Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was unquestionably one of Lucknow’s greatest citizens.
Vajpayee was a freedom fighter, poet, orator, and diplomat. The late Prime Minister represented Lucknow with distinction in the Lok Sabha for three decades. He was a statesman who could work for peace with Pakistan even while decisively defeating them on the Kargil battlefield. His term as India’s Prime Minister is still remembered as a time of unprecedented progress and prosperity.
Lucknow is justly proud of Bharat Ratna Atal Behari.
The City of Lucknow honoured him with a giant mural.
The City of Lucknow also honoured Sir Cliff Richard with a similar mural.
Cliff Richard mural in Lucknow
While Sir Cliff is not generally associated with Lucknavi tehzeeb, he was born at King George’s hospital in Lucknow. His Anglo-Indian parents worked for the colonial Indian Railways. They were based in Dehra Dun at the time. They came down to Lucknow for looking for better maternity care. Cliff Richard's family later moved to Calcutta and emigrated to the UK in 1948, when Cliff was eight years old.
So, what do Cliff Richard and Atal Behari Vajpayee have in common? If their murals were to come to life, would they find anything to talk about?
Maybe they could talk about being bachelor boys.
One of Sir Cliff's greatest hits is "Bachelor Boy". The song goes:
“Son, you are a bachelor Boy
And that’s the way to stay
Son, you’ll be a bachelor boy
Until your dying day.”
Sir Cliff, being a man of integrity, lived by his own advice. He dated many charming ladies, including Sue Barker a tennis player and former French Open singles champion. But he has remained a bachelor (at least until his eightieth birthday).
Atalji was a bachelor too.
The way Vajpayee put it "main kunwar hoon par brahmachari nahin" (I'm single but not celibate).
Sir Cliff might relate. They might just have something to talk about.
Though I doubt if even Sir Cliff’s persuasion could get Atalji to do the dance steps from the Bachelor Boy video (click here to watch). Those immortal moves can belong to one and only one of the Lakhnavi bachelor boys.
It isn’t a love song. It is about Paul McCartney's mother's death.
I found out from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, from this interview with Paul McCartney airing on NPR this week, in honour of the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ conquest of America.
In the interview, Paul talks about how he lost his mother as a teenager. John Lennon also lost his mother at about the same age, and that shared experience of loss was a deep bond John and Paul shared. However, as working class lads from the North, they couldn’t talk about it. It just wasn’t done. It was put to Paul much later in life that Yesterday might be about his feelings when his mother died, and it dawned on Paul that that was probably true.
The song sounds different now, now that I know this interpretation. Still a great song. But different.
Actually, it's the wind above my wings that makes me fly.
Air flows faster over the upper surface of the wing, which lowers pressure, and therefore provides lift and enables flight. The mechanics are the same for a airplane wing, a frisbee, a sail, a swinging cricket ball or an eagle's wing. Similarly, the spoiler blades at the back of F1 racing cars are designed so the wind passes beneath the wings. This pulls the car down towards the tarmac, and provides stability.
This science is complex enough to provide many engineers with a lifetime of work, but is neither new nor controversial. It follows from Bernoulli's principle, which I was taught in 8th class by Kanaka Eshwaran-Miss (aka Kinetic Energy-miss).
So why does Bette Midler keep showing up on Muzak tracks around the world singing:
"I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings"?
Wrong! The wind above her wings makes her fly high. The wind beneath her wings brings her down to earth. Ignoramus. Fancy dress Fatima! Bougainvillea! Pithecanthropus! Odd-toed ungulate!! Nit-witted ninepin! Squawking popinjay!
F1 car, that uses wind beneath the wings to stay low
Airplane, that uses wind above the wings to fly high
PS: I'm kidding. It's fun to win an argument conclusively in an age of "it depends".
Daniel Barenboim conducting the West Eastern Divan Orchestra
The BBC Proms, on TV this week, features the West Eastern Divan Orchestra playing the complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The West Eastern Divan Orchestra are an ensemble of accomplished musicians from the Middle East, with a compelling story about trying to bring understanding and harmony to that troubled region; they are playing Beethoven's symphonies, unquestionably some of the greatest music ever conceived. Yet the advertising tag-line reads "Daniel Barenboim conducts...". Is this fair? Does the conductor add so much value that he deserves to be the headline act?
