 

Last month Ram went to USA….In the stopover at Dubai, he paused at a duty-free shop at the airport….Looking at the display of high-class watches, he spotted a Rolex that was the very same model as the one his Granddad had had….He tried it on….It felt perfect…He asked the shopman to pack it…The shopman wasnt sure he had heard it right, and looked up unsurely at this ‘Indian’….’It is 16000 Dirhams Sir’, he said, which is a few hundred thousand Indian rupees….’Yeah, that’s fine’ said Ram, and gave his credit-card, rather like the Maharaja of yore who went to London and bought a Rolls Royce when he went out shopping one evening….

Ram walked out of that shop wearing his Rolex…

Ram’s wrist has found it’s watch. This one has been working just fine….

When he was back after his trip, his boss jumped out of his skin when he noticed Ram wearing that watch….He just dropped whatever official stuff that they were discussing, recovered his poise, and heartily complemented Ram on his peice of Sun….For a while the two of them left the gravitational pull of work and business, and simply space walked….

 There are a few things that are beyond time….

Uncle Sam

Sam Palmisano dropped in today…

He came in to Delhi, for a CEOs forum hosted by CII (Confederation of Indian Industries).

Perhaps the fact that IBM is an old warhorse that has been around for a hundred years or so, touches a chord in all those who have some aspiration to immortality, and sure enough, the audience had a large percentage of people with salt and pepper hair. Lessons for longevity for the new Indian CEO. 

It was a full house, and the audience trooped in well in time.

“Have you heard Sam before?” asked someone during the tea prior to the talk. “Nope” said I. “Aah…he does a good act” said this someone. India has arrived.

 True to tradition, the dress code was formal, and the front row was taken by IBMers, I suspect, if their dresses were anything to go by. That was one sitting opportunity to innovate!

Sam sure did a good act.

In twenty minutes or so, he summed up a few centuries of management models. 19th century, he said, was the time of “international” corporation. When companies set up sales offices overseas and thrived. 20th, he said, was the time of ”multinational” corporation. When companies opened up full scale offices overseas. Had their manufacturing,  supply-chains and even the ’so called’ back-office operations done locally in the respective countries. This century, he said, is one of the ”globally integrated” corporation. Where functions had no rigid binding to point of use, and were carried out wherever it made sense….And these functions could be carried out remote, and be massively integrated horizontally, delivering to their points of use world-wide. Supply-Chain in IBM, he said was one such function, where technology has enabled just this to happen. 

(One wonders though, about this technology enabled super-management….this super-connectivity that enables total centralization….)

Sam spoke of three drivers of this globalization. First, economy….Do it where it makes economic sense…No one can argue against economics…Second, expertise…Just economics wont do….You got to do it where you get real expertise…which is why TCS sets up its RFID lab in USA…or Motorola sources for employees in India….And third, openness….By that he meant the openness of operating environments, in terms of free trade, good infrastructure, good laws, intellectual property protection etc….

And then, there comes into play the core enabler to play in this ‘globally integrated’ workplace. Thats “Trust”. You gotta build trust, he said. And that comes out of the behaviour displayed by employees. In IBM, they had embarked on pushing the ‘centre of gravity’ of the company down, so that employees in the front-end of the compamy would feel empowered to deliver this ‘trust’….

IBM has bet big on India, said he. It now has over 50000 employees here.

They had an open house in Bangalore last year, where they had around ten thousand employees assemble….Mr Sunil Mittal, Vice President CII, and Chairman Bharati group made a mention of this during his ’welcome address’…He said that the gathering was nothing short of a ‘political rally’, and was a ‘near riot’ situation! Sam was all smiles…

In the Q&A that followed, Sam did mention that ’India had been discovered’….that China, Latin America and others were watching closely. And that competition was bound to hot up. Which indeed would be a good thing….(For whoever wins or loses, IBM, I guess, being on both sides, would be on the winning side….like Milo Minder Binder of Catch 22)…

Oh, the usual questions were there….Global warming, WTO, Digital divide, China, ‘but what about SMEs’ etc….And he answered them with aplomb….

Long live IBM! God bless America! 

Coming back to college….

The world of internet  has enabled people all over the world to discover and reconnect with their high school and college chums….And the egroups that get formed do have a goldrush kind of process….(of that in some other post…)…

But at some stage, the gang does get together for a major reunion…like my college classmates did, to mark silver jubilee of our completing our graduate degrees….Having studied in a residential institute, we had put in five years of our lives, living in the same campus, twenty five years or more ago….And then we met, after all these years, in the same campus….Heres a shot at a ‘pome’ that tries to ’say it’, as it happened.

Hello!
 
A batch of sixty co-students
            All guys,
Got together again
twenty five years after
And gaped.
 
The athlete of the college
Had run faster than the clock.
The lean one
Nicknamed ’stick’
            (Who was rumoured  to have flown away
            That year of the cyclone)
Had put on a hundred kilos.
And the fat one
Had shed a ton of weight.
 
The Miss World face
Had grown a macho mouche
The bush haired
Had become bald
The old-fashioned, orthodox, spectacled one
Was now dashing, debonair, nude eyed,
Wearing see-through contact lenses.
 
Fat jowls
Hid the once smoke-sunk-cheeks of one
And a designer beard
The baby-bums face of another.
 
The roughneck of yore
Looked now, like Gautama
The Buddha.
 
Time teased
            Grinned
                        Laughed.
 
It was not as if they gaped for a long time.
 
It all happened kind of together,
They gaped, gasped, smiled, spoke…
 And it was when they started speaking
That they hit gold.
 
I tell you differently.
 
Eyes didn’t help recognize.
 
Ears did,
For voices had not changed.
 
And so, recognize me?
 
Hello! Hello! Hello!

The full moon of Chitra / Vaisakh

It is that time of the year again…

Festival time in South India…Siva temples all over will be celebrating the celestial wedding of Siva and Parvati…Madurai, especially, will be a hive of joy, as the annual Chitra festival reverberates across the land…The powers that be will open dam controls and more waters will flow in Vaigai, for the annual dip of Azagar…

It is also the day of birth,  the day of enlightenment, and the day of Nirvana of Gautama Buddha.

Beaches in Chennai will be packed choc-a-bloc with people as they picnic in the full moon night…

The ‘procession idols’ of many temples will take tours of their sovereign…carried in palanquins, decked in the finest dress and decorations, going on a procession across the towns and cities, stopping to accept worship from devotees who wait outside the gates of their homes, plates of offerings in hand…

And this year, they have a very special celebration in a village called Tallapaka in Cudappah disctrict, in Andhra.

They are celebrating the 600th birth anniversery of a boy from that village, who went on to become one of the most extraordinary mystic-poet-musician-saint of all times…

Saint Annamacharya. 

Annamacharya (1408 - 1503 ) reached the highest of spiritual experience even as a young lad. What an extraordinary outpouring of devotion emerged from his lips…Sri Annamacharya went on to compose more than thirty thousand songs on Sri Venkateshwara, the Lord of Seven Hills….

Apparently, his songs were lost for many centuries….And then, sometime in the middle of twentieth century, they discovered a rock-cell near the Hundi at the Tirumala temple, and in that cell they found more than ten thousand songs of Annamacharya, engraved in a few thousand copper plates…. Talking of buried treasures, what a discovery that must have been!

Great musicians, scholars, connoisseurs of music have all approached the portals of Annamacharya music with great reverence, humility, and sheer awe. Such is the ocean of divinity that pours out of these leaves of copper…

One doesnt even need to know the language. When one hears a song like  “Brahmam okate para brahmam okate”, one knows….This is the voice of divine…