Behind the External Form of Music

Q: What is there "behind" the external form of music?

Music is a means of expressing certain thoughts, feelings, emotions, aspirations. There is even a region where all these movements exist and from there, as they are brought down, they take a musical form. One who is a very good composer, with some inspiration, will produce very beautiful music, for he is a good musician. A bad musician may also have a very high inspiration; he may receive something which is good, but as he possesses no musical capacity, what he produces is terribly commonplace, or dinary, uninteresting.

But if you go beyond, if you reachjust the place where there is this origin of music - of the idea and emotion and inspiration - if you reach there, you can taste these things without being in the least troubled by the forms; the commonplace musical form can be linked up again with that, because that was the inspiration of the writer of the music. Naturally, there are cases where there is no inspiration, where the origin is merely a kind of mechanical music. It is not alway_ interesting in every case. But what I mean is that there is an inner condition in which the external form is not the most important thing; it is the origin of the music, the inspiration from beyond, which is important; it is not purely the sounds, it is what the sounds express. Excerpts from AIM (May 2006)

Life in the modern age is governed by seduction

In this the day and age of the make-over, how do we aestheticize beauty? Beauty is now a mask, layers of artificial skin. Tremendous attempts are made to rediscover the persona. However imagined, it is not the self that is evaluated. The make-over pronounces a newer self based on a change in wardrobe and lifestyle. The greater discovery is the level of existence. The mirror reflects. It doesn’t possess.

The hip hop culture is a reality. The excessiveness of money and fame is present in the modern day culture. Credit has been given to hip hop as a new form of civil rights movement. Socio-politically, it addresses consumerism, psycho-sexuality, urban violence, spiritual wealth and racism. Unlike rock and roll, hip hop is more than a state of mind. It harbors a conscientious awareness. As with any movement, hip hop has generated universal interest. Its influence is greater than any marketing ploy. A younger generation has been granted a new voice, creatively and politically.

The language of hip hop is clever. Many phrases that stemmed from hip hop have made their way into popular culture. They are in constant everyday use. These phrases are used by the young found mostly in urban areas. Suburban culture has embraced this as well. Black and white subcultures within the element of hip hop have come together, forming a new vernacular. Beauty is then created through the rhythm of language. Beauty when intellectualized takes shape and indeed comes full circle. The language in hip hop meets that dimension. Relating back to the jazz musical “riff,” it has helped establish permanent roots in American culture. posted by Kofi Fosu at 7:54 AM Thursday, July 20, 2006 African Postmodernist Dispatches

Artistry of good writing and editing makes a spiritual statement

grant said...In all honesty bob, your writing style is more of a draw to this reader than the stuff you say...so keep crafting those long sentences, which, to be sure, I hadn't even noticed were of above average length, because so well-crafted. You hone your ability by writing a lengthy blog several times a week, and the practice seems to pay off. There was a single typo in this latest blog entry: "But even when people have bad moral, such is the Islamists..." (it should have been "such as"). This is the only typo I have seen in any of your writing. Quite a feat of editing. The artistry of good writing and editing makes a spiritual statement that trancends even the didatctic or intended content of the prose, I think. It is a "mathematics" of sorts that Heidigger himself might have appreciated. You are a manifestation like any other, and I do like to see a manifestation that exhibits sheer artistry. 11:51 PM

Instant graphic novel

Touch of Genius Mukul Sharma The Times of India 29 Jul, 2006

Can't wait to see your favourite novel made into a movie? Very soon you probably won't have to. You could simply scan and digitise the whole book and feed it into a computer to get an instant multimedia screen experience. Well, maybe not with your favourite cast and director too. But researchers at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland have created a unique software package that can automatically transform English text into 3D computer animation.

Sort of like getting an instant graphic novel that's also on the move and with real sound. According to Professor Paul McKevitt, who did the main work developing the software, it understands natural-language English input and automatically maps it into 3D multimedia presentations. It can be used in something as simple as bringing a child's story to life or as an educational tool to allow students to view literature from different perspectives.

It could also have applications for teaching languages and creating interactive city maps. Film-makers too could use the technology to produce vivid animated storyboards from screenplays so that directors may experiment with viewing different scenes from different angles in different backgrounds before the actors are even brought on the set.

What is the future for such mind-boggling technology? Take machine translation for instance, with which it shares a conceptual similarity. Today, computers can translate most straightforward text without losing much of the meaning; they don't however do a very good job recreating nuances of meaning from one language to another.

But even that day is not too far off when a software Edward Fitzgerald could be expected to pull off its own Rubaiyat on an original Omar Khayyam and no one would know the difference. In the same vein the Ulster program can at present make only a rudimentary moving rendition of text. But since it utilises techniques from film editing and theatre for narrative montage to perform cuts, pan shots, imagery and even voice-overs, its grammar becomes almost the syntax of normal film-making.

