A sound and smell take on Madras

I see so much being written about the city I grew up in as it celebrates 375 years of it's coming into existence. The reason I write this is also because of the fact that I keep reading articles on Madras by people 30 and below who write about Saarang and not Mardi Gras or from people who were 50 and above who write about the time when the Adyar river was still used as a means of transportation. The other reason is the fast narrowing gap on the difference in the number of years I spent outside Madras and in it. As though, prophesied, I left the city of Madras the year it changed its identity to Chennai, circa 1996, after having spent 24 years in the city. I dread the time I will turn 48 because that's when I have to end up equally sharing the period of my domicile status with a couple of other Middle Eastern cities.

Here is a take on how nostalgia can trigger you, courtesy wikepedia.

‘The scientific literature on nostalgia is quite thin, but a few studies have attempted to pin down its essence and causes. Smell and touch are strong evokers of nostalgia due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places where we have spent time. Music and weather can also be strong triggers of nostalgia.’

So here I am trying to use sound and smell to bring to you the nostalgic journey of a die-hard Madrasi.

You can go to bed in a neighborhood called Border Thottam, where the lullaby would comprise of the sound of the choicest words from the original Madras Tamil literature the kind of o..., kasmaalam, kaidhey and the likes, addressed by a rickshawkaaran high on a round of sarayam, the local brew or the potlam the local potent smoke, followed by an interlude coming from vessels being thrown around and conclude with the so far patient wife thrashing the day lights out of him and then the thuds of thumping her heart, not as a sign of victory but as an act of cursing her fate . In the very same city in another part you can wake up to the strains of suprabadham making its way through your windows. Or a song from an Illayaraja number playing in your next door tea shop. The strains of 'sa re ga maa' from the paatu class or the 'thyyum thatha thayyum thaha' from a dance class in the neighborhood. The call of the old newspaperman or the kaikarikaran, the mobile vegetable vendor breaking the afternoon silence with his call for business which actually sounds like it follows all fundamentals of Carnatic music or the late night arrival of the cotton candy (sonpapadi) man ringing a bell. Or simply close your eyes and stand in T Nagar and hear the din, for some, but music for others like me, or the call to business in the zambazaar fish market. The kaaapi kaapiy call as the Madras Mail pulls into Arakonam junction and after you alight from the train the ‘side, side’ call of the coolies or the ‘meter mela 10 rubaa savaari’ negotiations with the omni present autokaaran who you can hear before you can actually see them. The mother of all sounds of Madras ironically is the music associated with the final rituals en route ones heavenly abode. I have always wondered that the rhythm associated with the ‘Saavu mollam’ could actually bring back the dead.

In a recent tribute song called the Madras song by Murugappa Group and The Hindu as part of the Madras day celebration the lyrics went thus 'Vasanai thaan enga GPS' literally translated as we use our olfactory enabled GPS. I know it is debatable and taboo to talk about the scents of Madras. However I intend venturing out on it. Sitting in a window seat of an erstwhile PTC bus, try and do a Parrys to the South of Madras trip, the fragrance in the air to begin with is jasmine from the flower bazaar which gets a little adulterated as we pass the Napiers Bridge this turns to a musky smell of salty air from the Bay of Bengal and then we smell the strong aromatic balm we associate with colds and coughs as we cross the Amrutanjan factory on Luz Church Road. On the way we cross a shrimp processing unit followed by a cookie (more commonly known as the butter biscuit) factory. This gives you a feeling that you have had a seafood meal followed by the choicest of cookies on cream as deserts. Small joys I say. As the bus passes a funeral procession, this is when the smell and the sound of Chennai get juxtaposed. You smell the rose petals and tap your feet to the rhythm of the saavu mollam. So if you ever were to be kidnapped in the city blindfolded you exactly know the route you are taken.

The landscape of the city may change over the years, the memories that one has from the senses above are the ones that are retained for decades. Madras might not look the same anymore but it still does smell and sound the same for me always though with some minor variations.

Happy Madras Day to all.

Ice bucket challenge!

When I first heard about this, me being me, thought it was a game played at the neighborhood whiskey club. The challenge that might decide the fastest finisher in an on the rocks contest!

