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

The art of sport

By Matthew McGough Home > News > Boston Globe > Ideas May 21, 2006

WHEN QUARTERBACK DOUG FLUTIE announced his retirement from football on Monday, news reports invariably included footage of his 1984 Boston College Hail Mary pass, widely considered to be one of the most dramatic college football plays of all time. Across the country, replays of the ''Miracle in Miami" were punctuated with the ''boo-yah!"-style color commentary that, for better or worse, now seems to characterize most sports programming. Not that Flutie's heave isn't worthy of hyperbole; 21 years later, it's still thrilling to behold. But underlying the cries of ''en fuego!" or ''straight butta" (or whatever catch phrase is currently in fashion at ESPN) is another, calmer term, that might be used to describe this and other great sports moments of the highest order: beautiful, in the philosophical sense of the word.

So argues Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of literature at Stanford University, in his new book ''In Praise of Athletic Beauty" (Harvard). Gumbrecht laments that most contemporary academic analyses of ''sport" as a cultural phenomenon tend to be socially patronizing, dismissive of sports fans as having fallen for a modern-day version of the old bread and circus treatment. Such thinkers, he argues, ''find it difficult to admit that the fascination with sports can have respectable roots in the realm of aesthetic appeal" more typically associated with the so-called high arts. Conditioned to look for aesthetic pleasure in a concert hall or museum, we fail to recognize that watching a tense seventh game of the World Series (or a championship fight or a 100-meter dash) might be considered a legitimate aesthetic experience as well.

To ground his argument, Gumbrecht turns to that staple of sports bar disputation, Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Judgment." At the center of Kant's writings on aesthetics is his conception of the ''beautiful" as paradoxically related to ''purposiveness." The paradox, as recounted by Gumbrecht, is that although ''something does not need to have a purpose in order to be beautiful. . .whatever we find beautiful looks as if it had a purpose." A triple axel or bicycle kick or 6-4-3 double play clearly have no function outside the arena or off the field. And yet, writes Gumbrecht, such actions give a distinct ''impression of purposiveness." They are beautiful to behold because they appear both carefully calibrated and perfectly natural.

Gumbrecht employs another of Kant's theories of aesthetics, ''subjective universality," to address the communal aspects of sports spectatorship: How it is that certain sports moments (the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle, USA hockey's triumph at the Lake Placid Olympics, Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round the World) come to be recognized by individual fans as particularly worthy of canonization, a collective judgment of beauty that coalesces and only deepens with time. Subjective universality-the sense that ''our individual acts of aesthetic judgment always imply the expectation, perhaps even the invitation, for everybody to agree"-may explain why a diverse stadium crowd will gasp as one in response to an acrobatic alley-oop or an improbably converted flea-flicker.

Of course, Kant, who died in 1804, wouldn't have known an alley-oop from a hole in the ground, and Gumbrecht doesn't mention whether he was much of a sports fan. In any event, there's more to appreciating beauty in sports than what Kant offers: Clearly, the beauty of a play also depends on the circumstances in which it was made. This is why DVD compilations like ''404 Great Soccer Goals" and their brethren are so unsatisfying to watch all the way through; without context, the disembodied plays feel like nothing more than sports pornography. Kirk Gibson's home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series is revered by baseball fans not because it was so beautiful in and of itself; the play's aesthetic clout comes from the knowledge that Gibson hit it cold off the bench, on a bum leg, against a future Hall of Fame pitcher, and that no one had hit a come-from-behind, game-winning home run in a World Series ever before.

What is Ananda?

SRI AUROBINDO, Letters on Yoga,
Volume 1, Section Four, REASON, SCIENCE AND YOGA

What is this Ananda, after all? The mind can see in it nothing but a pleasant psychological condition, — but if it were only that, it could not be the rapture which the bhaktas and the mystics find in it. When the Ananda comes into you, it is the Divine who comes into you, just as when the Peace flows into you, it is the Divine who is invading you, or when you are flooded with Light, it is the flood of the Divine himself that is around you. Of course, the Divine is something much more, many other things besides, and in them all a Presence, a Being, a Divine Person; for the Divine is Krishna, is Shiva, is the Supreme Mother.

But through the Ananda you can perceive the Anandamaya Krishna, for the Ananda is the subtle body and being of Krishna; through the Peace you can perceive the Shantimaya Shiva; in the Light, in the delivering Knowledge, the Love, the fulfilling and uplifting Power you can meet the presence of the Divine Mother. It is this perception that makes the experiences of the bhaktas and mystics so rapturous and enables them to pass more easily through the nights of anguish and separation; when there is this soul-perception, it gives to even a little or brief Ananda a force or value it could not otherwise have, and the Ananda itself gathers by it a growing power to stay, to return, to increase.

Raga grammar of music

One cannot forget to admire the dexterity and meticulousness of the Western people in furthering the human excellences. But, strangely enough, the elaborate Raga system practiced in India from ancient times has never received the attention and aesthetic curiosity it deserves. It is also difficult to imagine how such invigorating music has failed to stir the non-Indian listeners. Is culture such a dampener? musicindiaonline.com

Odets's 'Awake and Sing!'