Meaning, when that happens why would we require human film-makers? "For that human touch that can only come from a human brain", some would say. But by that time the human brain would already be having implants to boost memory, process data faster, perhaps even heighten creativity. So what touch are we talking

Sri Aurobindo Institute of Mass Communication

Monday, June 12, 2006 The best entertainers The Hyderabad Film Club screened 15 films on two days - eight on the first day and the remaining on the second. Here are the synopses of some of the movies that got a good response from the viewers:

• SLICE OF LIFE: A young cobbler gets a gift from a couple when he returns them their bag they forget at his shop. He eagerly closes the business for the day to give the gift to his young sister at home. Just at the moment as he and his sister open the pack and eat the cookies, their elder brother bullies the boy for leaving work. He thinks the boy spent his day’s earnings on the cookies. The sweetness of the movie lies at the end when the boy opens his fist to give a battered cookie to his sister even after being severely assaulted by his elder brother. The 10 min 40 sec-movie in Malayalam was directed by Sagir Krishnan, who graduated from Chetana Media Institute in 2003. It won the Special Appreciation award.
• SAPERA: It is a documentary on snake charmers well picturised in a village in Uttar Pradesh. Directed by Ravish Kumar and scripted by Vivek Mishra and Ravish Kumar, it won a Special Appreciation award. The duration was 18 min 38 sec.
• XENO: The film portrays the feeling of dislike towards the Muslims.It has no dialogues and depicts a scene in a restaurant. Two persons siting there suspect a man who appears a Muslim when he goes out of the restaurant, leaving his bag ther. A beep comes from the bag. Suspecting it to be an explosive, the two search the bag only to find a cell phone ringing. The 8-min movie was directed by Albert Kurian and produced by Chetana Media. It was adjudged the best film on communalism.
• BHENT (The Gift): The Marathi film starts with a kid telling his uncle how he has stored a shell gifted to him by the latter a year before. ‘‘I didn’t give it to anybody,’’ he tells his uncle proudly. His uncle gives him Rs 10 to eat an ice cream.The boy goes to a restaurant and orders an ice cream. While eating it, he observes the waiter there who is busy taking orders from customers and serving them the food. He also observes how the waiter gets disappointed when the customers go without giving him a tip. Meanwhile, the waiter gives the boy the bill. The boy gives the Rs 10 note and gets back Rs 1 as change. He looks at the coin and in the next scene we see the tip the kid left for the waiter - it is not the coin, but the shell which his uncle had given him a year back and which had been his priced possession.The boy in the film looks natural and innocent. The 7 min 35 sec film, directed by Anand Pande and produced by the department of Communication Studies, University of Pune, was adjudged the best short fiction film.
• EARLY MEN: The film is a documentary on newspaper boys, who work even at 0.2 degrees temperature in the winter of Delhi. The unique feature of the documentary is, it has neither a voice-over nor any dialogues. The viewer follows the story only through the conversation of the newspaper boys. The 8 min 12 sec long film was directed by Karan Thapliyal and Souveek and produced by Sri Aurobindo Institute of Mass Communication in film studies. It won the best short non-fiction film award.

The last two movies received overwhelming response from the viewers at the Prasad Labs. Source: Indiavarta idleburra.com

Vulgarity and banality is crossing all limits

Checking degeneration: The Orissa Cine Critic Association criticised the vulgarity in Oriya cinema and music The Hindu Friday, Jun 17, 2005

It is now the time of remakes and remixes. Oriya cinema and music have been vitiated by crass commercialisation because of some dubious elements. The vulgarity and banality is crossing all limits. So, Orissa Cine Critic Association took up the cudgels on behalf of the audience looking for healthy entertainment by organising a seminar where the State Culture Minister was given a memorandum to act on.

It was proposed that tax rebate should only be available to original Oriya films and not remakes. A censor board to screen music should be immediately formed comprising lyricists, composers, music critics, etc. A similar censor committee should keep tabs on the video albums keeping in view the vulgarity of costumes, poses and lyrics. CDs cleared by the committee can only be telecast in various channels including the Doordarshan.

Eminent filmmaker Prashant Nanda, ace musician Prafulla Kar and actor George Tiadi came down heavily on the corruption in films and music, and urged the government to come up with sanctions against such makers and cassette companies. Cine critic association secretary Dillip Hali, highlighting the steps being taken in Maharashtra, asked the Government to come up with remedial measures immediately in the light of the memorandum presented. The event was organised in collaboration with the cultural outfit `Sanskruti O Sanskruti'. B.M.

Demoting the question of dream and life to madness and delusion

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil makes a profound declaration about the poverty of modern living. Clearly Orwellian, it portrays an atomized society where the people are subjugated to a system of deceptive images and technological barriers that isolate them from each other both physically and psychologically. As a critique Brazil seems more relevant today than when originally released. With plastic surgery and shopping all the rage, clever propaganda posted on every street corner, an unbearable paranoia regarding terrorism, and the acceptance of torture as a means of persuasion, the world of Brazil is only a slightly exaggerated version of the world we live in.

Stuck within this autocratic machine is the film’s protagonist, Sam Lowry, a dreamer and slacker, unconsciously searching for a way out. Suffering from a severe case of boredom Lowry often lapses into the dream state, where he has reoccurring fantasies of a particular woman he has never met. When he finally has a chance encounter with that woman, the scruffy Jill Layton, he is shaken from his weariness into a state of extreme giddiness, like someone who has fallen in love for the first time. Although Lowry never questions his position as a government agent he is quick to abuse that position in his romantic pursuit of Layton, and is even willing to cast it aside when he has convinced himself she is a terrorist. It is Lowry’s passionate drive towards Layton that gets him labeled a subversive by his peers, leading to his mental breakdown at the hands of an irrational government. While his eruption is a failure, snuffed out by the power of a totalitarian state, it is still genuine and raw, driven by a need for love, freedom, and poetry.

