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
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)
16 Sunday Oct 2022
Apologies to whoever wrote the saccharine ‘Titanic’ Celine Dion hit song lyrics. But I’m referring here to an actual heart, the embalmed heart of Dom Pedro I (1798 – 1834), nicknamed “the Liberator”, the first Emperor of Brazil.
Last month (7 September) marked the bicentenary of Brazil’s Declaration of Independence from Portugal (or more precisely the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves).
To mark the occasion, the former emperor’s heart was flown from Portugal to Brazil and received a ceremonial welcome usually accorded to a visiting head of state.
Brazil’s colonial history is inexorably tied to our own, as Ernestine Carreira’s exhaustively-researched (and thankfully translated into English) book ‘Globalising Goa (1660-1820): Change and Exchange in a former Capital of Empire’ underscores.
To quote one instance, emphasizing “Goa’s place in the vast trading chain across the Portuguese empire”: “Since the 1660s, the government of Lisbon had allowed vessels from the Carreira da Índia on their annual voyage to India to call in at Salvador de Bahia (Brazil’s capital then). It even set up a customs-house there in the 1730s, with plentiful supplies of pepper from the Malabar coast, (later to become one of the essential ingredients in local cuisine and called pimento do reino) and cotton textiles needed to clothe a constantly rising population and also as trading currency in African slave markets.”
Spices and cotton textiles as “trading currency” for slaves. I baulked the first time I read about it, but it comes up repeatedly.
Also: “We can suppose that the development of exchange with Brazil brought in large amounts of piasters and precious or semi-precious stones, which would also explain the boom in the jewellery business in Goa after the 1780s.”
With the independence of Brazil in 1822, the repercussions of the “loss of the consumer markets across the Atlantic” (soon followed by those from East Africa which were absorbed into Brazilian economic activity from the 1820s onwards) altered for better or worse the fortunes of those across “the vast trading chain of the Portuguese empire.” It “broke up the circulation of monetary flows”, reducing Goa to “a modest Asian suburb, a marginal figure within the globalized banking network which was as anachronistic in monetary terms as were its former dependencies Mozambique and Macau.”
“Goa’s monetary destiny was always linked to the fortunes of the sea and the incoming supplies of metal. After 1822, links with East Africa became less frequent”, and there was complete severance of links with Brazil by 1826.
Anyway, back to Emperor Pedro and his embalmed heart. Many historians are skeptical about the ceremonial fuss made over it, as it seemed an exploitation of a historical relic and an appeal to nationalism by current President Jair Bolsonaro in his campaign for re-election ahead of general elections earlier this month. “This is …..a farce by Bolsonaro, welcoming this heart like a visiting dignitary. We should ask ourselves what kind of way this is to think about history—a dead history stuck in time, like the stopped organ of a deceased emperor,” said historian Lilia Moritz Scwarcz to The Guardian.
Schwarcz has written several books on Brazil’s history, its independence era and Pedro I. I found an English translation of one of her books, ‘Brazil: A Biography’. The chapter ‘The Father leaves, the Son remains’ deals with a very convoluted period due to a succession crisis in the history of Portugal and her largest overseas colony Brazil. The father was Dom João IV and the son, Pedro (who would become Pedro I of Brazil and IV of Portugal). As the chapter title suggests, the father left for Lisbon while the son remained in Brazil.
But by 1821, matters had come to a head. As Schwarcz analyses in her book: “If he (Pedro) left, Brazil would declare independence; if he stayed, it would remain united, but would no longer accept orders from the Portuguese Courts.”
The clamour for independence only grew. When the Cortes (Portuguese Courts) dissolved the central government in Rio de Janeiro and ordered Pedro’s return, he was presented with a petition containing 8,000 signatures that begged him not to leave. He acquiesced, “Since it is for the good of all and the general happiness of the Nation, I am willing. Tell the people that I am staying.”
When Pedro got word on 7 September 1822 that the Cortes would not accept self-governance in Brazil and would punish those who defied its orders, he is famously said to have mounted his bay mare and uttered dramatically before those assembled, “Friends, the Portuguese Cortes wished to enslave and persecute us. As of today our bonds are ended. By my blood, by my honour, by my God, I swear to bring about the independence of Brazil. Brazilians, let our watchword from this day forth be ‘Independence or Death!'” The date is celebrated by Brazil for this reason.
I happened to tune in recently to BBC Radio3, a radio station devoted to classical music, and was surprised to hear Portuguese (in the unmistakably nasal Brazilian accent) being sung to a marching tune played by a wind band. It turned out to be ‘Hino da Independência‘ (Independence Anthem, not to be confused with Brazil’s national anthem), a Brazilian official patriotic song commemorating the country’s declaration of independence from Portugal, and composed in 1822 by Emperor Pedro himself,
with lyrics by poet Evaristo da Veiga.
The radio station had prepared a programme celebrating Brazil’s bicentenary, and the rest of the segment was devoted to more popular Brazilian music.
The presenter Sean Rafferty (who incidentally visited Goa some years ago) wryly commented that the only other composer-monarch (at least in European history) was England’s Henry VIII, who evidently found the time to write songs and instrumental pieces when he wasn’t marrying, divorcing or beheading his six wives. (To add insult to injury, one of his song lyrics goes: “I do no wrong; I love true where I did marry.”)
