From one Enfant Terrible to Another

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting the recently-concluded ‘In/Of Goa: Souza at 100’ an exhibition of the artworks of the celebrated Goan artist Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) on the occasion of his birth centenary at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts.

The exhibition aimed “to shed light on the profound influence of Goa, Souza’s birthplace, on his artistic journey” and it succeeded well in that objective.

One work that seemed almost an outlier of sorts was an A3-sized pen-and-ink drawing titled simply ‘Igor Stravinsky’ and signed ‘Souza 56.’

The collection had loads of nudes, of course, and self-portraits and landscapes. But there were just three named portraits of men: one, also in pen-and-ink of St. Francis (the ‘other’ Francis!) Xavier,

another of British artist, writer and photographer John Rivers Coplans (1920 -2003),

Souza’s contemporary and friend. These two have an obvious link to Souza. But why Russian composer and conductor Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1881 -1971)? Souza was well-known for his eclectic taste in so many spheres, which would have included music. But as far as I knew, there was no documented affinity for this specific composer or his work.

In his extremely interesting and informative lecture ‘An introduction to the live of F N Souza’, Conor Macklin, director of the Grosvenor Gallery London, (which boasts on its website of “close ties with the artist and always endeavour to have a range of his work at the gallery”) had told us some entertaining stories about Souza in general and about some works in particular. After he had led the gathering on a walk-through of the exhibition, I asked him about the Stravinsky portrait. There was no specific anecdote, he said, apart an obvious admiration Souza must have had for him.

I went home and tried to investigate further. I came across this on the website of Saffron Art, a co-sponsor of the Sunaparanta exhibition, and “a leading international auction house, and India’s most reputed, with over four hundred auctions to its credit. Its flagship gallery is in Mumbai, with offices in New Delhi, London, and New York”:

  “Known for the highly critical and frequently disfigured portraits of clergymen and members of the upper echelons of society that he painted in the 1950s, it was very rarely that Souza created an image in appreciation of someone. The present lot, a portrait of the revolutionary composer and pianist Igor Stravinsky, seems to be one of the exceptional works that was borne of the artist’s admiration rather than his unsympathetic disgust. Created shortly after his seminal 1955 series of drawings, Six Gentlemen of our Times, this portrait also exemplifies the artist’s intricate cross-hatching and confident line. Although Souza has constructed Stravinsky’s features with his characteristic cross-hatching and the subject’s bespectacled eyes are placed high in his forehead, the face in this drawing is not that of a ‘soulless’ socialite or corrupt businessman, nor is it “a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by lines and petrified by its own violence” (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 83). Rather, in Souza’s portrayal, the composer comes across as an intelligent individual, held in high regard by his peers.”

All very interesting, but no clear reason for Souza’s “appreciation” of Stravinsky. But there is plenty of room for an educated guess, or perhaps many.

Stravinsky, especially after the scandalous 1913 Paris premiere of his revolutionary ballet ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ (The Rite of Spring) was labelled the ‘enfant terrible’ of classical music of his time. The famous auction house Christie’s called Souza the ‘enfant terrible’ of Modern Indian art.

The enduring formative impression of Roman Catholicism in Souza’s Goan childhood on his art is well-documented. Yashodhara Dalmia, in the chapter ‘A Passion for the Human Figure: Francis Newton Souza’ of the above-mentioned book ‘The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives’

quotes him extensively on the subject.

Although Stravinsky drifted away in his adult years from the Russian Orthodox Church he had been born into, his homesickness while in Europe drew him back to the faith, “a portable piece of Russia”. An especially moving ceremony at the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua in 1926 while on a concert tour made him formally rejoin the Church. A slew of sacred compositions followed, most famously his ‘Symphony of Psalms’ for chorus and orchestra (1930, rev. 1948)

and ‘Canticum Sacrum’ for tenor, baritone, chorus and orchestra (1955).

Souza and Stravinsky also had inspirational subject matter (in addition to Christianity, of course) that overlapped. Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles’ tragedy, was the subject of a Stravinsky opera-oratorio (1927).

The inspiration for Souza’s 1961 depiction of the tragic king

was (as he himself explained) his own irrational feeling of guilt that his father died soon after his birth, and the disturbing revelation of surreptitiously watching his mother bathe through a hole he bored in the door. Imagine what Freud (Sigmund, not Lucian) would have made of that! It certainly puts his obsession with the female anatomy in perspective.

Macklin spoke of Souza’s strong anti-nuclear testing sentiment in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the motivation for his 1961 painting ‘Apocalypse.

Plans in 1953 by Stravinsky and Welsh poet-writer Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) to collaborate on an opera which detailed the recreation of the world after one man and one woman remained on Earth following a nuclear disaster never materialised with Thomas’ sudden death.  Stravinsky instead completed ‘In Memoriam Dylan Thomas’, a piece for tenor, string quartet, and four trombone the following year.

Stravinsky was the subject for many other artists, from Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861 -1942)

to Robert Delaunay (1885 – 1941)

and several others, but most famously Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973). 

The most plausible link between Souza and Stravinsky could have been Pablo Picasso whose timeline as you can see neatly overlaps that of Stravinsky. The friendship between Picasso and Stravinsky was strong, and even got them arrested once for ‘drunken behaviour’. Stravinsky wrote a five-bar sketch of clarinet music for Picasso on a hotel telegram. He used complex rhythms, and also turned the telegram on its side so that the horizontal lines became vertical. This presented a new and surprising perspective on the familiar object whilst also physically cutting through his music. The piece, though barely a piece at all, explored Picasso’s Cubist ideas in a musical context.

Picasso responded with three sketches of Stravinsky in 1920,

one of which was almost confiscated at the Swiss border on suspicion of being a coded military plan:

“From Naples I went back to Rome, where I had a delightful week with Lord Berners. I shall never forget the adventure which later befell me in crossing the frontier at Chiasso on my return to Switzerland. I was taking my portrait, which Picasso had just drawn at Rome and given to me. When the military authorities examined my luggage they found this drawing, and nothing in the world would induce them to let it pass. They asked me what it represented, and when I told them that it was my portrait, drawn by a distinguished artist, they utterly refused to believe me. “It is not a portrait, but a plan,” they said. “Yes, the plan of my face, but of nothing else,” I replied. But all my efforts failed to convince them, and I had to send the portrait, in Lord Berners’ name, to the British Ambassador in Rome, who later forwarded it to Paris in the diplomatic bag. The altercation made me miss my connection, and I had to stay at Chiasso till next day.”

Igor Stravinsky
“Chronicle of My Life”

Picasso also drew the cover art for Stravinsky’s 1918 ‘Ragtime’

and designed the costumes and sets for his 1920 ballet ‘Pulcinella.’

