Although I have not finished one complete year in the US, it feels like a circle, two semesters almost makes up for one year! This must be the period for reflection, sitting back and watching what happened, how it happened, and what it did to me!
I am already feeling hard to articulate. Today was the first day in my life in the US when I offered someone to come for a coffee. It has taken me a year to get over the value of a dollar and the potential of a coffee. Maybe I must make this as a lesson chart. Here are a few of them
Lessons Learnt:
A dollar expensive only as long as you compare it to rupee in the US.
Coffee is the key to conversation. Casual conversations happen over coffees.
A colleague at my new office (MoMA) told me today that a member of the MoMA who is on his visit to Mumbai for an upcoming exhibition to document urbanism in the city, sent her an image of a telephone booth (that is generally operated by visually challenged people in our city) to her as one of his documented images from the city. This colleague of mine seemed surprised with what the person inside the telephone station was doing! I tried to frame the context for her and later the conversation drifted into a history of the way in which long distance calls were made, and received. For me, it was difficult to take a position for this condition - this colleague was clearly finding the existence of such a condition outdated. By framing the context, would I represent India as still much behind in the "global" race, or non-developed? What would she make out of my contextualizing explanation? Would she think of the place, considered today a megacity, as something that is still to see so much?
I immediately contrasted it with the fact that even sweepers had mobiles today, but these telephone booths would become places to make anonymous calls, international calls, and so on. But another dimension that I got thinking about was that how, an everyday object like the telephone booth in Mumbai, becomes an object of curiousity for an 'outsider'. How then, so many things become matters of documentation for different cultures. Soon enough, I came to a comparative cross axis, thinking about what become objects of curiousity for me in the US. And the list was endless. Although I do not know in what light the MoMA member shall interpret his observations in Mumbai, but I certainly look at the new urbanity I am in here, through my critical lens. I don't have any glorified understanding of this place (New York), but only look at things here to understand how people here think, as compared to us.
The buttons at the signals to cross the streets, the computerised systems, the non-manual booths and kiosks, the streets saturated with signages, the large spread-out or multistoreyed parking lots, the straight endless roads, the criss crossing numbered streets and avenues - all dictate a highly structured world. For any one coming from this environment, Mumbai will be an absolute mess. But both, Mumbai and New York are amiable cities, and what makes them such is people. The number of chance encounters with people and finding that you are part of some or the other network through which you can connect to a common event are very high in cities. You see people from different places, races, ethnicities and don't find yourself as alien as you would find yourself in a small town.
Moreover, the city conditions people in similar fashions. Amongst the curious objects of the city, are also people - typified by the city life. People dozing off on the trains, sleeping on benches, spitting on the street, talking to themselves, shouting aloud abusing others, waiting for elses on the bus stops, shrugging about the missed signals or trains or buses, hopping in the rains without umbrellas, ignorant of the next person - you see bits of yourself somewhere in all of them. You relate to these conditions of the city in people if you have grown up in any city across the world as charged as New York or Mumbai.
Traveling back on the subways, like the Mumbai locals, after about 9 months, I find my body fatigued exactly like before - something I never experienced in the town of New Haven. What is this fatigue, what happens to the body? What gets inside? Why do we doze off on the trains in the morning right after having a bath, when we are just beginning our day? After some basic pondering, I have come to the conclusion that it must be some simplistic exchange of energy systems when our body is subject to a speed other than usual. The way in which the city makes us move up and down tends to accumulate some potential energy in our body perhaps, which is not transferred into any other form. This potential energy until transformed, makes us feel heavy on head! Or is it the quality of air that we breathe? This might be such a silly theory, absolutely irrational. What's the harm in thinking about it anyway if it placates the restive mind?
But traveling in trains is always enjoyable. As I have written before, long before, I like to see the way in which the city gets framed and reframed in motion - through the windows and doors of the moving vehicles.