As a surrealist I have always identified with Lowry who, in spite of the corruption around him, persistently and magnetically follows his personal quest for love. Like Lowry, we too live in a corrupt terrain of technological overgrowth and psychological misery. Lowry sabotages this setting by opting to follow the trajectory of his dreams into his everyday life. Unfortunately, when all hope is lost, his dreams engulf, rather than harmonize with, his daily existence, demoting the question of dream and life to one of madness and delusion. Regardless of this closure, Lowry’s rejection of the reality those in power have created is a reminder to us that no system which undermines freedom can provide us with the intrinsic, emotive factors needed for the actualization of real life. Brandon Freels Friday, May 05, 2006 Has Anybody Seen Sam Lowry? Flying Stone1:24 AM Permalink also chancereport.blog-city.com

To make theatre, one has to share space with living people

MOHAN MAHARISHI The Hindu Friday Review Delhi Friday, Jul 21, 2006

It is quite true that all of us would like to live in a society where culture in general and theatre in particular plays a significant role in negotiating social tensions, while defining our relationship with the whole psycho-spiritual environment we live in. Enlightening and entertaining people is the long established function of all art forms, especially theatre.

Even if the reader wishes to discount the bias of a theatre person (who, all his life, has done nothing to earn his bread except creating theatre) most would agree that theatre is an art form that has more direct relationship with the living impulses of a given society. It is so because not only is its site of exhibition social (as a theatrical event unfolds before a live audience), but the site of its making, unlike other art forms, is also social. Making theatre is not a job that one can do alone, hidden away in a studio or in the solitude of the Himalayas.

To make theatre, one has to come down to earth and share space with living people. It is a group work and demands creative interaction at every stage with the whole lot of other people. The final product, if there is ever one, is the result of months of colluding between thoroughly trained and exceptionally talented individuals.Good theatre demands the highest form of co-operation between creative human beings. How does one create an environment where this kind of activity is initiated and sustained over a period of time?

One cannot blame the young theatre graduates for having opted out for greener pastures. One could probably avoid that if theatre were a viable career option. The absence of professional theatre companies in the country leaves no alternative before a trained and talented young actor. After all, he too is responding to an overall social situation where success in terms of money and fame is idealised.

India is a state of being...an idea, a metaphysic

If I were asked who was the greatest Indian novelist of the 20th century, I would undoubtedly point to Raja Rao -- who passed away Saturday July 8th 2006 in Austin, Texas, just two years short of the century mark. Alone among all other writers of his time, including Mulk Raj Anand and R.K.Narayan, it was his destiny to unfold a profound insight for many readers into the eternal India. And in this, his works stand in contrast to the many new Indian novelists who see India through Western or Westernized eyes.

What makes Raja Rao’s unique is not just the highly innovative, experimental, and dynamic English prose style that he developed much before Salman Rushdie, but the deeply spiritual content of his works. His spirituality is not of a New Age feel good kind, but philosophically rigorous. He is a novelist of ideas, but the idea is always suggestive of something beyond itself, pointing, ultimately, to the Absolute.

As Professor Makarand Paranjape of Jawaharlal Nehru University tells us: “Raja Rao considered his writing a sadhana, a spiritual discipline. Reading him is also a sadhana. Like the great Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his fiction elevates the spirit, taking the reader to a higher plane of consciousness."

In many ways he was the quintessential writer of the Great Indian Diaspora, a harbinger for the likes of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukherji, Jhumpa Lahiri and many others who followed. His legacy lingers; but, sadly, few of the modern writers, who crowd the literary marketplace, are aware of or acknowledge this legacy. And long before writers such as Rushdie made it trendy, Rao was infusing unique Indian literary genres, including interior monologue, retrospective narrative and symbolism, into the narrative of English fiction.

In India Raja Rao would be, as he himself once put it, "somewhat important." But he chose to live in a modest apartment on Pearl Street in Austin, Texas, where he was on the faculty at the University of Texas from 1966 to 1980. When he retired as professor emeritus, he continued to make his home in Austin -- where both his sons were born. ..."India," according to Raja Rao, "is not a nation, like France or Italy or Germany: India is a state of being..." On another occasion he wrote that India is ‘an idea, a metaphysic. My India I carried wheresoever I went…’

India, Raja Rao implied, is open to whoever can attain it, wherever they may be. And reading his works was an invitation to taste that eternal India – of the Mahabharatha and Ramayana, of the Upanishads, of Sankara, of Aurobindo, of Tagore, of Vivekananda, and of Gandhi. indolink.com

I find it difficult to stay with myself

Two's company: As the pen of Oriya writer Devdas Chhotray overflows with "Longing", HUMRA QURAISHI finds that bureaucrats can be poets and artists can be self-effacing too The Hindu Metro Plus Thursday, Apr 01, 2004

ARCHITECT-ARTIST Prafulla Mohanti and bureaucrat-writer Devdas Chhotray don't give the slightest hint that they are great masters in the field of creativity, tending to speak of just about anything and everything except themselves. Recently their talent came to light when a book of poems titled "Longing" by Chhotray with illustrations by Mohanti was released in New Delhi. Mohanti has also translated the poems from the original Oriya.

If you were to ask Devdas, a senior bureaucrat, what makes him delve into that sort of romantic verse, he reveals he has been writing poetry and short stories for almost three decades and has provided lyrics for at least 75 Oriya films and written scripts of several films including "Shadows of the Rainbow" which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995.

He is also the son of the well-known Oriya personality Gopal Chottaray. "You could say I have it in my blood. My mentor has been the well-known music director Akshay Mohanty, and often I 'd composed the lyrics over the phone." There is an upsurge of sentiments hidden in his simple lines of poetry. Each poem is direct, with that longing of great intensity. The central character of Mallika remains unchanged in these poetic lines. But Devdas tries to brush off any inquisitive queries. "No, Mallika is just an imaginary character."

