Making ‘room’ for Fado

Looking through the list of films that bagged or were nominated for the Oscars this year, I realised I had seen a handful: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Maestro, The Last Repair Shop, The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar.

Until then I hadn’t even heard of ‘Poor Things’, the 2023 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. But as it won four Oscars this year and numerous other accolades elsewhere, I found it on a streaming service and watched it.

To say it has a bizarre storyline is an understatement.  Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone, who won Best Actress for the role) is a young woman in Victorian London who dies by suicide by jumping off a bridge, is brought back to life via brain transplant (from her own baby that she was heavily pregnant with!) and embarks on “an odyssey of self-discovery.” The “odyssey”, surprise surprise, involves to a lot of graphic sex scenes and nudity.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the end. Is this dark comedy, film noir? The protagonist’s “creator”, called “God”, Godwni Baxter (Willem Dafoe) looks like a ‘creation’ himself, of Dr. Frankenstein. The “poor things” ultimately seem to be a revolving-door of the men in Bella’s life who momentarily think they have her in their thrall. Is she a “poor thing” too? You be the judge.

Most of the reviews have raved over ‘Poor Things,’ calling it “wildly imaginative and exhilaratingly over the top”, and variations on that theme. There were a few dissenting voices, however.   Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle pronounced it “a 141-minute mistake” adding: “Worst of all, it’s dishonest. It purports to be a feminist document, but it defines a woman’s autonomy as the ability to be exploited and not care.”

Angelica Jade Bastién of ‘Vulture’ identified the decision to make Bella Baxter mentally a child as the “primary failure of Poor Things’ sex scenes…. In many ways, the film demonstrates the limits of the modern cis-male auteur’s vision for and about women — particularly their sexual selves.” I quite agree.

To me there was a touch of the grotesque in much of the film. It was the idea of ‘using’ suicide as a plot device, a literal springboard for absurdist comedy, and the very thought of in effect murdering a live newborn just to transplant its brain into a dead adult makes my stomach churn. It’s fiction, it’s just a movie, yes, I know, but it was quite a revolting stretch of the imagination for me.

I looked up the book (‘Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer’) that inspired the film, but have no desire to actually read it from cover to cover. Life’s too short; there are many much more worthy books vying for my attention on my bucket list.

The only reason I sought out the book was to check how prominently Lisbon (which Bella visits on her “odyssey” in the film) features in the book. It is mentioned just once, and just fleetingly in passing, at that.

The film dwells on the city for a little longer, but it is a very surreal nineteenth-century Lisbon. In Bella’s imagination, its trams (‘elétricos’) glide in mid-air like ski-lifts between mountain-slopes.

She is introduced to the city’s fabled pastéis de nata (egg custard tart pastry) by her debauched escort Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) thus: “So nuns and monks would starch their clothes with egg-whites, and with the yolks, make these tarts.” Seems like a pat explanation for any dessert involving egg-yolks! And the advice on eating them? “Not dainty flake by dainty flake, but inhaled with gusto like life itself.” And “one’s enough; any more is too much,” something Bella proceeds to ignore when she goes off wandering the city’s streets on her own.

She soon sees and hears a woman on a balcony strumming a ‘guitarra portuguesa’ and singing a melancholy fado.

An audio-search revealed it to be ‘O quarto’ (The Room), sung by Portuguese superstar fadista Maria do Carmo Carvalho Rebelo de Andrade, better known as Carminho. She was invited by director Lanthimos to make a special appearance in ‘Poor Things.’

The fado (lyrics by Carminho) was chosen jointly by her and Lanthimos, and seems an apt one, chiming in with what Bella must be feeling.

The “small room” (her mind?) she thought was just hers is infiltrated by the poison (veneno) of “loneliness (solidão). The emptiness is suffocating and is compounded by the “invasion” of the cold.

As in so many fados, these outpourings seem to be triggered by “a heart that broke” (“um coração que se partiu”).  “You don’t even see me when you enter.” Who? The thought of the one who hurt her? Or the past in general in Bella’s case?

“This room is of no use,” where the air doesn’t even fit” (“onde nem lá cabe o ar”).

In ‘Poor Things’ we hear just a little over a minute of the fado before Bella is distracted by a squabbling couple, and then, climbing up a flight of stairs to take in a stylised version of Lisbon’s rooftop view of its skyline, her visceral reaction is to retch and throw up. If only she had heeded the warning not to over-indulge on pastéis de nata!

‘Poor Things’ elicited a similar regurgitating reflex in me in places. Don’t watch it if you’re under-age, or on a full stomach, or perhaps a prude like me. I don’t think I’ll be seeing it again any time soon. Like Wedderburn’s advice, once is enough; any more is too much.

Nevertheless, that one-minute spotlight on fado in an Oscar-winning film will do much to showcase it to a global audience.

Incidentally, a wag was recently heard saying that we are getting an “overdose” of fado here, that not even in Portugal is such fuss made over fado as in Goa.

To me it seems a case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. It’s bad enough that nurturing anything with the ‘Portuguese’ tag (except for ‘Portuguese’ houses on the real estate market!) is viewed in some quarters as ‘anti-national’, (which mysteriously never happens to the British legacy, say cricket, tea, or the English language). Had these aspects of our heritage been left to wither and die, we would have bemoaned their passing. So when they are revived and even made commercially viable by an enterprising, passionate handful, why is that a bad thing?

Coming to fado, as in any art form, there are the stubborn entrenched purists who feel it should remain fossilised in its purported 19^th century original state, extending only to its early to mid-20^th century heyday; and then there are the innovators who want to give fado a 21^st century relevance, context, and (shock horror!) even fuse it with music from other genres and other geographic regions than Portugal. If history is any indicator, innovation and evolution are what make any art form endure, even thrive. In more ways than one, ‘tudo isto é fado’. All this is destiny, all this is fado. Viva! 