After a couple of hours of research, I sometimes squirm at the abuse of this word research, a word that was reverently and sparingly used and associated with some serious cerebral indulgence by individuals and corporates in the past is nowadays associated with a 4 year old checking out stuff on google. That's another story for another day.

Coming back to the ice bucket challenge that is doing the rounds on the social networks, is actually an act to create awareness of a disease called ALS which in itself is a noble cause. The participants pour a bucket of ice water over their heads and challenge others to do the same by recording their act and uploading it on social networks.

During the last weeks I saw videos of celebrities from the Silicon Valley, the wannabe celebrities, getting-there-but-not- yet-there celebrities and a couple of good friends doing and daring others to drench themselves with a bucket of ice cold water in the 'harsh' summer weather conditions of the Northern Hemisphere. For me sitting in the Middle East where the current midday temperature is around 45 deg C, wished someone challenged someone to pour a bucket of ice cold water over me every afternoon for the next couple of months.

In fact watching a couple of them reminded me of a scene out of a majority of Indian movies of yesteryears. Don't see them too often in contemporary films, who knows they might just make a comeback. It goes like this, as soon as the girl elopes with the boy next door the father or the mother depending on who was not a partner in crime, would barge into the household and grab the nearest bucket of water and pour it over them thereby symbolically disowning their kin. The difference here is that the legacy is passed on.

This is a sure no do in a city like Madras where buckets are lined up in a serpentine fashion awaiting the arrival of the elusive Metro Water tanker. Can you dare someone in that queue to do it? All you can do is to challenge them to run behind the leaking water tanker and get drenched. 

Taking a cue from this I would like the corporates in India to challenge  each other as part of their CSR initiative in providing every employee with a bucket of water to keep their surroundings clean. The media houses could do their bit by daring Arnobs and the Barkhas during the news hour every night that will at-least cool matters down and could well end up prolonging their life spans.

The politicians on their part could think about national river integration with the Chief Ministers daring their counterparts from neighboring states to pour buckets of water from the rivers from each other's states. On the international relations front imagine the likes of Obama challenging Putin, Modi daring Nawaz and so on and so forth. Suddenly a bucket of water over your head would make the world a better place. Think about it in your shower today. En Seau d'eau sans frontiers...or in plane english a bucket of water without borders.

This was initiated for a truly noble cause and is well appreciated by the writer. The blog is written in a lighter vein only on the chosen act of expressing solidarity for this noble cause.

The Lost Childhood.

Was at an intra-house cultural festival at my kid’s school over the weekend. This was a revelation of sorts for an easy going, laid back, and lazy parent like me. Here I was telling my kids on my way to the fest, fear no more, the champ is with you and rattled laurels I had won as a kid in such festivals, little did I realise that I would get hammered and return home bruised and empty handed. I ended up realizing that competitions were serious stuff and not anymore the fun thing I was used to. Sadly I understood a tad too late that the fun element had long disappeared from these competitions.

Professionalism had taken over the innocent performance of kids, expressions were taught, costumes were outsourced, the props were built, and backdrops were no longer the plain boring whites, the make ups were made up of foundations and super structures. Hey, this is no civil engineering, just make up, wake up to reality and smell the coffee, I told myself. The costumes were Fedexed over night from Mumbai. And then it sunk, gone are the days when I could make do with my mom’s old 'pattu' sari to do a King Herod or one of the three wise men who visited Jesus.

Shocked at the competition levels and the outsourced resources at hand I witnessed, I was telling myself, my kids are missing on so much fun; sorry, this is definitely not a, I-told-you-I-have–seen-it-all story nor is it a story of sour grapes. I realized that parents walk that extra mile or more to fulfil THEIR lost dreams through their kids.

Half sleepy, barely interested, and un-enthusiastic kids were adorned with the best of costumes and jewellery and were literally pushed on stage to perform and they did perform, just like most of us corporate slaves do, expecting an incentive.

Their performances were brilliant, but something was missing. Their eye movements were (dis)oriented towards their anxious parents and appeared as though they were pleading 'am I doing ok, am I doing well, am I meeting your expectations' an expression in which the child was lost in the dreams of his / her parents. I could sense that the child was living some else's dream.

