Grace and Grief

 I remember the day I took my daughter to a double feature. We were going to see "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Black Panther" back to back. I had been trying to get my daughter to watch superhero movies and somehow she was never drawn to them. When I walked into the theater I assumed she would love Wrinkle, a book she and I read together when she was 7 and maybe not enjoy Panther. It turned out to be the opposite! She found the colorful world of  Wrinkle in the movie not jive with her mental image of the world from the book. On the other hand, she fell in love with Black Panther. There was something about the movie that appealed to her and since then we watched the 20 odd Avenger movies and she still ranks Black Panther as her favorite. The movie brought joy to billions and we were no exceptions. You didn't have to be black to appreciate what a force for good that movie was. Believe me, I have seen Indiana Jones Temple of Doom and know a thing or two about stereotypes in Hollywood. But Panther arguably did more than even Henry Louis Gates Jr's brilliant documentary on Africa to challenge Eurocentric (which is inevitably white-centric) views of the world. So, the death of Chadwick Boseman came as a shock to me like it did for the world. But I was unprepared for the intensity to which it would affect me.

I don't know why the death of Chadwick Boseman has hit me hard. I am a cancer-hardened veteran who has lost my dad, two uncles, one of my closest cousins, a couple of friends and more relatives to cancer in the span of 17 years. But this one felt as personal as the deaths in my family. Maybe it was just this man's gentle, lightning smile. Maybe it was his grace and dignity that we saw on and off screen but is now 100X magnified knowing that all that grace was despite facing something as horrendous as cancer. Maybe it was the premium he put on his privacy. But him going through his treatments and still showing up to the sets to bring joy to the world as Black Panther transcends greatness. 

 

Till date, I had only my dad as a model for grace in the face of an uphill struggle against cancer.  He was funny, joking and making light of his struggles, thoughtful about his caregivers and the nurses in his hospice till the very end. But in a few rare moments he confessed to me that he was tired of fighting and wanted the end to be quick and made me promise to not put him on life support in case he went into a coma. Cancer can do that to you. Somehow Boseman's death brought back all those intense feelings.

 

17 years back just after my dad died I found comfort in Rainier NP under the gaze of the mountain. I had not shed any tears in India as I had to make room for my mom's grief and also had to handle the funeral. It was in Rainier amidst the wilderness, in that solitude,  that I finally found the space to come to terms with my own grief. I was in Sequoia NP when I found out about Boseman's passing and standing under those trees I sought comfort and saw his spirit in those giants.Very often when people die we collectively remember only their good things. In my dad's case I knew that was all there was to remember. He was 59 when he passed. In my mind he is always the Atticus of Mocking Bird and never the old, cynical,  grumpy Atticus of Go Set a Watchman as he never reached that age and I believe his basic nature wouldn't have changed much. I have a feeling Boseman was like that. The goodness that people attribute to him is not simply a case of remembering only the good. It feels like that was the sum total of his soul. May he rest in peace.

 

 

Wordsworth for the Weary

 As you can see from the last few posts, being cooped up inside for nearly 6 months has guided my reading in one specific direction. Being deprived of the great outdoors I am vicariously living through literature. Jonathan Bate's Radical Wordsworth was not just about satiating my need for nature. It also had a lot to do with human connection. Come September, I will celebrate 25 years of friendship with two special people with whom I had the pleasure to visit Grasmere and other places in the Lake District  that were fundamental to Wordsworth's poetry.

In Tintern Abbey, the prophet of nature wrote

Though absent long

These forms of beauty have not been to me,

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet 

Grasmere and the lakes of Lake District have offered similar sweet sensations to my weary mind especially during this pandemic. Back in 1997 my friends and I were  23, carefree, just getting started in our careers and had the opportunity to work and travel in the UK albeit each in a different city. Since then a lot has happened in our lives, both ups and downs and we've pursued our own interests. However, it has remained a steady friendship, a constancy in our lives without the need for instant gratification and frequent validation. We don't care where the other person works, what their title is, what their career progression has been. We are not connected on Facebook, LinkedIn and we don't even talk frequently.  As I get older I cherish the friendship even more now than I did in 1995. There are so many reasons that I am grateful to them for, but in the context of this post I am especially grateful that they humored my whims and wishes about the places I wanted to see in the UK and offered me their companionship.

