The Evergreen Bar and Restaurant

The Dudhwala Building

 This little essay  was written for the residents and owners’ of the little building Fifty One East at Bandra and was kindled by random reflections that occurred to me when I was informed of a sacred rite of Shri Satyanarayan Puja to be performed at the entrance to our building on the auspicious occasion of Akshaya Tritiya on 22^nd April 2023; a day six years ago  when my next door neighbour and I performed our housewarming rites. Subsequently many trickled in over the years performing their housewarming in their own way. I believe that these rites were meant to be not merely an auspicious beginning but an offering of the dwelling to that Indweller that He might dwell in our hearts. A corollary motive was also to placate unanticipated obstacles and purify the ground and the environs, if not evil spirits. Yet I cannot but help wonder if there was an unspoken idea born of disquiet that this site was once a pub. I have interspersed the text with a few verses from the eleventh century poet and philosopher of Persia called Omar Khayyam and his famous book of verse The Rubaiyat which has inspired generations of intelligent people settling for a quiet drink for centuries including Harivansh Rai Bachhan who followed up with Madhushala. Only a few are from the famous Fitzgerald translation while the others are not known. My quoting the text does not imply that I share his belief. Please take this as a light hearted piece and not seriously as opinions to contest or confront.

“How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?

Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.

Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yours

Will make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.

When once you hear the roses are in bloom,

Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;

Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-

These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.”

Among the memorable books that emerged from the flower children of the 60s is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig, where he ruminated on life and philosophy and at one point narrates a tale of some people who complained to a priest about a church building being converted to a pub. The sagely priest smiled and reminded them that the real church was never in the brick and mortar but in each believer in Christ who constituted the body of the church, a living organism; it was not a building but a body that is invisible. Of course Pirsig then proceeds to examine the idea of a University as a church of Reason. I am intrigued by the inversion of this metaphor of a pub or bar converted into a residence.  

 

I was persuaded to buy six years ago a flat in a building that stood on a site which once was “The Evergreen Bar and Restaurant”, a thriving and colourful bar and restaurant at the edge of a teeming slum called Shastri Nagar and belonged neither to the slum nor to the haggardly buildings that it rested against. There was barely even a footpath but a huddle of bricks next to the gutters of the slum that led nowhere wherein ambled sewer rats and bandicoots and then suddenly you chanced upon this bar and possibly was the cause of joy to some, an unburdening to others and the ruin of yet others, all who have vanished in the mists of history. I cannot say that I have been its patron though I cannot deny that there have been a couple of occasions where I freshly graduated in the early 1980s walked in with a friend; into its dark and eerily lit smoky recesses to down a pint or two or use a large rum and coke to kindle a conversation that exhausted itself in the smoke and din of friends jeering, shouting, and the tinkling and crashing of glass. With bearers running down the aisles and mingled odours of freshly spiced dishes and stale sweat and alcohol of assorted strength its ambiance assailed the senses into numbness. Once you stepped inside the bar you would forget the squalor that skirted the slum and the din of the concourse of life in huddled spaces was matched within the bar by din of a different order. This was not the species called “Family Bar and Restaurant” where families discreetly indulged a drink or two in a well lit genteel way with entrees covering up unnumbered drinks unobserved by prying eyes at ‘Gharonda’ or even ‘Chinar’ which were close by. It was worse than the ‘Ujala Bar and Restaurant’ which had a similar clientele but was cleaner. Yet it was a proud establishment that never failed to satiate the thirst of the thousands who met there.

 

“Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that youth will give you.

It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”

This place was loud and raucous and at times was drowned by awful music of the eighties and you entered a different world where you did not know where you were, dark, dingy even menacing lit in red bulbs with cigarette smoke curling up. It was a place where your status, position, title, wealth or rank held no place and was a strange equalizer. All you knew after a pint or two was what you were animatedly talking about, your friend and his glass and the remnants of uneaten snacks and cigarette ash. Strangely I believe that was true of every bar in those days of youth and if one were taken out of one and put into another you could not tell the difference. Those were also days of scarcity and thrift was imposed by the necessity of a light purse. Mostly they were just a pretext to catch up, talking animatedly with friends on every topic under the sun including books, films, music, philosophy, poetry and indeed love, late until we were reminded to place the last orders. Life was the tint of red wine and there was just the future, a great unknown.

 

I would never have believed then that someday I might inhabit and share the same space that was once a bar with my mother in tow and even call it home and herald each dawn with Vedic chants of Rudram Chamkam or the Taittiriya or the shahasranama. Indeed I might have even thought it unaesthetic or simply sacrilegious. Yet such is the strange turn of the screw of fate that I find myself in this place that upon reflection seems crazy, exasperating and strangely home though amusingly it was once a pub! Over the last five years the place transformed to an extent that can be only described as profound as that when a frog kissed by a princess turned into a prince. The slum beneath the building’s toes vanished and the building emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Of course I am exaggerating and resorting to hyperbole but nevertheless the transformation was great. I simply dismissed the place history as irrelevant to my intent and purpose of establishing a new home for my mother and me, though to many others it was a troubling idea. I was in a hurry and the others were not. It was mom’s 75^th birthday and impulsively took the decision to gift her a new place without bargaining much “Alhamdulillah” as the sales staff gushed. Many were unnerved at the slum just beneath our toes and others added that the developer belonged to another faith. The sales staff at the Dudhwala building chimed that the choice of a home is not made in one’s head but by the will of the good Lord “Insha Allah”. I am not saying that dismissing this history was a rational or good judgment. I am merely stating that there are more ways that people examine this, all of which are valid and legitimate though I might disagree with some or more.