Pedro’s anthem has ten verses (of which only four are usually sung) with a chorus between each verse and an eight-bar ‘introduction preceding each verse. The music is catchy, jaunty and stirring, in short everything you’d want in an anthem. The poet must have exhausted most of the Portuguese words that rhyme with ‘Brazil’ in the lyrics. One verse (usually left out) even has ‘viril’ (virile) referring to Pedro himself, and perhaps apt, given his reputation as “incorrigible womanizer.”
Pedro’s express request was that upon his death his heart be removed and preserved in Portugal (where it found a home in the Church of Our Lady of Lapa, Porto), while the rest of his body would remain in Brazil (where it is interred with his two wives at the Monument to the Independence of Brazil in São Paulo).
Pedro was an ardent champion for the abolition of slavery, terming it not only “an evil, and an attack against the rights and dignity of the human species” but “a cancer that devours the morality” of any nation. So the line in Pedro’s anthem, banishing ‘temor servil’ (another rhyme with ‘Brazil’), driving away fear of slavery was ‘heart’-felt and no empty platitude.
(An edited version of this article was published on 16 October 2022 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 23 October 2022 in Scroll.in)
17 Thursday Feb 2022
This year, the Persian Gulf National Day will be a milestone one.
It falls on the 10th day of Ordibehesht (the second month of the Solar Hijri calendar), coinciding with 29 or 30 April of the Gregorian calendar and commemorates the day that the combined forces of the Safavid Empire and the British East India Company captured Hormuz (Ormuz in Portuguese) and expelled the Portuguese from the Strait of Hormuz in 1622, exactly four centuries this year.
I get interested in such events as they are relevant to our own history.
The Strait of Hormuz is situated between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
It provides the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean and is one of the world’s most strategically important chokepoints.
A chokepoint essentially is any geographic feature that confers strategic military advantage by those controlling it over others traversing it due to its narrowing.
This is why, in 1507, to thwart the existing spice trade route in Indian Ocean, Afonso de Albuquerque took Hormuz after a bloody sea battle, subduing the then most powerful naval power in the Gulf, with only six decaying ships and about 500 men under his command.
His cunning and superior firepower carried the day, but the victory was short-lived. Mutiny in the ranks and inadequate manpower compelled him to withdraw. Albuquerque vowed not to cut his beard until he reconquered Hormuz. It may explain why he is so long-bearded in portraits,
(and why we refer to the Portuguese as ‘vhoddle haddache’) as that didn’t happen until 1515!
The assault fleet (27 vessels, 1,500 Portuguese, and 700 ‘Malabarese’) set sail from Goa to accomplish this.
We know of the conquest (and reconquest) of Goa in 1510. What is also interesting is that Albuquerque lost no time in proceeding the following year to seize another chokepoint, the Strait of Malacca.
I finished reading Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’,
a gripping read which also makes some points that bring our history sharply into focus. For instance, in the chapter ‘Chokepoints’, he mentions the relevance even today of the same maritime chokepoints that the Portuguese (and other European colonial powers) coveted in the sixteenth century: the strait of Hormuz (through which flow 40% of the world’s oil exports), the Strait of Malacca (vital for the transportation of oil to China, South Korea and Taiwan; “a larger segment of the economy than Europe or North America”); the southern tip and the Horn of Africa. Then it was spices, today it is oil.
Ghosh adds: Goa was like the centre of a spider’s web, connected to every outpost by an invisible filament” in the 1500s.
But the web began to unravel with time. In 1622, a combined English East India Company (EIC) and Persian expedition successfully captured the Portuguese garrison at Hormuz Island after a ten-week siege, thus opening up Persian trade with England in the Persian Gulf. (Exchanging the Portuguese presence for an English one would be like the proverbial frying pan and fire, but that would become apparent much later).
It put the English in an awkward position. Although Portugal and Spain were still in a dynastic union (which would persist from 1580 to 1640), England and Portugal were not at war, but actually beholden to an earlier treaty. But a percentage of the proceeds from the war booty silenced the indignant protestations of King James I and the Duke of Buckingham to the EIC.
However, this inevitably strained relations between the Portuguese (Estado da Índia) and the English in the region.
The fall of Hormuz affected Goa, the “centre of the spider’s web”. I keep returning to Ernestine Carreira’s seminal book ‘Globalising Goa (1660-1820): Change and exchange in a former capital of empire’.
With each re-reading, more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place.
The Estado got involved in the currency trade by bringing precious metals (e.g. silver Larims among others) into Goa (where a Casa da Moeda or Mint was established since 1510) through the Persian Gulf and other routes.
Carreira writes: “As the emporium of the most far-flung seaborne networks in the world at the time, Goa in the first decades of the sixteenth century became one of the hubs for the reception, issue, speculation, and distribution of all cash currencies circulating in Europe, Africa and Asia. It was without a doubt one of the most cosmopolitan monetary spaces in the sixteenth century.”
One of the reasons for Goa’s ascent as Asia’s monetary centre at the time was “its exceptional ability to assure supplies of precious metals. Its vast seaborne network enabled it to enrich imports to Lisbon and the Persian Gulf with precious metals from mines in Asia” as well.
Living in a heritage house that once was the Casa da Moeda Goa in the 1800s,
such information naturally excites me greatly. Goa ought to have a world-class numismatics and maritime museum, to reflect its central place in world history. In not doing so merely to airbrush or ignore our colonial past, we are cutting off our proverbial nose to spite our face. Other former colonies have not only reconciled with their history, but charge visitors good money for entry into such museums. We could and should too.