 

Bate says he wrote this book for "anybody who raises an eyebrow when the poet's name is mentioned and the only word that comes to mind is daffodils." That was surely the case for us when we visited Grasmere back then. Since then I went on to read more of his verses from Lyrical Ballads for my M.A. in English and I am positive the other two have not read much Romantic poetry. Reading Bate's biography was going to be an opportunity for me to once more savor the landscape and the friendship and while it certainly achieved that, it offered me so much more. 

Wordsworth often lamented about the fact of growing up. Growing up meant that the unity between the body, the self and the environment gets broken and the only way to recapture that "primal spirit" was through poetry and memory. As I was house cleaning during the pandemic, I chanced upon my daughter's journal from first grade and she had written "I want powers to like everything I already like when I grow up. So that I can pass my thoughts to my children." Here was a 6 year old who seems to know that as adults we forget the simple things we loved as kids and she never wanted to lose that ability! 

 

Wordsworth's poems gave me insights into my daughter's sensibility. If I am Jane Austen's Elinor, my daughter is certainly Marianne and spontaneity and deep feeling are just first nature to her when they are not even remotely third nature to me. Yet, to my credit (even if i say so myself) I have not let my "sense" completely crush my daughter's "sensibility." She loves the outdoors and when I see her seek some "alone time" at the beach or in the woods with her "favorite tree" I am pleased to recognize

    In nature and the language of the sense

    The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse

    The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

    Of all my moral being

 

One of her lamentations is how in high school the emphasis is already on college and she feels she is on a treadmill that she never asked to get on. On top of that the racism, sexism, environmental disaster of contemporary times is crushing children with feelings of guilt even though it is not their fault. Dealing with all this baggage in isolation is worse. Childhood seems to have vanished in the past year. This sense of loss of childhood is one felt acutely by Wordsworth and he writes with hope that "The Child is Father of the Man"

    My heart leaps up when I behold

        A Rainbow in the sky:

    So was it when my life began;

    So is it now I am a Man;

    So be it when I shall grow old,

        Or let me die!

While childhood is hard to recapture, the things that restore childhood can be found in nature and the ability to be excited by a rainbow can remain with one all their life. This is my hope for her and the generations coming after us. They will have wild landscapes available to inspire and restore them.  

Bate's biography also introduces us to a few characters who I had never heard of but who were instrumental in his poetical and political development. I specifically wanted to mention two. Helen Maria Williams an abolitionist, an anti-imperialist and a poet of great talent who wrote sensitive nature poetry was one who inspired Wordsworth. The other was an eccentric man called John Stewart known popularly as "walking Stewart" - an 18th century Forrest Gump. He never rode in carriages because "they were both elitist and cruel to horses" and he had "walked halfway around the world from Madras, through Persian, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa and every country in Europe as far as Russia." Walking Stewart introduced Spinoza's ideas of pantheism and the belief that God can be found in nature to Wordsworth.

The second half of Wordsworth's life was dreary as he deviated from his principles of his youth. His poetry became monotonous and not very inventive and he lived for a really long time unlike other Romantic poets who lived hard and died young and in glory. Bate purposefully presents only a "lightning sketch" of the second half of the poet's life. Despite the gradual decline, he argues that Wordsworth is still relevant "because he reminds us ... to cherish a child's way of looking at the world. Because he wrote with unprecedented sympathy for the poor, the excluded, the broken... Because his elegian poetry can speak to us when we are bereaved...he foresaw that among the consequences of modernity would be not only the alienation of human beings from each other, but also potentially irretrievable damage to the delicate balance between our species and our environment."

These past few weeks of reading Wordsworth has taken me back to my past and also given me glimpses into the future. I remember the day we walked around Ullswater in the summer of 1997. There were no dancing daffodils to greet us, but we had "laughing company". Someday I wish to go back to Grasmere with my husband and daughter and see these landscapes once again

    For oft when on my couch I lie

    In vacant or in pensive mood,

    They flash upon that inward eye

    Which is the bliss of solitude

    And then my heart with pleasure fills,

    And dances with the Daffodils.