 

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ moves on:

nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it”

 

Can a space that was once a temple or pub, have any bearing on its trajectory over time on the quality of the space? Simply put, it throws into relief the question whether space and time have any quality or are simply quality less and perfectly substitutable. Can a church that became a pub retain its sacred quality despite operating as a pub or can a pub changed into a residential building haunt its denizens of merits and errors/sins committed on its soil in the recent past. Can a site be made holy upon consecration or does it bear the burden of its history and remain lingeringly on the edges of its dual quality. I do not wish to get into the New Age wooliness of every place having vibrations and that one can sense positive or negative vibrations. I am tonally deaf to vibrations and cannot understand it and I find it exasperating when people declare that they can feel these vibrations and dismiss it to a fault of my sensibilities if not theirs. Is space neutral or is the scared and the profane inextricably commingled such as to render its quality as neutral? Literature laments the march of modernity and the loss of life’s certainties and the secularization of all public life and the loss of all symbolic life to the margins especially that of religion. But be that as it may does it really change the way people think or fear?

 

In most traditional societies like India where several layers of time sit uneasily upon each other simultaneously, the complexity of response is marked by even more uncertainty. Notions of space and time are not quality free and are not perfectly substitutable, they vary in quality like sacred/profane spaces like temple/crematoria sites or (in) auspicious time like rahu kaal, abhijit muhurta etc. In other words we fragment space and time and treat these fragments differently, their contradictions notwithstanding. When called upon to make a stark choice like buying property on the site of a pub, a crematorium, or a place of worship of a minority group (or even developed by someone of a different religion) we would be seized of non rational concerns and fears. We make rational economic choices and then rationalize these choices and appoint priests to negotiate with the Gods their placating, appeasement, or even silencing the voices of the past, be they spirits, residual karma or bad “vibrations”.

 

“Why ponder thus the future to foresee, and jade thy brain to vain perplexity? Cast off thy care, leave Allah’s plans to him – He formed them all without consulting thee.” Three Cups of Tea”

 

Some of my neighbours brought in priests from a distant pilgrim place, some performed rites over three full days, and some like my mother urged the priest to get on with the job quickly enough to attend to other cares. My own ritual advisor an elderly Malayali took over personally the task of Shuddhi and Shanti (purification and placation) more seriously than we imagined and brought a Malayali priest from Panvel notably three hours late on Akshaya Tritiya 2017 who then went on to draw diagrams of the Vastu Purusha for worship and over the next three hours ignored my mother’s urging to conclude soon. I remember that at one stage I was advised to place silver images of the heads of five animals within the walls and plaster it up, which I refused, reminded as I was of the nature of violence whether performed in the head as thought or physically as the body in the symbolic sacrifice of animals. I do not state this with any intent to denigrate these beliefs or show them in a poor light. On the contrary I enjoy observing these rites as a participant observer reflecting upon these things at leisure. We cope with uncertainty and allay our fears by practicing rites that would sacralise the secular and secularize the sacred. This is a perfectly valid and legitimate way to deal with our (un)conscious fears and concerns or even of making conscious statements for political or even commercial purposes. I am not sure I am a liberal though I tend more towards that, I think of myself as conservative and do cherish traditions and institutions and religious practice in private and read antiquated texts and for all appearances seem a yokel of the rural hinterland (not that I care).

 

About four years ago when there was an unfortunate and untimely death among the newly resident members in the building there was a palpable whisper that we ought to do some religious rites for Shanti (make peace or appease any lurking evil spirits that were yet possibly hung over from the erstwhile Evergreen bar) by doing a Satyanarayana Puja. I had then very unwisely remarked that prior to the death there was the birth of a baby boy in the building which had heralded auspicious tidings and that death alternating birth was the natural order and refused to take initiative. I must however confess that it also troubled me that the CHS is a secular institution and liberty of faith and its practice must be equally and not perfunctorily rendered, though it never troubled the majority. What I had not understood then was that fear more than joy grips our imagination and prompts us a course of action, regardless of the faith we followed. That error is now probably being remedied by the planned worship this weekend, notwithstanding the fact that life is a march of strife punctuated occasionally with vanishing rays of joy. It is strife that prompts our worship more than events of joy or those of thanksgiving.

 

Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!

One thing at least is certain - This Life flies;

One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”

As for the nature of the cooperative housing society (CHS) as a secular institution, I don’t think the question is taken seriously and it need not be, being edged out by our diurnal concerns. I have no problems with the unwashed labeling me a ‘sickular’ or ‘pseudo’ or anything that tickles their imagination. I don’t even think it is a serious enough question when more urgent conformance to rules plague the place. It is not that I am obsessed with a formalism of conformance to rules but just that it places everyone on an equal footing in the observance of being subordinate to a set of laws and rules. I am always reminded the wise counsel of my boss Dr M L Shrikant who told me “Srinivas these are the rules. All rules can be broken. Knowing which ones to break and when demands wisdom and responsibility and an understanding among all who are affected, why you are doing so”.