I don't feel too alone in the city of New York - there is always activity to look at, unlike New Haven. Yesterday for example I trailed to look at the Seagram Building by Mies Van Der Rohe, which is right next to my office. And I absolutely loved it. Today I was told by my friend that there is another building right across the Seagram building designed by SOM as well as one by Saarinen. The aspect of "design" is so prevalent in this city - I believe that people are generally aware of design and style and like to know about things, and how they come into existence.
The amount of people that visit MoMA everyday is phenomenal. I see queues to its exhibits even before the Museum opens. The galleries are never empty - also, being summer, it remains overcrowded. All kinds of people visit it - MOMA is the place for contemporary art. I must detail this aspect on another post. But New York has given me back my experience of a city, rather, it has allowed me to relook at Mumbai through an altogether different perspective. Although New York seems extremely organized, it can be absolutely messy with its grid iron streets (primarily Manhattan). The character of the city is similar at most places and it is as easy to lose track as to orient oneself. Perhaps one needs some orientation with the signage. Otherwise, it's just my Mumbai hangover through which I constantly transgress the rules of this city.
But in what I have written above, I have hardly covered anything that I really wanted to say. I guess thoughts just evaporate when I ask them to become words. I am sorry about that. Meanwhile, this piece of junk will be all I post for this post.
After watching so many videos and listening to most songs of Sneha Khanwalkar available online, I am still not sure how to begin talking about the music she produces. Her albums are of course the mere final product of her work, and that is only 10% of the actual story of her music, but what interests me, and perhaps everyone, is the 90% that remains at the background of these songs. This 90% is the real story, or the foreground of her music. Her music practice is foregrounded by multiple factors that are generally remain unrecognized in the music industry, a subset of the Hindi film industry.
I choose to write this essay on Khanwalkar's music for it introduces a practice that makes us aware of the sounds we live in. As mentioned before, I have been observing her interviews to understand how she thinks of music, its creation and her project. She does not confirm to the silent A R Rahman's mystic approach in explaining her music, and neither other musicians in India who are hardly able to describe the process they go through in creating their work. Sneha pulls off by choosing seemingly right adjectives and phrases to talk about her music. Her openness to express her ideas, thoughts and doubts with her music make it real, relate-able. People rejoice even in the ambiguity of the music she produces, because she acknowledges it outrightly. One can find her body language filling up the gap of non-descriptive aspects of her music. Her practice has a clear inspiration from that of UK born Grammy winning multi-instrumentalistImogen Heap. She takes the title of being a 'female music director' without making a big deal about it - confidently and casually acknowledging Jaddan bai (Nargis's mother), Saraswati Devi and Usha Khanna who preceded her in the industry.
To begin with, the beats, sounds and rhythms of her songs come from everyday lives - what has commonly come to be understood as folk, or popular (eventually pop). It is the music that common people create, engage with I think, therefore, it gets large volume of listening audience. Secondly, her music makes common people feel empowered, it gives legitimacy to what institutionalized channels often reject - hoarse voices, improper pronunciations, tonal quality, voice modulations, ranges and pitches and all such terms we commonly get to hear in music shows, reality singing soaps and from professional singers across the world. The music Sneha produces ignores these canons and comes to appreciate the ethnography of that voice or sound. Her music treats sound as a social product. It thus talks of sound as a product of one's history. This allows a new understanding of music - one that doe snot compare 'a' musical piece to other, but situates it in its own context, thus evaluating the intensity of emotion that it carries. Thirdly, her music interacts with geography and environment, rather it creates an environment that is localized, which one may not easily classify as global. In fact, I believe her music bridges the contrasting ideas of local and global. This I say primarily in the framework of her practice that harnesses the technological resources of the global world in order to channel and concentrate a culture that is extremely local. In other words it can be said that she appropriately appropriates the tools of the electronic world to shape her sound that is able to connect with its audience in ways more abstract than canonical. By abstract I mean to hint to an emotion that can not be easily described as opposed to the objective qualities of evaluating music entailed by canons of classical music.
