Carnatic Music and The Chennai Music Season

I am very pro-music. I have learnt music as a kid, and always continue to hope that some day I will resume my learning. I believe that music a lot more useful than being merely a means for entertainment.

I used to (still am, in a way) a Carnatic music aficionado. When in the hostel, I once had an interesting argument with a friend of mine about comparing Carnatic music with Western Classical music. My argument was that Carnatic music is the most refined and beautiful form of music to which my friend disagreed. His point was that if you would ask a naive African tribesman to listen to Beethoven and Thyagaraja and ask him to rate them, he would surely rate Beethoven higher.

This was a difficult experiment to analyze and react to. I couldn't imagine a tribesman with little connection with mainstream civilization, to like a Thyagaraja krithi over let's say Beethoven's 'Ode to joy' or some such. Does this make Western Classical music more beautiful? Tough to say. One would agree that Western Classical music is simpler to interpret and enjoy (I certainly believe so) and in this simplicity lies beauty and refinement.

Carnatic Music is a very specialized form of music whose interpretation and appreciation has some pre-requisites. Of course, there are a few krithis whose melody might cause instant appeal but the real joy and beauty of Carnatic music doesn't lie in the melody alone. In fact, very little of the beauty lies in the melody. The crux is in the rendering, the variations and the depth to which an artiste can explore.

Given all this, appreciating Carnatic Music is a very intellectual exercise. It is thus hardly surprising that Tamil Brahmin families consider this as a very important and necessary element of development. I am sure I am not the only one who has faced peer pressure at home when there is Carnatic Music on tv or the radio and identifying the raaga is the competition.

The high point of Carnatic Music exposition is the Chennai Music Season. I am in complete awe of how this tradition has continued for so long and even to this day (thanks to economics and media buzz) continues to attract a wide audience. It is an annual woodstock. Carnatic Music's growth in popularity in the near future will depend heavily on how the patronage for the Chennai Music Season changes in the coming years

I personally am out of all this. To put it bluntly, I am a very selfish aficionado of Carnatic Music. I want the art form to strengthen and continue but I am not ready to patronize it through showing up for concerts. I have been in Chennai for three music seasons in the last three years and I have attended only one concert (TM Krishna in Ananthapadmanabhaswami Kovil, Adyar, late 2009) I do not see a point in attending concerts. I do not enjoy them. This is not because I do not like the music but because my enjoyment of Carnatic Music comes from learning and improving my own skills.

Contrary to other people's opinions, I find concerts to be of no value in terms of learning. If I were at a stage where I needed to understand the nuances of concert presentation etc, there might have been some advantage in attending concerts. Currently all that I need to do is to listen to krithis. Listen to them repeatedly; which is something concerts cannot offer.

Unfortunately, I do not derive any ego pleasure from announcing to people that I attended X's concert at Y sabha, there was a superb rendition of Z etc. I am much happier when I realize that I can sing W sangathi in V krithi slightly better today as compared to yesterday.

All of us have different roles to play. I am playing mine. Baleh baleh.

Far from the maddening crowd

I have come to realize that most of my blog posts are turning into self-reflective ones. On thinking deeper, I realize that I do indulge in a lot of introspection. In a way, my aim every day is to be a more perfect me.

Was I different? As time progresses, most of us forget to examine how we've changed over the years. Thanks to some advice I received from friends, I make it a point to regularly reflect on how I have changed. It is a very interesting intellectual exercise. You have get yourself to remember what you thought, felt and liked and what your mental make-up was at times in the past.

This is where blogging is helpful. A glance at your old posts would give you an idea of what and who you were some years ago in the past. Here is my old blog (or one of my old ones). When I go through it now, I feel silly. If I knew the log in and password to access this blog, I would have deleted it. How different was I? I used to feel strongly about issues outside of me: traffic, programming, cricket etc. It is not that I do not think about all this now but I certainly do not have any 'feelings' about these things; at least certainly not have feelings strong enough to warrant a blog post.