A cooperative society is not an organization but an organism, "a fragile ecosystem, a combustible mixture of impossible people, ideas, and intentions" to borrow the words of a wise black pastor at Harvard in describing a school. It is founded on the collocation of its residents “are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It is made up of strange factions that constantly shift boundaries in redefining the “Us” as distinct if not against “Them” based on shared tongue, culture, region, dietary habits, social and economic standing, or any other basis sometimes bordering on the pretentious. Every institution has a dual nature one of ‘Form’ and the other “Spirit’. The Bengali tradition holds the sacred feminine, the Devi (or any institution, even nation) in her dual aspect as mrunmayee as “form” or image and chinmayee as an “idea” or spirit. So also at the heart of the CHS is the physical building and its custody and the idea of co-operation and a commitment to share the travail of having to live together responsibly regardless of our prejudice and preference. The rest is merely noise in the pub.  My mother given her advanced age is often asked her blessings and one of her pronouncements in Telugu is “challaga, pachhaga undali” may you be at peace and evergreen!

 

“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!

Alike for those who for To-day prepare,

And those that after some To-morrow stare,

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries

"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There.”

― Omar Khayyam, رباعيات خيام

 Post Script:

The rite was indefinitely postponed which is euphemism for cancellation for reasons which were more to do with scale than piety. The people who championed it fell into two camps the pietists who wanted a simple ceremony without any frills and the populists who wanted a jamboree with the worship merely a pretext for a party with all accompaniments. For a society which is running on a deficit budget and with more than 50 % owners as non residents it seemed rich. I wonder if this essay provoked any rethink which is most likely impossible given that it would mean a considerable effort to read and discuss and decide; too tedious a task. 

I have been intrigued by the Sri Satyanarayana vrata which in most Andhra households is commonly performed for any special occasions like housewarming rites. The putative origins of the vrata come from the Skanda Purana which is a large purana of over 70,000 verses and seems to have grown by accretions and interpolations over the centuries. The origins of the vrata also seem to come from Bengal and seems to overlap a syncretic tradition that refers to both a Hindu and an Islamic origin. The Islamic tradition is the worship pf Satya Pir (Shoccho Pir) and possibly commences around the 16th Century CE. It is difficult to trace which tradition influenced the other and an account of the Satya Pir Kavya dates according to some scholars 1545-1575 CE by Sheikh Faizullah. The worship is done in Bengal of a wooden plank (asana) which is vacant representing the deity or Pir which as it migrates towards Western India is replaced by a sacred pot (kalash that itself evolved as an ancient fertility symbol). The pictorial Vishnu arising from the worship as shown in calendar art is a twentieth century development. The worship is done of simple materials such that it is accessible to all classes and its officiating priest is not a brahmin. Further this puja is not done on an Ekadashi or Chatruthi in Maharashtra (which is strange if Vishnu is the presiding deity) but in Eastern India on the Full Moon day. There are no temples of Satyanarayana anywhere except one at Annavaram in Andhra Pradesh though it seems not an ancient one and was established  in 1891. The iconography of the Annavaram principal deities is also unusual with the ground floor devoted to the five forms or Panchayatana (Ganesha, Surya, Narayana, Shakti and Shiva) worship around the Tripad Vibhuti Yantra and the first floor housing the principal deity which seems like an amalgamation of Shaiva, Vaishnava and Shakta deities. The central Satyanarayana deva seems more of a linga aakara and is thus intriguing as it doesn't follow orthodox iconography. There is however a Satya Pir shrine in Odisha at Kaipadhar near Khordha whose present shrine dates back to 1893. It is likely that the deity is syncretic in origin as not many Vaishnava traditions (Ramanuja, Madhwa, Vallabhi, Ramanandi, Nimbarki or Gaudiya) hold it with any significance. It is a deity for the masses seeking succor to the travails of life and heedless to antiquity of tradition, scriptural sanction or social hierarchy and with no shrine or pilgrimage either. The syncretism and additions to the Hindu traditions is an ongoing process and is possibly responsive to the demands of faith according to the times. Given its unorthodox history the worship would have been welcome to our times. Possibly The rite will be conducted some day hopefully. 

A Srinivas Rao

701 Fifty One East

 The Atrophy of the Hyperbole

A Srinivas Rao                                                         

12-11-2019

I must state that this post is to examine whether this group is still breathing or as some millennial might state have migrated to more "happening” pastures. I thought I might post something that is not an obituary or memoriam and usher in the light through the self-wrapped drapery. I thought i might remark about the atrophy of language in our times.

I am I must admit quite alarmed by the overuse of words like Amazing, Cool, Absolutely, Humongous, Awesome, and other such words that underwhelm the language skills of some of us though this is not strictly with the millennial generation is more alarming by generations twice removed too. I can almost wince at how my teachers at school, who would box my ears with such careless usage. I was often accused of being pretentious if not pedantic in my use of words depending on which teacher admonished me for attracting their attention deliberately at times. I am sure most of them might swoon if not spin in their graves (for most of them were convent Christians) if they heard modern English usage among the great unwashed in WhatsApp English. I know I am inviting opprobrium by sounding elitist in an inverted way. It is as though these words are meant to exaggerate the idea, event, object, accomplishment or person in a manner that flatters but eventually means nothing; a language characterising nihilism. It is not even that this is an evolving usage of the language that adapts and flexes according to occasion. Some of these words don't even fit into context of the usage and yet are thrown liberally in the face of people to demonstrate belonging to some "in-group" that is possibly a fictional if not an imagined community of the "cool" id not callow and callous too.  