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD NYTimes.com Homepage: April 18, 2006

Dreams and disappointments, hopes and fears, encouraging words and bitter put-downs clash by day and night in Odets's turbulent comedy-drama about a Jewish family struggling to stay afloat in the 1930's. Conflict suffuses the stale air with a tension that almost seems to have mottled the walls. Dinner becomes a simmering battle between factions, in which grievances and recriminations are passed around the table along with the salt and pepper.
In the stirring revival that opened last night at the Belasco Theater, where "Awake and Sing!" was first produced in 1935 during the brief but influential heyday of the Group Theater, the tension derives above all from the question marks on the faces of the younger characters onstage.
Ralph Berger (Pablo Schreiber), toiling away at 22 as a clerk for a measly salary, comes closest to putting it in so many words, articulating a query that Odets posed in much of his work, occasionally with a defiantly American bluntness: What's life for, anyway?
The answers proposed and debated in this vigorous, still pungently funny play sometimes emit the hissing sound of old radio transmissions. "If this life leads to a revolution, it's a good life," avows Ralph's grandfather Jacob, a Marx-worshiping barber. "Otherwise it's for nothing." But even for Jacob life is also for listening to Caruso sing of a paradise that no social upheaval could really bring about.
Odets was writing at the height of the Depression, when economic disorder had led to a sudden, urgent questioning of some fundamental tenets of American society. "Awake and Sing!" and his other early plays are fired by a belief that art could play a role in transforming the culture, creating a world in which life wouldn't be "printed on dollar bills."
But his impassioned desire to proselytize for a better future didn't obscure his sensitivity to the everyday despair that tinted American lives long before the stock market crashed, or the humble forms of solace available even to a guy without a dollar to his name, like the rush of joy in his heart at the gleam in his girl's eye.

Juan Goytisolo and Orhan Pamuk

By FERNANDA EBERSTADT Published: April 16, 2006 NYTimes.com Homepage

He sees "seeds of modernity" in the Arab world and even dares to hope that radical Islamist parties may be tempered and matured by partaking in national governments. This optimism perhaps accounts for why Goytisolo's work appears to have found a whole new generation eager to embrace his "Babelization" of language and cultures, his plea for ethnic, religious and sexual pluralism, his defense of the outsider. "What was appealing to me when I first came across Juan Goytisolo's books in the 1980's," the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk told me recently, "was that here was an experimental European novelist who had renounced the flat realism of the 19th-century novel and who was paying attention to my part of the world with an extraordinary humility, searching in his life and prose to create a different style enriched by what he's found in this culture."

The Café France, where Goytisolo goes every day, overlooks Jemaa el Fna, the centerpiece of Marrakesh's old quarter, a square where the open-air storytellers, snake charmers and witch doctors that enchanted writers like Bowles and Elias Canetti still ply their trade. Much of Goytisolo's organizational energies in the last years have gone into a campaign to preserve Jemaa el Fna from the Moroccan government's periodic efforts to sanitize it. At one point, there were plans to turn the medieval square into a parking lot. Thanks largely to Goytisolo's zeal, however, Jemaa el Fna has been classed by Unesco as a site preserving "the oral heritage of humanity."

"People ask, 'Why do you live in Marrakesh?' " Goytisolo told me with a chuckle. "I ask them, 'Have you seen it?' " In Jemaa el Fna, Goytisolo explained, he finds all the heterogeneity that is in danger of disappearing from Western cities. "In the 70's, when I was very poor, I was offered a permanent teaching post at Edmonton. I realized I would rather starve in Marrakesh than be a millionaire in Alberta."

Bharat Natyam lacks surprise

DÉJÀ VU? YOU, TOO? Cupid’s arrows always come at the lovelorn nayika at a pree-cise angle of 45 degrees Renuka Narayanan Hindustan Times Sunday, April 2, 2006

I ’VE BEEN watching dance from the womb because my mother was a dancer and I absolutely had to learn Bharata Natyam, like brushing my teeth. But even I, the mad classicist, find most performances one big yawn today, except for the few magic-leaguers. I’m sad but not surprised that girls now prefer the bumpand-grind of Shiamak Davar or Ashley Lobo. B’Nat lacks surprise. And I think these bad habits of the dance are why it’s so boring:

CUPID’S ARROWS They always come at the lovelorn nayika (heroine) at a pree-cise angle of 45 degrees. Rukmini Devi Arundale of Kalakshetra, the pioneering dance academy set up in Madras (not Chennai) back in the ’30s, decreed they should. And the nayika always gives a little twitch when it strikes, just so.

PINING PYTs Each item is explained in a fruity, breathless voice that makes you giggle. And just how often can you endure the plaint, “O Krishna, come to me! O Lord of the sacred temple of Appalam Swamy Pappadam Perumal, you are my hero, I pine for you.” Leaves me muttering, “Get a life, girl.”

TANTRIK FAN-FAN That fan-pleat in garish orange silk teamed with a screaming pink blouse. The obscene blouse-accents in gold. The ghastly sweat patches in the armpits after twenty minutes of stomping. The trailing threads from a tatty kunjalam (fake plait). The klutzy jewellery in loud green and red from Sukra Jewellers, North Mada Street, Mylapore, Chennai. Eeuh. Go away. You offend my eyes, vulgarian.

