McMuthuswamy

Born in 1786, Baluswami Dikshitar was the lesser known brother of the musical giant Muttuswamy Dikshitar. Muttuswamy is widely considered to be a part of the trinity of musicians who in the 18th century changed the face of Carnatic classical music. While Baluswami was not as well known, his quintessential contribution to Carnatic classical music changed the way it sounded forever. He is thought to have introduced violin into Carnatic classical music, standardized its modes of fiddling to suit the Carnatic palette of sounds and began playing the violin sitting down. Much less known is the fact that Muttuswamy Dikshitar is said to have heard Irish music played by the British troops stationed at the erstwhile Fort St George(Madras) and is said to have composed Sanskrit devotional hymns on those tunes. These hymns are popularly known as nottuswara sahityam and are popular to this day as a means of introducing children to Carnatic classical music. Perhaps Muthuswamy today would have been criticized for "diluting the purity of our music in the name of fusion", but parochial cynicism aside sample some of the Nottuswara Hymns with their Irish cousins
1)Vande Meenakshi

http://youtu.be/B5r9Biejz9M


Rakes of Mallow

http://youtu.be/Z1AN9ccoF-Y

2)This has to be the heights
Santatham Pahimam


God save our queen
Please copy and paste the link, i couldn't embed it
http://youtu.be/tN9EC3Gy6Nk

The Sweet Palani

Muddupalani is not a name that has ever caused a revolution, nor did it set a 1000 ships sailing. But what it did achieve, is to me a cause to celebrate. Muddupalani was a courtesan in the court of Pratapasingha, the Maratha ruler of Thanjavur in the mid1700's. She wrote a remarkable epic poem in Telugu called Radhika Santvanamu (Consoling Radhika). An ordinary poem about sex - the voice of a self-aware and bold woman talking about a woman's sex life. No great thoughts, just an unabashed celebration of a woman's desire, an honest statement of her jealousy, a sympathetic portrayal of her dejection. She was in her own words:

Which other woman of my kind has
felicitated scholars with gifts of money?
To which other woman of my kind have
epics been dedicated?
Which other woman of my kind has
Won such acclaim in each of the arts?
You are incomparable,
Muddupalani among your kind.
She adds:
A face that glows like the full moon.
Skills of conversation, matching the countenance.
Eyes filled with compassion,
matching the speech.
A great spirit of generosity,
matching the glance.
These are the ornaments
that adorn Palani,
When she is praised by kings.


The following is an extract of hers from her epic poem Radhika Santvanamu:

Radha Instructs Krsna's New Bride in the Arts of Love2
[Radha has dressed up the young bride, as Krsna waits in the
bedroom.]
` How will the lips of this young girl
suffer his bites? He is the killer of the demon Kaitabha.
How will her breasts bear his clawing? He's a lion of a cowherd.
Can her tender thighs take his vigour? He wrestled Cantlra
to the death.
Will her smooth body survive? He's an elephant-killer.'
All the women were joking like this, and lla bowed her head
in shyness, her face all red. Radhika drew close to her
and offered comfort:
`When your husband holds you,
push him gently with your breasts.
If he kisses your cheek, touch his lips with yours.
When he gets on top of you, move against him from below.
If he gets tired while making love, quickly take over
and get on top. He's the best lover, a real connoisseur,
extremely delicate. Love him skilfully,
and make him love you. That's my advice.
But you know best.
Loving has its own laws.' And she taught her.
Then she said, 'Go quickly. The good hour
is passing. Meet your lover. Don't delay.'
And she led her gently to Krsna, and said to him:
` Her breasts are tender as young buds. Unlike mine,
they won't hold up if you claw at them.
Her lips are like leaves. Mine are full-blown coral.
Don't bite too hard.
My thighs are used to wrestling with you,
but hers are soft as bananas.
Her whole body is a fragile vine. Mine is tough
as gold. In a word, she's not me.
Not equal to you in love.
Innocent. New to the art.
You have to know how to handle her.
Do you need me to tell you?
You're good with women.
Just touch her lips with the tip of your tongue.
Don't squeeze.
Kiss her cheeks lightly.
Don't scratch.
Caress her nipples with your fingertips.
Don't crush.
Make love very very gently.
Don't be wild.
I must be crazy to talk like this.
When you and she are deeply in it,
wrestling with each other,
these rules of mine won't hold.'
Then she handed 'la over to Krsna.
But really she wanted to come too,
and held on to Ila's sari. Ila loosed her fingers:
be back soon,' she said.
And Rddha went, her mind a jumble
of misery and joy.
Lying on her bed, alone, she thought to herself:
`You can give money.
You can give away your own family.
You can give your very life, that isn't easy to give up.
But to give your own husband
to another woman—what woman can do that?
By now I'm sure she's sucking at his delicious lips.
Or already pounding his naked chest with her breasts.
Probably moaning like doves.
He's on top of her, and she's pressing against him.
She's quite skilled to begin with. Maybe a bit shy,
but by now he's won her over, freed her
from any reticence. He's brought her close,
touched her everywhere. Taught her everything.'
She kept thinking. Tortured by love,
she couldn't close her eyes.
Inside her, she was burning.
As for Krsna, he was busy
with the girl.
(Shamelessly "borrowed" from a resource available on wesleyan.edu, dunno if this infringes on any copyrights, if it does I'm sorry but this deserves a wider reading, at least from some of my friends)