Consider the usage of awesome, a most annoying word now that was supposed to mean the quality of inspiring awe, quite like what Moses felt when beholding the burning bush or that of the Prophet when crushed by Gabriel uttered the word "iqra", or even what Arjuna might have felt when beholding the Vishwaroopa. But we can’t watch a spectacle in a mall and call it awesome! That renders pedestrian the whole idea of awe. It is not that the thesaurus provides less synonyms for the word but then wisdom is discrimination in usage. Words have shades of meaning, and resonate when used appropriately. Akin to awesome is the usage of the word amazing. That which never ceases to cause wonder. Adbhuta in the vernacular (I curl my lip when I find some using the term “vernac’ by the same ‘crowd' to indicate those who might have poor English language skills). This is like heaping insult to injury for being one who is so linguistically challenged that notwithstanding an absence of self-awareness compounds it with elitist disdain. There is a vacuity in linguistic imagination in casually using Amazing as equivalent of “nice”. “There is this amazing place you must visit…or that’s an amazing outfit on that amazing girl. Can you imagine the lyrics of the hymn “Amazing Grace” and substitute it for nice grace! How come we are so linguistically impoverished with the dictionary and thesaurus on our fingertips but with gutterspeak on WhatsApp?

Another word is the use of absolutely for all the wrong reasons. Any common assertion can’t be absolute. The absolute in real terms means the ultimate truth. It is the final graveyard of philosophers quibbling on the nature of reality if not truth. It is Brahman, it is "I am that I am" of Yehowah, it is the Mahashunya, the great void of the Buddhist defined in the obverse. Are you going to the party tonight, Absolutely!!! I can see Socrates throwing his cup of hemlock at the person crying he doesn't want to die, forget unexamined life but unexamined language? I remember a quaint but interesting question by a student who asked that if the Jains don't have a concept of absolute in their philosophic categories does it influence the nature of their art?! Wow! That’s a brilliant question. While the teacher sputtered and looked for easy answers the Jains did produce some outstanding small scale metal works that used negative space (just a simple empty cut out of a Keval Jnani in ‘Kayotsarga’ pose) as an obverse of the absolute. That is absolutely amazing!!! Fortunately the usage of the word humongous has declined. Rarely have I seen people use it in the right sense. In most cases it is used as synonymous with amazing or tremendous though its real use pertains to enormous magnitude or of a monstrous size. The first time I heard it a decade or so ago I felt small for not being a part of my little lexicon, it was only upon looking it up I realized my folly.

Alternatively the usage of words like traction, bandwidth, etc have only betrayed that our usage of language is more cabalistic and not individualistic though the proponents of this American slang betray their need to belong to some imagined community of callow but cool membership. Individualism in language must weigh its words not necessarily against gravity but in terms of discovering one’s own idiom. That is not a usage of language like “distressed jeans” deliberately warped to reflect an absent individualism. I recollect an insightful though debatable point made by Fr Valson Thampu the ex-Principal of St Stephen’s that wearing distressed jeans mocks poverty as an inversion, thereby banning them at school (I generally disagree with him on many other things but this).

In India we have had a considerably sophisticated theory of language that puts many a literary theorist to shame today. Apart from the notion that the word nd its meaning are inextricably intertwined in an eternal embrace; it also maintains that words have three levels of meaning. The first is the denotative or "abidha", the second is that it is metaphorical "lakshana", and third that it is suggestive "vyanjana". meaning emerges when there is resonance across levels that is the nature of language and the apposite usage of words. Even with speech the Indian idea is that unuttered speech rests in equilibrium in the recesses of the heart and is "paraa' then it stirs and gives rise to an urge that is noticeable "pashyanti", then it gives a middling thought that becomes choate, and finally explodes as speech "vaikhari". 

I know that some would comment that I am lamenting the loss of not nuance but indicating that I belong to a generation on the lip of senility in making much ado of convention. I believe that I am lamenting the contamination of the commonplace with hyperbole and insisting that the world is so drearily unremarkable that unless highlighted by hyperbole and exaggeration it might slip through our fingers to reveal our own bankruptcy if not absence of the emperor’s robes. But this is reducing the figurative in language to a hypobole if there were a word like that. Else lets invent fun words as synonyms for groovy without excavating an older usage and bedeck them in distressed jeans.

 A Melody in Search of a Lyric

Kayao Shri Gowri Karuna Lahari

I would not qualify as Bhadralok not least because I am not Bengali and whose drive to be among its ranks is at times Pickwickean, I am not really "cultured" enough. Just that I am neither fan of its tongue nor of Robindro Sangeet and have at times begrudged the apotheosis of its great poet Tagore. I remember arguing with Prof Prabodh Parekh, an expert on Rabindranath Tagore at a lecture on aesthetics as to why it seemed that everything that Tagore did was so inestimable and addressed with such reverence, including painting that I did not see as much merit in. He countered whether I expected a deconstruction or a "Derrida" of Tagore. I held my tongue consoling myself that probably the genius of Tagore was accessible only through his poetry and not though any other means including music. When Kushwant Singh suggested that Bengal doesn't read or study Tagore but worships him there was a riot. It is my understanding however limited that the brouhaha created by Shanti Niketan over the apparent plagiarism of the a melody "Tomar holo shuru, amar holo shara" (a beautiful lyric and melody too, a Western one) was ironic given the many melodies Tagore picked up not just in India but in Europe and elsewhere to immortalize his poetry through song enroute to becoming a prophet for his people and Gurudev to the rest of us. Of course when Tagore did it he was merely inspired, as indeed he was, and one must hasten that one cannot retrospectively apply our present day values to what happened a century or more ago. 