 (An edited version of this article was published on 24 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A Fort-uitous Getaway -2

If you double the fortification of a city, what do you get? Eightification of course. And if you halve it, twentification. Yes, I know, terrible. My teenage son and niece thought so too. But when you visit one fort after another in just a couple of days, you become a serial ‘kila.’

In a recent previous column, I had begun the account of my serendipitous visit to Chaul (also called Revdanda fort), the historic fort ruin in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, a few kilometres away from Alibag.

 Senior lecturer in Portuguese history at the Université d’Aix-Marseille Ernestine Carreira’s book Globalisng Goa (1660-1820): Change and exchange in a former capital of empire’

documents the history of this fort city and its strategic importance to the Estado da Índia. 

Chaul comes up in the context of the complex interactions between the Portuguese and the Marathas, and Carreira rightly quotes the landmark 1983 text (translated from the Marathi) by Dr. Pandurang Sakharam Pssurlencar, ‘Portuguese Maratha relations,’

so I looked this up too. 

What emerges is far from the black-and-white clear demarcations that 21^st century hindsight tends to confer on our past. Pissurlencar himself writes in the first chapter that “between the Portuguese and the Marathas alone, no less than 25 pacts and treaties were concluded.”

Pissurlencar in his second chapter quotes a 1636 letter from Shahaji (father of the eventual Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj) to the Portuguese captain at Chaul, seeking shelter to his family “as he had always maintained friendly relations with them” and his family’s safety was in jeopardy from the Mughals and the Bijapur sultanate. The Portuguese declined fearing the wrath of Delhi and Bijapur, but offered to covertly secure his safe passage onward.

Pissurlencar also quotes a source in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon) which makes it obvious that there were Portuguese men serving in Shivaji’s army and in building ships for the Maratha navy, eventually causing alarm to the Portuguese authorities, as the ships could be “a source of trouble” not only against the Siddi [of Janjira] but against the Portuguese themselves.

In 1667, the Viceroy João Nunes da Cunha, Conde de São Vicente wrote to Lisbon: “I am afraid of Shivaji’s naval ships. We did not take sufficient preventive steps and he has built many a fort on the Konkan coast. Today he has several ships and they are large ones.”

In keeping with their guerilla tactics on land, Shivaji’s fleet consisted mostly of ‘galvetas’, small but speedy, a distinct advantage over the “slow large-sized Portuguese ships.”

“On 10 February 1670”, Pissurlencar writes, “Shivaji entered into a pact of friendship with the Portuguese.” One of its terms was that, since the Siddi [Janjira] had accepted the overlordship of the Portuguese, they were under an obligation to protect him, but since this ran counter to the “new friendship” between the Portuguese and the Marathas, the former would use their influence to conclude a mutually satisfactory treaty between the Siddi and Shivaji. Talk about ‘frenemies’!

 Carreira refers to the collapse of trade for Goa’s merchant fleet in the early 1700s “both in the Atlantic and within secondary networks in Asia, but Chaul, Bassein, Daman and Diu could take over on regional, coastal shipping, sometimes by joining up with Jewish and Parsi shipping companies from Surat.” Some of those Jewish merchant families must certainly have been in this region? Are some of their descendants still here, if they haven’t been part of the mass migration to Israel and beyond?

In the previous column I had highlighted the Bene Israeli settlement going back over 2000 years, and even being responsible for the etymology of Alibag (“Eli cha Bagh”, “Eli’s garden”). Although Alibag’s Magen Aboth synagogue was temporarily off-limits to us (as a precautionary security measure in the wake of the recent events in Israel-Palestine), we passed by the Bene Israeli cemetery in a deserted location in Korlai

and were able to get close to the few gravestones there, in Hebrew and Marathi, with names such as Eliyahu Solomon Sogaonkar, Michael Eliyahu Sogaonkar and Jonah Moshe Ashtamkar.  

Portuguese influence continued to wane, and Chaul fell to the Marathas in 1740, then to the British East India Company, and was already a ruin when J. Gerson da Cunha wrote his ‘Notes on the History and Antiquities of Chaul and Bassein’ (1876).

Da Cunha’s tone to the current reader smacks of what Edward Said called “the Orientalist gaze”, but he waxes almost poetic when he says in the Preface: “Even at the present day, among the thousand associations which crowd upon the mind when we gaze upon their ruins, none is more moving than the thought that we have before us the relics of a civilisation that, whatever its faults, or howsoever anachronistic its institutions may appear to the present dwellers on the globe, there is no doubt that it answered its purpose well, met best all the exigencies of the time, and when it became effete ceased to exist – a mere question of evolution, and not of revolution. To try to prolong it, however, beyond the period it was intended to serve in the economy of human society, to strive to extend it outside the sphere within which it was designed to move, would naturally amount to involving it in ruin. And that is precisely what took place.”

That ruin has undergone further decay since then to the time Amita Kanekar described Chaul in her valuable pocket-book on Portuguese sea forts

(which I sadly forgot to carry with me) and the downward slide (“evolution, not revolution”) continues.  

The only somewhat imposing structure still standing was the tower of the Franciscan convent of Santa Barbara, founded before 1564 but rebuilt after 1570. Kanekar informs us it was probably intended as a watchtower and navigational landmark. Two arched openings in its roofless upper storey (through which one sees bare sky) and a little window below give a ghoulish face to the façade, helplessly looking at the surrounding desolation. 

