MIXED TAPE - a chance find

That is Trilok Gurtu in full flow…he appears on the cover of a real gem of a book … MIXED TAPE – the First City Interviews 3: Music … you can call it luck or chance or more profound names as karma or serendipity … or whatever … if I hadn’t visited the bookstall at Hyderabad airport, I wouldn’t have known about this book at all … and I am sure, I wouldn’t have been able to find this book at any book stall in Hyderabad … it is not an old book published years back, but one which came out sometime this year… I was actually putting together a pile of books that I wanted to read, planning to buy at least a couple, and I was looking behind the books kept in the foreground on all the stacks in the shelves…and I saw this book…the word ‘music’ held me…I pulled it out and as it happened many times before with books on music, I forgot all about the other books that I was piling up…

This is a book of interviews with musicians…all these musicians were interviewed for FIRST CITY, a Delhi-based magazine, and these interviews appeared in the magazine between August 1990 and July 2009… the moment I saw Trilok Gurtu on the cover, my pulse quickened…TG has been one of my favourites ever since I heard the first album of his that was released in India, The Trilok Gurtu Collection, and after having bought listened to all his albums and his various collaborations, I still go back to the first TG piece that I listened to…Once I Wished a Tree Upside Down…(first in Living Magic and in then in The Trilok Gurtu Collection)…it begins with the ringing of cowbells and moves slowly into a mesmerizing saxophone part played by Jan Garbarek and all the while TG is busy creating magic with his drums and other percussion instruments…I digress, sorry…so, the prospect of reading TG’s interview was a pleasant one and I open this book and want to see who else is there…and wow!!…who else is not there? ... some of my most favourite musicians – vocalists, instrumentalists, and composers straddling the Indian Classical, Film, ‘Fusion’ (so called…!), and every conceivable kind of music that one can imagine that has some connection with India… Ustad Vilayat Khan, Kishori Amonkar, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain, Pt Ravi Shankar…Indian Ocean, Shankar Ehsaan Loy, Midival Punditz, Karsh Kale…Girija Devi, Ustad Bismillah Khan…Talvin Singh, Anoushka Shankar, Madhup Mudgal…and many many more…

And the interviews are not in the question-answer format, which tends to get boring after some time…the format is informal here and the interview also comes across as a friendly banter more than anything else…and it is very clear that the musicians are enjoying themselves…the interviewers describe the actions of the musicians and have masterfully captured the myriad way in which the musicians speak…the ‘na’ at the end of every sentence by Trilok Gurtu, the ‘you know-s’ of Talvin Singh, the guffaws, the cackles, pride, modesty…you feel that you are part of the group interviewing your favourite musicians…delightful…there are no clever (or so called ‘intelligent’) interventions by the interviewers…and the questions are not posed as such, but you can ‘hear’ the answers, which helpfully are in quotes…

The reader gets a ringside view of the changing scene of music…you can see the ‘Asian Underground,’ lounge, trance, etc., fuelled by electronica coming into their own through Talvin Singh, Karsh Kale, Midival Punditz…the Indian rock/pop scene gaining recognition…the second generation, Anoushka Shankar and Ayaan and Amaan Ali Bangash, getting comfortable in the limelight… and the tragic passing away of Ustad Vilayat Khan and Ustad Bismillah Khan…in short, a delightful journey into music in India from 1990 to 2009…

I am trying to inform all my music loving friends about this book…I think this book can become a good companion on many a journey…and many a lonely evening (mornings and afternoons also…)

Thanks FIRST CITY…for this lovely book and moreover, for this wonderful idea… I wish many more magazines emulate this idea and come out with 5-year or 10-year compilations of Music/Film/Art based articles…

A (sort of) review l(r)eading to a crime thriller...fANTASTIC...