Dalmia mentions Picasso’s profound influence on Souza, as did Macklin in his lecture. Picasso himself once said, “Lesser artists copy, great artists steal.” An identical sentiment that has also been attributed to Stravinsky himself: “Good composers borrow, Great ones steal.”

Souza referenced Picasso’s 1907 ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’

(which itself was ‘inspired’ by Paul Cezanne’s 1880 ‘Bathers’)

with his own ‘Ladies of Belsize Park’ (1962).

It is possible that Souza was responding to Picasso’s Stravinsky sketches with one of his own. A great “steal” if ever there was one.

 (An edited version of this article was published on 12 May 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Beethoven’s Ninth is 200!

200 years ago, on this very day, the world heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time.

I wrote about this momentous milestone for the NCPA Mumbai magazine ‘On Stage’ May 2024 issue.

To read the article, click here and go to pages 34 to 36

My mum Dr. Elvira Dias (1932-2024), the universal donor

I learned bits and pieces about my mum’s profession (which would eventually become mine too) from a young age.

Sometimes at bedtime while tucking my brother Victor and me in, she would for instance ask us to “say a special prayer” (one Our Father, three Hail Marys and a Glory be) for, let’s say, “Sumati.” But that wasn’t enough for five-year-old me. “Why are we praying for Sumati? What’s she got? Where’s she?” I’d ask, wanting to fine-tune my petition so there wouldn’t be any celestial misunderstanding. If she said “Eclampsia”, it would invite further questions that she would try to answer as plainly as possible. Often, she would end up saying, “Just pray for her”, and I would.

If she went on night calls, I’d try to stay up until she returned. I soon learned to “diagnose” the OT (Operation theatre) “smell.” I’d climb onto her lap and proclaim triumphantly “You did a Caesarean!” 

Often, she would be called out even on off-duty nights, which angered me. “Why must you go today too?” “I have to donate blood”, she replied. Donate blood?! What fresh scam was this? “Why can’t they take someone else’s blood?” And that’s how I learned my mum was an “universal donor”, blood type O Rh negative. (Incidentally both Victor and I are Rh positive, and my mum didn’t have anti-D prophylaxis in either pregnancy as it wasn’t standard practice in 1960s Germany).

The blood bank would request her to donate all-too frequently, for traffic accidents and other emergencies. She never once refused.

As I got older, I followed her example and we’d go together to donate blood. I was present when the in-charge at Panjim Blood Bank finally gave orders to his staff “not to take any more blood from Madam Dias; she has donated enough!” 

It is a powerful metaphor of my mum’s attitude to life, to her work and society. She quite literally gave her not just her blood, but her sweat, toil and tears, freely, unconditionally, even to a fault, to whoever needed it.

And this is not just in Goa, although she would give Goa the majority of her working life (1970 to 2020 when the pandemic hit, exactly fifty years!) but also in Mumbai (then Bombay) and Berlin (then West Berlin). Over the years I’ve met her colleagues and patients in the latter cities too, and the underlying thread of selfless service with a smile and good cheer runs through her entire career and indeed her life.

Most of her Mumbai colleagues have passed on (she was the last of that era) but all of them, and the Berlin fraternity too, told me that she could easily have risen to the top in those cities, she had the chops for it.

Goa has always been a different story. On a technicality, she was passed over for Professorship in the Department (and few if any took up cudgels for her then). But patients voted en masse with their feet, and her OPDs (out-patient clinics) were always overflowing and overbooked. For her, the clinical work and helping people was its own reward.

I remember once, after a session at one of the annual Casa da Moeda festivals where I had spoken of the history of the Mint and then of the house and the personalities that lived in it, I was reminded, rightly, that we had a living legend of Goa’s medical history in our very midst.  

Mum was embarrassed by the spotlight, which is why I’ve never written about her while she was living.

Her life fits into neat chapters. From 1970 to 1990, for twenty years until she attained retirement age, she was employed at Goa Medical College, in effect carrying on the Dias legacy that her father-in-law Dr. Victor Dias, and his father before him, Gen. Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias, had so richly contributed to the institution’s pre-Liberation avatar, Escola Médica.

Many of Goa’s most prominent obstetricians and gynaecologists today were taught by her, and benefited from her kindness and generosity. As some of them themselves tell me, whereas many other consultants were stingy in giving surgical opportunities to junior doctors, she believed that was the whole point of a teaching hospital and gladly assisted them in their first surgical cases. Their stint in her unit (Unit 2) was a golden period in their career development, not just for the surgical opportunities, but for the clinical experience they gained and the calm unfussy attitude to patient care. The irony was that I, her own son, benefited the least from her tutelage as I joined the department exactly in her retirement year, 1990, and so was in her unit only a few weeks.

After her retirement, the department degenerated into a toxic cesspit of coteries, petty intrigue and mediocrity that I was glad to leave when I did.    

Mum’s three-decade (1990-2020) innings in private practice came to an abrupt end with the lockdown. The post-pandemic years until her death were tough on her and on us, her care-givers.

As she got more house-bound, she, who went dozens of extra miles for countless others in her prime and headed a committee that gave a scholarship for advancement in geriatrics, ironically did not receive timely geriatric support herself.

In a further irony, students and relatives visiting from overseas spent more time with her in her last years than many in her own neighbourhood. Each visit was an occasion for a good laugh to lift her spirits,

but they were few and far between. Time today is at a premium, whether a doctor’s visit or a social one.

Mum wanted to die at home (she actually gave me a signed statement to this effect), and I must confess that toward her final years, I’d pray that she would slip quietly into the night in accordance with her wish. But it was not to be.

The earliest picture I have of our house Casa da Moeda is from 1936, my great-grandfather Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias’ ceremonial funeral. That occasion and my grandfather Dr. Victor Dias’s grand funeral are the stuff of family legend.

But here’s one last irony: although mum didn’t fight the bubonic plague like her grandfather-in-law Dr. Miguel Caetano Dias or oversee Old Goa’s sanitation plan like her father-in-law Dr. Victor Dias (who has been inexplicably consistently ignored by self-appointed custodians of Goa’s past), mum actually gave Goa more years of active clinical service than either of them, half-a-century! She brought countless thousands of babies to the world, and saved innumerable mothers and babies from the jaws of death. She mentored a whole harvest of successful obstetricians and gynaecologists scattered far and wide.

Does today’s Goa give a proper send-off only to the wealthy and influential, to ‘tall’ political leaders who actually ruined our land, rather than to a silent gentle kind human being, the “universal donor” in more ways than one, who kept on giving of herself until she could give no more? To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the good she did seems buried along with her bones.

Mum loved the Doris Day song ‘The Everlasting Arms’.

Take refuge in those Everlasting Arms, Mummy. Nobody ever earned it more than you.