I don't have a closed-ended answer to that question, but I am convinced that a conductor adds real value. This is thanks a one of the most memorable business leadership development programs I've attended - The Music Paradigm, with Roger Nierenberg.
This program is built on the premise that a leader in a business corporation is like the conductor of an orchestra. In a business, a machinist, statistician or accountant knows much more about her or his speciality then the Vice President or General Manager every will, like in an orchestra, the violinist, flautist or cellist are more skilled at their respective instruments than the conductor will ever be. The General Manager or the conductor is needed to bring the amazing individual performers together, harmoniously, to make music. The Music Paradigm session starts with members of the class, like me, sitting in the midst of the orchestra. Gradually, as everyone gets comfortable with the setting, members of the class volunteer to step up to the podium, pick up the baton, and conduct the orchestra (with Roger Nierenberg's help).
Roger Nierenberg helps a first-time conductor
What made the Music Paradigm unique, different from the dozens of other team-building or leadership development sessions I've attended, was the experience of stepping up to the podium, picking up the baton, and hearing this virtuoso orchestra responding to your gestures by making music. That was powerful, memorable, profoundly emotional, and completely unlike anything I had felt before.
My classmates and I had a debrief after the Music Paradigm session, and our takeaways were very consistent. We all were NT personalities in the Myers Briggs' framework; science or engineering majors who had experienced success as problem solvers. We were veterans of various leadership programs, and had several years of people management experience. We were used to thinking about leadership in terms of setting direction, getting buy-in or sponsorship, pulling together resources, defining roles and responsibilities, setting up incentives - as a series of problems to be solved. What we were less used to was leadership as an emotional experience. Music as a metaphor made it obvious that a conductor's, or leader's, main contribution is in establishing an emotional connection with the players and with the music, that that emotional connection makes the difference between a competent professional performance, and something that sounds very different, an inspired or visionary performance. My classmates and I may not have disagreed with that thought on a PowerPoint slide, but music brought it home in a way that PowerPoint can't.
Itay Talgam's TED talk makes the same point, with video clips of some of the twentieth century's greatest conductors in action. Maybe the next iteration of this talk will include Daniel Barenboim conducting the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. Enjoy...
An old friend put me on the spot recently, and quizzed me on how I found the enthu to keep blogging.
I wasn't expecting the question.
So, understandably, I lapsed into my native language: geek-speak. I chuntered
on about "intrinsic motivation" and "the universal need for
self-expression, for which there are only limited opportunities in contemporary
corporate life". Instead, I really should have answered my friend musically, by serenading him
with the Amitabh Bachchan - Kishore Kumar classic "My name is Anthony
Gonsalves".
Anthony Gonsalves has a real insight into an amateur blogger's psyche. His phrase "you are a sophisticated
rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", is spot on. In fact, if I'm asked the same question this Easter weekend, I might enhance my answer by emerging from an egg, unless "such extenuating circumstances coerce me to preclude you from such extravagance".
Happy Easter blog readers. For further clarification, please refer roop mahal, prem galli, koli नंबर चार सौ बीस . Excuse me, please!
I've never thought of Paul Simon and Jon Bon Jovi as kindred souls, until these words rolled shortly after each other on my iPod:
“...a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been...” in Paul Simon's Slip Slidin' Away, followed by
“...as I dream about movies they won’t make of me when I’m dead...” in Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses.
The same emotion, the same sentiment, the same thought. Maybe that is a universal experience...thinking of the different branching paths life might have taken...the alternative universes we might have inhabited. Regardless, I love the shuffle function on my iPod.
Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.
This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:
“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"
...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...
On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...
...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.
One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...
The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.
The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”
...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.
Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.
On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.
Once upon a time, grown women in Madras wore sarees. No longer. Now, the default outfit is a salwar kameez, especially among younger women. The saree is gradually becoming formal wear, for special occasions. One of my aunts thinks this is because of the coarsening of Tamil culture – the saree is too revealing for today’s nasty world, women feel safer in the more fully covered-up salwar kameez – and there surely is some truth in her viewpoint. But the more popular interpretation is that this is a part of a wider cultural phenomenon: the Punjabization of India.