SPEED KILLS Perhaps it’s because they know they’re up against Shiamak, Ashley and Saroj Khan. But dancers now whiz through slow, sensuous songs like how the Concorde used to break Mach 2. My fave example is actor-dancer Shobhana, the new Padmashri, whom I saw speeding madly through Kuru Yadu Nandana. It’s the sexiest song across the Big Six classical dance forms of India from Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. Radha tells Krishna, “O Yadava hero, rub sandal paste on my burning breasts with your cooling hands.” But what we got was heartless wham-bam, with Krishna dumped unceremoniously in the kadambvan afterwards. Nooooo!

The other truly awful one was Kuchipudi guru Vempati Chinna Satyam trying to be Satyabhama. Now Satyabhama is the most fiery, wilful, imperious, luscious nayika ever invented by the Male Gaze. You need to build her up nuance by delicious nuance. To see her made to skip like a springbok in mating season…

THE WONDERBRA VERSE This one slays me each time. When they’ve done pining for the hero in the first two verses, the nayikas always get darshan in the last one. Do they show ecstasy with subtle, beautiful netra bhava (eye language)? Naah, that’s work. ‘Upliftment’ always means a cheap, easy pectoral leap. I call it the “Wonderbra Verse” and you can see it coming a mile away. Forget it. Let’s watch Indian Idol.

Nearly all of my entertainment choices are produced by people openly hostile to my worldview

Kahntheroad said... Just by having to deal with the frustrations you express from reading this site you are learning more than you know about what it has been like to hold a conservative viewpoint in this country for the last few decades. For most of my life your views - meaning left of center - was the default position. There was rarely any serious debate, or resources to even hear an alternative view (especially before the internet).

In school I was taught one side, in the media one side was clearly elevated, even in pop culture "Republican" was a punch line. In college I found myself reexamining the liberal orthodoxy and becoming more and more conservative. And, believe me, this was no whim. I had no choice but to do my homework. Not only did I have to know what I believed, I had to know why I believed it and I had to know, inside and out, what the other side believed. If I so much as raised certain questions in a class I had to be ready to defend myself against a professor armed with a PHD and mob of affirming students. If politics came up in a social setting and I opined I had to be ready to explain myself thoroughly.

As a conservative I have to be prepared to overlook the fact that nearly all of my entertainment choices - from music to books to film - are produced by people openly hostile to my worldview and will often include pointed insults to beliefs I take seriously. This is not to mention politics coming up on dates, jobs, etc. I'm confident in my views, and I'm happy to explain, but there are times I don't want feel like discussing it, but can't be silent when someone presumes that everyone thinks as they do.

And once I found myself on a spiritual quest? Forget about it! Trust me, I know how you feel as a liberal reading Bob - I've dealt with the same thing in reading or listening to just about every modern spiritual guru on the bookshelf. Fortunately many years of practice prepared me for the critical mind required to discern wisdom from politics. By none of this do I mean to portray myself as a victim - it's just an explanation of my experience and how it's something I simply deal with as a fact of life.

I'm secure enough in my views that I can enjoy a great film or album made by a liberal artist. Also, I understand why people are liberal; like many here I was once liberal myself. I also have many friends with a broad range of views with whom I disagree, yet have a deep respect, and i gain much from debating. I have not come to my conclusions lightly, and I'm not afraid to be challenged or even proven wrong, as I have had to reevaluate, and sometimes alter, convictions many times. So welcome to the arena of ideas. The first steps will be bumpy, but if you stay in the ring I guarantee you'll come out more enlightened - and, who knows, maybe you'll enlighten some of us know-it-alls.

Are We Having a Conversation Yet?

An Art Form Evolves By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN The New York Times: March 20, 2006

What is there to talk about? The question should be taken literally. We can talk about the weather — which means just making casual contact, assuring each other that we are temperate in nature and not about to erupt in torrential outbursts. We can talk about politics — if we can assume certain shared convictions that will prevent other kinds of storms and disruptions. We can talk about family — if we can assume that we take that kind of a personal interest in each other.
But whatever we choose, there's a certain amount of risk involved, a tentative guess made about what should be shared and what should not, what would please the other and what would not. La Rochefoucauld said, "We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring." That is only the beginning.
Conversation is one of those acts that require subtle forms of social imagination: an ability to listen and interpret and imagine, an attentiveness to someone whose perspective is always essentially different, a responsiveness that both makes oneself known and allows the other to feel known — or else does none of this, but just keeps up appearances. It may be, then, one of the most fundamental political and social acts, indispensable to negotiating allegiances, establishing common ground, clearing tangled paths. Conversation may reflect not just the state of our selves, but the state of society.

O.K. But listen to "talk" radio, with its combative recruitment of allies; or "talk" shows in which guests are promoting themselves or their products and hosts are prepared with leading questions; or "talk" news shows in which conversation becomes a form of shouting. Look at our isolating iPods, at text messaging with its prepackaged formulas, or instant messaging with its iconic smilies, so necessary to make sure the telegraphic prose is not misunderstood. CUL8R.
This state of affairs helped inspire Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art" (Yale, $27.50). Mr. Miller, who is a contributing editor to The Wilson Quarterly, finds countertrends, as well — Internet communities that lead to new forms of conversation, diverse gatherings in which disagreements become an expected aspect of conversation. But, he writes, the "forces sapping conversation seem stronger than the forces nourishing it." So Mr. Miller, in response, is recounting another kind of conversation that has taken place over the centuries, one whose subject is conversation itself.