This piece is just a small tickle in the ribs to one such melody. This is just a playful observations and I have no intention to rile up the Bengali gentry. The British seized Mysore in 1831 on grounds on misgovernence and deposed its King Krishna Raja Wodeyar III. The Wodeyars lobbied at London and though Krishna Raja III died in 1868; succeeded in returning the throne to his adopted son Jaya Chamarajendra Wodeyar X in the Rendition 1881 who ruled until 1894. While creating the office of the Dewan C Ranga Charlu he also commissioned a State Anthem. This was the famous lyric "Kayao Shri Gowri Karuna Lahari" composed by Basavappa Shastry the court poet was well set to Carnatic paddhati. The simple lyric and melody was set to Dheera Shankarabharanam raaga with its equivalent in Hindustani as Bilawal. When heard with its gamakas it seems so quintessentially Carnatic. The lyric is constant with its last verse modified with each ruler. The lyric also served as a morning prayer at schools in Mysore state for many years. 

Click on the link below to listen to the official version of the lyric and melody. 

https://youtu.be/co1jIQvj_b8

In 1893 Sarla Devi the neice of Gurudev Tagore was at Mysore and picked up some melodies that struck her as likely to meet the approval of Tagore to set his poems to music.  According to an archive of Rabindra Sangeet "Gitabitan.com" she remarked ".. I had come up with a unique bouquet of music when I had been to Mysore. There seemed no respite till I could unload my basket under Rabi-mama's feet. He would gleefully pick up one at a time and own them with his own set of lyrics. 'Anandaloke mongolaloke ...' is a song the tune of which I had come up with.

The Carnatic gamakas were removed and straight notes replaced them and adorned the puja lyric of :Ananadoloke mongalaloke" a magnificent prayer song the Lord penned by Gurudev. Classified as Rag Jhijhit Mahisuri Bhajan in ektaal (though the pace can be sometimes tediously slow). Like "Kayao.." this too became a popular prayer song sung at schools and elsewhere. The lyrics almost sound like Sanksrit and has barely inhibited their immediate meaning. When Tagore visited Mysore in 1919 at the invitation of Sir Albion Bannerjee the first counsellor under Dewan M Kantharaj Urs he heard the original Kayao as the State Anthem. 

Listen to this version by Debabrata Biswas in his silky voice this is an unedited compilation Anandoloke ( 6.28 min to 10.48 mins). 

https://youtu.be/8E9yP9TosCc?t=372

Not only was this displacement of a melody from Dheera Shankarabharanam raaga from Mysore to Calcutta but the melody continued its journey further. At the turn of the 19th century the Brahma Samaj and as indeed several leaders trying to reform the Hindu way of life. Swami Vivekananda too was toying with the idea of how to 'virilise" what was considered the passivity and effeminate strain in the national psyche. One idea that the Brahma Samaj attempted was to contain the messy diversity of faith and practice of Hindus to make them akin to the monotheistic traditions of the Abrahamic faiths who claimed One God, One Book and One Church (not really). In its pursuit the Brahma Samaj selectively chose hymns and verses from the Vedas and other sacred texts that highlighted the impersonal Transcendent God. One such mantra was taken from the Rig Veda (X.191) exhorting men and women to unite under a common aspiration; and Tagore chose the same Mahisuri Bhajan raag to set this to music in taal Dadra "Sangachhadhwam Samwadaadhwam". The result was little short of success if not disastrous as the meter did not lend itself effortlessly and resorted to artifice to get back to its starting point as anyone who has sung the mantra (itself clumsily edited) to "Anandoloke" will point out. The point that the Rik was already metrical was overlooked and its original sonorous chant was really trampled upon. I am no purist but the idea of the mantra as an oral sound cathedral almost 3500 years of uninterrupted chant was reduced to just another "Ananondoloke". Roberto Colasso the Italian scholar echoed the Shatapatha Brahmana "Meters are cattle of the Gods" highlighting that the form of the poetry was as critical as the content in the mantra and inseparable. Indeed as scholars down the centuries emphasized that the union of form and content are as singular as the word and its meaning, Shiva and Uma. In a final twist, I discovered that the RSS too adds this mantra to its repertoire albeit also not faithful to the original chant but possibly as anthem to a collective consciousness among its faithful. 

This version is by the Ramakrishna Mission

https://youtu.be/ZF21YkreS1Y?t=18

"Kayao Shri Gowri Karuna Lahari, Toyajakshi Shankarishwari" Thou great Goddess, lotus eyes, wave of compassion and consort of Shankara" 

May we find commonality in our differences and a common melody in our disparate lyrics. 

The Lord of Fire

 Lord of Fire

8th April 2021

It seemed ominous as I read the last act of Andha Yug of Dharamvir Bharati in English this morning as it recounted the ushering of the age of darkness, I received a message that my next door neighbour and elderly gentleman in his early nineties succumbed to the blind age of the epidemic. These were certainly not the best of times and they do count among the worst amidst a pandemic that swallowed swathes of people who merely count among numbers. My neighbour however like everyone else who found their untimely exit was no statistic. For all the years that I have known, he seemed like the immovable pivot who would scarcely age nor perish and stood indomitable, unflappable like the grand Arunachala hill at Tiruvannamalai. It was often with this centre we measured out our lives however tawdry or arduous they seemed. Like that holy hill he was a silent presence with who we at times rebelled, and at times endeared and at all times feared. He was the Lord of Fire, Agniswar, a name that always sounded fearsome and mysterious to my childhood sensibilities.