 

Subsequent visits to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) revealed two inscription headstones from Chaul in the verandah area to the left of its entrance. One records construction in the fortress between 1635-36, and that João de Veloso Thobar, its captain, adopted St Francis Xavier as patron of the city.

The second inscription documents the vow made by the King Dom João IV in the Cortes in 1646 to “defend by all means in his power the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary”, for which purpose a decree was passed to carve such inscriptions in every city and fort of the Portuguese in India.   

However, as we have seen, despite all the talismanic appeals for divine protection, barely less than a century later, there was a different writing, figuratively on the wall for the Portuguese in India. Surely there is a lesson from history here about the folly of mixing state and religion, which we ought to heed today?

We had met the Marathas in Kolaba, the Portuguese at Chaul, and now the Siddi were waiting for us at Janjira. More about them in the final column about this fort-uitous odyssey.    

 (An edited version of this article was published on 17 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

‘Eve’ning the Score

I’ve been listening to classical music all my life, and give thanks every day for the advent of internet radio since the beginning of this century, which has given a quantum leap to the breadth and scope of music  now at my fingertips, and lets me carry it with me everywhere. People of my generation thought Walkmans (remember them?) were cool; who could have envisaged this back then?

Two seismic events in recent global history have dramatically pushed even further the boundaries of and irreversibly altered (for the better) the music ‘playlist’, as it were.

One of those events was the “Me Too” movement that went viral around the world following the exposure of numerous sexual-abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. The other was the murder in May 2020 of George Floyd, a black American man by a white police officer in Minneapolis, sparking off outrageous protest first in the US that quickly spread globally.

They seem to have triggered some collective soul-searching among radio presenters, curators of concert seasons or music festivals and performers themselves, to shake off even more vigorously the stereotype that classical music was the preserve of “dead white men.” It’s not as if it wasn’t being addressed before, but now it took on a fresh urgency. Suddenly I was hearing music by composers on radio stations that had never graced their playlists before.

In this column, I’ll dwell on the positive fallout of the “Me Too” movement on the soundscape of classical music today.

In her first book published last year, ‘Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World,’ multi-award-winning writer and historian Dr. Leah Broad, who specialises in twentieth-century cultural history, especially women in the arts, gives us a group biography of four women composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen.

As you can expect, it is a long read, and I’ve barely scratched its surface.

She makes pertinent observations in the Preface: “Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, …it was thought not just unlikely but a biological impossibility for women to manage the kind of abstract thought associated with composition. It was begrudgingly accepted that women could write and paint because, as one author put it, these art forms ‘all have a basis of imitation.’ But music was different. Creating music required the ability to think both logically and emotionally, and involved no imitation of nature whatsoever. It was a talent considered beyond women’s reach.”

The lifespans of British women composers Smyth, Clarke, Howell and Carwithen cover 145 years. But today let me tell you about another woman composer from across the English Channel who precedes all of them and whose music literally stopped me in my tracks some years ago.

When I hear a snippet of classical music that I cannot immediately identify, I play a ‘game’ with myself, and whoever else around (my family) might be disposed to play along. From the musical style, the instrumental forces and other tell-tale clues, we try to narrow down the list of ‘suspects’ and then hazard an educated guess from among them. And if the snippet is on radio, I wait impatiently for the identity to be revealed, hoping there won’t be some inane commercial break instead.

In 2018 or so I happened to be at home and heard a work in mid-performance on Classic FM. The segment I had stumbled upon had vigour an almost unrelenting energy, always moving forward, modulating this way and that, with some lyrical oases for woodwinds along the way. Who could this be?  It was from the Romantic period, no doubt about it, judging from the orchestral forces. But it wasn’t any of the ‘usual suspects’ I knew and loved.

It turned out to be Overture no. 1 by Lousie Farrenc.

That was my first introduction to her and I have been a devotee ever since, encountering her again and again on the airwaves, and even in my son’s Trinity Grade 6 Piano syllabus, an eloquent, heartfelt Impromptu.

Discovering her music was a delight, but why did have only have to hear her in my fifties and not sooner?

She was born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in Paris in 1804, fortunately to a supportive family. Piano lessons began early in childhood with Cecille Soria, former pupil of the celebrated Muzio Clementi, (called ‘Father of the Piano’ for being among the first to write compositions and etudes expressly for the capabilities of the instrument) and later with other masters such as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel (about whom I’ve written quite recently).

At fifteen, when she showed promise as a composer, she studied with Anton Reicha, composition teacher at the Conservatoire de Paris, but only ‘privately’, as Conservatoire composition classes allowed only males as students. 

At seventeen, she married Aristide Farrenc, a flute student ten years her senior; the couple gave concerts throughout France and later opened ‘Éditions Farrenc’, which would remain a leading music publishing house for decades.

These activities and the birth of her daughter interrupted her composition studies, but she nevertheless earned a formidable reputation as a virtuoso concert pianist and in 1842 was appointed to the permanent position of Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory, a position she held for thirty years. Farrenc was the only woman to hold the prestigious position there throughout the 19th century.

But she had to fight her corner. For nearly a decade, Farrenc was paid less than her male counterparts and she was vocal about it.  Finally, after the extremely successful premiere in 1850 of her nonet (a work well worth listening, which as the name suggests is a chamber work for nine instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double-bass)

she once again demanded equal pay, and was given it.

Farrenc also produced and edited an influential book, ‘Le Trésor des pianistes’, (The Treasure of Pianists)

about early music performance style.

A leading contemporary music writer and critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote about her in 1862: “The public, as a rule not a very knowledgeable one, whose only standard for measuring the quality of a work is the name of its author. If the composer is unknown, the audience remains unreceptive, and the publishers, especially in France, close their ears anyway when someone offers them a halfway decent work; they believe in success only for trinkets. Such were the obstacles that Madame Farrenc met along the way and which caused her to despair.”

