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
07 Tuesday May 2024
Posted History, In Print, Inspiration, Milestones, Music, thoughts, Tribute
in200 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
05 Sunday May 2024
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)
30 Saturday Mar 2024
My son’s school took its 8th and 9th standard students earlier this month to see ‘12th 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 ‘12th 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 ‘12th 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)
25 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted Chamber music, Child's Play (India) Foundation, Culture, Education, England, Goa, In Print, India, Inspiration, Music, Pedagogy, violin
inI spent the first weekend of this month in Mumbai attending the opening concert of the Spring 2024 concert season of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI).
The season concert programme was quite daunting to any orchestra and is an indicator of the maturity and gravitas the SOI has reached in a remarkably short time span. The concert I attended on 2 February had on offer the contemplative Nocturne from Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, followed by Johannes Brahms’ formidable First Piano Concerto (Barry Douglas, soloist); and after the interval, Mendelssohn’s effervescent Fourth Symphony (the ‘Italian’) conducted by Gergely Madaras.
I wish I could have stayed on for the rest of the season: 6 February (Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture and Second Symphony; Kodály’s ‘Dances of Galánta’; Gergely Madaras conducting); 11 February (Hector Berlioz: Overture, Royal Hunt & Storm from The Trojans; and Les nuits d’été (Summer Nights) and Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 “Organ Symphony”; Sasha Cooke soprano, Martyn Brabbins conducting); and 16 February (Richard Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman; Edward Elgar Cello Concerto; and Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony; the “Pastorale”; Bryan Cheng cello, Martyn Brabbins conducting).
This is a formidable sequence of repertoire spaced for any orchestra just a few days apart. In season after season, year after year, the SOI continues to attract a stellar line-up of world-renowned soloists and conductors, tacit acknowledgement of the respect the orchestra has garnered in the rarefied world of classical music across the globe.
The Symphony Orchestra of India, based at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai, is India’s first and only professional orchestra.
It was founded in 2006 by NCPA Chairman Khushroo N. Suntook and internationally-renowned violin virtuoso Marat Bisengaliev, who serves as the Orchestra’s Music Director.
Several years before this, in my England years, I had encountered the dazzling wizardry of Marat Bisengaliev through two of his compact discs. The first had him playing the Polish virtuoso violinist, composer and pedagogue Henryk Wieniawski’s two technically demanding violin concertos and his ‘Faust’ fantasy (Fantaisie brillante sur Faust de Gounod, Op. 20) with the Polish National Radio Symphony (Katowice) under the baton of the celebrated Antoni Wit.
The second CD was also all-Wieniawski: his showpieces for violin and piano (John Lenehan).
I would listen to Bisengaliev’s playing over and over, at home and while driving to work, never dreaming that he would one day soon be such a game-changer for the standard of the performance and milieu for western classical music in my own country, and that I would in a few years be interacting with him and the rest of his team.
The SOI has worked with such renowned conductors as Carlo Rizzi, Martyn Brabbins, Charles Dutoit, Yuri Simonov, Jacek Kaspszyk, Lior Shambadal, Rafael Payare, Richard Farnes, Laurent Petitgirard, Alpesh Chauhan, Duncan Ward, Karl Jenkins, Mischa Damev, Evgeny Bushkov, Alexander Lazarev, Christoph Poppen, and more. Soloists appearing with the SOI have included Maria João Pires, Augustin Dumay, Simon O’Neill, Cédric Tiberghien, Alina Ibragimova, Stephen Hough, Stephen Kovacevich, Barry Douglas, Benjamin Grosvenor, Pavel Kolesnikov, Angel Blue, Zakir Hussain, Béla Fleck, Tamás Vásáry, and Lena Neudauer, amongst others.
International tours have seen the SOI perform in Moscow; Muscat; and Abu Dhabi. In 2016, the SOI presented three sold-out concerts in Switzerland. Le Temps hailed “the commitment, the enthusiasm, and the discipline of this ensemble, which played with ferocious energy and appetite.” In 2019, the SOI embarked on a six-concert tour to the United Kingdom, performing to delighted audiences in prestigious venues in London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Guildford, and Edinburgh, and garnering rave reviews. In 2023, the SOI returned to the UK to perform nine concerts across eight cities.
Apart from the mainstays of the symphonic repertoire, the NCPA and SOI have also presented large-scale productions, including fully-staged opera productions of Tosca, Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, and Madama Butterfly. In 2017, the SOI premiered a highly-acclaimed, innovative new production of La Bohème, conducted by Carlo Rizzi, featuring an international star cast, which was streamed globally on OperaVision. Most recently, a fully-staged production of Die Fledermaus was presented in 2022, in collaboration with the Hungarian State Opera.
The Orchestra’s core group of musicians is resident at the NCPA all year round and forms the SOI Chamber Orchestra. Additional players are recruited from a talented pool of professionals from around the world. The SOI Chamber Orchestra performs a regular series of concerts through the year at the NCPA and elsewhere around Mumbai and India. A monthly concert series at Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, the first regular music series there, has been running for nearly a decade. National tours have seen the SOI Chamber Orchestra perform in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Dehradun, and Pune, amongst other cities.