Cicero gave advice about conversation (It ought "to be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty"). Montaigne hailed its pleasures ("I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives"). Henry Fielding praised it ("This grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant"). Adam Smith prescribed it (calling it one of "the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity").
There were also those who opposed it, or at least strongly declared other preferences. Rousseau sneered at the chatter in French salons. Wordsworth preferred nature and solitude. The writers of Romanticism shifted the emphasis, preferring to share feelings and perceptions rather than honor conversation for its own sake. Conversation became confessional — which in many ways, it still is. "Modern writers," Mr. Miller suggests, "tend to dwell on the emotional rewards that come from conversation."
In fact, in Mr. Miller's account, the United States may have played an important role in the evolution of the mode of non-conversation now developing. During the 19th century many European writers scorned American conversation, perhaps too much, Mr. Miller suggests, accusing it of excessive focus on money and commerce. There may have also been an American suspicion of conversation altogether: Thoreau couldn't be bothered with it, and Melville was wary.
Mr. Miller points out that in the 20th century, literary figures were also admired for being laconic. Was this an extension of early Romantic early suspicions? A democratic rebellion against the artifice and artfulness of 18th-century conversation? Did it even lead, perhaps, to the self-absorbed focus on self-fulfillment and self-expression that have, in Mr. Miller's view, extended from the years of the counterculture into the present?
Like a well-mannered host, Mr. Miller presents some hypotheses, but also leads the conversation along. For him, the powers and possibilities of conversation were most clearly revealed in the 18th century. Samuel Johnson praised the two key journals of the age, The Spectator and The Tattler; they were being published at a time, he said, "when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation."

The journals, Johnson said, "adjusted" conversation with their "propriety and politeness." That character also helped define London coffeehouses, in which political debate and conversation between varied classes took place. Andrew Marvell wrote: "It is wine and strong drinks make tumults increase/ Choc'late, tea, and coffee are liquors of peace."
But Hume may be the patron saint of conversation here, for though he noted that politeness "runs often into affectation and foppery, disguise and insincerity," he also saw a necessary connection between politeness and freedom. Hume suggested that politeness was not, in fact, "natural to the human mind," but "presumption and arrogance" were. Society depends on artifice. Conversation is an art.
As Mr. Miller suggests, American conversation now prides itself on angry authenticity or on being kind and "nonjudgmental"; it is meant to be "natural" and full of "self-expression." This does not make for great conversation or a vital political life.
Hume, in contrast, welcomed the necessary artifice of manners, through which, he argued, "a mutual deference is affected; contempt of others disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained, without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority."

It is an ideal worth talking about.

A Resurgence for the Humble Lecture

In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture

By DINITIA SMITH New York Times: March 17, 2006

"My purpose is not only to make the lions roar," he cries. Bounce. "But to trigger people's imagination." Bounce. Bounce. "It's not only sex that's exciting," Mr. Holdengräber says, "but the life of the mind. When you come into contact with a great idea, it can change your life." Mr. Holdengräber is riding the crest of a renewed interest in spoken-word events, lectures, debates, readings and panel discussions, in many corners of the city, from university auditoriums to the 92nd Street Y and bookstores and bars.

A spokesman for the library said that attendance at public events had doubled since Mr. Holdengräber, the founder and former director of the Institute for Arts and Culture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, arrived a year and a half ago. Dr. Paul LeClerc, the library's president, added that since Mr. Holdengräber, 45, began making his imprint on public programming, the audiences had "a different energy." "They tend to be much younger," he noted.

In January, Mr. Holdengräber said, when the French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was interviewed at the library by Tina Brown, "900 people showed up." "Diane Von Furstenberg and Lauren Bacall were there," he continued. "There was a line 150 meters long of people who couldn't get in. It went around the corridors of the library." In October, similar numbers lined up to see Bill Clinton interview the historian John Hope Franklin about race relations and to see the song-cycle version of "The Elements of Style," by Maira Kalman and Nico Muhly. "Several hundred non-ticket holders had to be turned away from all the events," Mr. Holdengräber said.

To be sure, some of the increase in attendance can be attributed to Mr. Holdengräber's efforts to liven up the programming. One of the first things he did when he arrived was to change the name from the Public Education Program to Live From the N.Y.P.L. It also helped that he changed the time most lectures began, to 7 p.m. or later, from 6 or 6:30, to make it easier for people with jobs to attend. And he increased the library's e-mail database of potential attendees to 7,000 from about 500. He says he relies on e-mail messages now to publicize events rather than brochures, a change that enables him to program more spontaneously.