Undeterred, she continued to compose for most of her life. She died in her home city in 1875.

I have so far explored and love all her three symphonies

and her two overtures. Among her chamber works. Same goes for the chamber works I’ve found so far: two piano quintets, two piano trios, the nonet I told you about earlier and her sonata for cello and piano. But there’s so much more.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, many radio stations gave the spotlight to women composers. Hopefully the time will soon dawn when their works are so pervasive and familiar that they don’t need just a day in the sun.

(An edited version of this article was published on 10 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A Fort-uitous Getaway

The sudden rescheduling of the school exams and subsequent Diwali vacation due to the 37th National Games, 2023, being hosted by the Government of Goa left many of us wondering how best to spend the break at such short notice.

After much deliberating, we decided to go with extended family to Alibag. I had never been there before and was excited to finally tick that off my bucket list. I usually like to do some reading up in advance, but got so caught up in whatever was happening in our lives then that it got sidelined. The itinerary was being planned by my Mumbai family, so I decided to just go with the flow.

I knew that one of the highlights of the trip would be a visit to Murud-Janjira fort, that I had been wanting to do for the longest time. But that there would be a few more forts on the menu came as a delightful surprise to me.

The fact that these were sea forts along India’s western coast meant that their history was directly or indirectly intertwined with ours. In retrospect I wished I had packed my friend, the esteemed architectural historian Amita Kanekar’s hugely informative pocket book ‘Portuguese Sea Forts Goa, with Chaul, Korlai and Vasai ‘. But hindsight is 20/20.   

We got to Alibag by the Ro-Ro ferry. The only other time I had been on a similar contraption was the Dover-Calais crossing somewhere in the early 2000s.

That afternoon we visited Kolaba fort (35 km south of Mumbai), one of the chief Maratha naval strongholds under first Chhatrapati Shivaji (who strengthened and fortified it in 1662), later his son Sambhaji.       

Kolaba fort finds mention only twice in Ernestine Carreira’s ‘Globalisng Goa (1660-1820): Change and exchange in a former capital of empire.’ In the early 1700s, long after the death of Sambhaji in 1688, Maratha chieftains such as a Angres were “troubling” the Estado in Goa from here.

A 1723 report by viceroy José Sampaio de Castro describes a naval fleet engaged in warfare against the ever-growing maritime strength of the Marathas from their coastal bases in Kolaba and Gheria (north of Goa). Reading between the lines, the Estado powers-that-be grossly underestimated the Maratha threat, to their folly.

Elsewhere in the literature (although the source is not mentioned), one learns that on 17 November 1721, the British, “incensed at (Kanhoji) Angre’s activities”, joined the Portuguese in an expedition against Kolaba. A Portuguese land force of 6000 and three English ships under Commodore Mathews co-operated but the attempt failed. The British blamed the failure on the “cowardice of the Portuguese”.

We crossed over from Alibag beach to Kolaba at low tide, by tonga drawn by two weary horses, who had to plough their way at a trot through the shallow water, kicking up a dirty sandy spray in their wake.

It was interesting to learn from the tonga-driver that the horse trade, over which so much blood was spilled, battles won and lost, and kingdoms and empires rose and fell, still continues to this day. He bought his horses at an animal fair in rural Maharashtra (I forget where) for Rs. 10,000/- each some months ago. At the rate charged per round trip, and several trips a day, he would have recovered that investment quite soon. He assured me the tongas worked on a rota system, so the horses got some days of rest and recuperation.

We had to hurry to take in as much of Kolaba fort as possible before the rising of the tide.  

But from the sweeping views it commanded from its vantage point, it was easy to understand its strategic importance on the coastline between Mumbai and Janjira.

A Soviet tank T-55 relic from the 1965 Indo-Pak war with a detailed description of its vital statistics for some reason greets visitors to Alibag beach.

The beach itself is a cautionary tale for what Goa’s already devastated beaches should avoid degrading even further into: sand-buggy operators vying with each other to take tourists at breakneck speed along the shoreline, flattening any little crabs or other life forms that have the misfortune to be in their path;

piles of horse and camel dung from the poor beasts engaged also in tourist rides.

As we left the area, we could hear loudspeaker exhortations in Marathi, asking listeners to come to watch a film on Nathuram Godse, murderer of the Father of our Nation. It felt surreal, but nobody seemed to bat an eyelid one way or another.  

According to Indian Jewish historian Esther David, Jews (the Bene Israeli Jews) arrived in the region around Alibag over 2000 years ago, escaping persecution from the Roman Empire, when their ship wrecked here. It is believed that a wealthy Bene Israelite named Eli (Elisha/Elizah) lived here and owned many mango and coconut plantations. Hence the natives used to call the place “Eli cha Bagh”(“Eli’s garden”) which got corrupted to “Alibag”.

We wished to visit the Magen Aboth synagogue on Israel Alley nearby, but it had been closed by police order as a pre-emptive security measure in view of the recent events in Israel-Palestine. A couple of Bene Israeli descendants sized us up suspiciously, puzzled at our interest in their place of worship. We had to be content with pictures taken from a ‘safe’ distance.

We stopped at the samadhi

and larger-than-life bronze statue, defiantly brandishing sword and shield, of Maratha naval admiral Kanhoji Angre (1669-1729),

scourge of the British, Portuguese and Dutch fleets in the Arabian Sea. A plaque below the statue states it is “a gift from Indian Navy to the people of Alibag.”   

The highlight of the next day was meant to be Murud-Janjira, but an unexpected stopover en route was for me the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream: destination: Chaul!

