Closeted Contemplations

It is said Shakespeare wrote "King Lear" when quarantined during the plague. Thoreau wrote "Walden" when he self-quarantined himself to simply experience solitude. It's been two weeks since "Shelter in place" began in California for the Coronavirus and yet it has been so hard for me to put pen to paper so to speak. My neighborhood is eerily quiet and the freeway noise has died down. Birdsong is loud and clear. Inside the house we've each colonized a space as our "work area" and during school/office hours we sport our headsets and are glued to our screens. The saving grace is we have all our meals together, play at least a boardgame together and go for a walk in the dark, you guessed it, together.

I know I am privileged as I am able to work remotely and am getting a paycheck and most people I know are healthy. The economy is tanking but I have a shock absorber that will hopefully take me and my family through, something that countless others cannot count on. However, privileged as I am, I cannot help being caught up in fleeting moments of nostalgia and feeling sorry for ourselves - when can we go on a proper hike, when can I go to The Getty, will I ever be able to travel? But these moments pass and I try to take a look at the positive. What Greta Thurnberg struggled to achieve, the coronavirus has temporarily achieved - cleaner air and a respite for Earth from human pollution. Spring is here and there are birds nesting in my backyard. Signs of bird-life everywhere even if everything else is looking dead. Despite being closeted together 24 X 7 we've managed to not get on each other's nerves too much. Since I am not driving it has given me back some valuable time which I have spent reading and visiting art museums online.

I wrapped up Mantel's masterpiece "The Mirror and the Light" last week. I wouldn't be surprised if this one also wins her the Booker for the third time! There are so many things to say about the book but the plague and sweating sickness which feature only in a minor role in this book seemed prescient. Her characters deal with the plague as a fact of life and are ruled by a selfish, fickle king. The trilogy is a perfect companion for these times.

This week I spent a lot of time visiting the Van Gogh Museum online. I was lucky enough to have been there in person two years back. I remembered the "Skeleton smoking a cigar"



I don't know how well known this painting was, but it was new to me at that time. And then I found out that Tamino's song "Cigar" was inspired by this painting. Tamino's concert was the first casualty for me due to the Coronavirus. I had tickets to go see him on March 11th in LA and we decided to cancel in the interest of social distancing.

More than the sunflowers and the irises I remember being struck by Van Gogh's paintings of trees - where he focused not on the top but on the bottom - the roots of trees. I am reading "Underland" by Robert McFarlane and hence I seem more tuned to looking at the understorey




 This was one of my favorite Van Gogh paintings. One of my friends went on a forest walk in India a few weeks back and wrote a poignant piece on what the forest meant to him. He talks about the need to slow down to nature's pace to become resilient. Maybe it is just that my brain is looking to make sense of these quarantines and social distancing, but his words seemed to resonate as we've all slowed down these past few weeks and there is no doubt that we have given the Earth a chance to heal. But will we able to heal and recover from this? Only time will tell.

Let me close this random rambling post with a self portrait of the man



The bandaged ear recalls what happened after 60+ days of spending time with Gauguin (only partly kidding). As we are all closeted with our near and dear ones - a friendly reminder to take care of boundaries, not to push each other's buttons and to pay attention to our mental health in unprecedented times like these.

On Privilege

T.M. Krishna is a musician I deeply admire not just for his musical abilities but also for his willingness to take on uncomfortable questions in the Indian Classical Music (specifically the Carnatic) world. Depending on which camp one falls in, he is viewed either as a progressive musician or an elitist trouble maker. His latest book "Sebastian and Sons" is a must-read whether or not one is into Carnatic music. This is a story about the first family of Mridangam (the foremost percussion instrument in Carnatic) makers who belonged to the Dalit (formerly "untouchable") communities and were often behind the foremost artists majority of them being upper caste Brahmins. In a quest to shine the light on these makers, T.M.Krishna walks us through the process of making Mridangams and helps us appreciate the art, the craft, the science and the sheer physical labor that goes into making these percussion instruments which are so revered and worshiped by the upper caste.