The Story Of Zero

And so it was, that on an extremely uncomfortable summer evening, an indian yogi in the streets of takshila was chasing away the flies that came in droves, in part due to the fantastic aroma that his body emanated after years of not having made his acquaintance with the bathing ghat and in part to eat away the caked up dirt from his body and to earn enough punyam to be born as something better than a fly in the next life.
And so it was,That a dog had after a long and lazy afternoon decided to do what the yogi hadn't done in years-personal grooming- which as any observant pet owner would know, involves the meeting of both the appertures of the body through which food is processed; and in doing so caught the yogi's eye and his attention,since he didn't understand the reason for this utterly strange behaviour, being to him a glorification, by the dog, of its own mortal body,which the yogi thought reflected so aptly on the society of his day, which had given itself to bacchanalian excesses since these strangely attractive greeks had shown up-an utterly telling demonstration of conspicuous consumption,going in one way and coming out the other and reentering the cycle again until it became poiintless like the unending cycles of life and death.

And so it was, that the yogi traced the symbol of his spiritual catharsis in the sand in front of him, repeating it again and again until it became second nature to him to trace this symbol of all pointless pursuits in life, telling him how nothing was indeed everything and indeed everything was nothing, which he kept chanting and tracing so that one day the world would know how he had derived the essence of spirit- nothingness- from the dog's pursuit of evrythingness, due to which he failed to notice the fact that he had gathered a staunch secretive cabal of devotees, who had gathered around him to follow him in this most recondite of spiritual pursuits, who in turn had failed to notice that he had died in the meanwhile and so had a few hundred generations of spiritually inclined young men and women who through their lifelong dedication had kept alive the flame of this secret knowledge.

And so it happened that the dirty emaciated Hindus were defeated and exterminated from the hindu kush which left the holders of the great secret knowledge in great peril, so they decided to bathe and grow a beard ,which would allow them to become muslims and live in peace while they practiced the secret knowledge of the nothingness circle, all the while fooling the blood thirsty ululating muslim hordes into believing that they were converted, which they were not, but that did not escape the notice of the arab religious police who noticed strange circles appearing in the sand all the time where kafirs would have been sitting a while ago, which interested them because they liked to mess with the secret hindus for lack of other entertainment,and so it became a great sport in arab circles to draw a circle and secretively discuss it to draw out the secret hindus and then to beat the living daylights out of them but the need to keep all of this a secret from the secret hindus lead them to name it the cypher.

And so it happened, that the arabs stumbled upon the cypher, mistaking it for what it just was not though at the end of the day the game caught on and travelled to the maghreb where the mystical spicy muslim orient met the bone headed mediaeval christianity of the erstwhile day, peopled by christians who thought every practice but their own a sin and attributed sinful motives to everything that was not their own, so when they saw arabs playing with these luscious circle, they could not but help bunching up the sacred circle with the barbaric profanity of other heathen people, thinking the circle to be the symbol of the feminine apperture, they attacked the use of the circle and the game that surrounded it, though they could not anticipate the sexual frustration that had built into the christians who wanted to use the circle as freely as the muslims did but were held back by papal decrees asking for restraint, and so this sexual frustration gave rise to the secret meetings of the circle where the availability of the number of circles was indicated to the interested men, who greatly outnumbered the women, thereby giving rise to the need for a symbol which would also indicate the number of men and hence a straight line to symbolise the erect members of a man was devised which was later called one just to clarify the number of erect members each of the lines signified, which lead to the convention of indicating one's and zeroes on the parchment which announced the secret meeting of the circles.