The expulsion of the Portuguese from Hormuz, and successively the rest of the Persian Gulf in and after the 1620s,
then Japan (1639) and lastly the decline in shipping by the Carreira da Índia (after the breakup of the Spanish-Portuguese Dynastic Union in 1640), severely disrupted the flow of precious metals, especially American silver, favouring the rise of the Mughal port of Surat over Goa.
The main reason that the Estado would later lose much of the vital Provincia do Norte (Chaul; Bassein or Vasai) would be the lack of necessary cash reserves to finance the war effort against the Marathas. In several cases, the Estado inhabitants would melt down their own jewellery and Church silverware to buy weapons.
The road in Panjim presently named after noted freedom fighter Tristão de Bragança Cunha (1891-1958),
running from the vicinity of Varsha book store and ending at the junction of six roads (John Paul building, near the old Praça do Comercio, Church square) was once named Rua de Ormuz, to mark the place of this Persian Gulf chokepoint in history. By a strange coincidence, T.B. Cunha shares part of this name with the Portuguese naval commander Tristão da Cunha,
who with Albuquerque seized the Gulf port of Socotra in 1506 as a prelude to the conquest of Hormuz the following year.
Reading about the flow of mined metals across the world, and Goa’s place in the ‘web’ and thinking Goa’s contemporary troubled equation with mining, I couldn’t observing how, at some basic level, very little had changed. Empires have been replaced by state-corporate nexuses that get fabulously wealthy, while the tiny cogs in the wheels of the ludicrously lucrative process benefit little, if at all. And then, as now, there’s an environmental cost incurred. The repercussions of that incremental planetary debt are being felt with increasing frequency in the form of climate change catastrophes, as Ghosh spells out both in the ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ and his earlier book ‘The Great Derangement.’
(An edited version of this article was published on 17 February 2022 in my column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Navhind Times Goa India)
26 Thursday Aug 2021
Posted Child's Play (India) Foundation, England, Fun, Heritage, History, In Print, Milestones, Music, Radio
inThe first wedding gift my wife Chryselle and I received was several months in advance of the date, on another continent.
We had gone to one of the BBC Proms festival concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall (RAH). A gentleman seated next to us got talking to her before the concert. He happened to be Roger Williams, who had just written a coffee-table book (‘The Albert Hall: A Victorian Masterpiece for the 20th Century’, 2004) on the building, beautifully illustrated, with rare archival photographs, blueprints, sketches and little-known trivia.
We got properly acquainted over drinks during the interval. He had a few copies of the book with him, and on hearing of our impending marriage, presented the book to us, with an inscription.
The RAH completed 150 years earlier this year,
a milestone that is being celebrated with pomp and circumstance at this year’s edition of the BBC Proms, with a special spotlight on its redoubtable ‘Father’ Henry Willis pipe organ, with its 9,999 pipes and 147 stops, once considered the largest organ in the world.
When the instrument is in full throttle, it is an unforgettable experience; you can feel the floor reverberate. Recordings don’t do it justice.
The RAH was the first concert venue I visited in England, and still occupies a special place in my heart for the innumerable memories it conjures up.
I had arrived in mid-July 1998, coinciding with the start of the Proms concert season. Standing tickets cost just £2 then, unbelievable value-for-money considering one could listen at close range to the world’s greatest orchestras, provided one was willing to queue up and stand for the duration of the performance. It was and is called ‘Promming’, and you were a Prommer if you Prommed. Prommers got access either to the Arena just in front of the stage or ‘up in the gods’, the Gallery.
There used to be a lot of jokes about the acoustics in the RAH, about its peculiar echo, letting you “hear the same concert twice”, and how you ought to pay double for the privilege. To tackle this anomaly, 135 fibreglass acoustic diffusers (fondly nicknamed ‘mushrooms’) were suspended from the auditorium ceiling. In 2001, they were deemed to be “50 too many” and the remaining 85 were reconfigured to improve the acoustic experience.
Over the years, I must have tried out every corner of the hall, and I still prefer the Arena, just a little off-centre.
It would be my annual ritual, July-September. On the nights I wasn’t on call, I’d rush off after work to join the queue that would snake around the building onto the pavement of Princes Consort Road. I
t was a great place to meet music-lovers from all walks of life and from around the world. Waiting in the queue would be like a picnic if you carried food and drink with you. I’ve rarely ever been unable to get in after having joined the queue. (Beethoven’s Ninth is a strong crowd-puller, as are the ‘great’ orchestras like the Berlin Phil, and if you have them doing Beethoven 9, it’s a double-whammy. I remember not making it into the hall after queuing for that one, can’t remember which year).
The token system reserving your place also meant you could go off to listen to a pre-Proms talk at the adjacent Royal College of Music and return to your place after.
On evenings I couldn’t make it to the RAH for some reason, I’d try (even when on-call if one could) to listen in on the radio or on TV if it was being broadcast.
Since coming back, I’ve tried to time return visits to the UK with the July-September Proms concert season. The Proms queue has been a place where I’ve forged new friendships, but also rekindled old ones. Some years ago, I just happened to be standing right behind long-lost musician friends who weren’t even from England, but happened to be visiting. It was a pleasant coincidence.
Prommers’ ticket stubs to six different concerts of each season can be exchanged for a ticket to the Last Night, a much-coveted event, with much flag-waving and rather triumphalist mass singing of anthems like ‘Rule Britannia’ and all sorts of noise-makers and high jinx.