Somehow, somewhere life has come to revolve lesser and lesser about these things. So there is a Anna Hazare. It is not important that I do not know what he is fighting for. It is important that I do not care to know what he is fighting for. He is just an example. There are so many things that are happening out there in the world which I do not care to know more of. I am, for bad or for worse, far from the maddening crowd.

Sometime during those years when I was able to churn out blog posts about all those 'world-ish' things, I remember to have read an article in The Hindu titled 'Rebels without a cause'. I do not remember anything about the article but the title of the article had a huge impact on me. Anna Hazare is a rebel if you want to call him that. And he is surely a rebel with a cause. So are the thousands who flock to meet and greet him and attend his speeches etc.

But for every such rebel with a cause, there must be a hundred rebels without a cause. These are the millions who have an opinion on something they do are not directly involved with. It is like me having an opinion on Ganguly's batting on some blog post. Pointless.

To me, not having an opinion about something is a strong statement. And personally, it means that that 'something' is not on my critical path in life. I am a rat, wanting to remain a rat. All these 'somethings' which people make a huge noise about, do not show up in my racetrack. I can at best acknowledge their existence. Ask me for an opinion and you will get nothing.

Annus Mirabillis

Here we go again, another new year. Happy New Year to everyone. On new year's day, I am prone to being nervous. Somewhere inside me, I have been made to believe that how you start on day 1 will determine what lies ahead. But over the years, this belief has waxed and waned. This time around, I really didn't think about it too much. Perhaps it was because I had grown up and believed in a 'who-the-world-works' or maybe it was just a result of a long bout of tension and sleep shortage thanks to work.

But since it is a new year ahead of me, I think it is a good time to reflect back on life over 2011 and how I can be better and more effective in 2012. There are a few things which I surely want to do this year and I see a merit in putting some of those down.

1. Exercise more often

I have had the dream of being presentably slim for a long time now. This has to be the year I do something about it and make it count. There are two broad ways of becoming slim and staying that way - exercise ad diet. The latter, I have found is significantly tougher and hence I shall stick to exercise.

2. Write more often

I think dreams come in cycles. There can be a whole passage of time where I don't dream of a particular thing and then suddenly it shows up on my radar. Writing is one such thing. I hope to write more and write more often this year. Perhaps take the first steps towards writing a book or something.

3. Better anger management and channelizing negative energy

This has been among my greatest strengths and in my view the most useful thing I have taught myself. It has been over a decade since I have started experiencing the benefits of this. I wish to continue perfecting this habit and hope to lose my cool fewer times this year.

4. Crunch the time between thought and action

Many times, circumstances get the better of me. In large situations (large being defined by the scale of implications of the decisions that are being complicated) I find that I fret too much about the outcome at the cost of losing my objectivity. This is further affected by self-doubt and your gut's lack of confidence on your brain. It is some sort of 'analysis paralysis'. This year I need to get better at backing my logic and judgement and thinking lesser and acting faster.

5. Do something creative regularly

I have been trying this for some time now and find that it helps immensely in reducing boredom. I just need to be more regular; actually regular creativity is almost an oxymoron. Forget it. I know what to do.

6. Read news more often and have an independent world view

My daily schedule gives me little time to read the newspaper and I am left with relying on the Internet for reading news. Thanks to google news being the way it is, my following the news is at best haphazard. I need to correct this. There needs some method to this.

7. Learn to say No

I think it is the most important skill to have in the world.

Apart from these, there are other minor things -- like cleaning my car more often, ensuring my next shirt is not blue, never wearing mismatched shoes, learning to write fast with a fountain pen, etc.

Getting on with life

In my final semester of engineering, the last exam I wrote was for a course called 'Security Analysis and Portfolio Management'. The last words I wrote in that exam were 'portfolio management'. I remember these words very specifically because at that point, these seemed the last words I would ever write in an exam. Quite a sentimental fool I was. Plan A in life was to end education with that exam and get on with everything else.

The name of the course 'Security Analysis and Portfolio Management' has some funny memories associated with it. Back in semester 5, when I chose Financial Management as my minor I was told that the last course would be 'Security Analysis and Portfolio Management'. I was and still am someone with a average intellect. I wondered what security had to do with finance. I told myself "maybe they will teach us how to guard an office and how to analyze office security". Of course, portfolio management I could never figure out what.