And so it happened, that zero arrived in all the major civilizations of the world, except the Chinese, who aren't very major because they have small dicks, which besides being totally irrelevant is very insulting to a lot of my friends, so continuing with the ones and the zeroes, people in europe kept at it in their own combinations of ones and zeroes, until one remarkable englishman called george boole observed that the combination of ones and zeroes corresponded rather exactly with the number of people present at the gang bang, thereby laying the foundation of the binary system, which lead to the modern software industry, after which, finally the zero, collared by the ones and packed into computers arrived back in india, requiring millions of hormone zapped young people to move to strange towns for a job in the software industry and to find their own binary sex life waiting to happen to them, thereby completing the circle from right where it had begun-in India and in a wasteful circle -just the way the naked yogi had predicted, just like his own spiritual revelation of the circle, which ended up like the dog grooming itself- In a circle of nothingness.

The Gospel according to St.John

"Don't you love me?" is the magical question that seals all the cracks in a relationship. It appeals to a mind that wants to believe that things last forever and that you will ride into the sunset with your Prince Charming - the first and the only one to do so.

And so, John asked me one day "Don't you love me, anymore?" I meekly surrendered, I was so afraid of the answer to that question, that I didn't want to face it yet. John was the kind of unremarkable person whose very simplicity makes them dangerous. These are the people who are like recreational drugs, you play around with them for fun or out of boredom, and you never fully recover from their effects. His was the kind of demeanor that never threatens you, and so never alerts you to its pitfalls.


He was a 24 year old with an evidently fake American accent and a slightly thinning scalp. His achievement in life was that he worked with well-meaning whites in the "Christ the King" fellowship programme. When he was around, I could pretty well have been the center of the Universe. I liked the fact that his mediocrity made me feel so much better about myself. Not to add I had everyone's admiration for being able to look beyond physical beauty. To feel loved is a wonderful feeling.....to feel worshipped is to loose ones mind. John could make you feel worshipped and I had the ego to revel in his worshipping ways.

Every morning I would find him waiting for me at the bus stop, with a smile reminiscent of a sunrise. I would reel off the instructions for the day and he would patiently nod his head to everything. Somewhere along the way he would let it slip that he had to go to the Good News center because there was an old woman who had found Christ but not enough money for her hypertension medication. Somewhere along the way my hand would involuntarily slip him a 100 or 2. Somewhere along the way I stopped looking at him when i spoke to him. Somewhere along the way I stopped listening when he spoke. Life was kingsize, so was my self-importance, a few expenses were expected and a few, created.

Once every so often he would also show up at my college during the day, his only purpose would be to make sure that I had had my lunch. He would then be late for his prayer meeting at Rev.Yesupaadam's prayer hall. It wasn't too much for anyone to arrange for 50 bucks, after all an autorickshaw would solve the problem.

Admiration corrupts, absolute admiration corrupts absolutely. Attention has a strangely addictive quality to it, one can never get enough of it. And when one doesn't manage to get it, the consequences can be......let's call them unpleasant.

So, I had a boyfriend called John. His mandate was limited and rather clear-to serve me well. One rather busy Sunday morning I received a call from John, he was calling me to tell me that he wouldn't be able to meet me that day. As it happened, it was just a day before my father's death anniversary and hence I expected all hands on the deck. I was counting on his presence to take care of all the minutiae, hence, his absence meant an effort on my part .It was an extremely inconvenient thing to speak to people and arrange for things. After all if you have a boyfriend with low self esteem and a lower income, you must have some returns on all the time and money you invested in the person. Of course, he could only have made up some story to escape his responsibilities and to make more money out of my oh-so-kind&large heart. An enlarged heart is a dangerous affliction and I was determined to cure myself of it.

Over the next many days, I stopped taking his calls and with great sorrow told my friends of how I had been at the losing end of the deal. He was the cunning, mean and manipulative villain of my nightmares and I was determined that nobody else would be cheated the way I was. I sent him a stern message not to show up at my door. He made me a martyr and the sympathy for a martyr was something that I found quite agreeable. I found new sources of attention to supplement the loss of John. He became a name in a long list of benevolent conquests.

Months later, we met accidentally. I greeted him. I was secure in the knowledge that I was the wronged party in the incestuously limited world of Hyderabad's gay community. His new "best friend" was my acquaintance and hence I struck up a conversation. I was at my amiable best. I asked him how they'd met, he told me that he was the physiotherapist treating his sister. It did not strike me that John's sister needed a physiotherapist because she was ill. I just anticipated him to ask for money.