But Devdas's yearning seems absolutely intense, as though matching his classical name and his romantic temperament, which seems bordering on restlessness. "I find it difficult to stay with myself," is how he puts it. As to why Oriya talent doesn't reach the mainstream, both these men have this to say: "Orissa earlier remained backward because of historical reasons, and even now the Government is not interested in the promotion of arts and culture of the State."

But apolitical men like Prafulla seem to be doing their bit, for though he is based in London, he makes it a point to come to his Orissa village Nanpur, staying there for three months, running a village school and arts centre there, with his English friend Derrick Moore. Let's not forget that Prafulla Mohanti is the author of works like "My Village, My life", "Indian Village Tales", "Changing Life", "Through Brown Eyes".

If Prafulla is himself a writer then why did he take on the task of translating his friend Devdas 's poems? "I have enjoyed Devdas' poetry for a long time and he has generously allowed me to interpret, rather than translate these poems into English, using my own imagination. My aim has been to give expression to the rich imagery of these sensuous poems of Devdas and offer them a wider public. My drawings are not illustrations. They are evocations of the general effect of the poems on my artistic sensibility."

Fidelity by itself is a kill-joy virtue

An unseasonal fruit The HarperCollins Book of Oriya Short Stories, 1998, Reviewer: DEVDAS CHHOTRAY Biblio MAY - JUNE 1999

Early in life, when I would plunge into reading of classics translated into the vernacular, particularly Oriya, and find large tracts unreadable, someone consoled me by saying that translation is a woman who is either faithful or beautiful, but seldom both. As I grew up, and relished more bawdy jokes, and read more Oscar Wilde, I too believed that it is better to be good looking than good; and fidelity by itself is a kill-joy virtue.

Therefore, I veered away from reading of translated works, more so when it dealt with Oriya, on account of its insufficient osmosis, which occured often. The other reason that did not exactly spur me to grab the Harper Collins Book of Oriya Short Stories (for instant reading) is the fact that most of the stories selected from works of veteran writers have become well-worn, after years of reading in school texts, and thus the curiosity was halved. So the book was left on the table after a brief rummage, which accounts for its delayed review.

What however brought me back again and again to the book is the lure of the cover by Brinda Datta, a jacket draped in the conch shell motif of traditional Oriya sarees in an aquamarine shade, unostentatious but elegant, which no Oriya can resist. Besides, my young son, who is much less an Oriya by upbringing, and hardly tied to books, greatly surprised me by devouring nine out of the 31 stories in one go. Then it was my turn.

Several more lives to live

Essay: Misery Loves a Memoir By BENJAMIN KUNKEL The New York Times : July 16, 2006

It's no news, of course, that so many recent memoirs, good and bad, well or execrably written, deal with hurt and healing. But when so many memoirists are busy confessing to so much, we easily miss what the form has come to exclude. Contemporary memoirs tend to be either convalescent or nostalgic in mood. (It's as Augustine said in his "Confessions": "I remember with joy a sadness that has passed and with sadness a lost joy.") But is there nothing more to life than recovery and grief? Is there no idea of the good life we can sustain beyond the possession of health? To understand what's gone missing, it's useful to recall something about the turn of the 19th century.

It was then that secular autobiographies — we call them memoirs — first attained something like their contemporary prominence. There had been a few before 1800 (for instance those of Benjamin Franklin and Edward Gibbon, and of course Casanova and Rousseau), but in English it was Wordsworth especially, in "The Prelude," who discovered that the self could provide a "heroic argument." By this he meant that the theme of an individual's growth could claim all the dignity and moment traditionally accorded battles in heaven or on earth.

Wordsworth and the other Romantics took the form of Augustine's "Confessions" and threw out the devotional content. They retained the down-up shape of crisis and recovery, but instead of an accession to godliness the pilgrim came into restored wholeness and an awareness of vocation. Contemporary writers agree with Wordsworth on the supreme importance of "what passed within me," just as their direct manner was pioneered by him: "I speak bare truth / As if to thee alone in private talk." But how crabbed our memoirists' ambitions are compared to his! The maintenance of recovered health is a narrow vocation, and as for nostalgia, it's only nostalgia.

For the Romantics, you lost your way in life not when you began to take drugs, leak self-esteem or be ill-used by your intimates. For them, the crisis was immediate and general: to be a functioning adult in a corrupt society was to be far gone already. They sought a return not to mere sanity, but to a state of being that had scarcely yet existed. Psychologically and politically, the young Romantics were revolutionaries. Indeed, the culture of secular autobiography and the ideal of radical democracy emerged roughly together: now it was up to the individual to say what a good life might be and how society might allow one.

The best and most Romantic memoir an American has produced is "Walden" — though nobody calls it one. But it is: Here is what I did with a few years of my life and how I feel about it now. What Thoreau has to overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health. His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors, their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip.

Thoreau isn't against self-esteem (he admires a friend who has learned to "treat himself with ever increasing respect"); but his main task is to lose his esteem for society in which "trade curses everything it handles" and the singular natural resource of time is wasted in barren productivity. Maybe he had vices out there in the woods, but that's not his concern, or ours. The overwhelming impression is of his philosophical ardor, which he tries to fuse with his practical ardor. There's not a note in the book of self-pity, or nostalgia. And why did he quit his cabin in the end? "It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live." 12Next Page » Benjamin Kunkel is an editor of n+1 magazine and the author of "Indecision," a novel.