The Orchestra places great emphasis on education. Many SOI musicians are also teachers, working to develop the musical potential amongst young people in India. Musicians of the SOI conduct workshops, masterclasses and teacher-training programmes in various cities and a traineeship programme nurtures the talent of young musicians from around the country. Chief amongst the Orchestra’s educational initiatives is the SOI Music Academy which brings a professional level of teaching, previously not available in India, to gifted young musicians. Several graduates of the Academy are now pursuing music further in leading conservatories around the world and can often be heard performing as part of the SOI. Together, these programmes aim to raise the standard of Western classical music performance in India and grow the number of Indian musicians in the SOI.
Had the SOI been around in the 1980s, my own life trajectory would have been so different. I would have endeavoured to join its ranks immediately after finishing high school, and not chosen to pursue medicine. I keep telling GenNext that they don’t know how fortunate they are to have such a heaven-sent opportunity. Where else in India (or elsewhere on our subcontinent for that matter) can one hear, live, to world-class standard, a Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler or Sibelius symphony and so much more in the orchestral and chamber repertoire? And to actually be given a chance to be part of making such exhilarating music, I can think of no greater high than that.
That our very own maestro Zubin Mehta was so impressed with the high standard of the SOI when he conducted the orchestra last September says a lot. “I hope that other cities in India take an example and take inspiration from what’s happening in Mumbai,” he said. Goa, are you listening?
We at Child’s Play India Foundation have been in talks with the SOI since our inception, and I am so glad that their first music camp in Goa in collaboration with us was such a success that they are returning again this year (26 February to 3 March) with a string quartet (two violinists, a violist and a cellist) to engage with our youth, to teach students and to help teachers with technique and so many other matters musical.
I am confident that this partnership will grow ever stronger and will soon include assistance with other orchestral instruments, the woodwinds and brass. Such a valuable outreach on such fertile soil as Goa will certainly reap a rich harvest!
(An edited version of this article was published on 25 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
30 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted Books, Civil Rights, Culture, Education, Ethics, Family, History, In Print, Inspiration, Milestones, Music, Pedagogy, Radio, thoughts
inI couldn’t wait to watch ‘Maestro’,
the 2023 film focusing on the complex life of American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).
I was surprised to find Bradley Cooper in the title role. He seemed an unlikely fit to me. But he also directed it, co-wrote the script and co-produced it with heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, so it was obviously a labour of love.
It is impossible to do justice to such a larger-than-life personality, a veritable Colossus of the arts and humanities in the duration of a film (129 minutes in this case). ‘Maestro’ centres on the relationship between Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre.
There is a telling scene in the film where Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) is quite literally in Bernstein’s giant shadow as he conducts.
That the depiction of the Bernsteins’ turbulent family life got a ringing endorsement for their three children Jamie, Alexander and Nina says a lot about the research that went into the making of the film and the sensitivity with which very intimate subjects were handled.
Although I would have loved more focus on the many professional highlights of Bernstein’s career, the snippets of his music in the soundtrack became a springboard for me to dive into works I hadn’t heard before (his 1983 opera ‘A Quiet Place’; ‘For Felicia Montealegre’ from “Four Anniversaries”(1948); ‘To what you said’ from his 1977 Songfest: A cycle of American poems for six singers and orchestra) and revisit other that I had.
The film however didn’t touch at all upon Montealegre’s social activism that also defined her. She unwittingly popularised the term ‘radical chic’ in 1970 when a fundraiser she hosted at the Bernsteins’ Park Avenue apartment to support the families of Panther 21 (members of the Black Panther Party who had been jailed for nine months without set trial dates or financial resources to cover legal fees and their families’ economic hardships) became the subject of a cover story in ‘New York’ magazine titled “Radical Chic: that Party at Lenny’s.” Social activism was important to Bernstein too; he fought all his life for a variety of political and humanitarian causes, from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War protests to nuclear disarmament to advocacy during the AIDS crisis.
Also, what some have described as “Bernstein’s greatest gift to music”, his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, get just a passing mention in the film. To me this is unfortunate, as those concerts were and still are a source of inspiration and education to generations of young people. They are still a benchmark and a reference point for music educators everywhere.
This year is the centenary of the Young People’s Concerts, “the longest-running series of family concerts of classical music in the world.”
The New York Philharmonic’s annual “Young People’s Concerts” series was founded in 1924 by conductor “Uncle” Ernest Schelling “to encourage a love of music in children.” From 1930, radio helped disseminate the series ever wider, across the US and Europe. Schelling and the Philharmonic also went directly into New York City’s public schools, presenting “School Day” concerts to young students.
Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic took the concerts to a new level of popular attention. The advent of television coupled with his enthusiasm and ability to explain musical, theoretical and philosophical subjects of any degree of complexity in the simplest terms that a child would understand, were a winning combination.
The Bernstein Young People’s concerts aired on television from 1958 to 1972, bringing “cutting-edge music pedagogy into the homes of millions.” He overcame the challenge of bridging the gap between music appreciation and technical discussions about music through spontaneity, humour, and an interactive approach through which children were quizzed and otherwise included in the program both as players and audience members.
Alicia Kopfstein-Perk, Ph.D., is an “enthusiastic postmodernist” who has taught musicianship, guitar, music history, and general education courses at American University Washington DC since 1998, and musicianship for the Washington National Opera Summer Institute since 2009. Her book ‘Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts’ studies the social, cultural, and political aspects of Bernstein’s ground-breaking award-winning TV programs.
One theme running through her book is Bernstein’s ability to transcend what she refers to as “brows,” as in “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “middlebrow.”