Reading Thoreau Under Lockdown

A dose of Thoreau in the right quantity is good for anyone, anytime. But if there ever was a perfect time to delve into him - this is it! I first came to Thoreau by way of Gandhi, but visiting Walden in the winter of 2010 set me on a path of no-return. Since then, I returned physically to Walden in the summer of 2014, read more transcendental literature and was eagerly looking forward to a trip this Christmas in preparation for which I was going to read Walden (again) and read Laura Dassow Walls' latest biography of him. That trip is up in the air now but this past month of (re) reading Thoreau has comforted me despite the madness that is the world today.

My daughter asked me one night as to why I admire Thoreau so much and I realized that it was the Thoreauvian idea of simplify, simplify, simplify that I admired the most! Thoreau challenges me to live deliberately and get to the truth of my existence. He proclaimed in Walden "My greatest skill has been to want but little" and this is a skill I aspire to. I also seek membership into his "Knights of umbrella and bundle" - but alas despite being a lighter traveler I am not there yet.

Thoreau is commonly perceived as a hermit, almost a misanthrope. (Also people need to read his full quote about Government. He didn't say no government at once, but called for a better government immediately!) He was a dutiful son, a loving brother, a loyal friend, and an inspiring mentor. The more I read about him I feel like he was the true renaissance man after Da Vinci. An inventor of graphite pencils, a civil surveyor, a botanist and birder, a naturalist of some repute, an Indian ethnographer, an ardent abolitionist (credit to his mom and other women of his household) , an inspiring speaker who combined wit and wisdom, and not to mention a wonderful philosopher and writer - he wore many hats and was truly a jack of all trades. He was also a man of contradictions and someone who struggled with the conflict - hated hunting but couldn't give up meat, was eager to learn from natives but at times dismissed their myths, made a living by surveying which in turn destroyed the woods he adored.

He was a man ahead of his times and is therefore a man for all seasons. When he lamented that "men have become the tools of their tools" I see a commentary on the modern day walking texting phone zombies. When he complains that "those things for which most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants" I am reminded of Hassan Minhaj's piece on if colleges are still worth it. When he wrote about the cable under the Atlantic he commented it appeared that the goal seemed to be "to talk fast and not to talk sensibly... After all, the man whose horse trots a mile a minute does not carry the most important messages" -  he could have been writing about our penchant for tweets. And before Jon Stewart critiqued the 24 hour news cycle Thoreau observed "Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels."

Before we conclude he was just a 19th century equivalent of a late-night comic wielding satire as his only weapon, we should remember the courage with which he spoke up for John Brown when the entire nation seemed to disown him, even the abolitionists. In A Plea for Captain John Brown we witness Thoreau referring to death as an honor conferred only upon the select few who knew how to live. However, the death of such an honorable person enrages him especially because society determines him to be a failure. He states, “They talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.” The death of John Brown was not simply the death of a man, but the death of a principle, and he regarded this event "as a touchstone designed to bring out with glaring distinctness the character of this government." In 2020 we witnessed the death of George Floyd and his death revealed more about the character of our government than anything else. We were all implicated in his death and this is a feeling that Thoreau was familiar with. Walls states

“Thoreau was a haunted man. He and everyone he knew were all implicated: the evil of slavery, the damnation of the Indian, the global traffic in animal parts, the debasement of nature, the enclosure of the ancient commons - the threads of the modern global economy were spinning him and everyone around him into a dehumanizing web of destruction"

This is probably one of the reasons that Thoreau resonates even today when we as a species are faced with two main crises. One is the existential threat to the planet, its wildlife and its wilderness. The other is the world we are creating on the back of always-on, always-connected technology that fuels the gig-economy that makes us all expendable. In today’s screen-filled world where real nature is replaced by virtual reality, where privacy is rendered non-existent and voyeurism has become acceptable, the transcendentalists, especially Thoreau offer real solutions. Reclaiming wild lands and with it our wild spirits, getting comfortable in solitude by shutting out distractions and being disconnected, and living deliberately as opposed to instagramming every moment is needed now more than ever. Reading Thoreau is a reminder to myself of what I truly aspire to and how far away I am from my ideal. But as he said in Walden this is not an "ode to dejection, but to brag lustily as chanticleer in the morning only to wake" myself up.