She apparently had met with an accident, on the day he had disappeared. Their already tenuous finances sunk under pressure. Thanks to my unwillingness to listen he could not ask me for help. Thanks to my circle of friends, no one would lend him money. Serves him well.....how could he have not shown up at my place and begged with me for forgiveness. The horror of being disregarded, sickened me. I left the place thoroughly disgusted at his vile selfishness. It hurt me to think of him and I took a litany of lovers to get over him. I was entitled to some solace after what I had to go through. And people fell in eagerly to sleep with the Saint of Hyderabad who looked beyond beauty and lived for his love.


But thinking of John still hurts me.....I sometimes wonder why?

Caeser Must be Buried

"I come to bury Caesar not to praise him" is the most infamous obituary in history. The unkindest acts of revenge are the ones that we heap on our dead. The impotent rage of a lifetime that now remains unfulfilled, bursts forth in a myriad ways, for its the only opportunity left to revile the person whom you will have no further opportunity to hate.




While people in different parts of the world have different structures dedicated to the dead, the Hindu world of the dead is remarkably devoid of any signs of physical commemoration. The best commemoration that a dead Hindu can hope for is the ritual feeding of the crows whom his soul is said to take temporary abode in. The body is duly burnt at the first available occasion, because a corpse to a Hindu is a great source of pollution. The ashes are scattered and the charred fragments of bone are thrown into flowing rivers. The result is remarkable- absolute hygiene and no memory. Perhaps its also the reason why the grossly overpopulated universe of Hindu myth has no parallels to a zombie or a vampire. With the physical basis of existence so utterly destroyed there could be no fear, no memory, no institutionalization of sorrow or ritualized recollection. The only thing one is obliged to do is to feed the dead once a year- not to honor them, but because not doing so would be catastrophic to the surviving family. It's for your own good that you feed them not because they are worth being remembered.



My father was the kind of man that everyone loved, the blue-eyed boy of the family who was always on the verge of something great. The one about whom there was this unmistakable air of expectation, the kind that always hung about- because he never cared enough to fulfill the expectations and finish off with it. I never once remember him from the collage of my childhood memories burdened with anything more serious than laughter. He could be the life of any party and could solicit the charm of anyone he set his sight on. His sense of entitlement was something that could put Alexander the Great to shame. He could be stunningly magnanimous to strangers and mystifyingly elusive once they'd lent him some money. He lived effortlessly, because most of the effort that sustained him fell to other people's lot.




It's been 8 years since I left my father's body to burn on the pyre. I returned the next morning to find his ashes cold after a night of rain. I ran my fingers through pasty ashes for bones, tied them up into a neat bundle and packed them in the ceremonial pot to throw them in one of the numerous Sacred Rivers of India. The hope was that he would find some way to salvation, at least in the calm muddy waters, at whose shores numerous men, women and children, bathed and chanted hoping for great virtue. The day we threw his ashes and bones into Godavari, I had to travel on a small thermocol dingy haplessly struggling under my weight, adding an element of mortal danger to the entire exercise. I hadn't cried in the days following his death, people thought I was bottling everything up. I desperately wanted to get the ritual done and get back to pretending a cataclysmic sorrow. I just didn't feel any great emotion stirring deep within as I was told I would. Somehow, I was pretty embarrassed at this utter lack of emotion that had overcome me. For years, I had hoped secretly that this man would one day miraculously disappear from our lives, and I was being told that I would need to rue that it had finally happened. I was scared that it was all just a set up and that he was playin a cruel joke on us, that he would come back the next day laughing at my naivete.



The only lasting memory that I can associate with my father is him banging furiously on my door asking my mother to cook or clean or wash. The only lasting sensation is one of a visceral pain at the prospect of sitting next to him smelling the alcohol on his breath. Evenings didn't come with the hope of a family dinner but with the terror that any moment now there would be boys running towards our home to excitedly tell us that my father had collapsed in some lane after drinking too much. In a particularly telling moment of desperation , he had sold off all the old newspapers and scrap he could find, to muster enough money for his fix. Ironically enough he sold my horoscope with all the rest.



The man has now been gone for 8 years. He made a huge impression on me, I have dutifully fed the crows and a bunch of greasy Brahmins every year, on the day he died. I still haven't come around to crying for him but his inheritance sits easy on me now. The future might be a dream but the past is set in stone. When Brutus came to bury Caesar, he came there to exactly do that. To bury Caesar was his burden, to praise him was not.

Desi Kid Wins THE Spelling Bee................AGAIN!