On my way back I told my kids it is not about winning or losing it is all about enjoying your 3 or 4 minutes on stage. I’m not sure I was wrong or right. But once back home I asked them to rate their performance sadly they rated themselves low. But little did they realise that it was their dad who let them down…. on second thoughts, Did I???

I was a know-it-all dad, who had not grown up to accept the realities of the world, a dumb dad who thinks competing is still fun, and a stupid dad who still thinks winning or losing doesn’t matter.

My kids had lost competing with the dads/moms of their co-participants; they lost to kids who actually did not know if they enjoyed what they did because they were doing it for their dads or moms who were busy shooting pictures and videos, looking for brownies (aka Likes) on their next Facebook posting.

As I now tuck them in bed and see them sleep peacefully, content with no worry in the world I’m happy I won when all those parents lost, even though their kids brought THEM laurels.

Sadly even this piece in which the protagonist was the kid with lost childhood ends on a note where the parent wins!!! In short it is the battle of the parents trying to win their dreams these days.

God save us from the tribe of selfish parents, I’m happy I was born in an era when God still made selfless parents!

I, me, myself and Cheese!!!

The latest obsession of mankind is HIM. Well some might say this is not new, mankind was always obsessed with them. Some of those self-obsessed men have also altered the course of history. I wrote a couple of years back that prefixing a series of gadgets with the letter ‘I’ was in a sense a symbolic representation of the transformation our society was going through. Every man unto himself was the order of the day and the mushrooming of social networks just increased it. Social fellowship with the help of your smart devices was enabled from the confines of your living room were you renewed your emotional connect with your high school chums. Well this is not certainly my idea of a healthy social behaviour until you smell the coffee, bite the cookie and pinch your friend.

Around 600 odd years back the acclaimed artists of the Renaissance period started to paint themselves, thus was born the art of self-portrait. With the advent of mirrors in the 15th century the artist had a new tool to express themselves. It is said that in some of the works the artist depicted themselves without a hand, the hand that was actually painting. Mirror technology was still at its nascent stage, larger mirrors were hard to find and transport and hence the images were only as big and as good as the mirrors. Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Van Gogh you name them, they did it, their Self-portraits.

You might wonder at the reason I am hoping from modern day social network behaviour in one paragraph to 15th century self-portraits in the next. Well the link is the obsession of the modern day man to selfies. Yes SELFIES is the newly coined word for a picture of you taken by yourself using your own smart phone and posted on the virtual world and then waiting for comments, likes and shares to happen.

Just as mirror technology was making its way in the 15th century the camera resolution technology and it’s positioning on a telecommunication device like a phone was becoming more and more relevant so much so that phones are being designed with higher resolution on its front facing cameras to facilitate the projection of a better self-image. (Irrespective what your actual self-image in the social realm was)

This selfie bug has caught on like a virus so much so that politicians, artists and people from all walks of life don’t miss out on an opportunity to take a selfie of them. Be it at the Oscars, award functions or even at polling booths or an illegitimate union, the last two of which recently got a couple of high profile politicians in trouble.

We are suddenly seeing multiple offshoots of a selfie, the most famous of them being the recent pictures of inked fingers as testimony to exercising one’s franchise. This I named impulsively as fingfie when I first saw it but the media were quick to rename it the fingie getting rid of one redundant alphabet, redundant for me, but valuable for the twiteratti where an alphabet saved is an alphabet expressed. So going by this, you can take a picture of any part of your anatomy and suffix it with an ‘ie’ and viola you have selfie of ‘IT’. My dirty mind does think of a few but they sound so unprintable and hence I refrain.

Today we call it a selfie, even when more than one are present, shouldn’t it be called wefie or an usfie. Yours truly would like to patent it along with ‘selfiegram’ for a website on which you could post only selfies but digitally modified to look better, slimmer or fairer.

There is a beeline among celebrities to get longer arms, the six packs are passé. The longer arms at least will prevent us from getting a sneak peek into sweaty or hairy armpits of the selfie taker. So all you smart phone makers listen to the end users, along with better resolutions we need wide angle capability too to keep our arm pits out of the frame.

I intend to take a selfie of myself facing a mirror cutting off the arm with the phone from the frame to symbolically represent the coming together of the art of 15th century and the technology of the 21st century.