Inscape: seeing with exactitude

Poets have always understood that by indwelling in nature we can intuit what dwells within nature--we are always swimming in a sea of clues that point beyond themselves to a hidden reality to which the clues point. By attending to things and events in a certain way, we allow them to "speak" to us, and this in turn informs us about their nature.

The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term "inscape" to refer to this more intense experience of observing things in such a way that their intrinsic qualities emerge. He believed, for example, that by allowing one's attention to be drawn to a bird in flight, a tree, or a landscape, we allow their character to act upon us through a union of the inner and outer worlds. Similarly, Goethe argued that we discover the true nature of things through a contemplative kind of looking he called "seeing with exactitude." By doing this, we can open ourselves to what the cosmos is telling us about itself.

This has obvious theological implications. For example, what is scripture but an exterior narrative that tells us of the within--the inner nature--of God? ...As the poet Novalis put it, "The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet." If you are feeling boxed in by the materialistic paradigm of modernity, know that you may escape it any time through the many inscapes that surround us. posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:31 AM

Same evil, new axis

It is absurd that contemporary scholars continue to convey flattering ideas about ancient Greece and Rome. Being that they are mostly secularized minds, they do not understand the real drama of history: the struggle between darkness visible and uncreated light...

The literature of antiquity abounds with details of how it was necessary to beat children in order to drive the demons out of their minds. One book notes that “When the Emperor Diocletian became ill in 303 AD, the state required a general sacrifice. Anyone who did not sacrifice a child during the Emperor’s illness would be immediately executed.” When he was 22, Nero murdered his own mother out of fear that she would kill him first. Nero and Caligula inaugurated so many grotesque cruelties that I don't think I want to even mention them. It will ruin your day.

Crucifixion was the product of the most lingering and painful death the Romans were capable of imagining in their sadistic minds. Although they didn't invent it, they perfected the process, making it as slow and agonizing as possible. The length of survival on the cross might go on for as long as four days, with insects burrowing into open wounds and birds of prey tearing at the victim. I could go on, but I won’t. You’ve probably seen the Passion of the Christ anyway.

“Thou shall not murder” made no sense whatsoever to the Romans. Nor did “I am the light, the way, the truth.” Has anything really changed? Same evil, new axis. Some people need to see the darkness before they can appreciate the light. If so, be sure and read LGF every day for dispatches from the front, where light does battle with the absolute darkness of our enemies--enemies of humanity, enemies of God, enemies of the light, enemies of progress, and enemies of all that is decent and holy. posted by Gagdad Bob at 6:58 AM 13 comments

A fresh definition of sensuality in motion

Alvin Ailey Dancers Turn Up the Heat at Paris Festival

By ALAN RIDING NYTimes.com Homepage: July 6, 2006

PARIS, July 5 — There was color, passion, lyricism, energy and loads of talent, but what really won over a large crowd of Parisians to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater this week was something all too often overlooked amid the abstraction and intellectualism of contemporary dance. Sexiness.

True, the French are meant to be experts in these matters. And love, sex and eroticism all parade noisily through French advertising, literature and movies. Yet on Tuesday, with the first of five programs being presented here through July 22, the Ailey dancers offered Parisians a fresh definition of sensuality in motion. No doubt it helped that this week's program revolves around jazz. So amid lifts, leaps, spins and arabesques, there was jive, mambo, merengue and more. Put differently, on display was modern classical dance with wiggles galore.

While no stranger to Paris, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is the guest company for the second edition of a new summer festival called Les Étés de la Danse de Paris. Last year's featured company, the San Francisco Ballet, proved an immense success. Now Alvin Ailey is offering a quite different look at American dance today.

For some years now dance has probably been America's most appreciated cultural export to France. Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs all have huge followings here. And with 20,000 people attending the San Francisco Ballet performances last year, the stage was set to welcome the Ailey troupe this month.

Fruitful dissatisfaction with fossilised ways of life

Dissatisfied man - a pose? Chandrahas permalink

A recurring figure in modern literature is that of the Questioning or Dissatisfied man - distanced, for this or that reason, from the customs and codes of his own society, but also rendered strangely immobile, apathetic, rootless by his rebellion, and almost chronically discontented and splenetic, ill at ease wherever he goes and whatever he does - the figure, in other words, of an alienated human being. But this condition, while never pleasant, is nevertheless a fashionable attitude towards life, which is why it is the task of readers coming across this predicament in literature, whether in autobiography or even fiction (for fiction can be untruthful), to judge whether it is genuine or merely a pose - fruitful dissatisfaction with fossilised ways of life, or merely the caterwauling of a selfish being.

The unity of discrete literary formations

Genealogies of Indian Literature P P RAVEENDRAN Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006

Indian scholars who have theorised Indian literature in diverse ways in the 20th century include K R Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, Krishna Kripalani, Umashankar Joshi, V K Gokak, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Sujit Mukherjee, Sisir Kumar Das, G N Devy and Aijaz Ahmad. Most of these scholars with the obvious exception of Aijaz Ahmad, whose sensitive and highly nuanced elaboration of the category of “Indian literature” is in effect an acknowledgement of the impossibility of positing such a category, arrive at the broad possibility of conceiving an Indian literature either as the expression of an essential Indian culture or as the unity of discrete literary formations.