 (An edited version of this article was published on 05 May 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

India’s ‘Electile’ Dysfunction

What do you call a flawed democracy? An ‘electile’ dysfunction.

It seems an apt description for the situation India is in today.

The Democracy Index published by the Economist Group is an index measuring the quality of democracy across the world. This quantitative and comparative assessment is centrally concerned with democratic rights and democratic institutions. The Democracy Index produces a weighted average based on the answers to 60 questions, which are grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.

India has the dubious distinction of being labelled a “flawed democracy”. But even that seems a rather kind assessment, given the systemic rot that pervades the functioning of democracy in India.

The biggest and most recent case in point is the scam of electoral bonds that was struck down last February by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud as “unconstitutional.” Apart from finding it “violative of RTI (Right to Information)” and of voters’ right to information about political funding under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, they also pointed out that it “would lead to quid pro quo arrangements” between corporations and politicians.

Such an institutionalisation of “quid pro quo” undermines the very fabric of democracy, and unlimited corporate funding makes a sham of the concept of “free and fair” elections. 

Unsurprisingly, when last month  the Supreme Court ordered the State Bank of India to disclose the details of electoral bonds to the Election Commission of India (ECI), the biggest beneficiary of the electoral bonds at ₹6,060 crore (over 47.5% share in the total bonds encashed) was the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but other parties benefited too: All India Trinamool Congress received ₹1,609.50 crore (12.6%) followed by the Congress ₹1,421.9 crore (11.1%), the second and third biggest parties in terms of encashment in the period.

But here’s the interesting part: although the lid has been blown off the scam, and the names of donors and beneficiaries are in the public domain, everyone gets to keep the money thus acquired. So how “free and fair” will this coming election, or indeed any elections in the foreseeable future, ever be?

How surprised should we be if the political party with far and away the most stacked coffers wins yet again? Is it really a measure of good governance, or further evidence of “quid pro” in action?  

India ought to currently be one notch further down the Democratic Index to what is called a “hybrid regime”, just a step away from the lowest rung of the index, the “authoritarian regime.”

“Hybrid regimes” are “nations with regular electoral frauds, preventing them from being fair and free democracies. These nations commonly have governments that apply pressure on political opposition, non-independent judiciaries, widespread corruption, harassment and pressure placed on the media, anaemic rule of law, and more pronounced faults than flawed democracies in the realms of underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.”

Even without all of the above hugely troublesome issues, I find it more and more difficult to believe, going by past and present examples across the world, that democracy actually works in practice.

I recently came across this quote by the novelist Franz Kafka (1883-1924): “One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.”

Nowhere is this truer than in Goa, where the same rabble of politicians hop fences so effortlessly that we have trouble keeping up.

The other issue is our voting system, first-past-the-post (FPTP) or plurality voting, wherein voters cast a vote for a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election. Its advantage is that is easy to understand and implement, but it has serious drawbacks, far too many to get into here, but let’s just look at the big ones that are the particular bugbear of elections in Goa time and again: vote-splitting and tactical voting, which are inter-related.

Where two similar parties or candidates compete under FPTP, the vote of their potential supporters is often split between them, thus allowing a less popular party or candidate to win the seat.

FPTP encourages tactical voting, as voters often vote not for the candidate (or party) they most prefer, but against the candidate (or party) they most dislike.

My own voting history reflects both these issues. Ever since I became eligible to vote, I have almost consistently voted Congress (except for one delusionary phase when I thought that the Aam Aadmi Party was worth supporting; the honeymoon didn’t last long) not because I particularly believe in it all that much, but because they seemed and still seem the ‘lesser evil’.  At least it was born at the hands of statesmen and women I admired, and I still do, most of them. And more importantly they seemed (and still seem, sometimes…) a counterweight to the divisive and communal forces in India. (Can our conscience permit us  to forget about Manipur even in faraway Goa?)

So my voting history has always been ‘negative’, voting ‘against’ rather than ‘for’.

And this is the quandary I find myself in, like clockwork, every time another election circus puts up its tent in town wanting to blacken my index finger yet again. If I abstain, I’m called an irresponsible citizen. If I vote for someone who (surprise surprise!) actually wins, I have no way of knowing that they will not post-results hop another fence (even saying God told them to!) and betray my vote.  

It’s a Kafkaesque circus, but who are the clowns: the politicians, we the people who vote them in through omission or commission, or the flawed democratic process itself?  

And yet, infuriatingly, the voter will be blamed by political pundits on endless analytical television shows. “The voter got the government it deserved.”

But is that a fair assessment? It’s a rotten system, and we certainly didn’t deserve this.

(An edited version of this article was published on 30 April 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)

A Fort-uitous Getaway -3

The final leg of our travel back in time took in the ‘impregnable’ fort of Janjira.

Pushkar Sohoni, who is an architectural and cultural historian and associate professor and the chair of the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune has written an informative article about it in ‘African Rulers and Generals in India (Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora, vol. 1)’ as a contribution to University of North Carolina Ethiopian and East African Studies Project; Ahmedabad Sidi Heritage and Educational Center, 2020.

Another useful resource was the 1993 Goa University PhD thesis of Raghuraj Singh Chauhan, ‘Siddis of Janjira and the Portuguese’ under the guidance of Dr. P. P. Shirodkar.

Janjira fort was the stronghold of Janjira state, which was ruled by the ethnic group of administrator-warriors of East African descent called the Siddis. Starting as nobles in the courts of the NizamShahs of Ahmadnagar and serving them for over a hundred years, the Siddis eventually created an independent kingdom, centred around this island fort. They ruled over this sovereign state for over three hundred years, from 1621 to 1948. Sohori calls the fort “a palimpsest of almost five hundred years of the history of the Deccan coast.”

Siddis (also known as Habshis, or Abyssinians) originally came as military slaves, merchants, sailors, and mercenaries from East Africa, most probably the highlands of Ethiopia, according to Sohoni.

The fortified island itself was called Habsan (Persian for ‘Abyssinians’), or Murud-Janjira (a concatenation of the words for island in two languages, Murud in Konkani and Jazeera in Arabic), while the name Janjira, sometimes used for the island, also refers to the entire independent kingdom.

I found the word associations interesting. The Konkani word, often used derogatorily for a black person (which caused such a storm when a minister used it some years ago) is believed to have come from the Portuguese ‘Caffre’ (which in turn is a corruption of the Arabic ‘kaffir’ for non-believer), but could it just as possibly be derived from ‘Habshi’?

Also, I’ve never come across ‘Murud’ as the Konkani word for ‘island’. It seems so far removed phonetically from ‘zuem’, which I know. Could it be that another word for ‘island’ is/was used elsewhere on the Konkan coast?