You can ask anyone from India for characteristics that define a Brahmin and I bet vegetarian, cow-lover, classical music connoisseur will show up in a list that may include religious and intellectual. So it is ironic that the Mridangam is a skin instrument that relies on healthy cows (especially female that have given birth to one or two calves) being slaughtered specifically for their skin, a fact that I was ignorant of or perhaps blind to. T.M.Krishna shines as a historian of music and the legwork he has done for this book has taken him to slaughterhouses and into the homes and workplaces of the legendary makers. At the heart of the book is the relationship between Mani Iyer and Parlandu, the artist and the maker, who together changed Mridangam and Carnatic music. However, Parlandu's story is rarely talked about or even known and this book attempts to change that. Although both Mani Iyer and Parlandu are no more, their stories are told through their progeny and students. In giving the "other" a voice, TMK is careful enough to make sure he is only a medium and the only judgements he passes are about the music.

A picture from the book - Mani Iyer and Parlandu

This is also a book about privilege. There is a quote that is attributed to Chomsky that says "The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have the more responsibility you have." TMK is not adopting a holier-than-thou attitude in this book. As a man of privilege he is taking that opportunity to understand the sources of his privilege and feels that the whole Carnatic music world has a responsibility towards these makers who need to be not just acknowledged but also celebrated. Cow protection shows up in the Indian constitution and there are many who think that beef eating should be banned in India. However, the classical arts which rely on slaughtering animals especially the cow exposes the hypocrisy of this cow-loving stance.

Personally, this book affected me a lot.  As a Brahmin I grew up surrounded by Carnatic music. I was also surrounded by numerous "others" who did not belong to my social class. My parents and even my grandparents were generally very tolerant, but there were so many coded behaviors which were passed along from a place of privilege. There were numerous people in our lives who did not belong to our social strata and on whom we depended on - my mom's rickshaw driver, our maid, the lady who sold flowers, the lady who ironed our clothes, the newspaper recycler, the bicycle repair man, and the watchmen of our colony. My parents showed kindness to them, loaning them money, offering them a cup of coffee or food. My mom would always get down from her rickshaw when in an up slope and would walk next to the puller so as to not burden him unduly. My dad even attended the weddings of a couple of them and was the first to show up to the police station when one of them was wrongly accused of theft by someone else in our community. However the benevolence was often marked with certain class conditioning that both sides followed. They never sat on our couch, never entered our kitchen, always had a separate set of utensils from which they ate or drank and always addressed my parents with respect. I wish i can say I knew each of their names. Unfortunately a few were simply referred to by their professions while they addressed my parents as Sami or Iyer amma. Ironically the lady who ironed our clothes was christened by my brother as a toddler as "Sami" as he thought she was announcing herself when she was really addressing my dad - so in an interesting double twist she became "Sami" (upper class male) at least at our home until the end of her life. When TMK tries to understand who Parlandu truly was he is unable to break down the wall and beyond his technical skills was never able to get to the stories about the man behind the Mridangam. Similarly, I often look back on these people who formed part of my daily life and realize that I never really knew them as the caste barriers cropped up.

This book is an eye-opener on many levels, but especially on a personal level if you grew up in a privileged position. Privilege does not automatically mean a position of financial or political power. On the contrary many Brahmins (including my own family) were not wealthy. There were no ancestral properties. My parents didn't even own a cycle, or great luxuries, relied on public transportation for their entire working career and worked hard to pay off their mortgage. They had little to no influence in the corridors of power. Their votes hardly counted. However, we all grew up with a feeling that our lives and stories and that of our ancestors mattered and that was a feeling that gave us confidence in our future. Decades of Dravidian movement that had an anti-Brahmin policy at its core or an affirmative action policy that tried to shut off Brahmins from public sector jobs or educational institutions had still not significantly dented the cultural cache of the community or the upward movement of the class. The privilege also meant that someone else did our dirty jobs for us - whether that was repairing the sewer of the city or slaughtering a cow for its skin for our precious instrument.  Although unchained from the shackles of caste in the US, I realize that I need to be continuously aware of my privilege. TMK's book is a clarion call for awareness more than anything else.