No title

Being detached with any kind of popular media from India makes me realize how much it constructs us. I am talking about the television serials, soaps, films, newspapers, magazines or any such sources that mediate reality for us, make it ready for us to be consumed. It constructs us as much as we construct it. When our thoughts become real, the do not necessarily represent us completely. they are always fragments. When mediated (read realized in media), they are available for us to pass our judgments, critique and critically look back at what has been said and done. They are available for consumption, to take on identities, to define ourselves and to thus make up our own image.

Meanwhile there is nothing really to look forward to. Thus I save a lot of time thinking about many other things that I once used to think of. A huge repository of material that generally irritates us, but also gives us some common ground to talk about, creating some kind of space of dialogue, debate and general discussion. I wonder how much time does it take to absorb and be able to comment about a new culture? And would it be even appropriate to talk or pass opinions about a culture that one is not brought up in?

It was funny, today I saw a child (perhaps 7-8 year old boy) playing around the MoMA courtyard where a number of sculptures are placed. One of them is that of a lady almost in a falling position abutting the shallow pool. The sculpture is made up in black stone (perhaps), the lady is naked. The child goes to it and in amusement, looks at the naked sculpture. He soon explores it from all sides, and points out funnily, the ass hole of the lady to his sister. I dont know what exactly he felt - he laughed in amusement, perhaps finding it erotic, yet funny. He then pointed it to his mother, sharply laughing by now. The mother laughed too, that was her only response!

I wondered how would this incident take place in India? Would the reactions of the child and the parent be the same? We do have our temples filled with erotic sculptures. Would our parents sit and discuss them with us?

Anyway, I think I have digressed, but the this whole thing of lack of cultural understanding doesnot allow me to talk - I may be voicing a wrong opinion all the time in here, so I keep questioning and doubting myself when I talk about America. But all one can do is compare - being detached gives a perspective. Difference in everyday practices makes us experience the extent of deviation of doing things. Analysis of this deviation helps us to understand the way in which this society functions, thinks. All of these operations or thoughts are embedded in histories. And much of history is mediated - in which we believe, revel and find ourselves.

Being away from home is thus difficult. It limits your sphere of operation, but at the same time allows you to look beyond.

There are plenty of naiive questions I wrote here, and erased. Only because I know these questions cannot be answered. You only have to take a position!

Lessons in USA

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.

Formality is formality.

Golden words don't cost anything!

Personal space is reverential.

Having a car is hardly a luxury.

You grow up when you are 18 (even 16).

Keep things to yourself.

Keep up a good face.

Recommendations matter.

Learning NYC

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.

Sneha Khanwalkar & the Geography of her Music

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-instrumentalist Imogen 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)

American English

And one year of US taught me my common errors  and new words in English:

Can you suggest me something? (incorrect)

Can you suggest to me something? (correct)

Can you suggest something to me? (correct)

You like this shirt? Is it? (Incorrect)

You like this shirt? Don't you? (correct)

You like this shirt? Do you? (acceptable)

Let me wear my socks. (Incorrect)

Let me put on my socks (Correct)

Are you not coming?

what would it mean to say in both:

Yes, I am not coming.

No, I am not coming.

"Can you get me a glass of water without ice" (doesnt work here)

"Can you get me a glass of water with no ice." (More like it!)

I didn't get you = I did not understand you

is not same as "I did not get your words."

Correct expression: "Can you say that again."

New Phrases I learnt:

cute as a button

I am all wet

To go by the ear: take decision as per circumstances develop

Whatever Floats your boat – soothes your soul

Debilitating

Sassy: improperly forward or bold

To be perfectly ripened: fresh fruit is perfect when it is a little old. That is called ripe

Cool beans

I'm down for both:

Be there or be square: be honest or direct if you aren’t there

I’m golden