Property & People - the true pandemic in America

It has been hard to write anything these past few weeks, primarily because nothing seems to change day to day and a kind of paralysis has set in. Then the events of the past few days brought about the realization nothing has really changed, certainly not for the Black people of America. While we all look forward to returning to "normal", Black America is probably closer to Stephen Dedalus in thinking “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” As a country we are quick to decry the looting and violence meted out against property because property is sacred. (This is not new. The 14th Amendment which granted equal protection and due process under the law to former slaves was historically used by corporations to gain more property rights.) On the other hand, people seem to be expendable. Their rights can be trampled by those sworn to protect rights but all our attention is on the property damage. I shouldn’t have to state this but I know I am expected to, I don’t condone violence - but violence against property cannot be judged on the same scale as violence against people. 

It was pure coincidence that I just finished Ibram X Kendi’s masterpiece “Stamped from the Beginning: A definitive history of racist America”. He argues that the three most popular strategies against racism in this country have all failed:

• self-sacrifice : a myth that claims that White people would have to sacrifice in order to ensure a more egalitarian anti-racist America. This has been disproved time and time again. You can pursue self-interest and also be anti-racist. For all the "others" in America, especially immigrants like me, Kendi says “it is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans and Latina/os to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are free of racism.” I have not personally experienced hate in this country (UK - that’s a different story), but I am not naive to think that my group of people are somehow exempt because we are model citizens, highly skilled workers. Just see what other Asians are facing now as though every individual Chinese person was responsible for bringing the pandemic to this country! So yes, while we may not personally understand the struggle of black America it is in our self-interest to join this struggle. 

• Uplift suasion - where Black people are asked to show exemplary, upstanding behavior to convince white people of their merits. This is a racist idea because individual Blacks (or Asians or Muslims or ….) are not race representatives. Every Black man cannot be Sidney Poitier or Denzel Washington. We are often quick to use “few bad apples” to explain away police brutality and systemic racism. Racism is individualized. But we don’t afford the same privilege to the other side of the coin. Welfare queens, Mexican rapists, Islamic terrorists … the epithets are endless.
•  Educational persuasion - where we think we can educate the hate out of people. Instead we should focus on racist policies that lead to racist ideas leading to ignorance and hate as opposed to the other way around.

So do you blame when people who have tried every “approved” failed strategy resort to looting and violence to express their anger? Kneeling didn’t work. Just ask Kapernick. Black Lives Matter is still trying. What has changed? What have we all learned in the past few years? Just because we had elected a Black President can we close the book on racism? Paul Beatty in The Sellout states “That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the $%^*  on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.” The land of the free is also home to millions who are not free from prejudice and some of this runs deep through the entire existence of this country. History comes back to haunt us. To break this cycle Kendi proposes we should all be focussed on only electing principled anti-racists to any elected position - from our local school board to the President of this country. 

I will never know what it is to have been George Floyd, but his plight evokes a visceral feeling in me. To a small extent, the birdwatcher, Cooper in NYC - I could identify with him. As a fellow birder I am annoyed to see pets not on leash but I have hesitated so many times to call someone out because of the fear of being perceived as an outsider, someone who even after two decades of living here has been (and will forever be) asked, “where are you from originally?” and constantly have to prove I am 100% American. Black lives matter and not just for Black people. It matters to all of us - immigrants, minimum wage workers, Gay/Lesbian/Trans Gender, Women and even to the privileged majority. Covid-19 disproportionately affects African Americans, but so does this other pandemic which has been killing them long before the virus came around. When we find the cure for the former, let's not forget the latter.

Find Beauty, Be Still - "Underland" a Book for our times

I wrapped up Underland today. Somehow it doesn't feel right to write about it right away but it has stirred up a lot of feelings inside me that I would feel better getting them out. When I purchased the book we were in pre-coronavirus era.  I had listened to some talks by Robert Macfarlane and I thought his writings would help me "slow down". Little did I know that life as we knew it would come to a grinding halt. The current situation therefore colored my reading of the book and maybe some day I would revisit it with a different viewpoint. (If you want to skip this review and just listen to Macfarlane - here is a talk about the book.)