Chaul has much broader representation in Carreira’s book, with good reason. The fort city of Chaul was the first Portuguese settlement in the Provincio do Norte. They arrived there in 1505 and established a feitoria (‘factory’) there in 1516.

It is situated downstream on the Kundalika river (therefore called Chaul de Baixo by the Portuguese) of a much more ancient entrepôt (that for the Portuguese was Chaul de Cima, Upper Chaul) that finds mention by Ptolemy and in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Kanekar calls it “the richest port of the north Deccan, for it was located midway between Khambat and Malabar, where textiles from the former could be traded for spices of the latter.” 

The Portuguese feitoria soon became a fortified city (São Pedro e São Paolo de  Chaul) that traded with the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and China, fostering an upstream hinterland that produced goods of high commercial value: wooden furniture, cotton fabrics, silks (the raw silk imported from China and woven here), satins and taffetas.  

We approached the present-day fort entrance by a road that ran parallel to the Kundalika river, parked nearby and walked in. After all these years of just reading about this place, without even planning it, I was finally here in Chaul!

More about this and other forts in another column.

(An edited version of this article was published on 03 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Dispelling reservations about reservations

I was at a dinner party some months ago, when I heard snatches of conversation a few places down the table from me.

The topic was some bureaucratic appointment in a government department. “He can’t even speak English properly! Honestly, it’s high time reservations were scrapped. Everything should be on merit.”

And then the conversation drifted off to something else. I know I should have said something to counter the comment, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t. I can give a list of excuses why I didn’t: I was too tired to get into an argument; I felt it might dampen the mood; and perhaps most crucially, I felt it would not change the person’s viewpoint no matter what I said.

So I’m writing here what I should have said.

 Some decades ago, I too subscribed to the view that “everything should be on merit.” It sounds so egalitarian, so just, so logical, doesn’t it, on the face of it?

The first seeds of doubt to this view were sown in the wake of the massive protests nationwide against the implementation of the Mandal Commission report by the V. P. Singh government in 1990. I was a resident doctor then, and was initially impressed by NDTV coverage of young doctors like me, in white coats, stethoscopes around necks or in pockets braving water-cannons and lathi-charges on the streets. I was aghast by the self-immolations by students in protests, and their deaths in many cases.

But NDTV also covered the other side of the argument. A young Dalit asked, “Why is it OK to have capitation colleges for those who can’t get in on merit? If you have money, you can bypass the merit-based system and nobody questions this.” I had never thought of this before. I knew colleagues studying medicine and engineering in such colleges, and it was just accepted as ‘normal.’

I began to read up in earnest about caste discrimination and injustice a decade later for a whole host of reasons not worth going into here, when I really understood the fallacy of the ‘merit’ argument.

The idea of ‘merit’ presupposes the notion of a level playing field. The oppressed castes and other marginalized sections of society have had to endure systemic barriers to education, employment (except those considered demeaning and other sections were unwilling to do), nutrition, healthcare, housing, land ownership for so many centuries that they have been left far behind.

The caste system, in other words, has been in everything but name, another ‘reservation’ system where its benefits have accrued over centuries if not millennia, to the dominant castes. The inherent endogamy that keeps it alive to this day has conferred a ‘blindness’ to their own privilege and entitlement, and a blissful ignorance of and insulation from the hardships faced by those outside that ‘entitled’ ‘elite’ circle.

There’s an interesting video on YouTube called “Equal opportunity? Different starting lines.”

It has an American setting, of course, but the message is universal: Those born into privilege have a head-start in the “running race” of life. In the video, the youth with the head-start for example were those who didn’t have to worry where their next meal was coming from, didn’t have to help their parents to put food on the table and pay for rent and other living expenses. In the Indian setting, so many more privileges could be added to that list: just having a roof over one’s head, or indeed a stable address to allow one to have an Aadhar card and other essential ‘kaagaz’ (documents) that increasingly, ominously are tied to belonging and citizenship; access to electricity to be able to study at night; adequate living space without being cramped which became so relevant for social distancing during the Covid pandemic; ready access to running water; ease of transport to school or college to name just a few. The privileged among us are blind to these ‘head-starts’ but still talk of ‘merit’.

As for ‘fluency in English’: the privileged among us have had access to education for generations, and if that education was in English (which even in Goa is true for at least two generations or more by now), its byproduct is some degree of fluency in that medium of instruction. To hold a lesser degree of fluency against someone who is a first-generation learner in that family is churlish and unkind. I remember an instance at Dhempe college where one such first-generation graduate was working as a demonstrator in the chemistry lab, and the fact that she mispronounced the word ‘solution’ would draw smirks and snickers in the class. But she knew her stuff and actually that is all that should matter.

Isn’t it rich, how we find it ‘cute’ when visiting European speakers (for instance so many Portuguese academicians at Goa University, Fundação Oriente, Instituto Camões or elsewhere) get their English grammar mixed up or mispronounce words, but we cannot extend the same courtesy to our own first-generation student or graduate brethren, for whom English-speaking is just as challenging? We still collectively suffer from the white-skin worship syndrome.         

Also, as at the dinner party where casual casteism reared its ugly head, those who denounce reservations suffer from selective recall bias. They harp on one or two instances where a beneficiary of a reserved seat in academia or employment was (to them) found wanting. But instances where other reserved candidates were silently efficient, or instances where someone from the ‘general’ category was grossly incompetent, are conveniently ‘forgotten’ or ignored.     

As for the rhetorical question “How long do reservations have to continue? Haven’t they been around long enough to make a difference?”, the answer is: there is still much left to be done. Through bureaucratic sleight-of-hand stemming from casteism, reserved seats go unfilled or, on grounds of being ‘unfilled’ are filled by the general category. As long as societal caste prejudice persists, caste-based reservations should continue.