I went to a few Last Nights until the novelty wore off.
In my first year, 1998, I joined the Prommers’ orchestra, with an opportunity to perform Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony among other works at door 9. It was my first taste of British orchestral playing and the phenomenal ability of even amateur players to sight-read pretty daunting repertoire.
A few years later, I had my five minutes of fame on British television, winning a place on the Prommers’ music quiz. The day I was invited to have it filmed on-site, I was excited but for another reason. I can’t remember how, but I’d heard on the grapevine that Pandit Ravi Shankar would be at that concert (the quiz was being filmed in the interval). I asked the organisers to be permitted to meet him before the concert, and they arranged it. It is etched in my heart as he picked up on my name and Goan origin, and spoke a few halting sentences in Konkani to me, much to the bemusement of everyone else present.
In 2006, in response to a flyer circulated in the Arena, I sang tenor in The Rabble, and together with several other choirs (The Shout, National Youth Choir of Scotland, National Youth Choir of Great Britain, and the Rodolfus Choir) and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Martyn Brabbins, participated in that year’s Prom 20 (‘The Voice’). The programme included the world premiere, the first realization of ‘We Turned On the Light’, a piece about the impact of global warming and climate change, with apocalyptic words by Caryl Churchill and music by Orlando Gough. I was a GP (general practitioner) in High Wycombe by then, and getting to rehearsals in London after finishing work well past six after a day’s work was hectic, but well worth it. The Guardian’s music critic Tim Ashley called our performance “spine-tingingly visceral” and gave it four stars. Nicholas Kenyon, the then director of the BBC Proms, said it was the “greatest Proms adventure of all time”.
I’ve heard so many great concerts in the RAH, too numerous to mention here, but among the concerts that veered a little beyond classical music, the ones that come to mind are the Gypsy and Klezmer Prom (2001) featuring the fabulous virtuoso Roby Lakatos and band (I’d heard his recordings before, but watching them live was an electrifying experience)
and Michael Bolton (Chryselle’s teenage idol) belting out ‘How am I supposed to live without you’.
Most significantly, it was the jaw-dropping RAH performances of two orchestras made up of underprivileged youth from two different corners of the globe, the Soweto Buskaid Ensemble (South Africa)
and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra (Venezuela)
at the 2007 edition of the BBC Proms that influenced our decision to return home to set up Child’s Play India Foundation (www.childsplayindia.org) the very next year.
I’m listening in on internet radio to this year’s Proms concerts. As I leaf through that coffee-table book now, it takes me back to so many beautiful memories, all inextricably linked to the RAH, “a place for Princes and Prommers alike.”
(An edited version of this article was published on 26 August 2021 in my column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Navhind Times Goa India)
11 Sunday Apr 2021
The obstruction to the Suez Canal by an ultra-large Golden-class container ship ‘Ever Given’ for just a week (23-29 March 2021) has highlighted just how vital the waterway is to global trade ever since its opening in 1869.
The vessel is one of the largest container ships in the world, at 400 meters in length almost as long as the Empire State building is tall, far exceeding the width of the Suez canal, under 300 meters at its widest, even in its 2015 newly-widened segment.
The Suez Canal has played its role in altering the course of history as well.
During the ‘Ever Given’ stalemate, I happened to watch an episode (Season 2, Episode 1) of the historical drama Netflix series ‘The Crown’,
aptly titled ‘The Misadventure’. It is a double entendre, referring both to Prince Philip’s extra-marital affairs as well as to Britain’s ill-advised involvement in the 1956 Suez crisis. This year 2021 marks its 65th anniversary.
Briefly: Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal by its fiery President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)
was followed by the invasion of Egypt by Israel, joined later by Britain and France under the ostensible pretext of ‘peacekeeping’, but with the real intent of regaining control of the Canal. The Suez crisis is therefore called the second Arab-Israeli war or the Tripartite Aggression in the Arab world.
The confrontation between Egypt and Britain put independent India and its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)
in a delicate position. All three nations belonged to the Commonwealth; but Nasser and Nehru (with Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito) were founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
In fact, literally just a week before Nasser’s move to seize control of the Suez Canal, he had co-signed the Declaration of Brijuni in Yugoslavia on 19 July 1956, formalizing the birth of NAM.
Nasser had given no inkling to Nehru about what was obviously a calculated decision, bound to elicit a reaction.
The picture was complicated further by the United States romancing Pakistan in 1954; India thus felt compelled to maintain good relations with Britain as a sort of counterweight to this equation. India therefore had to tread cautiously.
Nehru wrote to C Rajagopalachari in August 1956: “This is by far the most difficult and dangerous situation in international affairs we have faced since independence…Probably we shall end by displeasing our friends on both sides.”
Shortly after Egypt’s takeover of the Suez Canal, an international conference comprised of the largest users of the Canal and a few other countries was held in London to defuse tensions. While Egypt refused to attend, it used India (and the Soviet Union) to represent its interests. Nehru (via the Indian delegate Krishna Menon) took India’s role of mediator seriously.
But the Tripartite Aggression by Israel, Britain and France a few months later caused Nehru to abandon the balancing act. Despite military successes by the three nations, pressure from the United States (enraged at having been kept in the dark about the military offensive by all three nations) and the Soviet Union threat of using nuclear weapons in Egypt’s defence led to a ceasefire. Egypt maintained sovereign control over the Suez Canal, and Britain and France lost what had remained of their post-WWII international clout. India was asked to lead the international United Nations peacekeeping force to enforce the armistice line between Egypt and Israel.