Lastly, I hadn’t known before that ‘Janjira’ was derived from ‘jazeera’, meaning ‘peninsula’ or ‘island.’ It explains the rationale for the name of Al Jazeera media network, based in the Qatar peninsula.   

Sohoni points out that Janjira was one only two princely states (the other being Sachin, in modern-day Gujarat) that was directly ruled by Siddis. Succession to the throne was decided by election and not merely by bloodline. Furthermore, Janjira “was the only Indian kingdom which was militarily based off the mainland and relied on its naval prowess rather than its territorial forces. Hence, the architectural importance of the fort of Janjira cannot be overstated, both as an exemplar of naval fortification, but also as one of the few sites that could resist all the major imperial powers of early modern South Asia.”  

Reading these sources as well as Dr. P. S. Pissurlencar’s ‘Portuguese Maratha relations’, in which the Siddi of Janjira figure several times, the word ‘frenemy’ comes to mind. One’s head begins to spin keeping pace with the numerous skirmishes on land and sea, bipartite or even tripartite ‘friendship’ treaties of mere convenience that were either loosely adhered to or ignored, or even betrayed, territories won and lost at various times particularly in the seventeenth century among the many ‘players’ along the Konkan coast: the Nizamshahs of Ahmednagar, Adilshahs of Bijapur, the Dutch, British, Portuguese, Marathas, Mughals and the Siddi of Janjira.

As we approached the fort by sailboat from Rajapuri jetty nearby, one got a sense of the ingenuity of its builders. Its walls skirt all along the edges of the 22-acre island.

The main entrance gate that faces Rajapuri is so well hidden that it only became visible when our boat was in very close proximity, a few metres away. 

  

You have to step lively off the boat (and safely stash phones and cameras lest they fall irretrievably into the water) onto the narrow strip of beach that hugs the fort’s rampart walls and walk gingerly up to the entrance gate.

The boatmen ferrying us there also doubled up as guides and gave us a dispassionate description and history of the fort in Hindi/Urdu on the 20-minute sail there.

A voluntary suggested donation for the guiding service was willingly given at the end of the trip by all on board save for a tiny group that chose to chant provocative slogans instead. They tried to incite the rest of us to join them but quickly ran out of steam when no-one took their bait.

 On the left bastion of the fort entrance is an engraving of a tiger battling six elephants, four under each of its claws one in its mouth, the last trapped in its tail,

a proclamation of royal sovereignty and military might.

As at the Kolaba fort, we had only a short time at Janjira before the boat took us back, so our exploration was a little hurried.

The excavation of two large freshwater cisterns not only provided basalt for building the fort but also year-round potable water for the fort-city.

Janjira’s fort bastions and walls stand proud, but the interior is in decay. One hope that its inaccessibility that defended it so well from marauders will also protect it from the onslaught of destructive tourism and misguided ‘development.’

As we returned to Alibag, we drove tantalisngly close to Korlai fort, also on my bucket list. But the sun and our energy levels were setting fast, so we beat a prudent retreat.

On returning to Goa a few days however, I was soon at another ‘island’ fort, Jua or Santo Estevam, my native village, on a walk led by architect Lester Silveira. The contrast with Janjira not only in size (Jua fort is minuscule; Kanekar sums it up in a page in her book ‘Portuguese sea forts: Goa with Chaul, Korlai and Vasai’),

but also in shape (Jua fort is angular, compared to the rounded curves of Janjira’s walls and bastions) were striking. Kanekar calls it “essentially a battlemented watchtower,” atop the island’s highest point, affording a wary vigil over possible attack by land or sea.  

The Directorate of Archives and Archaeology Goa information tells us it was erected in 1668 during the tenure of Viceroy João Nunes da Cunha, Conde de S. Vicente, and that Sambhaji captured it in 1683 but abandoned it soon after.

The fate of Portuguese Goa hung by a thread and our history might have been very different had circumstances allowed him to continue the siege of Goa.

Our short family trip with the unplanned visit to these forts made me widen my own reading of history and get a better perspective of our past from those vantage points.

 (An edited version of this article was published on 28 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Tern-year old concert pianist Ayaan Deshpande makes his Goa debut!

Our music charity Child’s Play India Foundation is fifteen this year, a milestone we have been celebrating with a slew of concerts, workshops and music camps since this year began.

It gives us singular pleasure to host the Goa debut concert at the Maquinez Palace Auditorium 1 Panjim on 27 April 2024 (donation passes at Furtados Music store and also at the door before the concert) of an exceptionally gifted child from Mumbai, Ayaan Deshpande.

Born on 27th December 2013 in Tokyo and raised in Mumbai, Ayaan has been studying the piano at the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) Music Academy, National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) since May 2021 under the guidance of Ms Aida Bisengalieva.

Six months later, in November 2021, at just seven years of age, Ayaan gave his first public performance with the SOI Chamber Orchestra under the direction of maestro Marat Bisengaliev at the Tata Theatre, NCPA.

Along with playing the piano, Ayaan also loves to compose. He has composed a Sonata, a Waltz, a Nocturne, a piano & strings Quintet as well as a few other pieces. Ayaan’s Goa recital will also feature his own three-movement piano sonata. I can’t wait to hear its Goan premiere!

In July 2022, Ayaan gave his debut piano recital on the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre stage performing the works of Mozart, Chopin, Debussy along with one of his own compositions.

Ayaan has also performed on various occasions at the Little Theatre NCPA, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, (CSMVS) Mumbai, Tata Theatre NCPA, Happy Home & School for the blind – Worli, Prithvi Theatre, Mazda Hall – Pune.

In May 2023, he gave his first international concerts at Kurmangazy Orkestri Kazakh Concert Hall in Almaty, Kazakhstan, performing a solo piano program, duets accompanying violinist Marat Bisengaliev, as well as performing with an orchestra of Kazakh folk instruments. He also performed at the School for Autistic Children and at the Republican Kazakh Music School named after renowned Kazakh conductor, composer and musicologist Akhmet Zhubanov (1906-1968).

Ayaan was selected as a winner at the Golden Key Music Festival of Vienna, 2023 in both piano performance and composition categories. He performed during the festival at Palais Ehrbar and the Bӧsendorfer Hall in Mozarthaus.

Ayaan performed at the Mumbai Piano Day in September 2023 playing a program of Jazz and Western classical music. On 31st October and 1st November 2023, Ayaan performed Haydn Piano Concerto No 11 with the SOI Chamber Orchestra conducted by maestro Marat Bisengaliev in Mumbai and Delhi.

In 2023, Ayaan was featured among the Unstoppable 21 talented youngsters by the Times of India, India’s leading English newspaper.

I was reading up on the concert hall Ayaan performed in last year, the Bӧsendorfer Hall in Mozarthaus Vienna. The Mozarthaus was the residence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) from 1784 to 1787.