Vir Sanghvi wrote this nice piece about the Punjabization process. The passage which stuck in my mind was:
I went to shoot at a small hotel in the Wayanad region of Kerala. I had been looking forward to some good Kerala food. Instead, the buffet was full of black dal, butter chicken, paneer and seekh kebabs. I remonstrated with the manager. He was helpless, he said. This was what his largely south Indian guests wanted to eat when they were on vacation.
To put this nationwide Punjabi influence into perspective, the distance between Kerala and Punjab is about 1500 miles, which is the distance between London and Moscow. Arguably, the cultural differences within that span are even greater in India than in Europe.
The Punjabi influence isn’t limited to South India. For instance, this Bengali blogger was upset at the wedding sequence in the movie Parineeta. The movie is based on a classic Bengali novel by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay. However, in the Bollywood version, the bhadralok wedding acquires a Punjabi flavour, with garish costumes, dolaks and song and dance sequences. Parineeta’s leading man was Saif Ali Khan, a son of Bengal’s revered Tagore family, which can’t have helped ease this blogger’s angst.
However, there is a flip side to being offered butter chicken in Kerala: it is not so hard to find a good masala dosa in Chandigarh or Lucknow. Bombay-style bhel puri is consumed with gusto in Calcutta, plenty of rasagollas are enjoyed in Bombay. Indian identity is sometimes compared to a salad bowl. As the salad bowl gets shaken, cultural elements get juxtaposed in unexpected, surprising, random ways. It isn't one-way traffic. What goes around comes around.
This is precisely why "why this kolaveri di" is so refreshing. It is in Tamil, or at least, it is Tamil-flavoured. The video features a bunch of losers in lungis who can't dance. It isn't Punjabi. It doesn't sound Bollywood. Yet, Kolaveri di is going viral right across the country. India just bit into a chilled-out southie ingredient in that cultural salad bowl, and enjoyed it. So did Japan.
Kolaveri Di's refrain translates roughly to "why this murderous rage?", the tone implies that the rage is so not worth it. So the next time a fellow south Indian gets worked up about the cultural imperialism of the north Indians, I can respond in song with "Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri... why this kolaveri di?"
Homogocene: the term ecologists and evolutionary biologists use to describe the current era, when ecosystems are becoming more homogenized, when tough generalist species take over large portions of the globe, pushing out the specialized species that developed in isolation.
I was in Istanbul recently. Typical business trip: airport, hotel, conference, hotel, airport. I had no chance to go exploring, to soak up the atmosphere of the eternal city, a title Istanbul deserves every bit as much as Delhi or Rome.
I did, however, have a ray of hope. We had a formal dinner on the night of the conference, with live entertainment. This live performance might give us some local flavour. Maybe a local poet would recite Jalaluddin Rumi’s poetry, and interpret Rumi’s immortal words for this English-speaking audience. Maybe we’d have some mesmeric, mystical Sufi music, with a black and white film of dervishes whirling playing in the background. Even a contemporary Turkish pop act would be cool.
Instead, we got a couple of guys wearing jeans and t-shirts, carrying guitars, who perched on stools in front of mikes and did cover versions of The Eagles, Dire Straits, and Eric Clapton. They played Tequilla Sunrise, Walk of Life and Hotel California. They finished with an impassioned rendition of Wonderful Tonight, which was especially well-received at my table, which comprised entirely of grown men with families and advanced degrees in quantitative disciplines. We solemnly clinked our glasses together, and congratulated each other on how wonderful we looked tonight.
I was down at the club last night. Tennis social. Dusted off my old racket - the same Prince Spectrum composite that I had back when I was in college - and gave my game a spin.
My game was filthy. I still play squash regularly, so I had no problem hitting the ball, but I had no control. I was spraying the ball all over the place. I resorted to tapping the ball back over the net to keep it in play, until I finally lost patience and started giving it a whack and hoping for the best. And, heck, whaddaya know? A few of those whacks actually landed in the court :). All in all, I had fun.