But the library is not the only place that has seen an increase in attendance at spoken-word events. Uptown at the 92nd Street Y, Helaine Geismar Katz, the associate executive director who is in charge of public programs, said she had seen "a big change" in the size of audiences at the Y's lectures and panels. Like the library, the Y has increased the number of its lectures, debates and forums to feed the public appetite. "We have had poetry for over 60 years, every Monday night," Ms. Geismar Katz pointed out. "Now we have programs almost every single day and night."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has always had good crowds at its panels and lectures, said Hilde Limondjian, general manager of concerts and lectures. Its musical performances are often accompanied by talks as well. Smaller outlets have seen a steady increase in attendance. Denis Woychuk, the principal owner of KGB Bar at 85 East Fourth Street, which is a center for readings by authors, said: "We set up our first in 1994 on Sundays because Sundays were slow. Things were dead. I said, 'Let's do something that's going to be fun.' The business was secondary, but there was certainly that." Every eager young writer attending a reading means, of course, that at least one drink is bought at the bar.

Sri Aurobindo and Sartre

I think Aurobindo's "Future Poetry" represents a rather good example, in riveting language and style, of an atypical Indian view of literary criticism of English poetry.

Sartre's "What is Literature?" is a great essay, extremely well-written and illustrated like many of his other work. It attempts to be persuasive in every line and paragraph, and may even succeed at times but for the narrow view of literature espoused, particularly with the role of literature in modern society. I am forced to agree with Sartre when he says that literature needs to serve today's world; but it would again be a limited idea, inherently defective and contradictory to Sartre's advocacy of the primacy of free thought and expression. All literature written today cannot serve today's world, some need to and can, but others should exist in equal terms, whether accepted by today's world or not.

Literature can be a tool for societal change but its primary role may not be this Marxian view at all, particularly in today's globalised world. The essay has a great line on critics, comparing them to cemetery watchmen, the cemetery being a library - thus implying that literature was probably dead when the essay was written! When Sartre famously declined the Nobel Prize in 1964, one of the reasons he gave was that literature was dead!!! This disowning of literature was rather sensational and controversial because it was uncommon and unusual, but that apart I am not sure whether it carried much substance away from a Sarteran world view. Thejaswi Shivanand Location: Bangalore, India posted by Dumaketu Saturday, October 29, 2005 @ 11:43 AM 14 comments

Wallace Steven: never "true to life"

Language and Poetry Norman D. Livergood

A transformative poem such as Wallace Steven's Analysis of a Theme, is only actualized and consummated by its being appreciated, understood, and enjoyed by a discerning reader. A reader who merely passes over the words of a transformative poem by Stevens, without genuine comprehension, leaves the poem in an unfinished state in regards to his own experience. If the reader, out of egotism or scholastic puffery, injects spurious, extraneous meanings into the poem, he creates a perversion of his own design totally unrelated to the real poem which Stevens created. The essential poem, containing multiple meanings, cascading associations, and profound metaphysical dimensions, is available to the appreciative, discerning reader who has prepared himself to discover what Stevens deposited in his artistic creation.

From Wallace Stevens' perspective, "poetry has to do with reality in its most individual aspect." Only poetry deals with the singular element of reality, "science does not cover 'particularity here and now.'" Stevens claims that "there is in reality, whether we think of it as animate or inanimate, human or sub-human, an aspect of individuality at which many forms of rational explanation stop short." Humans, he claims, dismiss "individual and particular facts of experience as of no importance in themselves."

"The aim of our lives," Stevens claims, "should be to draw ourselves away as much as possible from the insubstantial fluctuating facts of the world about us and establish some communion with the objects which are apprehended by thought and not sense." Stevens believes that "Plato would describe himself as a realist in the sense that it is by breaking away from the world of facts that we make contact with reality." What we're after is "contact with reality as it impinges on us from the outside, the sense that we can touch and feel a solid reality which does not wholly dissolve itself into the conception of our own minds."

"The wonder and mystery of art," Stevens believes, "is the revelation of something 'wholly other' by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched." He claims that there is a "unity rooted in the individuality of objects," and that this individuality is "discovered in a different way from the apprehension of rational connections."

The genuine artist, Stevens claimed, is never "true to life." "He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it." "The poet sees with a poignancy and penetration that is altogether unique." "Meaning is an awareness and a communication. But it is no ordinary awareness, no ordinary communication." In genuine poetry, Stevens believed, there is an "authentic note; it is the insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our consciousness and refuses to be managed and mastered." The poet mediates for us a reality not of ourselves. The supreme virtue of a poet "is humility, for the humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts."

Stevens believed that for a genuine poet, "the faithful poem is an act of conscience." "What a modern poet desires, above everything else, is to be nothing more than a poet of the present time." The genuine poet attempts "to find, by means of his own thought and feeling, what seems to him to be the poetry of his time as distinguished from the poetry of . . . any other time, and to state it in a manner that effectively discloses it to his readers." Wallace Stevens' Poems

"So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the word carries. It expresses not only the life-soul of man as did the primitive word, not only the ideas of his intelligence for which speech now usually serves, but the experience, the vision, the ideas, as we may say, of the higher and wider soul in him. Making them real to our life-soul as well as present to our intellect, it opens to us by the word the doors of the Spirit." Sri Aurobindo, "The Essence of Poetry"

Truer Than Fact

Why have we forsaken the novel for the memoir?