Hi…

Bought some books last week…one of them is a current international blockbuster…yeah… Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo…usually, I keep my eyes open for interesting new books, keep myself updated on latest releases through reviews, but somehow, I didn’t know about this book at all…until I read Sandipan Deb’s piece on this novel in his regular column Rear Window in the weekly Open (Sandipan Deb is the editor of this weekly)…this was an unusual piece…not a review per se (though Deb says it is one…of a kind…review)…but intriguing enough for me to want to read it anon…I will not repeat everything that appears in Deb’s piece here, but it had enough points to arouse my curiosity (in case you are interested, you can read Deb’s piece at this link http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/marked-for-life) …I have since bought the novel and finished reading it…and it is everything that I read in Deb’s piece…I used all the spare minutes that I managed to scrounge in between preparing my daughter’s feeds, washing feeding bottles, running errands, and generally carrying her around the house…it is, to use book readers’ killer term ‘unputdownable’…and is worth all the praise that is heaped on it…and to think that, the author, Stieg Larsson (a Swede), died even before seeing his novel becoming a blockbuster…He wrote two more novels (both crime thrillers and I think, sequels to ‘…Dragon Tattoo’ …correct me if I am wrong…) before he died…together they are called the ‘Millennium Trilogy’…unable to resist the temptation, I have placed orders for the second and third ones too…

There are two other books that I bought …I am reading one…this is about music…books of this kind are not published frequently and I am glad I found it… I hadn’t heard of this one too…until I saw it lying unconsoled, consigned to the back stack, last but one stack from the bottom of a shelf at the airport book stall…for me it was like finding a hidden treasure…more next…

My precious...

Hi…

Isn't she an absolute darling... I was away for the last 5 months preparing to welcome her into our lives... and I am happy…very happy…

Shruti and I have a baby girl with us now…so, now you know where I was all these days…I was with Shruti in the hospital trying to do my bit during those anxiety filled days and later sorting things out at home after she came back…our daughter was born premature…6 weeks before the expected date of delivery…and she was in the neonatal ICU for close to 3 weeks…

She is now three months old and is a delightful bundle of joy…we see a lot of things that she does as tantrums and some as demands and some as requests…but do we know actually? She manages to communicate effectively…she doesn’t want to be left alone…she is fond of music…she likes melodious music, not a big fan of beats…partial to instrumental music, I feel, but Shruti says she likes Hindustani classical vocal more…I’ve bought a harmonica and try and play random music on it hoping that she’ll appreciate my musical explorations…she listens intently sometimes and sometimes she screams…ha ha ha…so much for my music…

Now…both our lives are centred around her…anything else is incidental…we have named her ‘Sudhriti,’ meaning ‘positive courage’…and of course, we call her anything we feel is an endearment…chonu…sugar plum...precious...poochu…putumayo…buthros buthros [these two are mine… : )] …shona papa…putti…chinna…and her doctor calls her ‘bangaram’ (gold!)…

Truly amazing…

Marut and his Pens - Story 1

While I enjoy a very high degree of freedom with regard to indulging in my passion for fountain pens…an occasional warning (from you know who!) suffices to douse my ardour for quite some time till temptation strikes again…but I have been remarkably successful in recent times in resisting fountain pen temptation…more so because I now have my grail pen, Montblanc Meisterstuck 149, with me and the other pens in my wish-list are quite high priced too…so I don’t want to venture too far…but some heavy discount offered on Parker Sonnet pens left we weak kneed and I dissolved into ink…and bought 2 Sonnets…see, I am running away with my pens…I have to link up somewhere near the second line and continue with what I wanted to say initially…I will come back with another post on the Parker Sonnets…god promise…

My colleague Marut is a fountain pen enthusiast too…but he doesn’t enjoy a great deal of freedom to nurture his hobby…his missus lays down the rule…but Marut is a clever fellow…I have so many stories to tell…well, at least three good ones about Marut and his pens and his missus…she was once a colleague as well, for only a brief while though… and sometimes this ‘everybody knowing everybody’ leads to tricky situations as narrated below…

This happened almost a year ago…I had to make some pen purchases at Deccan Pen Stores, Abids and I thought I’d alight at the last stop, Koti, instead of my usual Secunderabad stop, and go to Abids from Koti…Marut also travelled in the same bus and gets down at Koti…when I told him about my plan to visit Deccan Pen Stores, he was tempted and decided to accompany me there… and while on our way to Abids from Koti, he switched off his mobile phone…I didn’t know why…I asked him and he smiled…at that time I didn’t know about his travails…it was later that I understood it as a strategic move…I had already informed home that I’d be late…but Marut had just impulsively joined me and no information to missus!!!