None of the other players at the social knew me. None of them were colleagues, or parents at my daughters' school. I wouldn't blame any of my doubles partners if they didn't remember my name today; I'd struggle to remember their names now. I was just a brown-skinned guy in a blue t-shirt, hitting yellow spheres across the net. I felt no shame, despite the filthy game. That is probably why I had fun.
The nice thing about being away from home is the anonymity, the absence of context, the freedom it brings. That sense of freedom shows in many ways, including the way I hit a tennis ball.
In Suzanne Vega's words, "I was in a timeless, placeless place, out of context, and beyond all consequences".
Yet, the worst thing about being away from home is also the anonymity. Hitting a tennis ball isn't intrinsically fun or not-fun. Tennis is worth my while because of context, because of the references to tennis running through the rest of my life.
I first played tennis at the Madras Cricket Club, my father's spiritual home. My father had been a very good player in his college days, and was still on the MCC tennis team. Marker Venkatesan - the tennis pro in western terms - would toss me a balls as a favour to my dad. Members who walked by easily recognized me as Chandru's son, as Raju's nephew, as Nari's nephew. They would stop to watch me play, throw in a word of encouragement, a well-intentioned tip...they wished me well. One of them, Ayya-mama, bought me a Tintin comic for every Merit Card I won at school. It was all very warm, and intensely personal.
One of my earliest memories is being woken up in the middle of the night by my excited dad, being bundled into a car and driven to my uncle Chander-mama's house. They were showing a recording of the Roscoe Tanner vs. Bjorn Borg Wimbledon final on TV. In my mind's eye, I can still see a blurry black and white image of this game in a crowded, darkened room. Otherwise, my entire clan gathered on our terrace to follow Wimbledon on BBC shortwave radio. By the time the great age of McEnroe, Borg, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova rolled around, tennis already was in my blood-stream.
When I was a teen-ager, I was sometimes invited to play doubles with my dad's friends. These were very good players, they played seriously, they played to win. My dad's friends still wished me well. But now, with my young legs and sharp eyes, they also expected me to perform on court. I was eager to impress. But I also understood that the MCC ethos did not smile kindly upon double faults or foozled volleys. I especially didn't want to let myself down and be an embarrassment to my family, so wound up playing a cramped, self-conscious game. But there was never any doubt in my mind that the game was worth playing, and worth playing well.
My dad's friends aren't playing tennis at MCC more. But I still couldn't show up at those courts and play the filthy tennis I played yesterday. At a minimum, I'd need to put myself on a regimen that would get me back to being a good player. No anonymity there, and no freedom.
Yet, Janis Joplin's words, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing ain't worth nothing, but its free".
Of course, the ultimate zen state is not perfect freedom, but to be in a context full of meaning and still play with freedom; to be Sachin Tendulkar playing for India in a World Cup final, in Bombay, and still play with freedom to lead India to victory. That dream is still possible as this post goes to press. C'mon India.
We don't need no education, We don't need no thought control, No dark sarcasm in the classroom, Teacher leave them kids alone, Hey teacher! leave them kids alone! All in all it's just another brick in the wall, All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
I spent a chunk of my youth chanting along with this Pink Floyd rock anthem. So, I was intrigued to learn that one of the leading lights of the recent student riots in London was the Pink Floyd lead guitarist David Gilmour's son, Charlie Gilmour. The rioters were protesting the government's plans to raise university fees.
David Gilmour thinks education is worse than a waste of time. Yet, his son Charlie believes education is very important, and should be massively subsidized by the state. How did father and son wind up having such dramatically different views?
Or are their views really all that different? On reflection, I suspect not.
Neither father or son really has a point of view on the positive externalities created by subsidized, over-consumed higher education. They are not policy wonks. They are musicians. They are expressing an emotion. I think both father and son are expressing exactly the same emotion.
Jack Black captured this emotion precisely in School of Rock:
"The Man is everywhere. In the White House, down the hall, Mrs. Mullins (the head mistress), she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called rock ‘n’ roll."
I think that is what both father and son were doing. As young men, they were sticking it to The Man. Once upon a time The Man said "go to school". Now, The Man says "you can't go to school unless you pay for school". Regardless, rock 'n roll wants to stick it to The Man.