Her singers are not conventional. Her voice casting includes beggars singing in the trains, women singing in the temples, to neighbourhood singing stars, small children, local performance artists, tribal and folk men and women - all whom she finds on her journeys. Similarly, her recording studios are not permanent. They change places from peoples houses, to open streets, to personal spaces and open grounds. Her field lies outside of the four walls of the recording studio. A lot of her composition happens on the computer - tweaking, mixing, matching, mashing, correcting, looping sounds that she ends up collecting in the geographies she travels.
Her own reflections on the geography of sounds is interesting. Ways in which accents and pronunciations of words change as one moves from place to place become aspects of highlights of her songs. "Womaniya," "Nervousaao nahi moora," and more such regional twists of foreign languages in regional dialects become important anchors for her songs. This adds, along with humor, a satirical statement to her songs. Her compositions are qwerky, and it works for her. I think in this fast post post-colonial vocabulary-changing world, languages morph, like other things in the environment, to become elements of hybridity. I think my interest in such hybridity makes me take a closer look at the music recently created by Sneha Khanwalkar.
The songs she has composed shows a distinct sensitivity in the way sounds interact with each other within them. Through her thoughts on the recording of Womaniya, we come to understand that we do not listen to music in the ideal sound-proof conditions that they are often produced in. The surrounding environment within which we hear music; for example in train compartments, in buses, on the streets or crowded places; all influence the way in which we perceive music. She interestingly induces this contamination right at the stage of creating her music. She refers to the leaking dischordant sounds of the group that she auditioned for Womaniya in Gangs of Wasseypur that gives it its raw flavour. Sounds of everyday objects are forced under a seemingly underplaying rhythm to give rise to a chaos in which encounter music in our quotidian lives.
I quickly want to talk about the psychogeography of her music, or the way in which her music psychologically interacts with and creates space. A single piece of music can make different associations for us depending on various factors and circumstances we hear it in. It relates to phases of our lives, people and incidents - and not to forget the spaces which they make to us the most impacts in. Thus the postmodern reception of music is absolutely non-deterministic. In addition, we have always heard more music outside the confined and controlled atmosphere of the cinema halls. Thus the popular reception of music is almost always adulterated. It takes a great amount of risk to project such adulteration confidently. The "Chee Chha Phake Leather" brings in the irritablity of the street through the voice of a train beggar or the "Tu Raja ki Raajdulari" invokes in us a space of an adolescent erupting into an adult. Similarly, she matches the variant pronunciations of the phrase 'Bihar ke lala' by Manoj Tiwari in the song to the imagined self-'glory' of an everyday Bihari goon. Such abstract themes of 'irritability' or 'adolescent' become the only geographic destinations through which imaginations of places can be discussed in the global field of media flows.
On the other hand, the way in which geography affects language also comes through sharply in her songs. The conscious or subconsious decisions through which floating words get twisted and assimilated into local cultures defines a new anomalous geography of a place that is part real, part imagined. Sneha refers to it as the 'grain of voice' or the 'textures of sounds' that she is able to tap into people by being in their own environment instead of pulling them to the recording studio. She offers these non-singers an ease of their geography by recording them outside the intimidating environs of the studio. The connection of a voice to a surrounding becomes more evident through these experiments. The space-sound relationship gains particular currency in her compositions. Lastly, she openly acknowledges that today, technology allows her to carry the recording studio along with her wherever she goes. Thus she is not only able to grasp the feel of the voice in the place, but also some of the most unconventional sounds and mannerisms of cultural instruments through which the energy of sound in a space is tapped.