JULIA GLASS NYTimes.com: February 11, 2006

Fiction writers work tremendously hard to make things that are patently untrue seem as true as possible. "Let me tell you a story that isn't true," beckons the fiction writer, "and I will show you some of the truest things you'll ever know." A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.

A memoir says, Look at me; learn from me how one life has been lived. That solipsistic focus has its place; it, too, can move and inspire, but only fiction can give us faith that we all have the imaginative capability to understand any number of stories not our own, especially the stories of people who never would or could write a memoir. 2Next Page > Julia Glass, author of the forthcoming novel "The Whole World Over," won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002.

What’s So Bad About Doing Good?

An Essay Review of "The Rainmaker" Mickel Adzema

MusePapers December 17th, 1997 Primal Spirit Home Page

Last night my wife and I went to see "The Rainmaker"—the hit new movie based upon the blockbuster novel of the same name by John Grisham. While it was an extremely well-produced, acted, and directed movie, I didn’t feel very good when I left the theater afterwards. Uncovering the layers of feelings that were in me then, I realized that I was not satisfied at all with the ending. The movie had a triumphal and climactic courtroom scene, a delightfully sweet love story, and was totally engaging throughout—so much so that I was surprised, upon checking in with my body, occasionally, at how tense and "in suspense" I was because of my involvement with the movie: Caring and pulling for the events to turn one way as opposed to another—just as if these were real events in people’s lives instead of mere fictional events played out by actors with lives totally unlike the characters they portrayed.

Nevertheless, I noticed my body being in suspense, as well as my wet cheeks, replenished continuously by tears flowing freely during love scenes of caring and compassion, and scenes of tragedy and sadness.

So why did I leave the theater feeling so dissatisfied? Beneath the more superficial layers of feelings—the disappointment that the "victory" was only a pyrrhic one—i.e., it did not reap the expected benefits and was almost as good as a loss; and the fact that the romantic element was left undertermined—you weren’t sure that there was going to be a "happily ever after" for this couple—I realized there was the larger disappointment that the "heroic" main character, after this first and only case as a lawyer, and despite his huge (though prryhic) victory, was considering quitting the legal profession. This, because of the corruption and injustice in it.

I realized that this part was disappointing because it fit with a pattern of numerous stories of the Nineties whose message was largely that corruption and injustice (or downright evil) was everywhere and that it is hopeless to resist . . . and that heroic responses, by contrast, were stupid, or naïve, or—worst of all—too . . . well, "Sixty-ish." (I was beginning here to notice the generational tie-in --> deeper depressing feelings still!)

Photoroman

Living away from Delhi and returning there from time to time made me look at the city differently. Hanging out at Safdarjung, Aurobindo Place and Green Park I was struck by the rambling and dilapidated ruins of monuments lying amidst the urban space of markets and colonies. I realized that I had taken them for granted to such an extent that I didn't even know what these structures looked like from within. A few trips made were enough to get my juices flowing and soonthe germ of an idea took place in my mind.

Delhi unlike Bombay was an urban city with space for clandestine love. Mosques and mausoleums, tombs and temples dotted the city and in turn were dotted by names of anonymous lovers etched forever on stone and granite. Who were these secret lovers, what was their story, for surely they had a story to tell, and by extension, there must be countless such myths and folk tales surrounding these various heritage sites...I decided to weave a contemporary clandestine love story among the ruins of Delhi - a love story where the young man and girl in question become influenced by the past to such an extent that it starts overtaking their conscious waking life...

As a filmmaker I also took a conscious decision to treat the proposed film differently. Some years ago I had the good fortune of seeing Chris Marker's legendary film "La Jetee" a sci-fi film comprised entirely of still images with voice-over narration and sound design -Marker called the film a photoroman. The film was so influential thatnot only did Hollywood make an ugly remake (12 monkeys) but a La Jetee Bar also exists in Tokyo! I came up with the decision to make my film in a similar fashion albeit do away with voice over narrative and in its stead have many voices of both the present and the past imbue thesound design. Best, SIDHARTH SRINIVASAN by reader @ 31.01.2006 09:04 CET

The words bring moisture to one's eyes

Words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother Hindusthan Records and Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Vol. I 3719-C- 559 - Songs and hymns in Sanskrit - Various artistes - Price Rs. 50.

SRI AUROBINDO was a political activist, Indian Yogi, and spiritual master who first came into prominence during India's struggle for independence. He gradually withdrew from politics and shifted to Pondicherry to evolve a new method of spiritual practice or internal Yoga with the help of his spiritual collaborator, the Mother. He founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. Sri Aurobindo shed his mortal coils on December 5, 1950, and the Mother passed away in 1973.

Beginning with the chanting of the primordial sound 'Om', this audio album features songs and hymns in Sanskrit with recitation in English from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A delightful musical composition by Shobha Mitra on India and her future as visualised by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is flooded with melody. The choral singing and the individual renditions do invoke a spirit of emotional ecstasy.

The words of Sri Aurobindo pledging his love for India and professing his affection for her as one would his mother bring moisture to one's eyes. The narrator says that the Mother asks us for no schemes, no plans, no methods, she will herself provide them better than anyone can devise. She asks us for our hearts, our lives, nothing less nothing more. The narration, as perfect as the Queen's English, is an aural joy.