Admittedly, the son did get a little excessively carried away. But one lesson he will have learnt from his father, and his father's friends, is that sticking it to The Man does not preclude making it up with The Man at some later stage. For all David Gilmour's angst about education, he still sent his son to an expensive private school, and on to read history at Cambridge.
I was at the club, meditating on a cappuccino, while the kids were at tennis class. Muzak played in the background. Billy Joel floated up on the Muzak track, singing:
She can kill with a smile, She can wound with her eyes, She can ruin your faith with her casual lies, And she only reveals what she wants you to see, She hides like a child, But she’s always a woman to me...
I noted that the saddest thing that can happen to art happens when music turns into Muzak. This does not apply to made-for-Muzak specialists like Yanni, Norah Jones or Richard Clayderman. But when the work of real artists, like Jim Morrison, Neil Young or Bob Dylan is stripped of its emotional heft and piped around supermarkets, to people hearing without listening, that is profoundly sad.
Point noted. Billy still banging on:
...She carelessly cuts you and laughs while you’re bleeding, She brings out the best and the worst you can be...
Maybe I just was not in the mood to sympathize with unrequited love. Billy, I asked myself, as he built up to the crescendo...
And the most she will do is throw shadows at you, But she’s always a woman to me.
...what exactly would happen if she did not remain a woman to you? What if she stopped being a gorgeous babe who kills with a smile, who causally throws shadows at poor besotted Billy? Would she turn into a flitty, flighty, fluttering, fairy? Would she turn into a hag, or a fire breathing dragon?
A tautology like “always a woman” is worth stating, even in a pop song, only if it has another layer of meaning, a layer in which it isn’t obviously a tautology. For instance, when Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang, “A man’s a man who looks a man, right between the eyes...” they were pointing to an ideal of manhood, of integrity, that boys should aspire to but seldom achieve. Billy's tautology implies that the only women worth the name are babes, deadly babes, the sort of babes who promise you more than the Garden of Eden.
What about my buck toothed, bespectacled second cousin who chain-reads Agatha Christie? Or my caftan-clad maiden aunt, who is excessively proud of her almond burfi? Neither of them is a crush-worthy babe. Neither of them is the flirty type who might throw shadows at Billy. But surely, they still are women. This is so unfair.
This is what Noami Wolf called the Beauty Myth, feminism's last great battle-front. Women have shaken off many myths of womanhood, expectations which once bound their lives. They are now at liberty, at least in my circles, to walk away from purity, chastity, motherhood, servitude, delicacy, vulnerability. "Frailty, thy name is woman", would not have occured to Hamlet if he had seen watched Serena Williams wallop a forehand crosscourt.
Yet, after all these victories, women are still bound by one final myth, the expectation that a woman must be beautiful, desirable. This final myth leaves women vulnerable to countless soul-destroying insecurities, and open to exploitation by men, and by the market. Besotted Billy's lyrics, unknowingly, are reinforcing this nasty myth. Stupid Billy.
As it turns out, this post is not a political rant. It is about the value of even a little research. I had totally misunderstood the song. Billy gets the shackles imposed by the myths of womanhood, and is on the right side of the argument.
Wikipedia tells me, authoritatively as usual, that this song was written for Billy Joel's first wife Elizabeth. She had become Billy Joel's business manager at a time when his life and his finances were on the rocks. Elizabeth sorted out his finances, became his wife, and managed Billy to platinum albums like Piano Man, The Stranger and 52nd Street. She was considered "unfeminine" in the industry for being a tough-as-nails negotiator. Billy wrote this song as a rejoinder to that "unfeminine" label. "She only reveals what she wants you to see" is not about her decolletage, it is about her negotiating style. Regardless, she's always a woman to Billy.
Another song in The Stranger, I Love You Just the Way You Are, was also written for Elizabeth, and expresses the same sentiment, without the delicious ambiguity.
Unfortunately, Billy and Elizabeth divorced, and Billy doesn't enjoy either Always a Woman or Love You Just the Way You Are anymore. He tries not to perform them. So this John Lewis' Christmas advert, which I think captures the open-hearted spirit in which the song was originally written, has vocals by Fyfe Dangerfield. Enjoy.
These words are from a favourite old song by Kannadasan, one of Tamil cinema’s greatest and most celebrated poets. This translates roughly to: does the forest have a gardener? His side is the side I’m on.