I saw two main themes in the book. It is an ode to the underland which according to Macfarlane has three main functions: "shelter what is precious, yield what is valuable, and dispose what is harmful". The other theme is a gentle reminder to us to be good ancestors, not just good parents or grandparents, but ancestors which automatically lengthens our horizon. "Deep time" is a defining feature of the underland and at the very least the book is a call to think in those time periods.

Macfarlane is also a lover of language and he bemoans the loss of so many words from our language as we become disconnected from our landscape. The book is filled with so many beautiful phrases that one can read it simply for the love of the language. Macfarlane is also a seasoned adventure traveler and in this book he explores some of the fantastical places on earth - burial chambers in Mendips, dark matter research stations underground, understorey of forests, the catacombs of Paris invisible rivers in Italy, hollowed lands called foibes in Slovenia, prehistoric caves in Norway, glaciers in Greenland and finally radioactive disposal stations in Finland!

I have done a bit of travel and have had enough adventures just a bit outside my comfort zone to know what it means to experience the exhilaration albeit on a small scale. With each such adventure my language also expands a bit and accommodates new words. "Switchback" was a word I had never used until about 20 years back when I started hiking. Similarly crampons, moraine, moulins were not words in my vocabulary until I experienced glaciers. The only place where I experienced total darkness was in a cave in Sequoia National Park. Hiking in Rocky Mtn NP taught me the risks of hiking above "treeline" - another word that I rarely use. MacFarlane's adventures are 100X magnified. I know that I would never do anything like he did and I am thankful for his book as it took me to landmarks in some extreme landscapes that I would not dare to visit. This also meant he gave me new words to add to my vicarious vocabulary. Here is a short list, some of which are slang:

• derp = derelict + ruined places
• bunkerologists
• Cenote (Spanish) = sinkhole that is often flooded
• Wunderkammer = place where curiosities are exhibited
• doline = funnel shaped sinkhole
• okna (Slovenian) = point where water has worn a passage through a rock
• Karst = limestone landscape
• turlough = intermittent lake that wells up from underneath and drains dry in summer
• fluvial = of or found in a river
• foiba = sinkhole used for killings
• corrie / cirque = steep sided hollow at the head of a valley
• occulting = nautical term for light that flashes on and off
• scabious = a type of flower
• posthole = cut used to hold wood in place
• wind slab = layer of snow formed by wind 
• cornice = overhang of snow at edge of mountain
• zawn = deep and narrow sea inlet
• Rime ice = result of freezing fog
• katabatic wind = wind from higher elevation carrying higher density air
• bergschrund = type of crevasse that separates moving ice from fixed
• couloir = steep narrow gully

Made me look up Google Images and Wikipedia too many times and that's the only drawback of the book as he did not add any pictures. It was very hard to visualize - easier to imagine fantasy worlds / mythic worlds. This was harder especially when snow is involved as that's simply not my element. Our family doesn't ski and our snow adventures are limited to some snow shoeing, a couple of guided glacier walks for beginners. So I was glued to his adventures in Greenland and the North. With the warming temperatures he talks about how Greenlanders feel the soundscape of the glaciers has changed and they now experience a silence. The ice is a living, moving thing for them as opposed to a scary nemesis for me.

The book ends in Onkalo where humanity is trying to bury radioactive materials "in order to preserve the future" from the present. He contrasts that to the seed bank at Spitsbergen where we are preparing for a catastrophe when the Earth's biodiversity is lost. Both these acts are steps in becoming good ancestors. Somehow Macfarlane manages to leave us on an optimistic note. He quotes this passage from a book called "After Nature"

People are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature; something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love a quality... which they can do their best to honor. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture, is the beginning of collaboration among people but beyond us, in building our next home.

I believe we are at that point with the pandemic amidst us. What is needed is a spirit of collaboration to solve some of the big problems that we face. For now closeted in my home, I am trying to adopt a phrase that according to Macfarlane, W.H.Murray said after being released from POW camps in Germany and Italy

FIND BEAUTY, BE STILL

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.