The reformist-nationalist- modernity projects that were under way in all parts of India in the early 20th century acted as a great unifying force at this juncture. So did the progressive literary movement (Indian Progressive Writers Association, IPWA), which launched in 1939 a journal under the title New Indian Literature from Lucknow. Since its inception in 1954, the Sahitya Akademi, under the tutelage of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was also the first president of the Akademi, has been propagating the idea of the unity of Indian literature by using the slogan “Indian literature is one though written in many languages”. The title of the Akademi’s journal Indian Literature, echoing the name of its short-lived IPWA forerunner, is more than symbolic in this sense.

That Indian literature as a theoretical category was constituted in the 19th century would nowadays be disputed only by bigoted adherents of cultural revivalism. Many thinkers of liberal persuasion can be seen, sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, to be opposing this bigotry. Sisir Kumar Das’s move in publishing the last two volumes, the ones pertaining to the period since 1800, of his projected multi-volume history of Indian literature can be read as an implicit criticism of this bigotry. ppravee@sify.com

Mr. Godot has come and gone

'Godot Has Left the Building': Still Waiting in a Wasteland, Revisited and Revamped By GEORGE HUNKA NYTimes.com Homepage: June 30, 2006 The 100th anniversary year of Samuel Beckett's birth continues apace, bringing with it the New York premiere of John Griffin's "Godot Has Left the Building," an explicit homage to Beckett's best-known play, in a production by David Friedman and FourScore Productions at the Culture Project's 45 Below theater. Forum: Theater

"Waiting for Godot" has been such an inescapable presence in postwar theater that one can be forgiven some trepidation at a modern-day salute. Fortunately Mr. Griffin's play manages in large part to defuse this trepidation. Godot's country road is here a junkyard filled with old computers, tape machines and a film-editing rack. Its Didi and Gogo are Sebastian, a bookish, philosophizing vagrant, and Joe, a well-dressed young executive who wakes one morning to find that everyone in the world has disappeared, except for himself and Sebastian.

Mr. Griffin certainly has the tone and dry, poignant humor of "Godot" well in his grasp. The dialogue is crisp and sharp, and his characters ring through the Godotian changes: they play games (including a most dysfunctional "20 Questions"), tell stories, share a pair of boots and even deliver disquisitions on meaning and being. The play falls short in its arid imitation of Beckett's admittedly inimitable lyricism. With the play having disposed of the idea of Godot, the friends have little center around which to structure their waiting.

Mr. Griffin is fortunate to have attracted an engaging cast. Scott David Nogi, as the scraggly, bearded Sebastian, possesses a peculiar, sometimes manic manner, and Edward Griffin, as Joe, accomplishes the character's shifts through confusion, anger, fear, vulnerability and despair with great precision. The two deliver Mr. Griffin's dialogue with an appropriate disciplined energy. Gabriel Gutierrez and Bert Gurin also impress in much smaller roles.

The director, Will Pomerantz, navigates the play through the wide and deep 45 Below space with imagination, aided immeasurably by Garin Marschall's set, a veritable cornucopia of wired and metal detritus. "Mr. Godot has come and gone," a character says late in the play, but his memory is still very much alive. "Godot Has Left the Building" continues through July 9 at the 45 Below theater at the Culture Project, 45 Bleecker Street, at Lafayette Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101.

Banaras - a mystic love story

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 Ulrich Mohrhoff, the quantum scientist and spiritualist, on Banaras

"Dear Mr. Singh,

Yesterday my wife Vishwajyoti and I watched your movie Banaras-a mystic love story. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised, for I am generally not a fan of Hindi movies. Unfortunately I missed much of the poetry in the songs and dialogues, which my wife tells me that the subtlety got lost in the translation to subtitles.

I am not a film critic, so please expect no expert comments.

I was touched by the story and believe in the ancient Indian wisdom that the movie was trying to recall. It is certainly not a movie that will appeal to the masses, but numbers don't count in these matters. Banaras has the potential to awaken a soul to higher realities, and if this happens to a few, it has achieved more than any of the blockbusters.

Affectionately, Ulrich"

Pondicherry, India Teaches maths, physics, and quantum philosophy at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. His blog can visited at:

http://koantum.blogspot.com/2006/06/disentangling-entanglement.html

posted by L C Singh @ Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The film song is mass hypnotism

Song Of Amnesia The film song is mass hypnotism, an aid to help us forget. But the past never leaves. Sunil Menon one page format feedback: send Special Issue: Bollywood Music Special

An outsized paper moon, a cardboard night. A faux skyline, windows tungsten-lit...a city beyond our love-lorn balcony. The hero, effeminate despite his jodhpurs, fingers all mixed up on the mandolin. The lady: ethereal, weaving the studio backlighting in her hair. For all the miles between them, they’re dead on cue in their song of lament. Paisley on the billowing curtains; lattice shadows on her blameless face. An unseen orchestra.

This scene was never shot, but does that matter? It matches a diagram in your head—in our collective head. We recognise all the elements in this romantic impasto. We’ve seen that paper moon a gazillion times, attained a state of bionic senility. Point a cursor and click on the diagram, and a medley of sounds too picks up from some corner of the brain. They strangely match our phantom set-piece—so flavoursome despite its bare economy. We could even swear we know the lyrics—give me a minute, it’s at the tip of my tongue. Even a false cue automatically opens up a folder—the Fifties, C:\MyMusic\ Bollywood\50s.