As it turns out, the forest does have a gardener. His name is Les Morson. His side is the Hartington Sports Committee. My family and I discovered him, and the woods named in his honour, on a recent walk through the Peak District National Park.
Kannadasan’s lyrics were written for a character disowned by his family, trying to assert that he still is one of God’s people. In that context, the kattukku thottakaran, the forest gardener, probably refers to God. Krishna is vanmaali, literally forest gardener, in many Indian traditions.
It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that when Mr Les Morson starting planting trees to make a forest, he did not intend to discover his inner Krishna-avatar, even if that is in fact what he did. The Lord manifests himself in mysterious ways.
A Buffalo Springfield classic just shuffled up on my iPod. It goes:
Sit down, I think I love you Anyway, I’d like to try I can't stop thinking of you If you go, I know I'll cry...
...Oh you know what they say about the bird in the hand And that’s why I ain’t leaving without you...
...So if you want someone to love you Pretty baby, I’m your guy.
Really?
Experts like Dear Prudence clearly know more about matters of the heart than me. But even I can tell that Dear Prudence would not recommend “I think I love you, anyway I’d like to try” as the ideal declaration of undying love. You had to think about it? And having thought about it, you were so completely convinced that you were willing to “give it a try”? Dude… really...
And what’s the deal with “the bird in the hand”? Is the girl worth trying to love because she is a bird in hand? Or should the girl settle for you because you’re worth two in the bush?
These lyrics are by Stephen Stills, who also wrote "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with". Bit of a theme developing here.
Maybe Stephen Stills knows something that Dear Prudence and I don't. Maybe this ironic, laconic, self-deprecating approach really works. Real-romantik, a la real-politik?
Either way, great song. Click here to hear it on You Tube.
An auspicious post to wish all readers a happy new year...
Just discovered a piece of children's entertainment which is not just mostly harmless, but positively good. It is teaching my children that the differences between cultures around the world are there to be enjoyed, but that underneath these differences human beings are essentially the same, that we are The Family of Man (I think). This is a collection of video and music clips from Sesame Street around the world, published by Putumayo, a favourite music label.
My family is now singing along with Elmo, Big Bird and Sesame Street stars from India, Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. The look and sound of each of these video clips are distinctive and local. Yet, the same spirit and mood clearly animates each of these local executions. Unity in diversity, that old mantra of Indira Gandhi-esque national integration, applies not just to India but to all of humanity.
More generally, I also think this is a fair representation of how globalisation impacts local cultures and identity. At one time, even serious and well-intentioned people in India would have had doubts about whether letting Coca Cola and their ilk operate in the country would somehow dilute India's Indianness. The first debate I ever won, back in high school in the mid 80s, was about "Have we sold our culture for a pair of jeans?". I opposed the motion back then.
Now, two decades after liberalization started, that argument feels settled. Coca Cola and Sesame Street are very much a part of the Indian landscape, and have figured out that it makes a ton of commercial sense to adopt an Indian idiom. India is changing rapidly, India is becoming ever more closely connected to the rest of humanity, and yet India remains as distinctively Indian as it ever was.
And exactly the same logic probably applies to Israel, Mexico, Russia and South Africa as well.
The war in Afghanistan is not going that well. It is not clear what exactly the fighting is for. Young soldiers are getting killed. There is no end in sight.
Yet, Sam Kiley, a British journalist who just brought out this book on touring with the paratroopers of the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand province, reports that the troops are committed and motivated.
Why? In part, says Mr Kiley, it comes from “a basic male instinct” to prove yourself. In part it is about fighting for your friends and, when they are killed, about avenging them. Above all, it is about sheer thrill. As one Para quoted by Mr Kiley says during a battle: “Living the fucking dream mate.”
Without having read the book, my instinct is that Mr Kiley is telling it like it is, no spin. The Para living the dream is a Universal Soldier.
He's five foot two, he's six feet four He fights with missiles and with spears, He's all of thirty one, he is only seventeen, He's been a soldier for a thousand years.
He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain He's a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew, He knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will Kill you for me my friend, and me for you.
He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France, He's fighting for the USA He's fighting for Russia, he's fighting for Japan...