The book begins with a Foreword by Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore and São Paolo Symphony Orchestras and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Although only nine when her father took her to one of Bernstein’s concerts with the New York Philharmonic, she “instinctively knew that this man conducting the orchestra and enthusiastically explaining everything to the audience was much more than a conductor.” “From that day on he was my hero”, she writes. She turned to her father and whispered: “That’s what I’m going to do when I grow up; I want to be a conductor!” And so she did, actually becoming Bernstein’s conducting student at Tanglewood.
Alsop recollects a wonderful evening talking to Bernstein about Schumann’s Second Symphony. When she remarked that one phrase reminded her of a Beatles song, “he promptly sat down and played (and then sang) ALL of the Beatles songs!” For him there was no differentiation between highbrow and lowbrow. He said “there is only one brow” –because we all come from one human race.
Kopfstein-Perk’s book has a chapter, “Highbrow, Lowbrow and Middlebrow joined.” “One’s choice of cultural product was inextricably linked to social class” going back to ancient Greece. Linking the concept of “brow” to taste began with the mistaken idea that physical brow shape reflected intellectual capacities and taste culture, linked to the eighteenth-century pseudo-science of phrenology. So “highbrow” signified someone who had (or pretensions of) superior intellect, learning and interests- attributes ascribed to the wealthy and cultivated: in the US, the Anglo-American elite. To phrenologists, lowbrows were “immigrants, dark-skinned ethnic groups and the poorly educated working class” – the “folk/masses/hoi polloi”. (By this yardstick, Bernstein’s family origins were “lowbrow in every way”!)
By the early twentieth century, economic level and/or breeding were added to class, age, religion, ethnic or regional origin as influencers of “brow” or “taste culture.”
Interestingly, jazz and so much Latin American dance forms such as the tango; and the Portuguese fado were once regarded as “lowbrow,” and their “elevation” to “highbrow” taste is amusingly recent.
1950s America thought of “lowbrow” culture (e.g. music by African-Americans such as jazz) as an entry-point to “miscegenation, sexuality, violence, juvenile delinquency and general moral decline.”
Bernstein however “joyfully embraced anything of quality no matter what the “brow” level”, as is evident in his Young People’s concert archives, ‘Omnibus’ (from early in his career)
and ‘The Unanswered Questions: Six Talks at Harvard’ (known as the Norton lectures, from later in his career),
all of which are fortunately accessible on YouTube.
From the rank novice to the musicologist, each episode is entertainingly educational. In “What is a mode?” (1966), for instance,
Bernstein demonstrates the use of Dorian mode in Debussy (Fêtes), Gregorian chant, rock’n’roll (the just-released ‘Along comes Mary’) and Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony on equal terms. One brow, one human race.
(An edited version of this article was published on 30 January 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)
21 Sunday Jan 2024
Posted Books, Education, England, Film, History, In Print, India, Inspiration, Mathematics, Religion
inI’m quite a fan of ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, the comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Waterson, that follows the antics of the title characters: Calvin, a precocious, mischievous, and adventurous six-year-old boy; and Hobbes, his sardonic stuffed tiger. There’s guaranteed humour and wit in each episode, but quite often you also get bite-sized profundity.
In one strip, Calvin tells Hobbes: You know, I don’t think maths is a science. I think it’s a religion.” He explains, “All these equations are like miracles. You take two numbers and they magically become a new number. No-one can say how it happens. You either believe it or you don’t. This whole book is full of things that have to be accepted on faith. It’s a religion!” Then comes the punchline: “As a maths atheist, I should be excused from this.”
A real-life six-year-old wouldn’t express himself so philosophically, but it underscores our adult tendency to accept many ‘truths’ without question when presented as scientific fact, and the idiocy of playing the ‘atheist’ card to rubbish anything incomprehensible or unpalatable to us.
This intersection between mathematics and religion came up quite innocuously, in the post.
Our son tried to read the fine print (obscured by the postmark) of the long-winded name on a postage stamp: “Srinivasa Ramanujan.”
This is one of the many lacunae in our education system: I hadn’t been taught about the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) in my school or college syllabus, despite taking Mathis in the 11th and 12th standard. It was my father’s ad hoc ‘home-schooling’ that made me aware of him, even though I was only vaguely aware why he was such a towering if unsung figure.
When it became obvious our son hadn’t yet been taught about Ramanujan in school, I sat him down to watch ‘The Man who knew Infinity’ the 2015 Ramanujan biopic starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.
I stumbled on ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan’ (1991) by Robert Kanigel (on which the film is based) on the bookshelf of a cellist friend in England in the early 2000s and asked to borrow it.
It proved such a good read that I bought my own copy. But then life and work took over and I had to shelve it unfinished, for later reading.
Now was the perfect time to pick it up again. It delves into complex matters mathematical, physical, metaphysical but in extremely easy-to-read language.
It has been said that “what Mozart was to music and Einstein was to physics, Ramanujan was to math.”
The importance of his “lost notebook” (found by accident in 1976) containing groundbreaking new formulas from the last year of Ramanujan’s lamentably, tragically, short life has been compared to the discovery of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony.
“A century later, these formulas are being used to understand the behaviour of black hole,” is a statement made at the end of the film.
His mentor at Trinity College Cambridge G.H. Hardy famously said of the first time he examined Ramanujan’s theorems: “They must be true because if they were not true, no-one would have the imagination to invent them.”