Going to a pen shop is not a brief affair for a pen freak…we were there for almost 45 minutes when my mobile phone rang…Marut looked at me and smiled and said, ‘must be my missus’... I looked at the number…it was not a ‘saved’ number, so no name…I read out the number to Marut…he said, ‘yes…that’s my missus …’ and smiled again…he was enjoying my discomfiture…I now had to answer the call… I pressed the ‘speak’ button…and there she was asking me about Marut’s whereabouts …I wondered how she knew that her dear hubby was with me… Marut would have reached home by now and he was now missing for more than 20 minutes from the scheduled time of arrival…she must have dialed her way around some of our bus-mates and somebody would have said innocently that Marut was seen with me last at Koti…Marut had purchased 4 pens by that time and the total cost came to Rs.280/- or so…I wanted to buy something in a higher range, but didn’t find anything within my limit…so I generally chewed the air for some time with the knowledgeable people there…strange fountain pen lingo…feeder, section, aerometric, eye dropper, cap lip, piston…anyway, coming back to the phone call…I told her that it is true that Marut had come with me, but he dropped me at Deccan Pen Stores and went home… how long ago was this…about half an hour ago…he hasn’t yet reached home…must have been stuck in a traffic jam, don’t worry, he’ll reach soon…and all this time Marut was grinning like a cat which had stolen, eaten, and digested the cream…I didn’t know that I could lie like this…must have sounded convincing…she said thanks and closed the conversation…Marut and I decided to make a move…it was now close to an hour since we entered the shop…I wanted some empty pen boxes to store my pens…I got some…Marut paid for his pens and we went out…Marut then told me to take his pens with me and give it to him the next day in the college…I was surprised…why?…you don’t know, saar, I will be interrogated and searched, pockets, bag, everything, now that I have come from a pen shop…we were now together in this pen-spiracy…he had unwittingly made me a partner in this caper… I had to play along…I took the pens he had bought and put them in my bag…

We went our separate ways…it must have wrenched his heart to see his newly bought pens going with me…that too with his approval and consent!! I hopped on to a rick and was winding my way home when my mobile rang…the number seemed familiar…I pressed the ‘speak’ button…and whose voice do I hear? Shouldn’t have surprised me…Marut’s missus…where is he? Why, what happened? He hasn’t reached home yet…he must be riding, can’t say with traffic these days, don’t worry, he must be close to home…when did he leave the shop (very tenacious, this lady!)…around 45 minutes back (I had to do a quick calculation, look at my watch, guess the time she called me when we were in the shop…and bingo! 45 minutes)… he hasn’t reached yet…(oh god!)…I then started weaving around some pointless sentences like traffic, potholes, time he left, time he’d reach, etc., intending to confuse her…I think she got the drift and closed the talk…Marut must have reached home soon enough as I didn’t get any more calls from his missus…

The next day Marut said he got an earful…in fact, two earfuls…for more than an hour…I said he got away lightly…because his pens were with me…imagine what would have happened if the pens were found on his person or in his bag…I shudder to think!! I then handed over his pens…she promptly discovered the pens that evening when Marut reached home (because she is a very tenacious lady…I told you so!)…and interrogated him…Marut told her that all these pens cost only Rs.80/- (!!!) … and self-pedestalled himself by telling her that I had bought a pen worth Rs.600/- or so… What? Oh my god! So expensive!…Don’t be too friendly with him…ok?

(Haaen!! I helped him cover his tracks and this is what he does to me...discredits me?? Traitor!!!...but as a fellow fountain pen enthusiast...you understand...and know how one feels...!!!)