Slowly the realization dawned on me that security is a very different thing in finance and it has nothing to do with uniformed guards roaming around with batons and whistles.

I caught the share market bug briefly at that time. I read the papers, watched a few stocks move. I even had a scrapbook with newspaper clippings and stock graphs. Again, Plan A was to start work, get a demat account, invest and grow rich.

When money came in in the form of salary, the testosterone was in short supply. One needed a certain amount of guts and a feeling of being dispassionate about money to invest. Suddenly the share market seemed like a well organized, legally viable means to bet (I still think it is a legalized form of betting, but as of now I am running along Plan D or Plan E for life) To cut the explanation short, I never invested.

After all these years, I finally got myself a trading account and a reasonable amount of money to 'play with'. There have been a lot of changes since 'Security Analysis and Portfolio Management' in my understanding of Finance and the markets. I traded today and it felt good.

Missing the Web 2.0 bus

Back when I started work, orkut was the rage. I spent a lot of time on orkut. A lot of time. It seemed like the right filler for days full of intermittent work. When you let the machine compile a huge jar file, there really isn't much you can do when the machine is compiling. Orkut filled this gap very well. Given the competitive nature of what I and my close friends were accustomed to, there was competition on orkut too: number of friends, number of scraps, fans etc. I know of people who came very close to screwing up academics (and hence life in a myopic sense) due to orkut. Orkut became a common noun, orkuting became a verb and an acceptable activity.

Orkut slowly gave way to facebook. There were a few other portals (which've been relegated to also rans - Friendster, Hi5, etc.) I was lucky to get early access to facebook thanks to being in a college that was covered by facebook. But I really didn't revel in facebook as much as I did on orkut. I found that it pushed people to be more phony than necessary.

The major difference between your orkut profile and your facebook profile was that the orkut relied on 'pull' in order to get recognition whereas facebook relied more on 'push' for recognition. It was a result of the basic design of the user homepage. Once logged in, Orkut opened to a page with your profile, your friends list and imminent birthdays of your friends. Facebook, on logging on, threw at you updates from what your friends were doing, saying and sharing.

This difference was stark. It meant that one would require different mindsets to navigate the two portals (soon they would become social networking sites) Facebook gave greater returns on pushy-ness, boldness and to an extant blatant self promotion. This came at a time when there was a mindset change in how people perceived the web.

This was around the time when Web 2.0 became a famous concept: when user generated content became the driver of the internet. Facebook fit better than orkut in the web 2.0. Also, let me not take anything away from facebook in terms of user interface, user experience and add-ons.

Close to the heels of facebook was twitter - a brilliant avenue to express, be-heard and self promote in the simplest of fashions. Twitter started a parallel network of connected people in a way nobody could imagine.

I heard of web 2.0 only after it became a huge talking point. Though I was on facebook, I had barely heard of twitter. When you have enough happening in real life, you rarely do look to the internet for excitement. It might have been a paucity of time which resulted in me not spending enough time or putting in enough effort on web 2.0.

I started using twitter regularly a month or so ago. Since then, I have been amazed by it. The design of the entire system is beautiful (I haven't figured it out fully yet) Between facebook and twitter, my vote surely is for twitter. It is smarter, quicker, adds greater value and doesn't damage once's personality as much. There are some simply outstanding people who make twitter what it is. It is almost like a large connected family out there which keeps the place abuzz.

But I have found that getting into the family is impossible (at least I haven't figured it out) And knowing social networks, being a male, out of college, with very few active friends on the network, the odds are stacked against me. Looking back, I feel that I missed the web 2.0 bus. I should have started being active on twitter long ago. But here I am, still searching, still trying to find my feet.

The Wedding Planner

Sorry for the catchy post title. This is not about classic wedding planning as we know it. This is a summary of my guide to attending weddings. Actually, the guide is applicable to family functions other than weddings as well.

Ever since I moved to Chennai almost a year back, I have been hit by a barrage of 'family functions'. I don't know if the last 12 months are representative. If they are, I should expect to attend more family functions in a year that I can count on my fingers.