It is hallowed ground as it is where the genius composer wrote so many of his masterpieces, notably his operas, Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) Don Giovanni (1787), 12 of his 27 piano concertos among so many others. What a rare honour and privilege to actually perform in such a space!

In fact, Ayaan performed one of those piano concertos (no. 21 in C major, nicknamed ‘Elvira Madigan’, K. 467, completed in 1785) just last Sunday in Mumbai with the SOI Chamber Orchestra to a thunderous ovation. He played his own composed cadenzas.

Mozart also features on Ayaan’s concert programme, a work from a little earlier, 1778, his Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310.

Out of Mozart’s 18 numbered piano sonatas, only two are in a minor key, the other being the Piano Sonata no. 14 in C minor, K. 457.

Mozart’s compositions are not often in a minor key. Out of his more than 600 completed works, a mere 30 are in a minor key. Apart from the above two piano sonatas, there are his Fantasias in D minor (K. 397) and C minor (K. 475); his Piano concerto 20 in D minor (K. 466, 1785) his ‘G minor’ Symphonies (numbers 25 and the famous 40) and of course the Requiem in D minor (K.626).

Could it be that Mozart reserved that minor ‘mood’ for his weightier works? The great contemporary Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel said that “the minor confronts you in Mozart as the superior force”.

Mozart was aged 22, visiting Paris in 1778 when his mother passed away. His K. 310 sonata, written shortly after, is not mentioned in his letters, but we know he was grief-stricken.  In a letter to his father Leopold, informing him of the sad news, he wrote: “I have indeed suffered and wept enough – but what did it avail?”

It is hard not to imagine that the tragic loss finds expression in this dramatic, dark composition.

As any experienced musician will testify, Mozart’s music is fiendishly difficult to play well even when seemingly innocuous. There is just nowhere to hide, the texture is so transparent.

Emperor Joseph II (in)famously told the composer his composition had “too many notes”; this sonata has some bravura ‘moto perpetuo’ passages too. There are moments of uneasy tension, conflict and dissonance.  

 In the development section of the first movement, the right hand is called upon to play three ‘voices’ simultaneously. (Interestingly, this same movement has been transcribed for three classical guitars, performed by Trio Elogio on YouTube).      

The second movement, Andante cantabile con espressione, in a consoling F major, offers a respite, but the final movement, again in A minor, gives a few glimpses of hope before rushing to its conclusion in bleakness and despair, presaging the music of later composers such as Beethoven and even Chopin.

I have been hearing about the musical phenomenon that is Ayaan Deshpande ever since he burst like a meteor on Mumbai’s musical horizon in 2021. But I only heard him play live in February this year, quite by chance.

I had gone backstage at the Jamshed Bhabha theatre after the opening concert of the Spring 2024 concert season of the SOI which had featured Barry Douglas playing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. Suddenly there was a stir; a visiting influential musician wished to hear Ayaan. It was an extempore request. Ayaan had come to attend the SOI concert, and now he was being asked to perform himself!

A small crowd gathered backstage around the Steinway concert grand piano as Ayaan began to play, from memory, divinely, Claude Debussy’s ‘La plus que lente’. Sitting on the edge of the piano bench so that his feet could work the pedals, he cast a spell that made all of us forget the lateness of the hour or anything else.

After he had finished someone wondered in a whisper, “Where does such a gift come from?” I think the answer is obvious. Listen to Ayaan play and to me that is proof that there is a God.

Come hear him yourself. It will be an evening you will tell your grandchildren about: “I was present at Ayaan Deshpande’s Goa debut when he was just ten years old.” This boy is destined for great things.  

   (An edited version of this article was published on 21 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

‘It is accomplished!’: 300 years of Bach’s St. John Passion

I set aside some time this Good Friday to listen to the complete St. John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

Besides being fitting music for that day of the Holy Week, this year marks the 300^th anniversary of the work.

In Christian music, a Passion is a setting of the Passion of Christ (ie the short final period before the death of Jesus, described in the four canonical gospels and commemorated in Christianity every year during Holy Week). The word Passion itself comes from the Latin ‘patior’, “to suffer, bear, endure”. We have a similar-sounding word in Konkani, from this same origin.

From 1723, Bach was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St Thomas’s) in Leipzig.

The job description included, among other things, composing music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city.

According to his “Nekrolog”, the 1754 obituary written by Johann Friedrich Agricola and the composer’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach wrote “five Passions, of which one is for double chorus”. The “double chorus” one is easily identified as the better-known St. Matthew Passion. Of the others, the St. John Passion is the only extant one that we know for certain was composed by Bach. The St. Luke Passion which was formerly attributed to him and even included in the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, Bach Works directory) under the number 246, now appears under the heading ‘apocryphal’ or ‘anonymous.’

There are as many as five versions of this Passion.  The work is most often heard today in the 1739–1749 version (never performed during Bach’s lifetime). In 1749, Bach performed the St John Passion once more, in an expanded and altered form from the 1724 version, in what would be his last performance of a Passion.

German musicologist Christoph Wolff writes: “Bach experimented with the St John Passion as he did with no other large-scale composition. The work accompanied Bach right from his first year as Kantor of St Thomas’s to the penultimate year of his life and thus, for that reason alone, how close it must have been to his heart.”

I won’t get into comparisons between his two known Passions, apart from stating the obvious, that the St. John Passion as about an hour shorter, and the orchestration simpler than the later (1727) St. Matthew Passion. St. John Passion doesn’t get performed or recorded as much, and is therefore less well-known.

I found it helpful to listen with the score (you can get YouTube versions where the score scrolls in real-time with the music). I am able to follow the German text, but there are easily-accessible English translations online.

Bach uses chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel of St, John from the Lutheran Bible, with the Evangelist using the exact same words. The Passio is divided into two Parts. Part One has two scenes, one in the Kidron valley (which separates the Temple mount from the Mount of Olives), the second in the palace of high priest Caiaphas. Part Two has three scenes: one with Pontius Pilate, one at Golgotha and finally the tomb site.

This is essentially an enaction, so there are ‘dramatis personae’. The narrator is the Evangelist (John here), a tenor. Jesus and all other male characters are sung by a bass (including Peter and Pilate) or tenor (servant); female characters (such as the Maid) are sung by a soprano, while the people who are often summarily called die Jüden (the Jews), the servants of the High Priest, and the soldiers are sung by a four-part chorus (SATB) in dramatic ‘turba’ or ‘crowd’ movements.