Hardy, an eminent mathematician himself, would later say “I have never met his equal, and I can compare him only to Euler or Jacobi;” high praise indeed, given that Euler and Jacobi were not just “great mathematicians”, but shared with Ramanujan a deep insight, a knack for manipulating formulas, a delight in mathematical form for its own sake.
As late as 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in Ramanujan’s writings about “simple properties” and “similar outputs” for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death.
The recurring question in any discourse on Ramanujan’s life is: what was the source of such highly original, profound insight coming “out of nowhere” in an essentially untrained mathematician from fin de siècle small-town South India?
To Ramanujan, the answer was crystal clear: his family deity Namagiri (consort of Vishnu avatar Narasimha). It was she who gave him such access to mathematical secrets hermetically sealed in abstract vaults that another Cambridge mathematician J.E. Littlewood remarked, “Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan’s personal friends.”
“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God,” Ramanujan once said.
Kanigel devotes a whole chapter to “Ramanujan, Mathematics and God.”
Hardy, an avowed “evangelical atheist” dismissed notions of the supernatural or divine in Ramanujan’s insights, and Ramanujan, sensing this in his host, may have downplayed its role to him. But to Ramanujan’s Indian friends and colleagues there was never any doubt. An acquaintance was told by him of seeing in dreams “the drops of blood, that according to tradition heralded the presence of Narasimha” and then “scrolls of the most complex complicated mathematics used to unfold before his eyes.”
In Ramanujan’s own words: “While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”
The divine apparitions would advise him on life decisions too: when the time was ripe to travel to England, when to publish his research.
Kanigel muses: “Did Ramanujan’s religious beliefs bestow on him his mathematical gift? Certainly not, since otherwise all those with kindred beliefs would share it. Nor did he necessarily gain mathematical insights through anything like the means he thought he did and to which he assigned credit. Nor, to state the obvious, does the fact that Ramanujan believed what he believed mean that what he believed is so.”
Kanigel further argues that “[Ramanujan’s] openness to supernatural influences hinted at a mind endowed with slippery, flexible, and elastic notions of cause and effect that left him receptive to what those equipped with more purely logical gifts could not see; that found union in what others saw as unrelated; that embraced before prematurely dismissing. His was a mind, perhaps, whose critical faculty was weak compared to its creative and synthetical.” Without the “protective screen” of the critical faculty, Kanigel asks, “did he thus remain more open to the mathematical Light?”
But Ramanujan was not alone among mathematicians in holding strong religious beliefs. Newton was an unquestioning believer and studied theology. Euler “never discarded a particle of his Calvinistic faith.” Cauchy “was forever trying to convert other mathematicians to Roman Catholicism.”
Someone once said of Hardy that his “deep reverence for mathematics and for all things of the mind was precisely of the same kind as impels other people to the worship of God. The only enigma about Hardy is that this never seemed to occur to him.”
Gauss, although not religiously minded, once wrote that he proved a theorem “not by dint of painful effort but so to speak by the grace of God.”
As Scottish mathematician E.T. bell said, “A rational mind is the queerest mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.”
Even the least devout among the mathematicians, according to Kanigel “contained the barest breath of ambivalence or humility in the face of the mysterious origins of creativity.”
(An edited version of this article was published on 21 January 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
14 Sunday Jan 2024
Around Christmastime my wife recommended that I watch the 2019 Gurinder Chadha comedy-drama film ‘Blinded by the Light’ on Netflix,
inspired by the life of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor (b. 1971) and his love of the works of American singer-songwriter Bruce (“The Boss”) Springsteen (b. 1949).
There was the music angle of course, but like every other Chadha film, it didn’t disappoint when it came to her trademark themes: a coming-of-age tale, the dilemma faced by second-generation British Asians walking a tightrope between two cultures and value systems. I heartily recommend it to you, especially if you are in need of a pick-me-up in these rather gloomy times.
It has meant that side-by-side with Christmas music, I’ve been immersed in the music of Bruce Springsteen most of the Christmas week. There is so much about him and his music that I didn’t know before. It is a testament to Springsteen’s heart-felt earthy lyrics that they could speak so compellingly to a Pakistani-origin boy growing up in a very orthodox Muslim family, becoming “a direct connection to everything that is significant and meaningful in life.”
I got hold of Manzoor’s 2007 memoir ‘Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll’
that inspired the film. There is so much that I can relate to. I spent several years as a general practitioner in High Wycombe, not far from or dissimilar to Luton (where Manzoor grew up) in terms of its demographic. My patient list was around 80% Pakistani, so Manzoor’s family circumstances were like so many families under my care then: working-class, parents recently arrived from the home country, and children torn between “not letting the parents down” but also open to what Britain had to offer and daring to dream far bigger than their parents could ever do or even comprehend.
My Pakistani patient population were initially wary of the ‘new Indian doctor’ in the practice, but I think the fact I could speak and understand (to a working degree) their language (Urdu, not Punjabi, although I can understand a fair amount of the latter now) eventually won them over. I don’t really follow cricket but would check the scores before coming to work so I could know what they were on about. They would make a point of congratulating me every time India won or played well. The other banter we shared was mangoes. They would insist Pakistani mangoes (Langra, Dussehri etc) were the best, and I would swear by our Goan ‘Malcurada.’
Manzoor’s description of the 1971 war from the Karachi perspective was an interesting counterfoil to my own memories of the conflict from Goa.