Hindustan Musical Products and Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 3725- C-558 Vol II - Words of Sri Aurobindo - Nalini Kanta Gupta - Price Rs. 40.

WORDS OF Sri Aurobindo have been read by Nalini Kanta Gupta in an audio volume released by Hindustan Musical Products and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry. Aurobindo's thoughts on physical sadhana, yoga, the purpose of avatarhood, and the importance of the Guru. In another album Sri Aurobindo expresses his views and attitude towards integral yoga, the supramental evolution, spiritual life, renunciation, the fundamental attitude, Sadhana and work, and education both physical and aesthetic.

The concluding sentences in the cassette get etched in one's memory: "Make the mind quiet so that what we call the opening is rendered possible. A quieted mind not necessarily motionless or silent, is good if one can have that at will and the persistent aspiration in the heart are the two main keys of yoga.'' - S.P. The Hindu Friday, September 21, 2001

Not be so bothered about making pretty gestures

The 1st Dec Programme: A conversation with Priti Ghosh ’64 , conducted in mid-November, on the intricacies of staging the 1st December Programme

Can you tell us briefly what is the subject of this year’s programme?
The subject which was suggested to me at the beginning of the year was ‘The Hour of God.’ I started working on it right away. Then, a few months later, I realised that it was getting a bit too intellectual and leading me nowhere. So I recast it in a completely different way. ‘The Hour of God’ is the theme, but the actual script is based on lines taken from Savitri and parts of the ‘The Hour of God’. Now the new script is titled ‘A Light There Is That Leads.’
I tried to find a way of expressing this idea in a simple way. The script is divided into five or six parts. First, we start with the Creation, then we show the Awakening of the Earth. After this there is the Emergence of the Ego, then Release from Ego. Earth is then ready to hear the voice cautioning her that this is the Hour of God. And finally, the Supreme Mother’s coming down to uplift mankind. That, in short, is the theme of the programme.
What will actually happen on the stage?
On stage there will be the performers, and on one side, facing the stage, the chorus, which will recite the lines. In fact we have decided to chant some of the lines rather than recite them in the usual way. And the dance movements will be in a free style, choreographed to Sunil-da’s music.
Right from its inception I had selected Sunil-da’s music for the choreography because it meant that at least one element was already fixed. That way it gave me the freedom to concentrate on the dancers and the recitations. Also, Sunil-da’s music carries an atmosphere which is very very elevating.
The interesting fact about the annual programme is that so much labour goes into the preparation of this one single performance. So many different kinds of skills are woven together before the programme can be presented. Can you tell us something about the details of the preparation of your programme?
When I started working on the script I realised that it was a colossal task. Directing one-act entertainment in the School Courtyard is one thing, and directing a programme on such a vast and abstract theme, and that too in the Theatre, is another – it is just stupendous. So I asked several people to help me, specially for the choreography.
As I told you, the music was already there. Now, for the dances, I wanted them to be choreographed in such a way that there would be no allusions to any of the classical forms. I wanted something different, something very expressive. It is impressive to see how Vimala (Molly), Shraddha, and Datta have put in their best efforts and hard work, and almost spent sleepless nights in trying to find something fresh and different and beautiful. Veenapani (Chawla) and Vinay too have put in a herculean effort to choreograph a scene for boys, which I wanted to be completely different from the others. I cannot leave out Ashok (Acharya) who has been perfectionist in taping the several pieces of music in our programme umpteen times. I have been lucky in the selection of my helpers.
And how did the dancers respond to this different choreography, since no one actually has any base in contemporary modern dance style?
Yes, that has been a problem. Our students are very gifted and graceful but the girls all have a background of either Kathak or Odissi. It is very difficult for them to break away from that mould into which they have been cast for several years. Their body automatically reverts to classical poses. We have actually had to work very hard to get them to express themselves freely and not be so bothered about making pretty gestures, to get into the feel of the text rather than execute a perfect, but flat, movement.
And what about the recitation part?
Here the person who has helped me most is Maurice. He is the perfectionist and relentless in his efforts. The only innovation he has tried is, as I told you, chanting, where Shilpa worked miracles with her suggestions.
As a director, you have an advantage in that you are also an artist. Your strong visual sense must have guided you for the lighting, décor, and the position of actors on the stage.
This is only partially true. Although I can visualise two-dimensionally, visualising for the stage has not been so easy. I have already prepared the colour schemes of the lighting by actually painting the scenes on paper. But visualising the position of the chorus has been complicated. Firstly, there is the technical factor which limits the possibilities of where the chorus can stand. Every time I chose a position for it, Mahi would point out the disadvantage it posed for the mikes. So finally the chorus will stand outside the stage to one side. As for the colours, all the costumes of the dancers are white so that the colours of the light remain very pure.
What has this work meant personally to you?
Thanks to this programme I have realised that so many of my capacities left unoperational had just gone to sleep. I have been concentrating so much on my paintings over the past long years that I have let myself get intellectually mouldy. At one point Maurice asked me to join the chorus, and I realised how difficult it was for me to memorise even a few lines, and yet it used to be so easy not so long ago. This programme has helped me to be conscious of so many other parts in myself.
How did you choose your cast? Did you face any difficulties?