To end with, Sneha's music introduces to us the vast amount of music that remains within the folds of Indian culture. We have an intrinsic culture of singing and the diversity of the country constantly mutates its aesthetic forms. In this, a composer like Sneha brings to us a new aesthetic of sound - that which enables us to be more confident with the emerging hybridity of sounds, words and musics. Her sound thus doesn't hit the listener's ear as hard as the professionally composed high culture scores. Rather, it makes way through our ear into our mind in an extremely personal way, exciting our vouyeristic cravings, and sometimes our repressed unexplainable thoughts. To me it presents the tumultous global condition, forever fluxed, but charged. But it also becomes exemplary of the global condition by virtue of the practice being constantly on the move. Computer gives homogeneity to disparate flows of ideas. It bring together disparate pieces of sounds creating a new environment that can only be appreciated in its vagueness. Could I call it the gulzar-ization of music? This new environment comprises of fractured languages, tidbits of voices that get strewn into lyrics of songs as slangs and amplified by unconventional choice of singers. We only remain to see how long such practice of music making remains unconventional, and whether it sustains the consumption by a mammoth called the Bollywood.
(this article contains a lot of jargon, and occasional improvisation of this article is but natural) last updated: 6th June)
Change of geography is a difficult thing to handle. Imagine if you got up one morning and found yourself in a space where the walls of your room have changed directions, your bed has turned and you are no longer facing the window you slept against at night. Not only will it be completely disorienting, but the structuring of the house will no longer guide you in the same way...they no longer direct you like before.
I am saying the above in reference to the ongoing shuffle of my working place at the Sterling Memorial library at Yale which is going a major renovation. I had just gotten used to my work place after a semester of work which made my body mover and twist in regular ways. I had all my turns calculated, steps were measured and heights were defined. However, now I no longer engage with the space in the same way. By virtue of shift and change of the old working conditions, the space which one bends, moves or sits is absolutely different.
Similarly, I changed 3 houses in my first year. And every time it was different - the shapes, heights and smells of all these rooms were different. The seasons I occupied them in were different. The neighbourhoods and the views they framed were drastically different. The sounds that occurred while at home and the way the morning showed and woke me up were just not the same. The light and the people were different. Thus this space (New Haven) has never been settling for me. My research in domesticity underplayed a large role in this understanding.
The notion of 'unsettling' becomes starker when every action that your body gets accustomed to is challenged time and again. What they call it the "choreography" of built space...Re-imagine then, the initial scenario - where the geography of your house has changed. You realize that you no longer see the same view while reading on your desk, the light coming from a particular direction while you watch television has changed or the height of your wash basin had gone lower by two inches or the switchboard you blindedly used before entering the room has changed its wall. The way in which the house folded your body is no longer the same. Sometimes this can bring irritation, because the choreography of the house calls for a change in your physical actions.
If we were to extrapolate this learning to a larger level in architecture, the results are even more drastic. Churning landscapes into different territories altogether affect a large mass of people. New typologies of buildings change the settled character of built space, affecting masses of people together pushing them to a transformation. Transformations are always difficult because they ask you to reconsider old habits, old norms. However, being critical is only then a matter of closely looking at the nature of change, how would it affect you and what would it do to a probable future...
Anyway, I haven't developed this writing well, because originally I meant to describe geography as a physical setting of sorts. This physicality structures us as much as we design it. As Lefebvre calls it - we share a dialectic relationship.
Last night, I entered the apartment I stay in late. It was pitch dark, but i managed to make my way to the room because my steps were measured and I had tactile landmarks for myself. I turned left and right at the right place and took cues by feeling the objects in the dark before i finally gauged the switch of the lamp! It did not dash myself, hurt my body or bang against any wall. The geography of the house was now familiar to me, it has become a part of me...soon to change though.
But does this remind you of how Alibaba found his way to the treasure inspite of the fact that he was blindfolded for the first time when he was taken there?
Sometimes I wonder if the same old people still read my posts? Rather, I wonder if those people whom I would want to read my blog actually do read them?
We always write for someone, there is always someone that we address our writing to...This reader is not imaginary, is it? We definitely have a character in head whom we idealize and write for that person. Perhaps it may also not be so...but I constantly keep on confusing myself with whatever I say! So while one post is for someone, another can be for someone else - and thus there are overlaps, incongruencies, inconsistencies which are inevitable in the format of a blog readership.