(An edited version of this article was published on 29 February 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)

Curtain-raiser to the Symphony Orchestra of India music camp 2.0

I 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)

Not a religious but a pious man

As medical students we are bludgeoned by such an overload of ‘knowledge’, hoping to upload it into the memory drive of our brains for as long as possible (definitely until we can spill it out for our exams) that there is little room (certainly not in our dry textbooks) for the fascinating lives of the pioneering men and women who were responsible for those facts, discoveries and innovations in the first place.

I’ve been a social media follower of Hungarian-American writer Daphne Kalotay ever since I read her magnificently crafted 2010 historical fiction novel Russian Winter’

about an aging ballerina and the secrets from the past that come to light when her priceless jewellery collection is auctioned off.

Kalotay recently posted an image of the books she was then reading. Among them was ‘Breaking Through: My Life in Science’,

the autobiography of Hungarian-American biochemist researcher Katalin Karikó,

who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year (along with colleague Drew Weissman) for “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” It was published just days after they won the prize.

I expected it to be a jargon-peppered read, but her blunt, direct, no-nonsense style drew me in. Her book deserves a whole column someday but I want to focus on the foremost influence on her from her school years in Hungary.

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986), the Hungarian biochemist who first isolated vitamin C,

and whose breakthrough research into cellular respiration laid the groundwork for the identification of the Krebs (or citric acid) cycle and who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is a cult figure in his native country,

although like Karikó, he would also finally live in the US.

As schoolchildren, Karikó and her classmates decide to write to the great man in the US. They didn’t have his address, so they just posted it to “Albert Szent-Györgyi, USA”.

She called it “a stab in the dark, a wild gamble.” They didn’t believe the letter would ever arrive, but incredibly, a month later, they received a reply, a personal letter from Szent-Györgyi himself, with a copy of his book ‘The Living State.’ He inscribed it “To the enthusiastic cultivators of science in Kisújszállás” (Karikó’s rural hometown).   

That small gesture of kindness touched Karikó. “I had no doubt, The great scientist is talking to me. Cultivator of science. Oh, yes. That I am.”

That little schoolgirl, a butcher’s daughter, would become a biochemist researcher herself, and also win a Nobel almost a century later. Millions around the world owe their lives to her because of the COVID vaccine that her work enabled.

The pathbreaking work of Szent-Györgyi (Hungarian for “Saint George”, a chivalric order in the name of the saint) straddles two of our first-year subjects in medical school, physiology and biochemistry. He also ascertained the molecular basis of muscle contraction; that muscles contain actin, which when combined with the protein myosin and the energy source adenosine triphosphate (ATP), contract muscle fibres. If his name did appear in our textbooks, it would have been at best a footnote.

Music played an important part in the Szent-Györgyi household. Albert’s mother Jozefina had wanted to become an opera singer when young and auditioned for Gustav Mahler, then a conductor at the Budapest Opera. He advised her to marry instead, since her voice was not suitable for operatic singing. Albert himself was a good pianist, while his brother Pál became a professional violinist.

Albert’s academic studies were interrupted in 1914 by the First World War, where he served as a medic. Two years later, disgusted by the war, he deliberately shot himself in the arm and claimed he was wounded by enemy fire in order to return to civilian life and research.

He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1929 where his research involved isolating an organic acid (which he then called “hexuronic acid”) from adrenal gland tissue.

A year later, after accepting a position at the University of Szeged, Hungary he and his research fellow Joseph Svirbely found that “hexuronic acid” was actually the thus far unidentified antiscorbutic (anti-scurvy) factor, known as vitamin C, later given its chemical name L-ascorbic acid.

There is a humorous story about Szent-Györgyi’s isolation of vitamin C from paprika. One night his wife served him paprika for dinner, and it occurred to him that he had never tested it for the vitamin. He said in a 1984 interview. “I didn’t feel like eating it but didn’t have the courage to tell my wife.” So he told her he would finish eating the dish it in his laboratory, and subjected his “dinner” to tests instead and found it was a rich source of vitamin C!

It was for his work not only on vitamin C but also on cellular respiration, identifying fumaric acid and other components of the Krebs cycle (which is also known now as the Szent-Györgyi -Krebs cycle)

that he won the 1937 Nobel Prize.

But Szent-Györgyi offered all the Nobel Prize money to the fight against the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940. He joined the Hungarian Resistance movement during the Second World War and helped Jewish friends escape to safety.

 Although Hungary was allied with the Axis Powers, the Hungarian prime minister Miklós Kállay sent Szent-Györgyi to Istanbul in 1944 under the guise of a scientific lecture to begin secret negotiations with the Allies. The Germans learned of this plot and Hitler himself issued a warrant for the Szent-Györgyi’s arrest. He escaped from house arrest and spent 1944 to 1945 on the run from the Gestapo.

After the war, Szent-Györgyi entered Hungarian politics and was even touted as a potential President but his disillusionment with communism prompted his emigration to the US in 1947.

Nevertheless, Szent-Györgyi is so revered in Hungary that an anthem to him, for choir and orchestra was composed in 2012 at the University of Szeged, which is incidentally also Karikó’s alma mater, and which she visited just a week after her own win last year, posing next to a life-size statue of him.

Living life to the fullest, Szent-Györgyi was passionate about motorcycles and cars and loved sports such as horse-riding, tennis, swimming, and gliding.

There are several of Szent-Györgyi’s wry comments and statements that are quotable quotes in the scientific community.