OOPS! WE did it again...... and again......yeah, another desi kid spelt his way to the rarified mnemonic paradise, that most middle class Indians esteem more than Shangri-La. The one supreme achievement, that signifies the acceptance by mainstream America of the all kinds of wierd tribes that flood its airports every year----the victory at some kind of National Bee...

OUR ticket to nerdly Nirvana is the National Spelling Bee. For ages the humble brown skinned wierdo has been the taxi driver or the overworked motel owner in the American mythology. He was chracterised by the strange "britishness" of his English groaning under the weight of many regional accents. He worked himself to bones and often would scare people in some hospital playing the doctor on Halloween.But No More -will he have to stand the slights of rednecks in school playgrounds, take the bullets in his convenience store holdups.The New Age saviour of the Indian is the here.....He/She is tiny....... is awkwardly gawky...........is as tall as the trophy he/she holds.....wears glasses.......AND KNOWS THE DICTIONARY INSIDE AND OUT. The Mastering of the English Lexicon by the Indian will be next only to the triumphs of Deepak Chopra in Indian-American folklore. Year after year, children have slogged in the mines , memorising words on the sly in the playground, reciting menmonic formulae to the gods, watching jealously while older kids walked away with spelling bee trophies.....and then the liberation comes.........That entry into the hallowed halls of nerddom....That cathartic realisation of the American Dream and a star is born. He/She knows that appoggiattura is not a fatal illness of the brain, isn't afraid of telling the bullies that there is no such word as dickhead in the dictionary and has been photographed for the high school newspaper with the proud Principal in the background.
Many Indian parents have waited all their lifetimes with baited breath expecting their little bundle of joy to liberate them from the dour existence of suburban America and catapult them to their fifteen minutes of fame. There is a vicarious joy in watching Indian mothers turning into the winged greek goddess of victory, much to the jealous fulminations of all the other indian mothers around. She has been the one person who waked her kids up at unearthly hours to memorise word lists. She has made ancient potions (on her grandmother's authority) to sharpen the memory of her to-be superstar. She has lied to the teacher that her child cannot take after school dance classes because her child has paediatric osteoporosis. Now the day comes when it has all come to fruition. She can hold her head high in the comity of suburban mothers. She can bake cookies for her kids that she'd promised them after the competition. She is now the mother of an All-American Hero.
Off course, All-American icons aren't easy to classify. In the demonology of the American Mind there are immigrants of three types:-
A) those that run across the border, steal jobs, speak wierd languages and vote for the democrats
B)those that work hard in family businesses, study hard at universities and are planning to take over America in the future
C)and finally the Terrorists.
Thanks to our skin colour(not color for me), we've been in all the categories of the list. The silver lining has always been that we knew, all our great brahminical traditions of memorising effortlessly, without comprehension, would someday pay off. And when it has paid off- we have managed to own the different kinds of Bees that Americans are so enamored of. The mindless prattling of information saturated kids for some reason touches deep chords of envy and admiration everywhere. That has proved to be One Strand of Hope that will lead us to the promised land of an All-American Life. LONG LIVE THE DICTIONARY!!! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!!!

The Waltz of The Flamingoes

"Now the female will start flapping her wings and circle around the male," he said pointing to the television in the corner of the fast food joint, which incidentally seem to always run either sports channels or "nature channels". I do not know what morbid fascination he had for birds, which he surely did not have for me. He had been talking about them for the previous forty-five minutes.



He was entirely delicious, the kind of guy one finds once in a neon moon, especially when one is alone at home. Initially during the conversation I told him how lonely it feels not to have anyone else at home, what with everyone busy visiting some relative or the other. I assumed he got the point. HE seemed intelligent, at least, smart enough to understand the suggestion. BUT NO! all he could talk abt was the mating dance of the flamingoes, he called it a waltz. I tried getting his attention and knew a few "discreet moves"-I tried throwing the spoon off the table and bending over to pick it, he didn't seem to notice. Damn those movies...none of those moves work in real life. He remarked how graceful the flamingo's legs were. I asked him if he liked long legged guys. He looked nonplussed and proceeded to explain how the anatomy of the human leg differs from its avian counterpart. I tried licking my fingers after i finished my sandwich, he told me that was unhygienic.

I had tried every trick in the book, and if there was chemistry it would show by now, otherwise the reaction was way off-balance. I passed the next half hour listening discovering a new dimension to the phrase "bird-brained". Having dated scores of men, I had a redoubtable reputation in the gay social circle in my home town. There were urban legends of me being able to bed the most recalcitrant of men with a wiggle of my finger. And here I was, unable to work sex into a conversation with an obviously gay man. I had a lot at stake that night. I had my reputation riding on this Hard hearted male (I was wishing for it to be the other way round).