We scarcely exchanged words but his mere presence was enough to make me search if I had inadvertently made an error which his stern look would be sufficient admonition to search my soul and expiate a wrong doing. Yet despite the stern demeanour he was soft, warm, and a vigorous youth at heart who preferred the simple joys of life amidst his circumscribed wants. And those times when he revealed his smiles, our hearts sang in unison. I believe that today I lost my father a second time especially given that after my father’s death, I did look up to him as my compass though I seldom referred to it formally. “Cheenu” he would call in a slightly high pitch, causing my heart aflutter wondering what he might have to say. I have grown less fearsome of that call but more welcoming as an umbrella amidst the drum roll of diurnal cares. Not that he would advise me nor assist but then he might casually hear my woe in silence, not respond and retreat back leaving me unburdened nonetheless.

Despite my mother often narrating the antecedents of many a neighbour, I believe I have never taken their facts or chronology seriously. As a child I have been often bewildered at the predominance of South Indians in my building and amazed at the diversity in their custom and practice. Most if not all my neighbours were from Kerala and Malayalam rang through the staircase like the fragrance of coconut oil seasoning pervaded the stairways offering the comfort of the familiar. The gardens like Kerala backyards blossomed with Jackfruit, Coconut, Mango, Guava Colcassia etc. Yet there was difference too with Nairs and Brahmins in close proximity and Tamil clamouring its special privilege colluding into little “Mandrams”. The Brahmins discernible through their upavitams displayed with pride upon their bare chests in white mundus, trotted about on every new moon day to offer obsequies to ancestors, muttering Sanskrit verses “Tarpayami, tarpayami, tarpayami”. In most houses the walls were adorned with huge pictures of South Indian deities, Guruvayoorappan, Ayyappan, Perumal, Satya and Shirdi Sai Baba, Pilliyar, Murugan and others jostling for space. Much else win the home was austere and Spartan and purely functional. Strains of Carnatic classical music mingled with popular Hindi film music in odd ways. We probably stuck out like a sore thumb, for we were from Andhra speaking Telugu, had different festivals, had different culinary tastes if not fare, held scholarship and professional expertise at a premium, than sports and games, and much to my mother’s chagrin was secretly ridiculed as “Nasrani” a pejorative for a Syriyan Christian from Kerala.

My neighbour was a Palghat Brahmin household and as different from us as chalk and cheese in their customs and engagement. We were fish and meat eaters and have always felt a pang of guilt at the inconvenience caused by the strong odours of meat and spice, while they spoke fondly of gentle tempering of their “Thorans, consistency of their Kalans, and Olans, the exotic sounding Eriserries, Molagootals and Pradhamans while we held our silence about curries of fish, mutton and chicken. They spoke of their observances of their ‘Sandhyas”, Amavasya Tarpanams, Upanayanams of an endless lists of children and grandchildren while we held our silence at absent heirs. I wondered as a child how “uncle” seemed so cool about their children’s academic accomplishments and paid a premium on their sports, health and fitness while my own parents wore me down with learning and study, not that I was good at any games or sports. I wondered if we might exchange our fathers despite my fear of uncle.

Mr Agniswar or “uncle” was to my childhood a figure of discipline and sternness. He seemed the fittest personage in the building with a discipline that even the military would envy. He was sturdy of frame and his skin glowed of health and vigour and there was always the fragrance of sacred ashes and incense that pervaded him like the ascetic Shiva. He had a facial deformity that I once shamefully as a child mocked to his daughter and was so severely reprimanded at home that I never even took notice of it again. He exercised religiously like his sandhyavandanam and never seemed to fall ill or even age. The womenfolk in the building set their clocks by watching his movements. My mother observing him from afar arriving from office would exclaim, “It is already five o clock!” He was a busybody and filled his hours doting on his family and rendering so many domestic chores himself that women envied his wife. I remember my mother once remarking probably half mockingly to ‘aunty” “you must have worshipped the gods with golden flowers on a golden platter that you have a husband like him”. She alluded to his culinary skills with envy and remarked that he held his palm to every footfall of his dear wife. At other times my mother declared that the devotion he displayed to his wife was paralleled only by Parameswara to Parvati. He weathered many a stormy weather in his lifetime with his children as he supported, disciplined and admonished them and courted disapproval and approval in equal measure as he waded through changing mores and values that differed from his own conservative upbringing. We stood silently by the side-lines watching him change from defiance, to resignation to acceptance. Through all the change there was also much that was constant. Years later when I resettled in my old home after a tumultuous breakdown I was amazed at his pressure cooker whistle going off at precisely 3.30 am each morning signalling time of meditation in that Brahmamuhurta though it distressed a few others.

Though I lost my father soon after my resettlement I was comforted in no small measure by the mere presence of my neighbour. It is not that I did not have my moments of frustration with the “Tamil Mandram” elderly and often chaffed at their parsimony and exasperating scrupulousness in accounts. But there were few differences and it was always a cocoon of warmth and affection that shone through the austerity. Many a day would be brightened with “uncle” bringing me what he could spare of his special festive sweets and savouries that I claimed nosily as sole recipient. I would eagerly wait for Janmashtami and will never forget how amidst the sorrow of losing my father on Janmashtami I stared at the savouries uncle prepared for puja, brought by Shernaz his daughter in law to the hospital (and in who I found a kindred spirit). I was often touched when he would lead me to view his “Vishu Kani” every 14th April and make me peer into the symbols of prosperity in the mirror, of grain, fruit, gold and money, gifting me a small token coin, all of which I have saved as his blessings. He often mentioned that he would always want me as his neighbour and I was touched if not flattered by his faith, though my mother had differing opinions despite her often grudging admiration.