We get drama in spades in this Passion. From the very beginning we are cast right into the action: “Betrayal and Arrest” (the Garden of Gethsemane). The music is almost cinematic, the chromatic undulations in the violins, the viola line sometimes rocking like an anxious heartbeat (or is it hyperventilation?). There is discord and dissonance, resolved for a second, only to get ratcheted up a notch higher, an upward spiral of tension, release, even more tension; until the chorus bursts onto the scene. “Herr! Herr Unser Herrschen!”  (“Lord! Lord! Our Master!”). The exclamations “Herr!” are sometimes on the strong beats, sometimes on the weak, adding to the sense of unrest.

The contrasts are striking; for example, the calm measured pace of the recitative setting the ground for Judas’ betrayal, and then Jesus’ query “Who do you seek?” is answered frenetically by the ‘turba’ chorus “Jesus of Nazareth!”

The dramatic narrative is interrupted periodically by eleven chorales that allow the faithful, the congregation to participate in the Passion. Their text and even sometimes melodies would have been known to contemporary congregations but so masterful are their four-part harmonisations by Bach that they are held up to this day as templates for basic principles of composition. Many Lutheran chorales are still used in worship in German-speaking countries even today.       

The ten arias are an opportunity for us to reflect on significant points in the narrative.

There are so many remarkable moments in this work, but the one that stands out is Peter’s denial. Soon after the Evangelist recites ‘And Simon Peter followed Jesus’, there is a beautiful upbeat soprano aria ‘I follow you with eager steps.’ But this is immediately followed by Peter’s first denial.

The way the St John Gospel plays out, it is a while (the striking of Jesus followed by a beautiful chorale ‘Who has hit you like that, my Saviour, and ill-treated you?’) before the Peter is accused twice more. The second accusation by the chorus is particularly vicious, attacking Peter without respite. After the crowing of the rooster, the Evangelist sings plangently “he went away and cried bitterly”, almost sobbing the melodic line, commiserating with Peter. The following aria reflects Peter’s ‘troubled mind’? It is something we can all relate to. If we were in Peter’s position, what would we have done?   

Two more notable moments in Part Two: the bass aria ‘Mein teurer Heiland’ (‘My dearest Saviour’)

and the final chorus ‘Ruht wohl, ihr helige Gebeine’ (Lie in peace, sacred body).

  Bach was himself a deeply devout individual. Barely a year into his new post in Leipzig, this was his opportunity to show on a large scale what his music could do in defining and strengthening Christian belief. As English conductor and Bach expert Sir john Eliot Gardiner writes in his scholarly 2013 book ‘Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven’

about the first performance of the St. John Passion on Good Friday 7 April 1724: “None could match the depth of [Bach’s] elaborately patterned music-   his meshing of narrative and reflection of scriptural chronicles and theologically shaped poetic texts. In a university city famed for its theological faculty, it was a courageous – some might even have called it a brazen – statement, coming as it did from someone who was not a theologian and who did not even have a university degree.”

But such are the ways of the Lord. The works of the ‘non-theologian’, non-degree holder Johann Sebastian Bach have been the subject of study by theologians and university dons and academicians the world over for the centuries that have followed his death, and will continue to be so for centuries to come.   

 (An edited version of this article was published on 14 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A little Night Music

Each time internationally acclaimed concert pianist Marouan Benabdallah visits Goa, music-lovers know they are in for a feat of music, a night to remember. Child’s Play India Foundation is pleased to present him on Saturday 13 April 2024, ESG Maquinez Palace Auditorium 1, 6 PM. Donation passes available at Furtados, and at the door before the concert.

Benabdallah is indisputably the leading representative of his native Morocco on the international concert stage. With a musical heritage deeply rooted in the Hungarian tradition, he received his formal training at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary.

He first attracted international attention in 2003, following his triumphs at the Hungarian Radio Piano Competition and the Andorra Grand Prize. Later on, he was a prize-winner at the Hilton Head Piano Competition (US) and the Arthur Rubinstein Master Competition where the local media proclaimed his playing “miraculous” (Maariv).

Benabdallah has been praised for his “stunning natural virtuosity” (Nice-Matin), “delicate stylishness” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), “compelling sense of momentum” (Washington Post) and “resourceful pianism, lyrical instincts and thoughtfulness” (New York Times). He has been invited as guest soloist by numerous orchestras in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, and has collaborated with conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Zoltan Kocsis, Iván Fischer, Renato Palumbo, Tan Lihua and others.

He has performed on stages such as the Great Hall of the Franz Liszt Music Academy and the Palace of Arts in Budapest, the Salle Cortot in Paris, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, the Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai, the Teatro Communale di Bologna, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the Maison Symphonique in Montreal, the National Center for the Performing Arts in  umbai, the Cairo Opera House, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Benabdallah makes his home between Budapest, Rabat, Paris and Beijing. He is a “Yamaha Artist”. He serves on the piano faculty of the Liszt Academy [University] of Music in Budapest.

As always, Benabdallah’s recitals are thoughtfully curated by him. The second half of his programme is devoted to ‘La Nuit’ (The Night): “The night is the realm of indistinguishability, the moment of revelation, of enlightenment. The night has always been paradoxical and malleable, it is reassuring as it is disturbing. It is a place of the imagination and the subconscious, a place that inspires artists and fires their creativity.

How do we depict the night? How do we give colour to such dark hours? How to make the night musical? Benabdallah invites the audience to an exploration of the night through paintings and music

focusing on French composers from the early 20th century,” ranging from the more familiar, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) to those perhaps less so: Henri Duparc (1848-1933), Mel Bonis (1858–1937), Abel Decaux (1869–1943), Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967) and Louis Aubert (1877–1968).

I’m just as excited about what is in store for us before that in the first half of Benabdallah’s concert: the not-so-frequently performed but extremely atmospheric Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28 by Russian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), whose 150^th birth anniversary we celebrated last year.

As their overlapping timelines indicate, all the composers mentioned above were contemporaries, so a juxtaposition of their works in one concert allows us to compare their compositional styles.

Rachmaninov was considered anachronistic even in his lifetime, as a 20^th century throwback to a Romantic era that had ended.

 The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians !1954 edition), barely a decade after his death, notoriously dismissed Rachmaninoff’s music as “monotonous in texture … consist[ing] mainly of artificial and gushing tunes” and predicted that his popular success was “not likely to last.”

But as Alex Ross put it in his August 2022 New Yorker article (‘How radical was Rachmaninov?’), “To be anachronistic is to be outside one’s time; it does not rule out belonging to the future.”

In my column last year to mark the Rachmaninov birthday milestone, I mentioned how it had taken hypnotherapy in 1900 to get him out of a depression trough after the vicious criticism of his First Symphony. Among the trio of “Dresden pieces” he wrote after emerging from that low point in his life were his Second Piano Concerto (which he dedicated in gratitude to his therapist Dr. Nikolai Dahl), part of an opera ’Monna Vanna’ (which was never finished), and this First Piano Sonata.