He was paying for the meal so I decided to appear graciously interested. If I couldn't get sex, I might as well indulge myself with the menu and make up for lost carnal pleasures. I polished off quite an impressive array of dishes whose names sounded vaguely like they were children of a French father and an Arab mother living in Timbuktu. He seemed unperturbed , he had this stoic expression on his face which didn't let you know if he was hiding something or if he really was an idiot. He paid for the dinner and asked me if he could give me a ride home. I might as well save a penny or two, I thought. What happened later was just a blur-when one is fast losing interest in the other person, it's hard to keep track of all that he wants you to hear. Usually, I am told that my eyes have a glazed look and I have a disturbingly smiling demeanor when I am not particularly listening to people. He took it as a sign of my interest in the long beaked finches of Galapagos he was telling me about. Finally after suffering one excruciating hour of Hyderabad's traffic, we reached home.
I suddenly felt an uneasy pain inside me.... there was my gloriously lonely home waiting for him and here he was, unceremoniously dumping me. Just as i was stepping out of the car he hurriedly mumbled something. I thought he was sayin somethin abt some damn bird- I just smiled and nodded. "So where do I park my car?" he asked me. Why would I worry about his lack of a parking space. He asked me the same question again...I asked him if he didn't have a garage at home.
"It'll take me a good part of the next three hours to park my car at my home and come back here" he said. He had been mumbling about wanting to come up "for a cup of coffee". My heart leapt out...there was more uneasy pain in the chest....well, butterflies in the stomach..... its alright, its just the anxiety of sleeping with this fabulous guy, I thought. I took a moment to compose myself and with an awkward smile lead him to our garage. The butterflies in the stomach still wouldn't go away.
The scene shifted to my living room. I made him coffee, (the next day i was to find out that he hadn't even sniffed it). We talked about lots of things.....mainly birds. I asked him if he wanted to take a look at my room.



We went into my room, he tenderly ran his fingers up my back. Now my heart was beating faster than it ever had. Suddenly, I felt this inexorable urge, the light in my eyes seemed to dim....... My legs sprang with an urgency i had hardly ever felt........I RAN...........................................
............. I RAN and moments later, i was crouching over the toilet throwing up like I was a pregnant frog. All the butterflies in my stomach decided to fly away that very moment.
All the exotic ingredients of the evening's meal, made an appearance in the show, all at once.
After eviscerating to my heart's content, I fell back. I felt him holding my head and rubbing my back. He cleaned me up and helped me to my bed.


"You should have gone easy with the sea-food" he said.

I smiled.



After quite some time I asked him why he'd acted so aloof and uninterested all evening? The Waltz of The Flamingoes, every species has its own version of the mating ritual, this is the mating ritual of the human homosexual. Someone acts aloof, someone else makes a fool of himself.


P.S. We were together for the next two years. Flamingoes don't mate for life, I guess.

NEW and IMPROVED- A Neutral Accent For Mr.Madrasi

Alright, so I am stuck with a familiar problem - how do I begin my rant?


A good idea would be to tell you how the Oxford English Dictionary defines what I want to rant against. But prejudice is far too familiar a concept to beggar the indignity of an introduction. So, let me begin by asking you who the person was that coaxed his prejudice into your face? If you are an Indian, a SOUTH Indian at that, was he someone that hid his ignorance behind a gaudy tie, the kind that seem so plentiful these days. Perhaps, HE also had an irritating over-confidence -- an air of smugness -- that seems to be the hallmark of everyone with a two-bit, third grade management degree from a back alley in DELHI. Somehow, HE behaves, as if HE were in fact the Archangel bearing the copyright of the one true gospel of GOD.




HE met me on a train, a bottle of mineral water in tow and some movie rag to keep his intellect occupied. Of course, on and off HIS cell phone would ring, of course he would lapse into ultra-loud conversations, of course in ENGLISH, of course peppered with four lettered words, and of course utterly endearing! As the norm for an Indian train journey goes, conversation transpires out of the nothingness, like a ghost out of the mists. You do not even have the time to anticipate its presence before you are inextricably trapped. Simple wordless bovine adjacency of the kind that the rest of the world treasures in the name of privacy is an anathema.