The role of Jawaharlal Nehru, both as leader of NAM and as India’s Prime Minister, was significant in this chapter in world history.
Nehru-bashing and airbrushing history have become almost a national pastime, but it is worth examining more closely his statesmanship, and hopefully, learning from it.
To quote Srinath Raghavan, senior fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (‘India should be prepared for the perils and prospects of diplomatic leadership’ Hindustan Times, 26 October 2016): “By showcasing its ability to play a genuinely independent role, India buttressed its standing as an Asian power. This history is worth recalling today. At a time when West Asia is in the throes of major conflicts, India is nowhere in the picture. It has stayed out of all international efforts to manage these conflicts, focusing instead on imminent threats to Indians living in the region. This stance sits awkwardly with India’s professed desire to be a leading power in its extended neighbourhood. The story of its involvement in the Suez crisis could offer New Delhi a lesson or two in the perils and prospects of diplomatic leadership.”
In what could be seen as Egypt’s ‘return of the favour’ to India, during the hostilities between India and Portugal leading up to the integration of Goa to the Indian Union in December 1961, an attempt by Portugal to send naval warships to Goa to reinforce its marine defences was foiled when President Nasser of Egypt denied the ships access to the Suez Canal.
It is interesting to note how it was reported in the international press. David Lawrence wrote in the Spokane Daily Chronicle on 23 December 1961 (‘Nasser Violates Pledge on Suez Canal Passage’), calling it “a grave blunder – possibly worse in its effects than Nehru’s theft of the Portuguese territory of Goa.” He speculated that “not long ago, Prime Minister Nehru stopped off at Cairo to visit President Nasser. Presumably an agreement was made then that if Portugal attempted to come to the rescue of her nationals in Goa, the Egyptians would block passage of any Portuguese ship through the Suez Canal. Such a deal would imply that the head of the Indian government disclosed his plans for aggression and Nasser was in effect, a party to them.”
It was followed by another short article: ‘Grab of Goa causes talk of Hong Kong, Macao’, the “alarm” over China possibly “taking the cue from India to invade the British colony of Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macao.”
Egypt’s support of India over Goa in 1961 is also confirmed by Egyptian researcher Zaki Awad, El Sayed in ‘Egypt and India, A study of political and cultural relations, 1947–1964’, adding: “the fact that NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] was supporting the Portuguese military action did not deter Egypt from standing by India.”
As it transpired, neither the NATO alliance nor the centuries-old Anglo-Portuguese treaty (“to be friends to friends and enemies to enemies”) worked to Portugal’s advantage in this instance.
My guess is that even if Nasser had allowed the Portuguese warships through the Suez, the conflict might have been longer-drawn and bloodier, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
Be that as it may, one couldn’t fail to register the irony when reading this excerpt in Charles Hallberg’s book ‘The Suez Canal: Its History and Diplomatic Importance’. The same waterway that “brought back to the Mediterranean the traffic in oriental commodities which, ever since the epochal voyage of Vasco da Gama late in the fifteenth century, had followed the long route around the Cape of Good Hope” by the very act of its blockage of access played its part in 1961 in facilitating Portugal’s exit from its most-cherished and longest-held possession, beginning just 12 years following that 1498 ‘epochal’ voyage.
(An edited version of this article was published on 11 April 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
28 Sunday Mar 2021
Posted Dance, In Print, Milestones, Music, Tribute
inIt was the birth centenary of larger-than-life Argentine tango composer, bandoneon player, and arranger Astor Piazzolla (11 March 1921 – 4 July 1992) earlier this month.
The Strad magazine carried a tribute article “How should we interpret tango music?” a guide to classically-trained violinists on how to tackle this music genre.
Yet again, I was struck by how much classical music had meant to Piazolla while growing up. The Todo Tango website published a first-person account of Piazzolla’s recollections of his childhood in New York.
“I attended four schools until I finished grade school. They expelled me for quarrelling. But at one of them I found music: A teacher used to play records for us as examples. She made us listen to the Brahms’ third symphony, or the second movement of a symphony by Mozart. And at the next class we had to recognize each one of them.”
This would have been before he turned twelve. As he puts it, “I found it but I didn’t discover it. I didn’t pay attention to the explanations. I couldn’t stop laughing and making my schoolmates laugh. I discovered it later when I was 12 years old.”
This is what then happened: “We lived in a very long house and there, at the back, beyond a courtyard there was a window and, from there, the sound of a piano was heard. It hypnotized me, I stood still beside it. Later I came to know it was a piece by Bach and that the pianist practiced nine hours a day. He was Bela Wilda and soon he became my teacher.”
I found this part of Piazzolla’s account really touching. Here was a neighbor who just happened to be going through his daily grueling practice regimen, but across a courtyard and through an open window, a little boy heard it and was “hypnotized.” Isn’t that something? There’s really no telling who or what can inspire whom, or how or when.
Bela Wilda was a Hungarian classical pianist who had been a student of Russian virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor and pedagogue Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1973).
Piazzolla vividly recalled his first encounter with his teacher: “My father and I knocked at his door and when he opened it I was bewildered by his grand piano and the pack of Camel cigarettes he used to smoke.”
As Piazzolla came from a poor Italian immigrant family, a novel method of payment for piano lessons was arrived at: “As mom had no money and because she worked as a manicurist she agreed to care for his hands for free, of course, and twice a week bring him a dish of gnocchi or ravioli. My teacher loved pasta.”