Although Rachmaninov soon abandoned the thematic idea (German polymath and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play ‘Faust’)

Gretchen sentenced to death Joseph Fay (1812-1875) Colour lithograph, in ‘Faust – the Tragedy Part 1’, Paris 1846 Wikimedia Commons.

that was originally the sonata’s inspiration, traces of its influence still linger. Its three movements, structured like a typical Classical sonata, (fast movements surrounding a slower, more tender second movement), are based on the play’s three main characters Faust, Gretchen (short for Margarete) and the devil Mephistopheles respectively. In that sense it parallels Franz Liszt’s 1857 choral work ‘A Faust symphony in three character pieces’ which also reflect those characters.   

I rejoiced when I heard Benabdallah would be playing this “dark, demonic masterpiece”. It has formidable technical challenges. Rachmaninov himself wrote of it in a letter to a friend: “Nobody will ever play this composition. It’s too difficult and long.” The Russian critic Yuli Engel on examining the score said of it: “Unravelling this tangle of passages, rhythms, harmonies, polyphonic twistings, is no easy matter, even for an accomplished pianist.”

But its building blocks are deceptively simple: fifths, scales, and repeating notes. It is a mark of the genius of the composer that these musical devices can be employed to “paint” portraits of three completely different personalities. Rising and falling fifths in the first movement for example could be seen as Faust’s constant questioning, yearning for “more than earthly meat and drink” to give meaning to this life, even to extent of being willing to sell his soul to the devil to find answers to those questions. And the single repeating note in one motif, similar to a Russian Orthodox chant: is Faust hedging his bets here, appealing to God too, to whoever answers first?

In the middle ‘Gretchen’ movement, those devices paint a picture of innocence, virtue and bliss. The last movement is the headlong galloping descent into hell, complete with tolling bells and a generous quote of the first fragment of the ‘Dies Irae’ (the well-known Latin chant portraying the wrath of God) motif that Rachmaninov frequently inserted in so many of his works, a sign of his profound contemplation on the subject of death and mortality throughout his life. 

What makes Rachmaninov’s music so compelling is not just its complexity but how it invites you to explore the whole gamut of the human experience. I was struck by the various impressions of this work by listeners on a piano forum. To one, it felt like “you’re flying through the cosmos and witnessing planets being formed and destroyed.” To another “it has this grand, subtly storytelling, yet almost hypnotic quality that makes me think of atoms and stars and stuff like that.”

What will be your own experience? Why not come along to Marouan Benabdallah’s concert and discover the answer yourself?

 (An edited version of this article was published on 07 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A premature end to a Mehli-fluous sound

“American Youth Symphony Announces Permanent Closure” screamed the ‘breaking news’ headline on the Violin Channel newsletter I subscribe to.

Rubbing my eyes in disbelief, I read further: “Citing financial challenges, the orchestra is ceasing all operations as of March 15, 2024, after almost 60 years.”

Due to my interest in music education, I keep abreast of youth orchestras and ensembles around the world. The American youth Symphony (AYS) was particularly well-known to me because it was founded in 1964 by Mehli Mehta (1908-2002),

who is today better recognised as father of the celebrated Maestro Zubin Mehta.

But Mehta senior was an acclaimed virtuoso violinist (whose violin-playing can still be heard today in the All India Radio signature tune)

and conductor. It was the musical milieu in the Mehli Mehta household in Bombay that was the stimulus for the phenomenon that his illustrious son still is today.

Zubin Mehta acknowledged as much when he told at press that his father had been his first teacher, that he had grown up listening to his father’s symphony and quartet rehearsals and that, until he was 18 and went to Vienna to study, “everything I knew about music was from my father.”

The media spotlight on the son particularly in India has meant that the father’s life in music is that much less well known.

 Mehli Mehta founded the Bombay String Quartet in 1940. He spent five years in New York City studying with eminent Armenian-American violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian, who was the teacher of many seminal violin players including Dorothy DeLay, Itzhak Perlman Kyung Wha Chung, Glen Dicterow, Eugene Fodor, Ani and Ida Kavafian, Michael Rabin, Simon Standage and Pinchas Zukerman.

In 1955 Mehli Mehta moved to England, where he served for five years as Assistant Concertmaster and Concertmaster of the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester under Sir John Barbirolli. Mehta came to regard Barbirolli as “one of the greatest influences of my conducting life.”

He joined the Curtis Quartet of Philadelphia in 1959 as second violinist and toured with them across the United States for the next five years. In later years he was to state, “the string quartet has been the prime, basic factor of my entire musical philosophy.”

Mehli and his wife Tehmina then moved to Los Angeles in 1964 after Zubin was appointed conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was Director of the Orchestra Department at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) until 1976.

Within a couple of months after his arrival there in 1964, Mehli organised the AYS with students from all the universities in Los Angeles.

Its mission statement: “To train gifted young musicians for professional careers in symphony orchestras; to make music available to all segments of the community through free concerts and activities around town.”

“It takes a lifetime to learn symphonic literature. The students know nothing and they must begin somewhere to dedicate their lives to learning this repertory. When they leave the American Youth Symphony they will have performed all the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, plus the last six symphonies of Mozart, five of Mahler, two of Bruckner and all the Strauss tone poems. To be a musician, you must know these things,” he said.

He would lead the AYS for 33 seasons, retiring at age 90 in 1998.

The AYS audition information at the now-defunct website declared, “As a member of the American Youth Symphony, you will receive tuition-free training, have wonderful opportunities to enhance your musical growth, experiment, study new works, develop leadership skills, and perform at a high level of excellence some of the great repertoire required of a musician today!”

Each season, around 250-300 applicants auditioned to fill an average of 30 open positions. There was no audition fee.

On Beethoven’s 200th birthday, 16 December 1970, father and son conducted their respective orchestras in a twelve-hour Beethoven Marathon in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Mehli led the AYS in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, while Zubin conducted the LA Phil in Beethoven’s Sixth and the finale of the Ninth.

In his biography of Sir john Barbirolli, author Michael Kennedy quotes the great conductor as saying, “I… attended Mehli’s concert with the American Youth Symphony. I am glad I did, for dear Mehli was magnificent. Made those children play really quite splendidly. I was really thrilled and impressed.”

Mehli mentored many generations of musicians through the AYS. Violinist Lawrence Sonderling, a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1977 and a former American Youth Symphony concertmaster, said that Mehli Mehta “did everything with great intensity and great purpose and great love for music. It was always the music that was the most important thing. In rehearsal with the orchestra, he would badger us, he would yell and scream; sometimes he would tell stories of things he had heard and seen in his musical youth. Always the intensity was there. And the passion.”

After his father’s death in 2002, Zubin Mehta told the LA Times: “Any concert of mine that he attended, there was no doubt to whom my message was going. That is what I will miss in Los Angeles, because he will not be there anymore.”