An elderly gentleman in the group of passengers, graciously offered tea to all his fellow travelers. HE refused, with all the practiced grace of a perennially smiling plastic doll. I, on the other hand committed a cardinal sin, I said "Ihad juSSSt noWW oNLy, uncle" all my south Indian upbringing pouring itself out, saturating my accent. For a brief moment I threw a glance at HIM, all-smiling. Yet, his smile was different, this time it was the triumphal smile of a wily python that is anticipating a wonderful lunch of a poor rabbit that had strayed right into its curls.
"You seem to be a local guy here," he asked me
"AF Corse, yes"
"Whaddyado"
"saari, i didn't understand"
"What do u do?" in ultra slow motion
"oh,i yam doo-ying my Ph.D under a joint Indo-GERRman pRRoject," I said with a fair measure of pride, trying to outdo his contempt.
"You didn't get through to a management school?"
"No, No, i waant to do this...In fact it is a good technical koschen that I am working on.."
"Waat do u do?"

"I work as an HR manager with I***l"
"What kind of career opportunities do you anticipate once you've done your....thing" HE

"I think I will join some AAR yand dee firm"

"Well, actually I run an institute as well, we are involved in Accent training, Accent neutralization, .........and we also place people with BPO's" HE
"You do realize that if you opt for a shift in your profession, the BPO industry will be a great alternative"

"Yesss"

" Give me a call, sometime, once you are back in hydRaBaD, attend a few sessions with us, I'm pretty sure you'll know the difference for yourself,"

"in waat?"

"In your Accent! once you are in the job market you will realize how hard it is for someone with a pronounced mother tongue influence on his language, to get ahead of the pack. I've seen loads of you guys face really bad situations. You know more than half of the South Indians that I interview, are actually, way underqualified . They SUFFER because of their accents." HE finally put a stopper in that verbal diarrhea.

"waat qualifikayshans aare reqoired faar the BPO jaab"

"A good command over the English language, competitive communication skills, great personality..."

"Oh, u mean like you,"

"Er...I think I am slightly over that phase of my career"

"So, you also got your accent neutralized..?"
"Well, I never had a problem in that area you see, we come from a cosmopolitan background in DELHI, accents are hardly a problem"

"So waat is a neutral accent"

"something that doesn't show traces of your mother tongue on your pronunciation, has clean vocabulary and great command on how to enunciate words... in the right way, internationally acceptable"

"means i should speak like Americans?"

"Lets not get ahead of ourselves.... no one is born perfect you see..... though many times my American clients have complimented me on how i managed to fool them"

"but i yam very proud of my mother tongue, i yam happy that it has the power to show up even when i yam speaking other languages"

"Well, it won't take you too far, though, will it?"

"No, its taking me to one of the world best cancer research institute....faar me that is enuff no?"
____________________________________________________________________

Well, let me do , what I thought would be a good idea to begin my rant with. Let me define a neutral accent.
(Keeping with the anti-Establishment tone i decided to use Wikipedia as my reference and not the Oxford English dictionary---very self-conscious, I know.....but hey its a rant. Also, i consider Wikipedia the modern day bastion of freedom; a slightly inaccurate, though wholly democratic, academic authority.)
Wikipedia defines neutral as the state of being entirely unbiased, free of any kind of typification or characterization, and not tending to any known position

Accent on the other hand is the sum total of all that typifies and characterizes an object or a process, provides it with peculiarity. Wikipedia defines an accent as a manner of pronunciation of a language by a certain group of people.

To my mind the phrase neutral accent is an oxymoron. Anything that is an accent by its very definition cannot be neutral. Indeed, when a falsehood is repeated long enough it starts to sound true....so does a neutral accent.
Only a group of culturally spineless people would speak a language in a way that is in complete dissonance with their learned phonologies. I am the lucky few who haven't had their accents neutralized....hallelujah for that. And everyone else that is in this great sheep trot to the neutralization center, good for them. I hope though, that because of the wierdo that Mr.Madrassi is, he will keep up his accent, even if as a charade for public entertainment.