My knowledge of Springsteen’s music didn’t extend far beyond his famous hits: ‘Born in the USA’;
‘Dancing in the Dark’;
‘Cover Me.’
So this was a pretext to widen my listening, to all the other songs (especially their lyrics) that featured in the film (incidentally, Manzoor co-wrote its script with Chadha) and the book.
When Manzoor first listened to Springsteen (or “popped his Springsteen cherry”, as he puts it), he had expected music and singing, but Bruce wasn’t singing; “he was just talking”, with an acoustic guitar playing in the background. That sums up the Springsteen magic rather well. If you pay attention to his lyrics, they’re pretty deep.
The title ‘Greetings from Bury Park’ (Bury Park is where Manzoor grew up in Luton) is an obvious take on ‘Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ’, Springsteen’s debut studio album.
Each chapter bears the name of a song or album by the Boss: ‘My Father’s House’;
‘The Ties that Bind’;
‘Blood Brothers’;
‘The Promised Land’;
‘Factory’;
‘Better Days’;
‘Reason to Believe’;
‘Land of Hope and Dreams,’
cleverly employed to focus back and forth on Manzoor’s life story.
When Manzoor’s bestie ‘Roops’ Amolak met Springsteen and gushed how much the music had touched their lives, the ‘Boss’ responded, “That was always the plan, y’know. To make music that meant something to people. That’s why I do what I do; you are the reason.”
Manzoor has been to over 150 Springsteen concerts; I’ve been to nil. I’ve got some serious catching up to do.
I learned a lot delving into Springsteen’s life. Being of Dutch, Irish and Italina descent, his surname is Dutch and is topographic, literally translating to “jump stone” and meaning a stepping stone used on unpaved streets or between two houses. It could be a metaphor for his music, connecting people across cultures.
Springsteen was raised Catholic, and although he rebelled as a boy at St. Rose of Lima Catholic school in Freehold New Jersey against the “harsh treatment” and rules imposed by the nuns there, some of his later music reflects a Catholic ethos and includes Irish-Catholic hymns with a rock music twist.
In a 2012 interview He said that his faith had given him a “very active spiritual life” but joked that this “made it very difficult sexually” and added “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
It must have been the Catholic upbringing that dictated his attitude to artificial stimulants. He didn’t touch alcohol until 22, and must be one of the very few rock musicians of his stature to have never done drugs.
He further asserted that it was his Catholic upbringing rather than his political ideology that most influenced his music.
His music has universal appeal that transcends boundaries of faith; Manzoor is the embodiment of its ‘catholic’ appeal, in the broadest sense of the word.
In his 2016 autobiography ‘Born to Run’,
Springsteen stated that although he rejected religion in his earlier years, “I have a personal relationship with Jesus. I believe in his power to save, love […] but not to damn.” In terms of his lapsed Catholicism, he has stated that he “came to ruefully and bemusedly understand that once you’re a Catholic you’re always a Catholic”. He elaborated, “I don’t participate in my religion but I know somewhere… deep inside… I’m still on the team.”
In a 2018 interview, he said, “You get more spiritual as you grow older. You’re closer to the other world, so maybe that has something to do with it … I do still find myself drawn to the Catholic Church. I visit my small church quite often … I continue to feel the Catholic Church’s imprint on me rather strongly.”
It doesn’t mean he doesn’t question his church on some moral issues (abortion, gay marriage for instance). But as the Catholic Herald put it, “none of it erases the Catholic mark on Springsteen’s significant lyrical achievements.”
In 2021, Springsteen returned to his childhood school and did a concert in the gym, “right under the cross too”, quite literally, he joked. He dedicated ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’
(a song imbued with Christian references) to his teacher Sister Charles Marie. “She really taught me a lot about kindness. She was very lovely and very compassionate.”
My own faith has its own ups and downs, but like the Boss, “somewhere… deep inside… I’m still on the team.” Manzoor hai!
(An edited version of this article was published on 14 January 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
05 Sunday Nov 2023
“He’s extremely talented.” “She doesn’t have the talent for singing.” We’ve all heard variants of these comments, even if we haven’t necessarily said them ourselves.
The dictionary definition of ‘talent’ is “a natural aptitude or skill.” It implies that one is either born with it or one isn’t, like some genetic luck of the draw.
The Japanese violinist, philosopher and educator Shinich Suzuki (1898-1998) is world-renowned as founder of the international Suzuki ‘method’ of music education for people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds.
As someone involved in music education myself since the inception of our music charity Child’s Play India Foundation and having experienced first-hand the use of the Suzuki method in our children and elsewhere, I found the book ‘Suzuki: The Man and his Dream to Teach the Children of the World’ (Harvard University Press 2022) by Japanese-American historian Eri Hotta a fascinating read.
Suzuki disliked the word ‘method’ to qualify his teaching. His goal was “not education of the violin, but education by the violin.” It embraced “all children, of great or small potential, whether it lay in music” or elsewhere. “To Suzuki, the achievement of a certain level of mastery on the violin was only an example – albeit a powerful one – of what any or all children could accomplish with proper guidance from an early age.”
Hotta delves deeply into “the loaded and cherished concept of talent” and feels Suzuki doesn’t address it very effectively, leading “to more questions than answers.”
Talent Education is an important feature of the Suzuki philosophy. But Hotta asks “why focus on talent instead of something neutral, like ability? Why try to democratise a concept universally understood as exclusionary, even as less value-laden concepts also exist?”