Vast mountains of para-real, audio-visual stock are stored up in each of us, permanently burned onto our memory cells. Whether the point of reference for your kind of film music is C.H. Atma or Trickbaby—or anything else from the half-a-century of pauseless music-making that intervened—you’ll have your Top 10 and Top 100, neatly catalogued. The rest is mnemonic debris, sheer inorganic waste floating in mindspace. It lies dormant till that accursed song floats up from the transistor on the migrant labourer’s shoulder, the family playing antakshari in the park...Hai Hukku Hai Hukku Hai Hai!

Call it passion or pathology, the film song is so basic to our landscape—like neem, or pepper, or cows on the roads—that we’re liable to not notice that it’s a special kind of artefact. Uniquely Indian, found in all its climatic zones, warm-blooded but immune to the snow. A supremely adaptive beast, it has segued well across time too: we have online antaksharis, Pallo Latke ringtones available for download, and a certain search engine called Yahoo! The film song is part of our suspended particulate matter. It’s in the air. At the water park. At the barbershop, on the ghettoblasters, all over TV. It’s the chewing gum that never leaves us.

We know all its visual cliches. The party dude at the grand piano, city girls cycling to a picnic, the Shakin’ Stevens in his open-top convertible, urchins, fakirs, sundry nobodies. We also parse it by its logical type. Like the declarative song that sets up a character—‘I am...’, and fill up the blanks (Awara, Jhumroo, Dus Numbri, Don, Aflatoon, Chameli, or whoever) All this trivia serves no tangible aesthetic function. It’s a shared database of no use except that it is shared—a zone of overlap in the experience of millions who will never know each other. It makes us all participants in a common pop history, with or without our consent. The old puritanical avoidance of films for its ‘low culture’, or the cultivated dislike of the convent-bred, they’re no immunity against the ocean washing up on your front porch. There are no draft dodgers here.

So much power. By what decree did it colonise the whole landscape of sound? That too in a country of a million songs of the earth, such richness of rhythm and tone? At its root, for a people who had lost patience for all that is archaic, it came as a technology that produces newness. This function is constant in each of its time-zones; only the aspect changes. It occupies a new habitat, a temperate flatland that shuns anything too ‘arty’, anything that bears the vestiges of ‘vulgar’ folk culture. Not abstaining, but coopting—it extends its body to ingest anything it fancies.

Singing Shillong

Caught In A Time Warp Soutik Biswas The Times of India Saturday, June 17, 2006

On a balmy Friday night in Shillong, Tipriti Kharbangar and her band Soulmate are belting out gut-wrenching blues in a cavernous pub called Cloud Nine. "The blues is my teacher/ The blues is my friend/ The blues never hurts me/ It just heals me in the end", sings Tipriti, as her mates plunge into a gritty sound. The audience is a mix of the young and old who have paid Rs 200 each to go in and listen to blues and fusion acts like Soulmate and Mermaid, a grungy girl band playing out lead singer Gweneth Mawlong's angst-ridden takes on life and times, alternated with her mate Lolly's sedate guitar licks.

Shillong is a place where the music stopped - in no other city in India possibly do rock and roll, blues and country music rule so strongly. Even hard metal, really. There are almost no DJs scratching records and playing hip-hop, and there are no 50 Cent and Snoop Dog clones. It's also a place where people take to the floor listening to peppier 12-bar blues. Where a politician and ex-minister is an ace blues harp player. The once-pretty hill town is also home to ageing Elvis Presley imitators, and two music festivals to celebrate the music of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley.

Fifty-nine-year-old Lou Majaw with his flowing hair, skin-tight denim shorts, yellow socks, white sneakers and a giddy stage presence that is a mix of James Brown and Angus Young. He is Shillong's own Bob Dylan playing out the essential Dylan songbook without a break for the past three decades on the legend's birthday. Cabbies play Deep Purple and Jethro Tull on stereo as they weave in and out of diesel fume-spewing traffic, and muscled bikers roam around town in AC/DC T-shirts. The place teems with bands with names like Mojo, Meghalaya Love Project, The Honey Drippers, Euphonic Trance, Brain Damage - and yes, Jerk. And they all take their music seriously. Mermaid's Gweneth, locally called the 'poetess singer', writes doleful angsty lyrics. Soulmate's sassy singer Tipriti writes a lot of her own songs because covers can be such a bore. She says their music is sometimes even influenced by local Khasi tribal folk, but in the end all musical roads lead to the blues.

"When I listen to my local Khasi folk, it reminds me of the Mississippi delta blues", says Tipriti. When people are not singing the blues in Shillong, they are trying to imitate Elvis Presley. On a slate-grey afternoon recently, Felix Ranee is in mourning after losing his wife and nephew, but mention Elvis and his face brightens up and he breaks into an impromptu Elvis act, belting out Blue Suede Shoes with frenetic air guitaring and nifty pelvic thrusts and footwork. At 47, Felix is an unusual Elvis clone - he is short, squat and balding. He says his life changed after watching the singer's movie That's The Way It Is. He got himself Elvis suits, glasses and silver belts, and began singing his songs. And nothing else mattered to him after that, "nothing at all".

Then there's 61-year-old Shandaland Talang, who began worshipping Elvis ever since he read somewhere that the star "loved his mother, only later fell in love with his wife, and gave away charity to friends". The music of Bob Marley also hangs heavy over the cloudy town. So much so that a local fan Keith Wallang grew dreadlocks, read up Rastafarian texts, and decided that the reggae legend's music was better than his Rastaman vibrations and reed. So a decade back, Wallang launched a music festival on the reggae star's birthday on February 6 where three local bands participate regularly and a few thousand fans turn up at a farmside lake. "Marley speaks the truth", says Wallang.