In the mobilities of time, space and people, some posts catch attentions of people who really surprise you by a random comment...those are special moments and it's nice in the way they get preserved in the blog! and when you revisit them, they give you sweet pleasure!
So if you are an old reader and still reading this blog, I would love to have your comment here! That shall boost me to bring out more of what's there inside my head!
I need to submit my paper tomorrow. And I am struggling to write the last 100 words, which will be the first 100 when I submit my document. All thoughts there in the mind, I find it so hard to express them beautifully, sot hat not only they express my concern, but also make logical sense. While i construct sentences in my head, they get dismantled when I ask to myself: "so what"? It is extremely frustrating when you don't get the right words to explain the feeling you are going through, or rather, something that you have a hunch on, something that is really bothersome, but you still do not have the way to express it.
That is about writing - as difficult as designing. Sitting with a blank piece of paper or an untyped sheet, sentences come and go. Seemingly well designed sentences fall immediately, and sometimes, loose ideas become so strong. Larger questions that always remain at the background are that "who is the audience?", who is interested in your thesis, why should any one be interested in your thesis? How does it change anything? And this is exactly what has to come out in the first 100 words - the most impacting paragraph...something that shall arrest the mind of the reader, something that will make the thesis more concrete and valid...
"There is a common theme running through all your writings," my advisor says - and we know that. But it's just so beautiful when she talks about it rather than me speaking or writing it out. I think she is fabulous, in the way she gives a literary shape to my thoughts. Talking to Eeva, my advisor, always brings a smile on my face. It feels like she tells me: "see it was so easy!" But I guess advisors always make things sound fantastic, because they are much well read and much more prepared with their positions. We are still constructing our positions.
In the last meeting she told me regarding my paper: "But what is a thesis if it can not fail? You have to take that risk, and your struggle with your writing is worthwhile. Tell your story, you have to tell a story, be assertive in your voice. And I think you already have a voice, it just needs some...some...like 2 minute noodles..."
That was reassuring, but the fact remains that one has to write the story, and there are so many ways in which your story can be told. But people have limited time, so you have to convey the right idea in limited words! Ah! Graduate school - it's much tougher than it feels to be!
Immanuel Kant submitted that "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inablitity to use one;s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another."
These days it has become so difficult to get an entry point into the numerous thoughts that run within my mind! Even for the current post, I am struggling to find ways of presenting the multiplicity of experiences that my mind is undergoing right now. Where on one hand I have the pressure of finishing my papers and course work, on the other hand I am pursuing some things that give me utmost satisfaction non-academically! I am truly living a liberal-arts environment - participating in music, films, discussion, debates, plays and what not! There is generally so much to document, and in addition, opinions constantly keep on forming, but I wait to finalize these in the head. I guess it's a phase when I am noticing and learning new things and it would be too early to harden my perspective about them.
Last two days I was at Boston for the 'Sa-re-ga-ma-pella' - South Asian A capella meet. We had four acapella teams from different universities who performed at the Boston University. I was along with my group Sur-et-Veritaal -Yale's only south asian acapella group! This gave me an opportunity to spend more time with the undergraduates at Yale. My interaction with the undergraduates at Yale has been varied. I taught a bunch of students at Yale last semester as a Teaching fellow; whereas over this semsester, I have been performing with my acapella group. Both these sets of people were different, or perhaps it was the relationship I shared with them that changed the dynamics of our conversations. I enjoy being with my music group - they are fun to be with.
I have always been self critical, sometimes a bit too harsh upon myself. Spending the last two semesters at Yale, I have found people here to be extremely encouraging, supportive and furthering. Even when I would feel that my ideas are not up to the mark, they have said them to be rich. This goes with my professors, friends and my acapella group members too.