Yet as the years went by I was saddened by the gradual decrepitude of the building and its surroundings as the succeeding generations resettled elsewhere and the elder generation stared vacantly at the changing seasons. The aroma of incense and ashes was now mingled with stale air of decay and disrepair as unlit rooms stood silent in a mournful if not reproachful dirge. We hurried our exits and never remarked about the need for repairs until serious plaster falls shook up the fragile security of a place called home to our uncle. Through all the change my ‘uncle” remained unshaken “achala” a constant isle of quiet in the welter. When I told him shamefacedly that I bought a new flat and that I intend to move, I knew it broke his heart as he accepted my sweet offering in silence. Something was irretrievably lost that day and a new ominous pace gathered of vacant plots gobbled up by Rahu, surrounding buildings demolished and daylight eclipsed with clouds of dust, hastily laid plans of exit made in strange secrecy. My mother and I stood stunned when suddenly one day he remarked that he was leaving the place he called home just then as we scrambled to assemble some token gifts, shocked as though the hill we stood upon moved.

Life was never the same again as we tried hard to regain our composure and continue our quotidian routines with a tug in our hearts that something had changed forever. We kept just a sliver of contact and broke our promises to visit him often, buried as we were of our own cares. When we heard of his wife’s passing away a fortnight ago, we knew that the strings of the veena were broken and the mridangam struck an ominous taala. I marked my reluctant though polite presence at the funeral fearful of what contagion I might bring home. While I made all the right noses I was thrilled to see uncle in the extreme corner sit in composure and I sat by him holding his hand. We did not need words to exchange and all that was unsaid was said. As I mourn his passing away my mother admonishes me that this was a better outcome as he would have been facing the enormous emptiness of an absence and threw his carefully cultivated routines off kilter. She stoically reads his devotion to his wife as the cause of his exit and does not give the gleeful virus any credit.

Today an entire generation of frugality, ascetic parsimony and probably purity was given a solitary cremation as few were permitted to see his hearse roll out. Both Agni and Agniswar must have emerged from the flames to receive this Lord of Fire!

 

 

Remembering Dr Manesh L Shrikant, the Institution

It is Dr Shrikant's first death anniversary tomorrow. I would like to pay my respects ,to him. I have been wary, given a train of eulogies and obituaries that I have penned over the past year, a prospect that I do not enjoy. I have been uneasy about a note that Dr Shrikant had sent me a few weeks before he died, wanting to discuss it before converting it into an article. Unfortunately we never met after that. It was at first glance undecipherable  (even banal) and people close to the dean to whom it was sent were also unable to make much sense out of it (I presume, as none replied). This is an attempt to incorporate the ideas therein, to weave it into this piece that argues that Dr Shrikant imagined the ideal of Vedanta at the heart of SPJIMR. The original  note stands appended to this article at the end. Fortunately I will not receive an early morning call from him asking me for my first draft, first thing at 8.00 am, hoping bleary eyed that he minimises his edits!The presumptions and errors in this article if any, would be entirely mine.

It was Friday 16^th October 2015, and the tithi, the third of the waxing half of the lunar month Ashwin, with Vishakha as the presiding nakshatra that Dr Manesh L Shrikant, our teacher cast off his mortal coil to be at one with all that exists, liberated from earthly fetters, in the Vedantic sense of his cosmology. It is his first death anniversary and in the traditional sense of shraddh (or barsi) we pay our respects unto him. I hesitate to pen any eulogy or mournfully reminiscence dirge like, notwithstanding the dark shadows that seem to haunt me this year. We thank him for the fruits of his labour that has given us our varied returns of personal fulfilment and economic wellbeing, especially from being part of an institution that has secured us not just a career but helped us possibly think better. I pray that his work which is his flesh embodied in the SP Jain Institute in the quaintly Christian sense be blessed with the success it deserves.

My Friend Sriram

A Srinivas Rao    26^th September 2016

He would have been 54 today and would have been as cheerful as always, for neither misfortune nor tempest would dampen his optimism. “A person must have a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge” remarked Nietzsche and Sriram was doubly so. Yet rather than listening to the gurgling brook of his voice over the phone, I am met with silence, four months since his untimely demise. I haven’t deleted his number though, not that he might call, but that I might wake up. I miss his infectious and disarming smile that would put even Medusa lower her guard. This is a reminiscence of a person who was close to me and was my best friend. I have wondered what if any we had in common, I believe it wasn’t much, yet we liked each other’s company and it has intrigued me as much as onlookers. I can’t describe him in eulogistic terms; though he had much that was worthy of applause. Probably what fascinated me were the contradictions which we ever so unconsciously gloss over as we make much of a false sense of consistency as a virtue.  Most of us if not all are inconsistent creatures, inconstant and shifting in our motivations, fears, desires and aspirations, it is ‘human all too human’. Consistency I think is a narrative strategy of the mind that possibly highlights, represses, and interpolates in retrospect, creating a convenient fiction of the self. At a distance from one’s own self one might see the range of protean characteristics that really animates each of us; though we crave for that indubitable, mysterious, unchanging essence which might well be a figment of imagination.

S Sriram-Farewell My Friend!

A Srinivas Rao  2nd May 2016  

Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant (the ordinary instant) . You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. 

A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.