Back at his home, he would listen to his father’s records of the tango orchestras of the great French-Argentinian singer, songwriter, composer and actor Carols Gardel (1894 – 1935)
and Argentinian tango composer Julio de Caro (1899 – 1980).
Thinking back on those days, Piazzolla was glad that his father “had those records and not ones cut by other tango men, in general, mediocre musicians.”
One of Piazzolla’s friends, fellow Argentinian Andrés D’Aquila played piano as well as the bandoneon (a type of concertina particularly popular in Argentina and Uruguay, a typical instrument in most tango ensembles)
and taught it to Piazzolla.
Wilda later in his music classes, made him play Bach on bandoneon. “He handed me the sheet music for piano and he showed me what I had to do and what I ought not to do. Very soon my father bought me [a bandoneon].”
Piazzolla told a colourful story of his first meeting with Gardel (going through a fire escape and a window to wake him up as the door was locked) in 1934 and even played a cameo role in the actor’s movie ‘El día que me quieras’ (‘The day that you will love me’) the following year. Gardel was sufficiently impressed with the teenaged Piazzolla’s bandeoneion playing to invite him to join Gardel’s performance tour, but his family wouldn’t let him as he was too young, much to Piazzolla’s dismay. But in retrospect it was a life-saving decision, as Gardel and his band would perish tragically in a plane crash while on that tour. Piazzolla would later remark with dark humour that had his parents allowed him to go on that tour, he would have “played the harp instead of the bandoneon.”
By the age of twenty, now in Argentina, Piazzolla could afford lessons in orchestration with eminent Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
on the advice of Polish-American pianist Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982).
Piazzolla immersed himself in the scores of Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel and others, rising early each morning to listen to the Teatro Colón orchestra rehearsals while continuing to play in tango clubs by night.
In 1943, he began piano lessons with Argentine classical pianist Raúl Spivak,
and wrote his first classical works ‘Preludio No. 1 for Violin and Piano’ and ‘Suite for Strings and Harps’.
As his tango career advanced, Piazzolla continued to study Bartók and Stravinsky and orchestra direction with German conductor Hermann Scherchen (1891-1966),
searching for his own creative voice, composing several works along the way.
In 1953, his composition ‘Buenos Aires Symphony in Three Movements’ featuring two bandoneons in the orchestra so offended the audience that a fight broke out, but it nevertheless won Piazzolla a grant to study in Paris with the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979).
From her, he would learn counterpoint, which would prove useful to him later.
By then he was tired of tango music and tried to conceal that aspect of his past from Boulanger. But she saw that his genius lay in tango when she heard him play his composition ‘Triunfal’
and urged him back in that direction.
Back again in Argentina, his distinctive style would be nuevo (new) tango, incorporating jazz, extended harmonies and dissonance, counterpoint and fugue, and compositional forms such as the passacaglia, a cyclical bass line, and allowing musicians the freedom of improvisation.
Perhaps the most recognizable among his works is ‘Libertango’, a portmanteau of the words “libertad” (Spanish for liberty) and “tango,” symbolizing Piazzolla “liberating” himself from classical tango to tango nuevo.
Although an instrumental composition, in 1990 Uruguayan poet Horacio Ferrer added Spanish lyrics, his own poem ‘Libertango’. Almost every line cries out at the beginning “Mi Libertad” (My liberty), and one couplet seems to sum it up rather well: “Ser libre no se compra ni es dádiva o favor” (“Being free is neither a purchase, nor a gift, nor a favour”).
Something to think about, both on and off the dance floor.
(An edited version of this article was published on 28 March 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
(An edited version of this article was also published on 01 April 2021 in Scroll.in and on 6 April 2021 in Serenade magazine)
31 Sunday Jan 2021
A history website reminded me last 15 November of the 136th anniversary of the infamous Berlin conference (15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885),
which formalized what historians call the ‘Scramble for Africa’ or the ‘Rape of Africa’,
with representations by imperialist European powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway and the Ottoman Empire) and the United States, but not one representative from Africa itself. It led to the carving of a whole continent by the imperial powers among themselves, drawing arbitrary lines on a map (sowing the seeds of conflict and impoverishment that persist in some shape or form) that left ‘independent’ only Ethiopia and Liberia.
Around the time I got this reminder, I was spell-bound by Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste’s 2019 novel ‘The Shadow King’ that was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. It was my first introduction to her work, and I’m hooked. Every sentence she writes is sheer poetic delight.
‘The Shadow King’ is set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, shining a light on the women soldiers not usually credited in African history. It is a historical period that I knew very little about until I began reading the book. But it can be viewed as an expansionist sequel to that Berlin conference.
Coincidentally, I also came upon passing references to Polish-English writer Joseph Conrad’s 1899 controversial, much-debated semi-autobiographical novella ‘Heart of Darkness’
in relation to social justice, while reading up on a seemingly unconnected topic, Konkani tiatr. Whether sympathetic or not to Conrad’s viewpoint, it is set in a post-Berlin-conference Africa and the horrors unleashed because of it.
Its after-effects would be felt in Portugal and in Goa too.
Among the points in the General Act of the conference was the principle of ‘effective occupation’, to prevent powers from setting up colonies in name only. This meant having a presence on the ground in the claimed territories.