Furthermore, she tells us, in Japanese, ‘talent’ is etymologically related to ‘genius’. The Japanese character for ‘genius’ literally means ‘heaven-sent talent.’
The English word comes from the Greek ‘talanton’, signifying a unit of weight or sum of money. It therefore implies something quantitative, something one has more or less of. Suzuki rejected this notion. He felt all children, irrespective of background and individual differences, should be measured against their own “raw” abilities, not anyone else’s. He believed that “we can all become talented in our own ways.” To him, talent is not a static inherited quality like, say, eye colour. Rather, talent is like a muscle that can be exercised and strengthened.
To support his argument, Suzuki pointed to the universal capacity for language acquisition among children, being able to speak and understand the language(s) that surrounded them at an early age. He felt that this ability could be applied to general education, not just music.
Children pick up languages from parents and society in “a spirit of love, patience and self-reflection.” That same spirit, if applied to all education, would give just as astounding results.
Suzuki saw from experience that the existing notions of ‘talent’ (and also other labels like ‘genius’ and ‘prodigy’) were actually harmful to children and society at large.
“Students who believed in their own talent were at risk of becoming egotists, and parents who believed in their children’s talent became obsessed and hypercompetitive, provoking destructive rivalries and damaging their children emotionally and morally.”
He therefore believed that “no child should be called a genius in music or in any other pursuit.”
To Suzuki, ‘innate potential’ and ‘raw aptitude’ were inborn, while “talent came to those who stretched their latent potential through nurture and effort.”
Although today he is remembered for the Suzuki ‘method’, a system for teaching the learning the violin and other instruments, what he intended and introduced in 1941 and drove his life’s work was much more than that: “talent education aimed at nothing less than a social revolution.”
According to Suzuki there were no education drop-outs in this world; only “dropped-outs” who had been compromised by adults.
Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling 2008 book ‘Outliers’
examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. A common theme throughout the book is the’10,000-Hour Rule’
based on a 1993 study by Andres Ericsson and others. In their groundbreaking paper ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’, they assert that “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice.” Suzuki’s ‘Talent Education’ (1941) had made this point over half a century earlier.
Ericsson et al observe: “The search for stable heritable characteristics that could predict or at least account for the superior performance of eminent individuals has been surprisingly unsuccessful.” However, they continue,” The conviction in the importance of talent appears to be based on the insufficiency of alternative hypotheses to explain the exceptional nature of expert performance.”
But, you may think, what harm could there be in using the word ‘talent’ or ‘talented’ if it is well-intentioned, right? It seems like such a harmless, nice compliment. But the word can cut both ways, and even play psychological mind-games with parents, teachers and students, as Suzuki himself observed nearly a century ago now.
The label ‘talented’ in the best-case scenario can spur the child, parents and teachers to work even harder at that skill. But if all it does is convey the notion that the child has ‘already got it’, it can foster complacency, lulling one into thinking that one needn’t work so hard if the magic is ‘already there.’
The consequences can be demoralising for the support system of those typecast as ‘less talented’ or ‘not talented’. It can sap the energy and confidence of that child, and parents and teachers may well decide not to invest so much time, energy and effort (and let’s face it, expense for lessons and commuting to and fro) on what can be erroneously perceived at least subconsciously, as a ‘lost cause.’
The biggest obstacle to any ‘extra-curricular’ pursuit in India, be it music, drama, sport or whatever, is the staggering academic burden, from school through college to higher studies. Families have to make superhuman sacrifices to achieve the right balance, doing justice to both without neglecting one in favour of the other.
There have been critics of the 10,000-Hour ‘Rule’. My reading of the data behind it is that expert performers put in the hard work to get there. It doesn’t mean that mindless clocking of hours is a passport to success. If the hours of practice are not focussed and intelligently structured, they will not be useful. But if those conditions are met, then it is only logical that the earlier in life one begins the pursuit the better. Precious years in the lives of our children unnecessarily slip by because parents are not mindful of the advantages of starting out early.
It is no coincidence that there are families with a ‘tradition’ of sport or music, etc. We could facilely assume the trait is hereditary, that the child is “a born musician or sportsperson.” But it can also be interpreted as the early beginning of those 10,00 hours due to a favourable nurturing milieu for that pursuit in that familial environment.
If you are a parent reading this, the earlier you detect, nurture and channel your child’s “raw ability”, the better.’
(An edited version of this article was published on 05 November 2023 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
(An edited version of this article was published on 13 November 2023 in Serenade Music Magazine)
24 Sunday Sep 2023
Posted England, In Print, Inspiration, Music, Piano
inThe 2023 edition of the eight-week long BBC Proms festival finally ended with a crash, boom and wallop on 9 September. It had me glued for all that time to internet radio, so the abrupt absence of the daily ritual is a little disorienting.
It has been a remarkable season in so many respects. One comes across new names all the time in the highly competitive world of classical music. But BBC Proms 2023 surprised me not once, but twice, in highlighting musical excellence against unimaginable odds.
A few columns ago, I wrote about horn player Felix Klieser, born without arms, perform one of Mozart’s famous concertos for that instrument.
In the final week of the Proms, another revelation lay in wait for me.
Every year, there is a steady stream of rising stars emerging from South East Asia, So I didn’t bat an eyelid on reading that pianist Nobuyki Tsuji (b. 1988) would be performing at Prom 70. The night before the concert, BBC Radio 3 aired some bravura works for solo piano by Liszt and Chopin, played by Tsuji, whetting the listener’s appetite for his concert the following evening.