The Universal Soldier is an archetype; vigourous, integral, eternal. He can pack more life into two days of intense experience than most mortals can in entire lifetimes (refer E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls).
Yet, this is almost certainly not what Donovan meant when he sang this song in the sixties. Donovan was the guy who replaced Bob Dylan in the Joan Baez sets at the Newport Folk festival, when Bobby quit being political and broke up with Joanie. Donovan had picked this piece up from a Canadian songwriter called Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was a sixties anti-war protester, a pacifist pointing an accusing finger at the Universal Soldier:
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame, His orders come from far away no more, They come from here and there and you and me, And brothers can't you see, This is not the way we put an end to war.
Fighting a fighting archetype, huh? Who would've thought...
Just made sense of a lyric I've heard many times before, but never quite understood. "The girl on the half-shell" from Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust, as in
... you burst on the scene Already a legend The unwashed phenomenon The original vagabond You strayed into my arms And there you stayed Temporarily lost at sea The Madonna was yours for free Yes the girl on the half-shell Would keep you unharmed...
This refers to Venus emerging from the sea, as, say, depicted by Botticelli. Joanie referred to herself as both the Madonna and the girl on the half-shell in those days.
Just watched I’m Not There, a movie about Bob Dylan’s life. Watch it. When you do,
What will you see my blue eyed sons? What will you see my darling young ones? You will see a highway of diamonds with nobody on it, You will hear the song of a poet who died in the gutter, You will meet one man who was wounded in love, You will meet another man who was wounded in hatred. You will know how it feels to be with the princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, amused at Napoleon in rags and the language that he used. You will know how it feels to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.
And you will struggle throughout the film to figure out what is going on and why, which is entirely appropriate for a movie about Dylan.
I’m Not There features six avatars of Bob Dylan, played by six different actors, set in different places and periods, beautifully shot in six different styles. The six actors playing Dylan don’t look like Dylan. The one who looks most like Dylan is Cate Blanchett, playing the stoned superstar who hangs out with the Beatles in London in 1966. Another avatar is a little black boy who travels around America in empty railway wagons, accompanied by his guitar, singing songs about the Depression. A third avatar features a folk singer singing political protest songs along with his Joan Baez-like girl friend. There really could have been many more avatars; there is no room for one featuring a middle class Jewish kid growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota.
The soundtrack is great. You will hear more than a trace of skipping reels of rhyme. Like Dylan songs, the movie floats along on a current of metaphor and imagery. It takes you on a trip upon a magic swirling ship, through the smoke rings of your mind, down the foggy ruins of time. Each scene feels rich with layered meaning, every shirt or jacket, every chance encounter and every throwaway phrase feels like an oblique reference to the god behind the avatars. I am glad I watched this film on DVD rather than at the movies. I had to pause multiple times to google up references. Is that girl meant to be Suze Rotolo? Or Sara Lownds? Both, it turns out.
Sure, it is fun to watch, especially for someone brought up with Dylan-lore. But how does it work as a movie? There is no obvious narrative tension. None of the avatar sub-plots have knots that need to be resolved.
Does this movie bust the theory, previously posited on this blog, that all great stories are built around somebody wanting something really badly, and having difficulty getting it? I thought it did, until I realized that the movie is not about the avatars but about Dylan himself.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you. The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore. Strike another match go start anew...
Dylan did strike another match and start anew, time and again. Leaving behind the orphan with his gun, crying like a fire in the sun. Yet just when the saints should be coming through, he settles into a new pattern, which becomes as limiting as the one he left. Maybe it ain’t over baby blue, until Bobby realizes that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Reach out your hand If your cup be empty If your cup be full May it be again...
These words are from Ripple, a classic Grateful Dead song released in 1970. They were on my mind because it was Pongal earlier this week.
Pongal is the main harvest festival along the South East coast of India, where I'm from. Pongal is celebrated by boiling milk in every home; it is literally the moment when the steaming milk brims over, symbolizing abundance.
The Grateful Dead clearly understood the symbolism. So does the Jamaican bloke who makes cappuccinos at the tennis club down the road, there's always a nice head of foamy milk topping off the (expensive) brew.