In 1885, the Portuguese government prepared a Mapa cor-de-rosa, (“rose-coloured map”, or Pink Map) to represent Portugal’s claim of sovereignty over a land corridor (present-day Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi) connecting its colonies of Angola and Mozambique, creating a coast-to-coast empire from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
To bolster its territorial claim, it had already sent several ‘scientific’ ‘exploratory’ expeditions led by Alexandre de Serpa Pinto
and others, even prior to the conference. Portugal laid ‘historical’ claims based on ‘discovery’ or those based on ‘exploration’, instead of the ‘effective occupation’ clause of the Berlin conference.
The Pink Map was endorsed by all participating countries at the conference, except for Britain, despite being Portugal’s longest-standing ally, gong back centuries to the Treaty of Windsor (1386), sealed by the marriage of King John I of Portugal (House of Aviz) to Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster.
Among the many reasons for Britain’s objection was the interference the Pink Map posed to Sir Cecil Rhodes’ ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ Red Line (a railway line linking Cape to Cairo, effectively bisecting the whole African continent).
Matters between the two powers came to a head with the 1890 British Ultimatum, delivered on 11 January 1890 to Portugal, demanding withdrawal of Portuguese claims to disputed areas, including some territory that had been considered Portuguese for centuries.
The British Ultimatum was seen in Portugal as a breach of the Treaty of Windsor. The capitulation to mighty Britain’s demands by the unfortunate King Carlos I (who had ascended to the Portuguese throne just weeks before, on 19 October 1889) was viewed by anti-monarchists and republicans in Portugal as a national humiliation.
On 1 April 1890, the disillusioned septuagenarian Portuguese trader-explorer António Francisco Ferreira da Silva Porto, who had unsuccessfully petitioned decades before for Portuguese military occupation of ‘discovered’ areas, self-immolated after wrapping himself in the national flag, in Kuita, Angola.
The financial crisis caused by the bursting of the Encilhamento economic bubble after the first Brazilian Republic was set up two months previously (15 November 1889) only increased public unrest, although republicans in Portugal were inspired by the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy.
A military uprising against the monarchy took place in the city of Porto on 31 January 1891 with the rebels declaring a republic from the balcony of the city’s seat of government, the Paços do Concelho.
Although the rebellion was quickly put down, it was the first big threat to the monarchic regime and a sign of what would come almost two decades later, with the formation of the First Portuguese Republic following the revolution of 5 October 1910.
After the Republic was established in 1910, the road in Panjim extending from the then-existing River Navigation department (Repartição de Navegação Fluvial), where the garish casinos are today, to the Phoenix Fountain (Fonte Feniz) Mala-Fontainhas was renamed Rua 31 de Janeiro (31 January Street).
Its earlier name was Rua 4 de Abril (4 April Street) to honour the birthdate of the Portuguese Queen Dona Maria II (Mary II 4 April 1819 – 15 November 1853, r. 26 May 1834 – 15 November 1853), called Mother of the City of Nova Goa as Panjim was elevated to the status of a Cidade (city) during her reign, on 22 March 1843.
There are two establishments that I know of on 31 January Road that reflect these important chapters in our history. One is the Barberia República,
my go-to place for a haircut (and if I’m feeling self-indulgent, a shave and a maalish) which still has some of its old-world charm, the misspelled signboard notwithstanding. The current staff couldn’t tell me since when it has had the name, but it’s worth finding out.
The other, of course, is the more famous 31st January bakery (Confeitaria 31 de Janeiro, or Savoy), again my go-to place, for birthday cakes and Goan delicacies, and one of the oldest bakeries in the city.
The establishment of the First Republic in Portugal had ramifications here in Goa. On 20 April 1911, guarantees of religious freedom and separation of church and state became law in the Republic, which meant equal opportunities for all faiths in education and employment everywhere, including Goa.
Portugal had become a constitutional monarchy after the end of the civil war (War of the Two Brothers or the Miguelite War) in1834 which extended constitutional rights to its people. These rights were extended universally in 1910 beyond Portugal throughout its empire, whose people were now viewed as citizens instead of subjects.. Although the Republic was short-lived, toppled in 28 May 1926 by a coup d’état leading to the Estado Novo dictatorship, the Portuguese citizenship bestowed on Goans from then on has changed the destinies and fortunes of successive generations. The thriving overseas Goan diasporas particularly the latest wave in the UK are testament to this.
Isn’t it ironic? The squabbling between two European imperialist powers (allies temporarily turned foes) over outrageous spurious territorial claims on another continent (Africa) set in motion a cascade of events that has caused people from a third continent (ours) to generations later reverse-colonise those very same now-faded ‘powers’. To add to our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s comment: Sirf Goa ke log nahin, hamaara itihaas bhi bahut ajeeb hai!
(An edited version of this article was published on 31 January 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
17 Sunday Jan 2021
To many of us growing up, fado was synonymous with Amália Rodrigues. Apart from one solitary 45 rpm featuring António Mourão, all the other records on fado that my family possessed in my early childhood years featured her and only her.
That changed with the arrival by post of a 45 rpm record from Portugal, a gift from my paternal aunt Ernestina (Tininha) to my dad in 1978 or the year after.
I was sold just by the record sleeve.
In striking colours, it was a sketch of children at play. One of them even seemed to be holding in her hand a bicycle tyre. It used to be our pastime at that age too. With bicycles so ubiquitous, you were never too far away from a cycle repair-man, there was a surplus of discarded tyres that we kids would ‘drive’ and ‘steer’ using a stick with great enthusiasm through the by-lanes of our neighbourhood. Each of us had our very own tyre, with our own identification mark. It’s hard to explain such simple pleasures to kids today. Anyway, that was one of the many reasons that drew me to the record. It seemed very child-friendly.