Honestly, I don't mind attending family functions. I am reasonably well behaved in public, I like meeting people, I like playing the good boy, I know who I should 'mark attendance' with, I know whom to shake hands with (and whom not to - though this handshake strategy warrants a complete discussion in itself) and I've noticed that people in general are also eager to meet me. Presence in family functions also does a world of good to my positioning in the extended family. Family functions only get irritating if they eat into work or weekend relaxation or if they are the excessively religious type and thereby against my principles.

Broadly, there are 2 main things you need to ensure when attending family functions: indemnify yourself against possible goodwill erosion, and eat a lot of good food. These are the two most important agenda items. I might have used complicated words to describe the first one, but in simple terms it is about ensuring nobody in the future cribs about you not attending. This might seem like a small thing but many people do take it seriously. I have noticed that in Chennai, the invitation to a function comes with an unwritten covenant of compulsory attendance. The second aspect is as simple as I've described it - eating lots of good food.

There might be other things you will end up trying to do - dress well, buy a meaningful gift, show-off the latest Upanishad commentary you've read, etc. But the two I've mentioned are most important from my perspective. I have a logic for it as well. To me, the good food is the only motivation to attend functions. (Its a bit like saying an asset, at the end of the day is about the cash flows it generates) All other reasons pale in comparison. I don't really find joy in networking or showing off my latest shirt or veshti. I do not need to get introduced to either 'girls' or parents of possible 'girls'. I don't read the Upanishads or do network marketing of sarees or beauty products. Good food is good enough. But it is important to keep the good food coming. Attending one off functions is of little use. You need to ensure you are invited again and again. This is where goodwill comes into the picture. Its like having healthy and consistent cash flows year on year.

Any moderately large family function will have a lot of people attending. The superset of attendees is determined the hosts of the function. Its elementary. If A and B are the hosts of the function, A and B will tend to decide the list of invitees with inputs from elders and other significant members of the family.

During most functions, the hosts are the busiest people. Marriage receptions might be an exception in which case the hosts (say A and B) might be the 3rd and 4th busiest. In general, it is OK to assume that the hosts are the busiest. But most hosts do acknowledge your attendance if you make the effort to make your presence felt. Hosts are usually very happy to see invitees attend. From their selfish perspective, that is all they would want - you attending. Like 'saala we took all the effort to invite but he did attend. Good boy'. Most hosts will not have time to look at your new shirt or listen to your latest Upanishad gyaan. As a safety measure, it always helps to also 'mark your attendance' with the host influencers (the ones helping out with invitee lists) Just in case hosts are very busy/unapproachable/dazed to notice you, the influencers are a viable second option. Of course in the event that neither the hosts, nor the influencers notice you during the function, there is a chance that the photographical evidence will act as proof. But nothing is as good as creating an impression in person.

Most family functions are followed by detailed postmortems where a lot of bitching is done about non-attendees. These bitching sessions will many times involve the hosts (A and B) and the influencers. Its these bitching sessions that you should avoid being a topic in. It leads to goodwill erosion. And in the high touch family-society of Chennai, goodwill is very easy to lose and near impossible to gain. Your missing the function might cost you half a dozen meals in the future.

So, to restate my point: it is necessary to attend and more importantly let the hosts and the host-influencers notice during the function that you have attended.

Regarding goodwill, you can play some long term strategies too. This would involve connecting with distant/long-lost relatives. Often these strategies will not have immediate pay-offs. It will take multiple meetings to start standing a chance of figuring in their invitee list. To me, that's too much effort for a possible meal in the distant future. Hence, I do not play this strategy.

Coming to eating the food, the strategy is pretty simple. More the better. Serving food is usually a batch process. There are pandhis one after the other. It is important to be shameless enough to capture your prized seat in the earliest possible pandhi. Earlier, I used to have reservations about eating early - a feeling that observers might find me too opportunistic for the food. But I then realized that people hardly bothered. And more importantly in many cases, eating early would ensure that you get a serving of all the dishes in the menu. As the pandhis go on, a few popular dishes might get finished without everyone getting to sample them.