This year being the 150th birth anniversary of Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873 – 1943), the spotlight quite understandably was on his works in the festival programme.
Tsuji would be playing Rachmaninov’s epic Third Piano Concerto Op. 30 (Rach 3 to music aficionados) with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Venezuelan conductor Domingo Hindoyan.
It is a daunting work, “the ultimate Romantic piano concerto”, having the reputation of being one of the most fiendish, technically challenging piano concertos in the standard classical piano repertoire. Music writer Alex Wade called it “the K2 of the piano repertory: a savage, relentless exposure to everything the keyboard can throw at anyone who dares to take it on. Just as K2, despite its death rate of one in three, will always attract the elite in mountaineering circles, so too is Rach 3 the work that every pianist of genuine ability will want to master.”
Josef Hofmann, the pianist to whom the work is dedicated, never publicly performed it, saying that it “wasn’t for” him. American pianist-pedagogue Gary Graffman lamented he had not learned this concerto as a student, when he was “still too young to know fear.”
I tuned in the listen to Tsuji play with great anticipation. It was a passing comment by BBC Radio 3 presenter Martin Handley that informed me that Nobuyki Tsuji was “born blind”!
I listened to Tsuji play Rach 3 in stunned silence.
As if that were not enough, he responded to the robust applause and the trademark foot-stamping of the Proms audience with an encore – the Concert Etude Op 40 No 1 by Nikolai Kapustin, that Erica Jeal, music critic of the Guardian termed “two minutes of manic jazziness.”
The performance threw up so many questions. How did he play a concert that requires the use of the whole piano register, for one?
How does he “follow” the cues of a conductor in an orchestral concert like this one, for example? When asked if he had to “adjust” in any way, that evening’s concert Hindoyan replied, “I don’t do anything different. We work as I would with any soloist. He [Tsuji] has a special way to learn pieces. He learns them in a way that is so logical. And he’s extremely sensitive. So he really feels every instrument and every breath, from myself, from the concertmaster, from the orchestra. It’s just like he understands the piece from the real soul of it, from very deep. It’s fantastic.”
Such accolades, I learned have followed Tsuji from the start of his concert career. The great American pianist Van Cliburn said after Tsuji won the gold medal at the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, “He was absolutely miraculous. His performance had the power of a healing service. It was truly divine.”
Competition juror Richard Dyer, a chief music critic for The Boston Globe, said, “Very seldom do I close my notebook and just give myself over to it, and he made that necessary. I didn’t want to be interrupted in what I was hearing.”
Another piano legend Menahem Pressler said “I have the utmost admiration for [Tsujii]. God has taken his eyes, but given him the physical and mental endowment to encompass the greatest works of piano. For him to play the Chopin concerto with such sweetness, gentleness and sincerity — it’s deeply touching. I had to keep from crying when I left the room.”
“He shows that the human resources are virtually limitless, that there is practically nothing that a human being cannot do.”
At the Prom concert, Tsuji apparently “measured the keyboard” from time to time in the orchestral interludes when he wasn’t required to play, just to confirm that he was in the right position in front of the instrument. And he was led on and off by the conductor. Apart from this one wouldn’t have guessed he was blind.
Tsuji was born with a developmental disorder, microphthalmia, in both eyes, rendering him completely blind from birth. But his musical ability and interest manifested as early as two years of age, being able to play tunes on his toy piano that his mother hummed. Formal piano lessons began at age four.
Tsuji’s earliest childhood memory underscores the importance of giving children a platform, and having access to instruments: He happened to find a piano when he was four at a shopping mall when the family was on vacation and began playing “Ballade pour Adeline” (made famous by Richard Clayderman). “A crowd surrounded me and praised me. I can’t forget that feeling.”
Before long Tsuji was winning prizes and performing as a soloist and with orchestras.
But how does Tsuji learn a new work? Braille music scores are very rare, so he learns by ear. A team of pianists records scores along with specific codes and instructions written by composers, which Tsujii listens to and practices until he learns and perfects each piece.”
But Tsuji doesn’t “copy” what he hears, he clarified in a 2011 interview. His assistants make special cassette tapes (“music sheets for the ears””, he calls them, where “they split the piece into small sections, such as several bars, and record it (one hand at a time).” In this way he learns a short piece in a few days, but a big sonata or concerto can take about a month.
In a 2017 interview, Tsuji confirmed Hindoyan’s observation. When asked “How do you stay in time when you can’t see the conductor?” he replied: ” By listening to the conductor’s breath and also sensing what’s happening around me.”
When Tsuji was little, he once said to his parents, “I’m blind.” He could sense from their silence their sadness, so he quickly added “But I’m all right because I play the piano”, to try and console them.
“It’s my true feeling,” he told an interviewer many years later. ““It’s my closest friend. When I play, I feel a sense of unity with the piano.”
(An edited version of this article was published on 24 September 2023 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
08 Sunday Jan 2023
My first introduction to the qawwali (the devotional form of singing of the Sufis in the Indian subcontinent), was through Hindi films.
I’ve written in previous columns how our excuse for going to Hindi films was that “it helped us improve our Hindi.” In the 1970s and 1980s, my school years, Hindi wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today on Goan streets. So going to Hindi films could be justified as a legitimate educational exercise.