It is difficult to pin down precise reasons but observers reckon Shillong, like most north-eastern states, got its bluesy musical groove thanks to a strong Christian missionary movement in the region, and a consequent affinity to western cultural mores. Many of the musicians cut their teeth in church choirs singing gospels - like Tipriti - and have a more limpid, honest approach to their words and music unlike the spoilt, flashy and unimaginative rock bands in mainline Indian cities. But for all their musi-cal virtuosity, Shillong's rockers simply cannot think of making a living off music.

Though there is an increasingly thriving rock music scene in India's main cities, Bollywood's stranglehold will mean that Indian rockers will always remain second- or even third-class citizens in the industry churning out retreads of western standards. But not all is lost. The world is beginning to take note of Shillong's love for music - some spotty international acts like Petra, Michael Learns to Rock, Firehouse and Air Supply have played in town. The local bands are getting invited to pubs and festivals outside the state. And hey, even musical time in Shillong may be beginning to crawl forward. Felix Ranee rues his children don't like their father doing the Elvis routine anymore. "They listen to hip-hop and rap". The times they are a changin'? The writer is deputy editor with BBC News site.

To Live or Not to Live

Chandrahas,

In this context, what you think of Mishra's view on novels? Do you think that the mid-nineteenth century Flaubertian model that he recommends (and has himself used) works in this century, especially when exploring Indian realities? In these times of globalized powers, terrors and dissent, is it possible for the novelist to be a creature of ascetic calmness and dispassionate observation, an animal without an angle of vision? I have my doubts. Amit Chatterji, at 5:53 PM, June 12, 2006

Dear Amit -

There are many ways in which to go about writing novels, and the model you speak about is still, to my mind, a perfectly worthy ideal, even if replete with all kinds of ifficulties. I don't see at all why it should be unsuited to dealing with Indian realities - in fact, just think of how swampy and stifling our middle-class life is, and how interesting an Indian *Madame Bovary*, written with close attention to the life of a couple in, say, Kota or Ghaziabad would be, were it to be written by an Indian novelist today - office life and family life, the great many things swept under the carpet, complicated and confused attitudes towards sex and the body, the taking of a vacation in Shimla, visits from relatives, letters from an old flame. It would be great.

The kind of observation you are speaking of as possibly being outdated, although you find good, rich words for it, is really not as ascetic and dispassionate as you think - even that has a kind of ferocity and ardour to it, a hunger for detail. It is so subtle as to seem without an angle of vision, which is of course much harder to do than write from a clear point of view - in fact there is a kind of wonder in it when it is successfully brought off. Chandrahas, at 8:17 PM, June 12, 2006

Participating in the writing process

Samrat Upadhyay

Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” remains an all-time favorite with me: the shock of the first line (“When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug”) followed by a languorous opening of several long paragraphs in which the body of the cockroach battles fiercely with the soul of a traveling salesman. It can’t get better than this, just in terms of “bursting” into a story, turning our world topsy-turvy, then relaxing and teasing out the implications of the opening line. When I read “The Metamorphosis,” I find myself participating in the writing process.

I’ve learned much from Nadine Gordimer on how to control narrative distance—you know, move away to provide a larger, omniscient picture, then zoom in on an individual character’s intimate feelings and thoughts. William Trevor is a writer whose technique I admire the most, but feel as if it’ll take me a couple of lifetimes to master what he does: provide a startlingly visual picture for the reader without compromising psychological accuracy. His compassion for his characters, even the “baddest” ones, seeps through the gaps between the words, and I’m in awe of it. “The Potato Dealer” from his collection After Rain is a good example of this. Simultaneously, we experience three characters’ point of view, and Trevor manages to make us feel for all of them. Chandrahas, 1:02 AM permalink (6) comments

Aesthetic pleasure and intellectual nourishment

Wednesday, April 12, 2006 A year of the Middle Stage

Today it is a year since I began blogging about literature - about other things too, but mostly about literature - at the Middle Stage...A blog is like a generous editor - it allows you to do whatever you want to do in the hope that you will do it well. I find I can write here about two areas of my interest, poetry and classical literature, when nobody wants a piece on any of these things for a newspaper. There are no restrictions on space - although I try not to misuse this by being verbose or imprecise. And I'm not limited to current books - I can write about whatever I want, and one of the things I like doing best is bringing the work of little-known or neglected authors to light.

There have been some debates in the Indian blogosphere recently - it is a good thing that there are these debates, and that the quality of debate here is better than in Indian newspapers - about what reviewing and writing about literature, about what work they should properly do and how they should go about it. But I must confess that, reading these opinions, I cannot agree with any one of them. The sentiments expressed here are not the sentiments that animate me.

I think of my work as a form of love. It is a way of sharing out with people books that have given me aesthetic pleasure and intellectual nourishment. When I write about current books I try to judge those by the highest standards. Nevertheless I get some kind of pleasure or the other out of most books. I try not to be cutting about low-quality or middle-grade writing, because after all each one can only do the work he or she is capable of doing, and often poor work is the stepping stone to better work. It is only with what I consider to be dishonest or wilfully mendacious work that I feel harsh. I take my work seriously, and ask also to be taken seriously and judged rigorously. I devote almost no time to thinking upon the subjective-objective questions raised recently. To my mind a good critic’s subjectivity is a kind of objectivity. Chandrahas, 1:31 PM email this to a friend permalink (27) comments