                                                    Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

I just returned fitfully from Chennai from the ceremonies where we possibly register our grief, take a last look at his face, possibly live it viscerally, or at the least legitimise our acknowledgement of a relationship that suffers a seeming closure with our presence. We wake up momentarily from our delusion that someone we love will outlive us and might die, reminding ourselves "for whom the bell tolls" making the uneasy truce with death. I lived in my own world which to me is magical. It is a world where even upon seeing Sriram's dead body, i still imagined he would wake up from slumber and smile chuckling "Swami what are you doing here?" as though nothing happened and he was not at all responsible for the huge brouhaha, much to my relief. But the reverie breaks just as certainly as a soap bubble. When someone told me i could get on the hearse and accompany his body i jumped before anyone changed their mind as the single vehicle cortege wended its way in front of the Ayodhya Mandapam where Lord Ram watched bemused as i kept reciting "Sriram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram" silently. A friend called to inform me that he was leaving and whether i was returning and i said "No I am going with Sriram" little realizing its grammatical if not metaphysical problem.

The Foundation Stone

The banyan tree noticed him from afar as he walked towards the temple in the measured pace and calm of a man in his seventies, surprisingly slim and little else but the grey of his hair would even give away his age. The old banyan in the centre of the Bhavan’s campus, standing in the corner acknowledged his familiar presence with a sway of her crown, home to several egrets, herons and water birds that fished in the Bhavan’s pond in that campus, that seemed less green with every passing year. She counted her years not by the locks of hair she let down to support her age but by the number of times women wrapped its girth with a circumambulating thread around on the day of Vata Savitri on Jyeshtha Poornima each year praying for their husband’s longevity. The young girls returning to Pallonji Sadan late evenings from college, imagined the tree to be a haunt of ghosts. The campus then was greener and the banyan hosted many more species of birds than its now manicured look and hodgepodge architecture; held many more secrets in the folds of her green shrubbery of love, learning and laughter. 

The Street Classroom

In 2002-3 I had spent time trying to help make a street school with a friend Aruna Burte. This write up chronicles those days which surfacing often in my thoughts. Those children have all grownup and many have even left. But their laughter and mischief fills my heart.

Twenty pairs of intense, sharp, clear eyes set in frail and small bodies, peering into your face trying to listen with concentration interrupted by restlessness and distraction can be unnerving for even a seasoned teacher not just an ill prepared one like me.  It was 2002 and I was a novice teacher unnerved with my little classroom impossibly filled with raucous children hell bent on doing anything but sit steady and listen.  But it was not that their restlessness was driven by ill intent, they seem animated by spirits stronger than their frail bodies could handle. But then those faces were in their own way remarkably diverse in colour and character and told me tales that I had never heard. Their little bodies were clothed with colours of playing in the dirt, some torn, few mended, few slipping to reveal tender limbs or shy bottoms, faces smeared with dust and tears or of the dried ice cream around chin and cheek, tousled hair, one pigtail with a missing ribbon, another with a broken clasp, one with sores on his feet, one who had waded in the gutter, many with a wide grin in an endless inventiveness of childhood pranks. Their satchels were as diverse as themselves and the state of their books and notes made me feel faint. The satchels’ real treasures were broken bits of coloured glass, some forgotten half eaten fruit, a feather, a drawing crumpled between books, chocolate wrappers, matchboxes, empty cigarette boxes, felt pens with missing caps, pencils with chewed ends, a magnet etc. They would give a sweet smile that would make one swoon at its innocence and resume their pranks of pulling a girl’s pigtail, or passing another’s pencil box across the room, or eating up someone’s tiffin box. I was helpless and crestfallen not knowing how to handle my little class.

Through the Bazaar With Mother

Many of my peers seem to not shop any longer in the traditional bazaars and prefer destination malls or dispatch their domestic help to do the shopping, or even order online or over the phone . I believe that they miss out interacting with common people and see their lives from close quarters, the warts, the smiles, the squalor and the immense human spirit. My mother introduced me several years ago to a bazaar of fresh vegetables and fish located at a good walk from home and oddly called the 11’O clock market located on either side of a road with vegetable, fruit and fish vendors by their large baskets calling their prices loudly with little space to navigate among shoppers. It was located next to a school where children with their sweet voices lustily sang the national anthem and a shloka on Sarawsati above the din of the bazaar. It was noisy, dirty, bright and beautiful with the air heavy with the aroma of greens and fresh bloom of all colours. It is an open bustling market that gets busy by 11 am and is deserted by 2.00pm. Of course it is often painful to see how they eke their living with their little basketful of wares. I have deferred to this idea because my mother insists that we must buy from the small vendors and support such livelihoods than the organised biggies.  Sometimes she picks up the smallest vendor and buys just to remind me of the same. 

Mamma Mia!

She never trusts me to buy fresh produce. She says it needs care and experience to pick the tender vegetable; that the tail of the ladyfinger ought to break under pressure, that the ridge gourd ridges should be wide spaced and shallow, that the drumstick should be sufficiently plump and the leafy bunch must look fresh and stiff, the stalk of the brinjal must not shrivel, and I switch off and refuse to heed further advise on fish or shrimp which i detest buying. I feel that rather than carry all these instructions it is easier to carry my mother to the market and stand silently in the corner watching the surging humanity transact. Slow in gait but steady like a tortoise my mother decked in her zari saree pressed crisp and in an ancient gold chain and bindi holding my hand is a familiar sight on a daily basis and some of the vendors seem to await her arrival. She knew exactly what a good bargain was and capitalised on it. Her head was full information on the day of the lunar calendar which made her calculate how fish might be cheaper on the 11th day of the moon (ekadashi) or in the month of Shravan, or Magha or based on the season which often bewildered me at such futility.