In terms of your position in the dining hall, a useful idea would be to sit close to the end of the table where the cooks keep the food. This increases the number of cooks/servers standing close to where you are sitting and hence asking for extra helpings are easier.

An ideal plan would be that you enter the function hall, time your entry into the hall such that it is close to mealtime, meet the hosts and significant influencers, head right to the dining hall, finish the most important task and then collect the coconut in the bag and go back home.

An analysis of anger

Like most others, I get angry, furious, vengeful etc. As a kid, I was always known to have been endowed with an excess these the emotions. They blamed it on some kind of inheritance of traits. But post adolescence, I have learned to manage rage very well. Honestly, now I am proud of how well I can control anger. I thought I will put down my basic understanding of anger and tenets of my anger management strategy.

The change started when I first read about anger, the nature and causes of it. It was an article on the internet (I'm unable to find it now though). From what I remember, there were 3 types of anger. I shall call them Internal-A, Internal-B & External.

Internal-A: This is the long lead time type of anger and can sometimes be confused with your personality type or mental outlook. The cause of this anger is internal and the anger takes a long time to build up. The outwards symptoms are tough to identify and this type of anger rarely does produce fits of rage. Very often, this type of anger begins during the developmental phase of one's personality (sometimes even during childhood) when the person starts to harbor ill-feelings towards specific aspects of his circumstances, surroundings or upbringing. The specific cause of the ill-feeling is not external but is the incapability of the person to come to terms with the perceived external stimulus for anger. The usual examples are anger and hatred towards rich people, anger at parents for their behavior type etc. Such feelings once developed, continue to linger with time and are hard to let go off.

Internal-B: This is a more common anger type which is sporadic and short lived. This can be triggered by internal reactions to external stimuli. External stimuli which are not anger causing. Let's say this is very expectation dependent. Anger caused by jealousy, remorse, guilt etc. fall into this category. This type of anger can affect a wide range of personality types. A few might take this anger very seriously (or to put it correctly - a few will be affected very badly by this type of anger) Reversing this anger is usually easy.

External: As the name suggests, this type of anger is caused entirely by external factors. These are external factors that specifically stoke anger in the psyche. This type of anger is most common and something which all animal species exhibit. External anger is driven by the mind's survival instinct. When someone hits you, you get angry and hit back. This anger is healthy and I would say 'right'. This anger is difficult to control, and in my opinion is wrong to try and control. It is supposed to be a natural reaction to external stimuli.

What I have found is that anger is very often a mixture of the three types. The pre-existence of one type of anger enhances the effect of the other. e.g. I've been feeling very angry at myself for driving carelessly thereby resulting in a scratch on my new car (can be classified Internal-B) Then this guy at the traffic signal bumps his car into the back of my car. I lose it completely (External anger enhanced by Internal-B).

Anger type Internal-A is very a existential angst type of thing. At a basic level, it can be overcome by logic and acceptance of life as it was and it is. If you've always been obese and hence hate slime people, relax. Give your genes their due. Being obese might be the right thing for you. At a more complicated level, Internal-A anger might need medical attention. Chronic cases of hatred, ill-feeling might lead to pathological depression warranting psychiatric care. But extreme cases aside, Internal-A can be overcome by right thinking.

Anger type Internal-B is the most unwanted type of anger. I personally find it the silliest and most useless type of anger. It is this type of anger that I have almost completely quashed from my mind. I often tell myself that it is I who lose when I'm angry for there is nothing to gain from this anger type. You never scare anyone, never make a point, never get someone to do things for you. I try and ensure that I never develop Internal-B anger. And believe me, it is easy once you realize that it serves no useful purpose.

External anger is good and necessary anger. The only challenge is to use it in a controlled and careful manner. External anger follows the pattern of diminishing marginal returns. Hence it is important to understand where you are on the curve and what the slope is. I rarely try and control external anger. The most I do is to examine where there's marginal benefit in continuing or increasing my anger levels.

All said and done, the most important step towards anger management is to understand which anger type one is experiencing and delve into the actual cause of the anger. Once there, one can use the skill of logic and cost-benefit analysis.