But it is my own fascination with how great men and women of the sciences respond to religion or thoughts about a Creator and the beginning of life that prompts me to end with this quote:

“I am not religious, but I am a pious man… A religious man has a definite religion. He says ‘God is there’ or ‘Your god is not my god, and that’s all.’ But the pious man, he just looks out with awe, and says, ‘Where is God?’ and ‘I don’t understand it and I would like to know what this creation really means.’ A pious man is really touched by the greatness of nature and of creation.”

(An edited version of this article was published on 18 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

And the (Moving Big ) Band plays on!

My very first job posting in England in 1998 was at Newham General hospital, east London. Its vibrant community centre in its precincts just a tiny yard across from my accommodation did much to alleviate my homesickness and help me fit in. Each evening of the week had a different activity, from chess night (where the local grandmaster would often play upto twelve of us simultaneously, stopping for a few seconds at each board to make his move), Alcoholics Anonymous meetings (but so many of them chain-smoked, which made me wonder why there wasn’t also a Smokers Anonymous group!) and best of all, on Tuesday evenings…Big Band!

Words fail one to describe the visceral experience of hearing the lustrous burnished sound of a truly accomplished big brass band up close. These were brass and woodwind musicians from all walks of life, mostly retired men and women from the many professional orchestras in and around London; from marching bands; from the Salvation Army, all united by a common purpose: their love of making music together, and willing to meet weekly round the year to do it. I loved sitting in on rehearsals which would be often followed by dance nights for whoever wished to take the floor.

It is this memory that came back to me when I heard of the upcoming performance of the Moving Big Band from Sweden, first at the Kala Academy auditorium on 15 February, and at Silva Heritage Lawns Benaulim on 18 February 2024, presented by the Live Music Project.

Moving Big Band was formed over four decades ago by Donald Roberts, a classical and jazz pianists and a retired cardiologist of Anglo-Indian extraction.

Roberts grew up in Vepery, an Anglo-Indian suburb to the north of that city, among those oldest neighbourhoods (as early as 1749) developed during the British settlement in Madras (now Chennai). In his youth it was a hub for jazz, and country and western music. His father was engaged as pianist in the heritage Connemara hotel, named after   he then Madras Governor during 1881–1886, Robert Bourke, baron of Connemara, a rural area in County Galway in the west of Ireland.

Roberts took up the piano after his father, studying both classical and jazz piano in his youth. After graduating from Madras Christian College, he studied for a while in Mangalore (where he picked up Konkani as well) and then undertook his medical studies at CMC (Christian Medical College) Vellore.

In the 1970s, Roberts moved to Sweden, where along with his medical practice and specialisation he kept up his abiding love of music.

The Moving Big Band was begun by him four decades ago with an ensemble of 16 musicians from all walks of life, quite like the band I knew back in Newham

. “In Sweden, every child that goes to school learns to sing and play an instrument. When the person retires, he or she may take up music again. We wanted to create a platform where people can still pursue their hobby which they left behind,” Roberts explained in an article to the press some years ago.

Beginning music education at as early an age as possible is a subject close to my own heart. I was reading a 2013 article in the New York Times by Joanne Lipman, co-author of the book “Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations.” Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement, but Lipman asserts that “the phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously. Many of them apply music’s lessons of focus and discipline into new ways of thinking and communicating — even problem solving.”

“Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas,” she continues. “All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.”

Aren’t these crucial life skills? This is why our children should learn music within the school curriculum in a comprehensive manner. We need only look to so many countries like Sweden and incorporate music from the primary level through to college as they do.

Another point Roberts made in that earlier interview ties in with the theme of a recent column of mine, of the fallacious notion of the “high-brow” and “low-brow” in music, art, or indeed any human pursuit.

Speaking about jazz, Roberts said that it was born out of the need for recreation among the poor. “They would get together in the evening probably in somebody’s house and engage in singing and dancing and that’s how jazz happened. It was started by home-grown musicians in the beginning and gradually people would pay and listen to this sort of music in America. It began to catch up with the sophisticated crowd during the 30’s and 40’s. Today, jazz is considered as classical art.”

Giving us that big band jazz sound are five saxophones (Marcus Flyckt and Peter Hallgren, alto sax; Rune Leander and Pelle Soedenberg, tenor sax; and Henrik Kloo, baritone sax), four trumpets (Lars-Olaf Eriksson, Goesta Emelius, Lars Folkerman, Maria Samuelsson), four trombones (Peter Malton, Niklas Angebrand, Pontus Bergmark, Lars Sjoestrand) Hans Hall (guitar, percussion, vocal), Donald Roberts (piano), Martin Wassenius (bass), Carl David Oesterberg (drums), and two singers (Ester Utbult and Elina Larsson). Most of the band including the I3 brass players are over 70 except for the 2 female singers who are in their 20s. Their India tour encompasses Chennai, Vellore, Ooty and Bangalore before the final leg in Goa before they return to Sweden.

I spoke with Matthew Samuel, Goa’s former Secretary for Art and Culture (among many other prominent governmental posts) who first told me about this maverick ensemble.   “Donald Roberts himself is an octogenarian, 83, and has energy like you wouldn’t believe. This band has grizzled jazz veterans who are extremely skilled in their music and have an inspiring zest for live performance. They will play jazz standards from the Swing Era (‘The Lady is a Tramp’, ‘Mack the Knife’) and they can be coaxed to belt out a few Abba songs to get you singing and dancing in the aisles.”

“You can go to extremes with impossible schemes; Fairy tales can come true; It can happen to you if you’re young at heart,” go the lyrics of the famous Frank Sinatra song.

Who would know that better than an experienced cardiologist? The Moving Big Band promises to be everything the doctor ordered.

