The South I've Left Behind

I'm no longer in Tamil Nadu. I complained to my boss that I was a tad lonesome and that I hadn't spoken to anyone who speaks English in weeks and weeks, and asked permission to come to Bombay for a long weekend to see my friend Janki, who happens to be here visiting her Indian family. "Yeah," he said. "Why don't you come for a month?".

So I'm in Bandra, a lovely suburb of Bombay, and, incidentally, the new happening neighborhood for young people and bars and all that, but all that will have to wait. Right now, I need to catch up some images I meant to put up like 2 weeks ago, but haven't had time to post.

First off, this is what South Indians do during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights...



Yeah, you got it. The set off fireworks in back alleys and they are extremely loud and they start doing it around 7 am. I didn't sleep for like 4 days. It was like a warzone.

During Diwali, I was living in a computer-skills training center outside of Madurai, the self-proclaimed "city of temples," right in the middle of Tamil Nadu. The biggest temple is the Sri Meenakshi Temple, which is dedicated to the god Shiva and his boo Parvati. It has four towers, all covered head to toe with intricately-painted idols. This is the largest, the south tower.





And this is Vana, the Tamil Nadu field guy for Dasra, with his wife Kalai and one of the neighborhood babies. They live on a little lane in Madurai, and I recently hung out for a lazy Sunday afternoon there, while the kids ran around playing.



Vana, baby, and Vana's daughter Ratchinya:



Cricket in the lane... I later joined the game, batted a century, bowled 4 wickets, and was borne on upturned hands around the neighborhood by a mob of ecstatic fans.



And as many of you know, I am learning an instrument over here called the veena or vina, which is a bit similar, to the untrained ear, to the sitar, but the veena is used only in South Indian "carnatic" music, rather than North Indian "hindustani" music. The veena has seven strings, four of which are used for melody, plucked with the index and middle fingers, and three of which are used to keep rhythm, plucked as a drone chord at certain set intervals with the pinky finger.

Learning veena is the closest I've ever come to meditating. Here's why. The rhythmic structure of the music is called talum, which basically means that certain beats of a given talum are emphasized (for example, in one eight-beat talum, the 1st, 5th, and 7th beats are stressed, meaning that I have to hit the drone strings on those beats), and there are over 170 different talums. My guru, K.S. Subramanian, a Wesleyan-trained ethnomusicologist who runs a carnatic music institute called Braddhvani in Chennai, knows all the talums by heart, and can play them, with melodies both fast and slow overtop, completely effortlessly. He says that I have to internalize the talums by repeating them over and over again, the same way hindu saints learn enlightenment by repeating mantras over and over again. So I sit and I practice, I burn incense (among other things), I try to concentrate on nothing but the rhythms, and it's pretty awesome. Look out, George Harrison. There's a new quiet eastern spiritualist available for Baltimore-New York-Pittsburgh area rock bands.

Here's Subramanian, rocking out in front of the Shaivite shrine in his living room:



And here's me, struggling to play long after my leg has fallen asleep, because the veena is huge and ungainly and you have to rest it on your knee...