It was called ‘Os Putos’, a word that sounded suspiciously like (but clearly wasn’t) a Portuguese expletive. Even today, Google translate sometimes gets a little befuddled and gives you the rude word instead.
There weren’t any sleeve notes, just the same painting on both sides. Side A had the eponymous track (which Daddy explained to us meant “The children” or “urchins”, (Google still seems undecided on how best to translate it and temperamentally gives a different one each time depending on its mood) while Side B had “O Homen das Castanhas (literally The Chestnut Man, referring to a chestnut vendor).
The dearth of other distractions also meant that a new record got our full attention. Although the lyrics meant nothing to me at first hearing, the songs and the singer’s voice were bewitching. The singer was Carlos do Carmo, the first time I ever heard him.
My father was our equivalent of Google translate back then. If I wanted to understand the lyrics of the German, French, Italian or Portuguese records or spool tapes in our house, I would play those tracks, stopping and starting line by line, not easy to do with records, lifting the stylus and finding the same spot again to move on with the translation. Even today, when I hear those tracks, those memories come rushing back.
Both songs are quite catchy and at a lively tempo, but I was partial to ‘Os Putos’
The other song, ‘O Homen das Castanhas made better sense to me when I visited Europe in the autumn stretching into winter of 1996, where I encountered chestnut vendors not just in Portugal but also in Germany and Austria (but for some strange reason they’re not that big in the UK).
Today one can look up lyrics on the internet and even follow them in real-time as the song plays. So over the years I’ve gotten better acquainted with the lyrics of both these fados. And I’ve been able to listen to much more of Carlos do Carmo.
But it is only recently that I came to grips with just how large he loomed on Portugal’s cultural landscape.
The death of Carlos do Carmo (full name Carlos Manuel de Ascenção do Carmo de Almeida, 21 December 1939 – 1 January 2021) on the first day of this year caused an outpouring of grief in Portugal, and a national day of mourning was declared on 4 January.
He will be remembered for having introduced new styles to fado, including the addition of orchestras, and the incorporation of other styles such as jazz into the traditional music.
It was after reading an emotional post by Portugal’s greatest living concert pianist Maria João Pires that I was made aware of their musical collaboration in 2012.
“Carlos do Carmo will remain in my memory as a true artist, a man of dignity and enormous culture… he will be missed in our hearts, by all of us,” she wrote. She also posted a clip of ‘Sem Palavras’ (Without words), lyrics by Maria do Rosário Pedreira, music by António Vitorino d’Almeida.
The idea for what turned out to be the 2012 collaboration between Pires, do Carmo and the composer d’Almeida was born three years earlier when all three shared a stage at an event commemorating 60 years in Pires’ pianistic career.
I listened to another track from this collaboration, ‘Morrer de Ingratidão’ (To die of ingratitude), lyrics by Vasco Graça Moura. Each track on the album has lyrics from prominent Portuguese poets and writers ranging from José Saramago to José Carlos Vasconcelos to Fernando Pinto do Amaral. They reveal a completely different side to both Carmo and Pires that I hadn’t heard before.
I tried to find the context to ‘Os Putos’ (lyrics by José Carlos Ary dos Santos, music by Paulo de Carvalho) and find it described as “a major milestone in Portuguese music after the 25 April 1974 Carnation Revolution.”
Its title may have come from the name of a popular 1973 short story book by author Altino do Tojal, (which was adapted to a television series in 1979) although this is conjecture on my part.
The song lyrics hint at struggle, not just the growing pains of childhood: “São os putos deste povo; A aprenderem a ser homens” (The children of the people, learning to be men); but also the robbing of one’s innocence and dignity by a regime that does unflinchingly uses force to quell the democratically-guaranteed right to dissent: “A força de ser, criança Contra a força dum chui, que é bruto.”(The strength of being a child against the force of a cop who is a brute).
The Salazarist regime in Goa ended on 19 December 1961, but the Portuguese people had to endure another 13 years before it was overthrown there.
It is tragically ironic therefore that on the very day marking the beginning of the ‘celebration’ of 60 years since that fateful day, brutal police force was used against a peaceful gathering at the Panjim church square, and that days later riot police and teargas were deployed against citizens merely defending their land in Shel-Melauli.
The song chorus has the line “São como índios” (They’re like Indians). It’s a reference to a different kind of “Indian”, the children’s game of cowboys and Indians, and we all know how that ends: the cavalry rushes in and the Indians are slaughtered en masse or taken prisoner, losing their land and becoming second-class citizens, if that.
But this is our Goan conundrum: since 1961, we’re being asked to be Indian, feel Indian, and the overwhelming majority of us do. But through the actions of governments that answer to Delhi instead of listening to the people that elected them, we’re being treated and being made to feel like the other sort of “Indians”, who have to submit to Delhi’s will or be suppressed with brute consequences if we don’t. We’re second-class, we just don’t matter in the mad scheme of things.
(An edited version of this article was published on 17 January 2021 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)
16 Wednesday Dec 2020
Posted Child's Play (India) Foundation, Goa, History, Milestones, Music, Tribute
inManuel playing Beethoven Contretanz (WoO 14, number 12, transposed for cello) at Child’s Play (India) Foundation‘s Morning with Cellos concert, literally days before the lockdown began