(An edited version of this article was published on 11 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Love is central to true Christianity

We get cable TV at home, and some channels are part of the package deal even though one doesn’t particularly wish to watch them.

One of these is Rophe TV. I encounter it only when channel-surfing, and I gathered from the beginning that it is an evangelical Christian channel. I give any evangelical enterprise a wide berth if I can help it. But I did notice in passing that quite often their ‘preachers’ were flanked by the Israeli flag. I shuddered in disgust but moved on.

Conflating the Biblical land of Israel with the modern eponymous state established in 1948 in the same region is not only erroneous but dangerous as it compounds an already vexed issue.

But after the unconscionable Hamas terrorist act of October 7 2023, I noticed a ramping up of the presence of the Israeli flag on the channel. There are at least four video clips still on their website from two months ago, where the disproportionate military response, the collective punishment meted out to Gaza’s civilian population by the state of Israel was spoken of approvingly and given ‘Biblical sanction’ by cherry-picking selective excerpts and actually saying that Devache utor (God’s word) was coming to pass.

The videos began with imagery of warfare: guns, helicopter gunships, cannons, barbed wire, to the sound of booming explosions. The irony of the greeting ‘Shalom’ (Peace) by Dr. A.R. Royan, Bro. Anthony Dias (Founder and Director) and Pastor Royston Dias after that ‘shock and awe’ introduction antithetical to peace seemed to be lost on them.

What I found quite remarkable in all four video clips was the fact that every last quotation from the Bible that they resorted to came from the Old Testament, never the New. And all of them take those quotations written several millennia ago, quite literally.

For instance Royston Dias (quoting Zepheniah 2:4) makes no reference to its context whatsoever, and instead plays upon the viewer’s assumed ignorance, asking breathlessly, “Do you know the word Gaza is mentioned in the Bible?” as if the mention itself has sealed its fate. Such simplistic Scriptural ‘interpretations’ do no-one any credit, least of all the viewer it seeks to address. It is unconscionable to forcibly extrapolate obscure chapter and verse, even if it be from a Scripture, to our time merely because it suits a devious, twisted, hateful agenda to do so.

But such Biblical literalist interpretations are used extensively by fundamentalist Christians; and the Old Testament, with all its instances of a vengeful God, is their happy hunting ground for their devious agenda. They wilfully ignore the New Testament, which focuses on the actual life and teachings of Jesus Christ (whose name they nevertheless evoke so fervently, sometimes as Jesus, Jezu or Yeshua) where the overwhelming narrative is one of love, humanity, humility, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation.       

Evangelical Christians view the Jews as ‘God’s chosen people’ and the creation of the state of Israel as the fulfilment of Biblical promises. In their twisted binary of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the Palestinian people are therefore ‘evil’. This is why, quite callously, in none of those videos is there even a throw-away word of empathy for the two million innocent defenceless civilians trapped as bombs and missiles rain upon them. Instead, the viewer is told “Do not fear what is happening, but trust in the Lord. These things are going to happen,” a harbinger of ‘End Times’ and one even asserts blasphemously that Jesus said so!  

Over 27,000 civilians (with several thousands more unaccounted beneath the rubble of demolished homes, hospitals, shelters), over 10,000 of them children have been systematically, remorselessly slaughtered in the Gaza strip so far at the time of writing this, and the number keeps rising each day.  To put 10,000 children’s deaths in perspective: if one were to attend the funeral of each child each consecutive day, it would take over 27 years. This is not an act of God but the bloodthirsty sadistic evil of Man.

A Palestinian man carries a child casualty following Israeli strikes on houses in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

What evangelical Christians wilfully ignore is the fact that there are Christians among the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their Muslim brethren in the face of Israeli oppression, apartheid, and yes, genocide. Israel recently went on trial at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, accused by South Africa of committing the crime of genocide with its ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip.

John Munayer, a Palestinian Christian theologian told the press, “When you support a specific state that has racist policies and is enforcing an apartheid state, that would be un-Biblical in my mind. That wouldn’t be loving thy neighbour as thyself.”

Now that’s a quote-worthy Old Testament text, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) the Golden Rule or the Great Commandment.

Jesus himself quoted it in Matthew 22:37–39.

The great Church theologian Saint Augustine in his ‘De doctrina christiana’ stresses the importance of humility in the study of Scripture. He also regards the commandment of love in Matthew 22 as the heart of Christian faith.

Add to that Matthew 25:40. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto Me.”

And the gospel of John: “A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have loved you.”

Love is central to true Christianity.

Listen to this excerpt from the speech of Pastor Munther Isaac of Lutheran Church Bethlehem (“Palestinian Christian Response to Christian Zionism” 7 November 2023): “The irony for us Palestinian Christians is that evangelicals with their overemphasis on prophecy have lost the capacity of being prophetic. You want to prove that the Bible is right? You don’t do this by pointing to self-fulfilling prophecy, or by pointing to world events as prophecy fulfilment. This is not how you prove that the Bible is right. We prove that the Bible is right by radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus, by proving that Jesus’s teachings actually work, and that they can make the world a better place. Let us love our enemies forgive them which sin against us. Let us feed the poor, care for the oppressed, walk the extra mile, be inclusive not exclusive, turn the other cheek and maybe and only maybe then the world would start taking us seriously and believing in our Bible.”

As a practising Christian myself, I find Bible-thumping messages of hate by false prophets who callously rejoice in the annihilation of the Palestinian people utterly reprehensible. “Not in my name,” is my response to any doctrine of hate, whatever the twisted ‘Scriptural’ justification for it.   

(An edited version of this article was published on 04 February 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

There is only “brow”

I 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)