Most Respectablest Grandfather

Today's the Father's Day of 2007. Its right in the middle of the day- the rather boring kind of day, when you have nothing better to do than to pretend to read a book. Now, there was this notoriously dense book, which my equally unintelligible Grandfather had decided to dump on me . In typically Brahminical fashion Grandfather treasured all that he didn't understand, and treasured even more all that ONLY he could understand. This tendency was much more pronounced in his selection of books. Of a particularly rare vintage was a book by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (personally signed no less), which by some rather wonderful logic traced the Aryan lineage to Antarctica. This was the book that I was sentenced to suffer for the afternoon by the imperial decree of Grandfather, who had caught me drooling over an entirely delicious selection of men parading themselves in the most titillating of circumstances.
"World is going to dogs, man has become a dog" he barked "you should know who you are," he growled as he thrust the venerable tome into my hands. He threw a disgusted look at my cousin, who's an year older to me, but infinitely wiser. He was long past the taunts and the looks and the wierdness and the whispers. "Normally", he would be fattening himself on the greasy food, they usually force down the gullets of young men who are looking to see if the girl in question fits the description of his lapsed lover/dream wife. He has steadfastly refused to be cowed down by Grandfather's angry fulminations and his mother's histrionics. It is one of his uncared-for visits "back home" - he usually haunts upmarket pubs by evening and dark public toilets by the night.


"I never should have allowed that filthy turkodu(telugu for muslim, derogatory) into my house" Grandfather had said once said in a more pensively loquacious mood. The filth he was referring to was a wonderful specimen of manhood that we called Raoof. He ferried the younger of our extended brood of cousins and siblings to school. We went from our rundown mohalla in the old city of Hyderabad to a school that agreed more with the anglophilia of my class of people. The older cousins could expect a ride to the college if Raoof decided it was sufficiently late for us to make it to our classes in time. Satish, an otherwise scrupulously punctual denizen of our small fiefdom of a joint family, slipped up far too often with his sense of time. And so it happened that Raoof had to drop us at the college-a bit too often. It was a sight to behold; a bunch of neatly washed and dried kids jostling for space in the back of the auto and two full grown boys clutching at straws to save their sorry rear-ends from landin up bang in the middle of road and a hirsute horse of a young man (I can attest by personal experience) putting F-1 racers to shame. Satish would be flush with the excitement of the ride, or so I assumed.
Grandfather had made grand plans for the wedding of our eldest "cousin-sister" who had befittingly finished her postgraduation to become a mechanical engineer and now had decided to put her skills to good use - oiling some stranger's alarmingly disappearing scalp and being called his wife. Raoof was summoned, presents were granted by a royally subtle gesture of Grandfather's bony, curved finger and the responsibilty of transporting "some minor essentials" for the wedding, delegated. Raoof had to contend with Satish during every trip made to the market for stocking up the disgustingly detailed groceries of a Brahmin wedding. One evening after a thunderous mid-summer downpour, Satish mysteriously disappeared for just long enough so people would notice. Then he came back with Raoof carrying a huge bag of rice.


Satish was summoned to the inner sanctum, given Swami Sukhabodhananda's "How to Manage Work: a Vedic Perspective", and sent away with enough counsel to last him through his next incarnation as a gutter worm (a species known only to The Brahmin of the south - Grandfather had made a prediction at a later time under different circumstances that Satish would be thus reborn). A few days later,at dinner, Grandfather contemptously looked at the artlessly simple laddus my soon to be married "cousin-sister" had made and told her even more contemptously that our grandmother could cook for a hundred people when she was her age. Arrived-lately-for-wedding-Grandaunt looked at the bride-to-be with the ever-so-exquisite disapproval that would have driven people from the outside world to suicide. But I know that we came from the family that had beheld the Original Revelation of Contempt and Prejudice, and so we did not care for her looks. Even as Grandfather returned to the bussiness of grumbling orders to his sons and daughters-in-law about the schedule for the next day, Satish again became conspicuous by his absence.
Grandfather had decided that he would take matters considerably more seriously this time. This meant he would park himself on the roof of his dilapidated ship like some modern day Nelson and wait for the enemy to arrive deep into his waters, at which time he would pounce on the hapless victim and devour him. He gesticulated with a flailing arm, which meant I had to follow him to the terrace carrying an ample and ancient armchair. It would have the honour of accomodating his bony rear end, which I suspected had a stick lodged somewhere deep in its not-so-spacious caverns. The staircase was steep and cluttered by years of minimal use. Every step we took was belaboured and heavy. The musty smell that this deep recess of the house held was never enjoyable. The lock on the door to the terrace was methodically matched with innumerable different keys by Grandfather. The darkness didn't hit us as we stepped out- it was disturbingly lit by the streetlights. What Grandfather saw I will never know, he hurriedly stepped back, face confused, sweat on the brow, panting heavily. What I saw Grandfather will never know- an exquisitely chiselled beefeater working his ride on Grandfather's not so worthy Grandson, a confused Old Man and Me staring at Satish hurriedly pushing Raoof sliding down the drainpipe