Actually, the cast has changed in the course of the preparation. We had set off with a different conception so we had a different group of people. Then, as we changed our script I realised we needed more people. We have a group of dancers and another group, forming the chorus which will recite the lines. The best thing to have happened is that, apart from the selected few, some students themselves came forward and asked me if they could participate. So, in fact, leaving aside veterans, nearly the entire cast is made up of students. Some of the 3rd year Knowledge students who are passing out this year decided to stay back during the holidays and participate in the programme.
After we had started rehearsing with the final script some performers suddenly dropped out because of personal reasons, so we had to find substitutes. This did cause some difficulties. But we had decided not to get disheartened by them.
We are in a strange situation now. So few students stay back in Pondicherry after finishing their studies that we cannot any more have a group of actors who by participating in a number of performances gain experience and form a ‘talent pool’ from which you can actually choose a cast. Either you can take very young and inexperienced students or you can take ex-students, teachers and other adults who are experienced but not so young. And when they are together on stage the contrast is very striking. So how do you see the future of the annual programmes? How are you going to find the participants?
The 1st December programme is actually supposed to be a programme of the School, and so students ought to participate in it. In my opinion, students should be asked to stay here during the holidays. It should be made compulsory. They can then go out after the 2nd and come back by the 15th. The School holidays were started only so that students could prepare for the 1st and 2nd December programmes. Since most of them go away every year there are some who have never watched a 1st December programme! If one has not participated in these annual programmes then one has really missed something very special in life. They are a unique feature of our Institution. Once the students pass out of the School and leave Pondy they will never get that chance again. These programmes give the students an opportunity to ‘offer’ something creative and artistic, so it would be in their interest if they could take full advantage of this.
Once upon a time people would have considered themselves lucky if they were given the role of even a soldier who did not have any lines to say. But now one has to beg and plead with people to even play the part of the hero or heroine. If they accept they make you feel as if they are doing you a great favour and you have to consider yourself very fortunate if they don’t leave the programme half way through. Why is there this lack of enthusiasm? Why have people forgotten the importance of the 1st December programme?
Not all are indifferent. There are still some who do consider it a privilege to participate. Some of them have confessed to me that when one of their classmates was chosen to participate they did feel a sting of disappointment.
It is true that things are not like before. There seems to be this wave of media culture which has taken everyone in its sweep. For children it starts much before they come to Knowledge, they are so deeply influenced by it. But I know our students also are a part of general humanity and cannot remain ‘untouched’. To be so deeply engrossed in the entertainment media that one cannot perceive the value of anything aesthetic is an alarming signal.
But I believe strongly that this is only a passing phase. The Benevolent Power which is protecting us will see to it that our students once again become aware of the difference between what is refined and what is gross and cheap. People have suggested to me that we explain to the children the importance that Mother gave to the 1st December programme. It is true. It is our responsibility. The present generation is really not informed about the significance of the 1st and 2nd December programmes.
The 1st December programme is always based on something written by Mother or Sri Aurobindo, and yet it is often very difficult to choose the theme or the text. Putting on a play by Sri Aurobindo has become nearly impossible for practical reasons. The actors are simply not available, it is a formidable task to direct a play when you have to develop characters and maintain a continuity. So increasingly directors are turning to abstract themes where only dance and recitation are involved. However this also is not something easy. The text is often lines from Savitri which are so charged with mantric power that they cannot be recited just anyhow. How do you prepare young students to be ready inwardly to express these lines on stage?
Yes, a preparation is necessary. The only way in which this can be done is to start preparing the students and other members of the cast very gently from July or August itself. Perhaps once a week they could familiarise themselves with the text on which they are going to work. They could work on a little at a time so that when they start the regular rehearsals in October they would have been sufficiently in the spirit and the mood of the lines to feel them truly.
During some rehearsals I noticed that some students would complain that they were being made to do preparatory exercises for too long. But they don’t realise that everything counts, even the time that they spend waiting, watching others work. The one hour that they spend working on Sri Aurobindo’s lines is like spending one hour in His presence.
Nowadays a lot of plays are put up during the year so we have quite a large batch of students who get some exposure on stage, but the inner preparation is something we, the directors, have to work upon; perhaps we must help the children to understand the difference between merely ‘acting’ on the stage and ‘offering’.

Waltz of poetry, story and drama !

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June 26, 2004 Reviewer: Samesh Braroo (foster city, ca United States) - See all my reviews

Having read some of the greatest playwrights, from Shakespeare to Miller to Kalidasa to Chekov, I assumed I had seen it all, or at least summed a good some of it, but not. Welcome to the dramatic world of publicity shy Sri Aurobindo ! His poetic plays are a treat of humor, tragedy, language and understandings of our world. Sadly his dramas have been buried by his own more dominant works on Yoga. If he hadn't been approached by philosophy, that drove people into making more attention for his yoga and divine elaboration, he would have been recalled as a great dramatist. Sri Aurobindo is one of the greatest and rarest of poets, philosophers, story tellers and a spiritualist of the divine caliber - indeed one of the most virtuous sons that Heaven spared for mankind's love and respect, and if I may so add - joy's best tears will not be shed reading anything else!