I miss the Hindi films of that era. The plots may have been hackneyed, the old ‘masala’ of lost siblings reuniting joyfully in adulthood to get even with the big bad guy, but today’s film music is not a patch on the songs and soundtracks of those films.
Song lyrics back then were sheer poetry; not only did they rhyme artfully, but there was wit and beauty in their craftsmanship. The qawwali ‘numbers’ were a good representation of all the above.
From the very beginning, with the film titles going up tri-scriptually (Devanagari, Roman and Urdu), they reflected the (at least superficial) inclusive zeitgeist of their time. Diversity was celebrated, as was ‘Unity in Diversity’. I don’t remember those decades as being idyllic, but we seemed to be collectively striving as a nation, as a people, toward an idyll of love and brotherhood. I miss that too.
The ‘filmi’ qawwali songs that stick out in my memory are the eponymous one from the 1977 musical drama film ‘Hum kisise kum nahin’
and ‘Parda hai Parda’ from ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ (from the same year)
but there were many more.
Those ‘filmi’ qawwalis, more often than not, necessarily dealt with romantic love, between the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’. It took me a while to learn that the ‘filmi’ setting was but a tiny fraction of much larger genre of qawwali music and the Sufi devotional element that defines it.
My exposure to qawwali has admittedly been sporadic, and mostly through recorded tracks that I happened to hear from time to time. A notable example is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s unforgettable ‘Dam Mast Qalandar’,
which got plagiarized and trivialized (although a runaway hit) into ‘Tu Cheez Badi hai Mast Mast’ in the 1994 Bollywood film ‘Mohra’.
But there’s nothing like the electricity and the buzz you get from a live concert; I think this is even truer for qawwali. A recording doesn’t quite capture the moment. Goa is not exactly the epicenter of qawwali, but whenever I know of performances that are convenient to get to, I do make the effort. The last pre-pandemic performance I can remember attending was by the Warsi Brothers at the Sufi Sutra festival in Panjim in 2016. I still remember their rendition of ‘Bhar Do Jholi Meri’ from that night.
I’ve mentioned in previous columns the many things I learned from reading ‘India in the Persianate Age: 1000- 1765’ by noted historian Richard M. Eaton.
It is not surprising that Indo-Persian Sufi singer, musician, poet and scholar Amir Khusrau (Abu’l Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau 1253–1325 AD) and his guru, the Sunni Muslim scholar, Sufi saint of the Chishti Order, and one of the most famous Sufis from the Indian Subcontinent Muhammad Nizamuddin Auliya (also known as Hazrat Nizamuddin, 1238 – 3 April 1325) find several mentions in the book.
Khusrau is widely regarded as the “father of qawwali,” fusing Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Indian singing traditions to create the genre.
So when I leafed through the programme brochure of the 2022 edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, I got excited by the blurb about ‘Jo Dooba So paar’, because not only was it going to be a qawwali performance, but it promised to “throw light on the person that Amir Khusrau was, his relationship with his Guru Nizamuddin Auliya and the advent of Qawwali through them. The interesting anecdotes and tales woven in a Dastaan accompanied with live Qawwali singing give insight about the essence of Sufism and the importance of the eternally relevant message of love among humankind.”
I was sold. Here was a chance to attend a live qawwali performance and also learn more about two spiritual figures I had recently read about, through the unique medium of the ‘dastaan,’ the ornate form of oral history brought to our subcontinent from Central Asia, Iran, Turkey and Azerbaijan.
I almost didn’t make it. I tried to pre-register on the Serendipity website but couldn’t. So I pitched up and was crestfallen to find a long queue of people like myself, patiently waiting 45 minutes before the start time, and as I took my place, the line behind me grew even longer. But I had a book to read, so I decided to wait it out like them.
It was well worth the wait. The close to two-hour performance gripped us all from start to finish.
I won’t pretend that I got every quip, every witticism or pun that was sung or spoken, but I think I got more than I would have done some decades ago; it’s a work in progress.
The Dastaan of the life of Khusrau was told in such an engaging manner that it drew everyone in, young and old alike. One could hear a little girl in the audience giggling uproariously at the point where young Khusrau was being chided by his calligraphy teacher in the madarassa. She had probably heard her own teachers assume that stern tone and heard a similar lecture.
In most qawwali mehfils I’ve attended before (or watched on film), there are one or two main singers, and the musicians and the rest of the singers comprise a sort of ‘back-up band’. This was a little different; there were two principal singers, Ajitesh Gupta and Mohit Agarwal, co-directors and story-tellers (dastaango). But the script was so skillfully crafted that at some point in the mehfil, every single other singer and musician got their moment to ‘stand out’, as it were, and give us at least a fleeting sample of their virtuosity.
I had guessed that the title of the show must be a quote from Khusrau, and looked it up when I got home:
“Khusrau Darya Prem ka, ulti vaa ki dhaar/Jo uthara so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar.” (The River of Love, Khusrau, upside down is its process; He that swims goes under, he that sinks in it, crosses.)
The more I read Khusrau and about him, the more I am struck by what a charismatic personality he must have been. He managed to not only survive but thrive in the reigns of two Mamluks, three Khiljis, and two Tughlaqs, and still speak his mind and write as forthrightly as he did.
“The eternally relevant message of love among humankind” resonated loud and clear at that heady mehfil. It was a welcome balm, a salve, an antidote to the poison of ‘nafrat’ (hate) we are subjected to every day.
(An edited version of this article was published on 08 January 2023 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)