Initially I was too new to the concept of A capella and would make plently of mistakes in understanding or coordinating music. Some days back, I was listening to the initial recording of our songs and they sounded awful. I remember how there was no criticism, or frustration expressed over things that didnot really work that time - in fact, it was considered to be normal. There were times when I would go up to our music director Marios and ask the same thing multiple times, ask the silliest of the questions and the group put up with that. While the group thought I was really good, I constantly kept undermining myself. Eventually things have gotten much better - but there have been times when I have kept away from taking lead for songs. I was to sing the lead for one of the songs at the concert we performed at Boston yesterday. I kept making mistakes with this song (Chhaiya Chhaiya) since the original song was edited to suit the composition and I wasn't able to memorize it. In spite of constant mistakes, I was never criticized by the group (at atleast it wasn't expressed) . They were extremely accommodating and kept positive mood! I wondered if I could ever be so patient with any one else working with me, especially until a few hours before the performance!
We performed well...and I wasn't particularly tensed since I had made up my mind to enjoy whatever I did. However, the group's positive encouragement helped me curb my own self-criticality.
I slowly started accepting that it's all about trying, practicing and giving time - not only to the self, but even to others. I guess this is what is the general culture / way in which things are taught here. Teachers appreciate even if a student brings one good point in comparison to nine other weak ones. The one good point is honed and taken to the next level.
But here is what I have always wondered - what is it about not being critical of your own weak points? While it's my tendency to work and better my weak aspects, Americans tend to choose their best quality and make it even better. It is not within this culture to talk much about things that are not working out! In other words, they are progressive. For example, in my case, the group did not really focus on my mistakes but kept praising me for the quality of my voice. They would say that the group had really strong soloists, instead of the fact that the group needed way more work on presentation.
This makes me think of an overall American culture as one which tries to cover up its non-working aspects through those that work for itself. They project their pretty points far too positively when framing a picture of themselves. I am not sure of my stand on this aspect since on one hand, being new to this place, I crave for such encouragement and adulation, but on the other hand I also would like to have some one be critical of my thoughts such that it makes me aware of things I haven't been thinking of or concentrating on before...
Well, that's a general observation, and it is definitely going to change, as soon as I see the results. Sometimes I also think that I have been too critical of myself for much long time to be able to even acknowledge my good qualities! So it's a nice moment to find a chance to appreciate myself. Perhaps, I also do not know how to acknowledge appreciation - I generally reflect it back as "Oh, I am not that great." Another reflex when some one appreciates you here is to give back that appreciation. I have found myself changing in that respect. Although I am not completely able to do away with my over-critcal nature, I keep this critical observation to myself as much as possible instead of throwing it off on others. But personally, it is hard for me to overly appreciate a minor good quality (and blow it out of proportion) overlooking that person's capacity to improve on other fronts. The primary reason I do not subscribe to that attitude is that it is to market-oriented and feels as if one is trying to sell oneself.
Guess I am again being critical.
To end it and frame an example of what I am talking about: Although I do know that we performed really well at the SaReGaMaPella, I know that the acoustics and the mike arrangement at the show sucked and it was partially responsible for nor bringing out the beauty of our composition. However, no one speaks about this terrible arrangement - everyone only appreciates how well the soloists sang, etc. But I find it too hollow a comment because it is too political. It feels as if the other teams praise us since they want it back. It's not about competition that I write the above, but to figure out how the arrangement can be bettered, what kinds of spaces work for a-Capella performances? What must be the setting and how they must be conducted in order to experience them completely...
I couldn't talk about (for example) performances that I thought did not really work well, and how they could really be reconsidered - it all gets covered in the mushy-mushy goody-goody "oh-you-were-so-good" compliments! Sometimes you can make out they are not genuine. I just don't find it healthy! Another example is the pre-made card that has presented to the group at the end of the show - don't know how much the words in the note really mean:
But there are a million other things to record and I am not sure if I can write all of them here!