But the AYS lived on after him, performing five to seven concerts each season, the majority of concerts presented free to the public at world-class concert halls, including UCLA’s Royce Hall, Walt Disney concert hall and local community venues alike, with “the goal of welcoming anyone who is interested to enjoy this beautiful art form.”

 Press reviews spoke of the “assured maturity, polish and depth” of the orchestra concerts.

AYS alumni went on to play in major American orchestras. A 2014 survey found that thirteen AYS alumni performed with the LA Opera, seven with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and fourteen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The press release announcing the sad news of it closure stated: “AYS has played a crucial role in nurturing the next generation of professional musicians and fostering a vibrant artistic community. AYS presented ambitious seasons of thoughtful programming of exceptionally high quality, covering a breadth of symphonic music, including beloved classics, film scores, chamber works, and contemporary pieces, while championing many of today’s composers.”

It spoke of “insurmountable” challenges and an “unsustainable financial infrastructure.”  We have exhausted every effort and hope the larger orchestral industry and classical music philanthropic community take note to shore-up these important pre-professional orchestras like AYS which directly benefit them.”

This latest news is part of a larger depressing trend worldwide to cut funding for music education at all levels, from grassroots to the top. Last month there was outrage over “mean and nasty cuts” to Melbourne Youth Orchestras, Australia.

India unfortunately lags far behind, not having a national youth orchestra in the truest sense of the term, with several concerts each season annually, and with year-round world-class mentoring. As a nation, we have our priorities elsewhere.

And in global terms, a 1953 cartoon, “The restaurant serves only one person” is still sadly topical: waiters fuss over a bloated representation of War while other, emaciated customers, the Arts, Sciences, Healthcare and Education look helplessly on.   

 (An edited version of this article was published on 31 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

The flip side of ’12th Fail’

My son’s school took its 8^th and 9^th standard students earlier this month to see ‘12^th Fail’,

the 2023 Hindi-language biographical drama film directed, produced and written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, based on the 2019 eponymous non-fiction book by Anurag Pathak about Manoj Kumar Sharma, who overcame extreme poverty to become an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer.

I totally get why school students should see it. It is an inspirational rags-to-riches story, with so many life lessons: Dare to dream big. Honesty is the best policy. Never ever give up. Try, try again until you succeed (or to borrow the film’s catchphrase: ‘Restart’).

I had heard a lot about ‘12th Fail’ but hadn’t yet seen it. Now that my son had gone to see it and liked it, I decided to see it too. (If you haven’t seen the film and wish to, stop reading here, as there are spoilers ahead).

I did come away impressed. But there was a disclaimer at the very beginning, that although the film was “inspired” by true events, “it is not a documentary/biography of any character depicted in the film. No scene should be construed to represent a true or accurate recreation of the actual events that transpired. The story and the relationship between the characters depicted in the film have been fictionalized. Any resemblance or similarity to any actual events, entities or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

So: what in the film is “an accurate recreation”, and what is a “fictionalized” account? I found an English translation of the book on which the film is based, and read through it. Maybe it reads better in Hindi, but the English translation is rather clumsy. However, there are so many scenes in the film that one assumes were “actual events that transpired” (for instance the theft of Manoj’s bag with his grandmother’s life savings on the bus to Gwalior) that are absent in the book.

I realise of course that any ‘biographical’ film has to truncate a lot, but there is a dizzying and frankly rather depressing timeline of “attempts” of the three-step (prelims, mains, interview) sequence of the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) qualifying exam of not just the main protagonist but his friend circle, with so many “failures” along the way, compressed into a short span. And there are the various state-level exams as well, to further thicken the plot.

As one fellow aspirant ‘Gauri bhaiya’ (who is also not in the book) explains, the odds are rather sobering in what he calls a game of ‘snakes and ladders.’ “Out of 200,000 Hindi-medium applicants for the UPSC, only 25-30 become IAS (Indian Administrative Service) or IPS officers. The remaining 199,970 go back to zero. Restart.” 

‘Guari bhaiya’ seems an invented composite character just for the film (part of the ‘artistic license’), but was it really necessary to have this very character come from a ‘backward caste’, who then explains that he is allowed six attempts (rather than the four in the ‘general’ category), and have him then fail even that last attempt? Caste is strangely absent in the book, a glaring omission in caste-discriminating India.

And then, wonder of wonders, the ever-selfless ‘Gauri bhaiya’ instead of returning home, opens a tea-stall named ‘Restart’, a ‘free UPSC guidance centre’ (again not in the book).

All the motivational rhetoric is of course necessary for young minds to hear and internalize, but what comes across in book and film and is painfully obvious in real life is the yawning chasm between rich and poor. It is no coincidence that the rich kids are fluent in English and able to afford expensive coaching classes for these entrance exams (which are conducted in English), while those from poorer, rural India, educated in vernacular-medium schools have to compete with their affluent peers at these incredibly tough exams with this added handicap of language (which comes across poignantly when Manoj misreads ‘Tourism’ as ‘Terrorism’). To me ‘12^th Fail’ is not just “the gripping narrative of a man who put his heart and soul into making the impossible possible” (as one publicity blurb puts it) but it is also a deafening indictment of our woefully skewed education system that offers English-medium instruction to a privileged few in urban India to the neglect of the remaining majority of our children and youth in suburban and rural India. Surely the abysmal annual UPSC exam pass percentage (0.015% according to the film) could be far higher if English-medium instruction was more uniformly distributed?

Another issue I found disturbing is the subtle emotional blackmail, the family pressure “of only returning wearing a police uniform” i.e. having passed the IPS exam. Pressure like that can be a double-edged sword. I knew a young Indian doctor in my UK years who repeatedly failed the PLAB (Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board), the qualifying exam to start working there as a doctor, incurring huge financial losses and borrowing money from friends and family, but felt he “couldn’t return home without getting a British postgraduate degree.” Eventually after many years it got too much for him and he did return, but the stress he endured was so unnecessary, from the real or imagined psychological pressure: “I can’t face my family and society unless I’m successful.”

There’s also the undiscussed issue of the girl-child’s education opportunities in the film. Manoj’s sister Rajni has to be content studying in the village and doing household chores. The only female students in Manoj’s friends circle are from well-to-do backgrounds. Maybe I’m nit-picking here, but it’s a thought.

What does one make of the media hype over lead actor Vikrant Massey getting a ‘tan look’ for the film? Would a lighter skin tone in hue-obsessed India make his role less believable? We can guess why. Poor India, literally, isn’t ‘fair.’

Around the same time, another article discussed school drop-outs and ‘12^th fails’ in celebrity Bollywood dynastic scions. What a stark contrast between the two Indias!

(An edited version of this article was published on 30 March 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)