Mayhem on the Marina

Every visitor to this city is impressed by its wonderful Marina Beach. Over the years, before the tsunami, it braved numerous depredations and retained its beauty despite epidemics of culture, patriotism, religion and politics. These noble virtues find expression on the Marina in its many memorials, stages temporary and permanent, pandals temporary and permanent, slums, slum clearance board offices and homes, statues, picnickers and sightseers, preachers, demagogues, healers and the peddlers of a million varieties of merchandise. Ugly buildings have replaced ugly buildings on one side of the promenade, and uglier buildings have displaced grand old buildings.

The Presidency College cricket ground, once a sylvan setting where heroic battles were waged by dyspeptic Europeans and tufted Tamils alike, for long vied with several other dungheaps in the metropolis for the top spot among open-air lavatories in the continent. A recent initiative by the Amalgamations group has been the first step in giving the ground a facelift.

Until the recent restoration of the Senate Hall of the Madras University, the DIG's office stood in solitary splendour among buildings on the verge of demolition, saved in the nick of time by conservationists, the threat of adding several storeys to itself warded off at least for the nonce. Presidency College, unlike its sorry cricket ground, received a so-called facelift, barely in time to escape the demolition squad's bulldozers. The AIR building looks as hideous as ever, no earthly hope of its façade being improved, visible anywhere in the distant horizon. The ghastly modern lighthouse across the road continues to frighten innocent bystanders who happen to drift beachwards of an evening.

Life goes on on the Marina; with a small rider. The traffic gets more exciting all the time. During Amma's earlier regime, we were all used to long waits while her security men played guessing games as to where she would appear from, once they knew she had left Poes Garden to go the Secretariat. The whereabouts of our Kalaignar hold no suspense to the police or the public, but there was a time he too thought nothing of bringing traffic to a grinding halt because he was late to work.

With the Chief Ministers, the ordinary, tax paying motorist or roaduser of any other description for that matter, knows exactly where he stands - usually by the wayside as these supreme beings whiz past us at the speed of light. It is with the lesser functionaries with officious looking number plates (1111, 5555, 9119, 6000 etc.) that we do not know where we stand or must take cover as they strike terror in the hearts of all and sundry during peak hours. Most of them, in fact all of them, have colour-blind drivers who cannot see yellow lines. They create an extra lane to the right of all traffic heading towards the Secretariat. We all know how brilliantly proactive they can be once they reach there and how electrifying their action on thousands of pending papers bound in red tape. Naturally, we cannot expect these, our gods on earth, to follow rules meant for lowly sinners like you and me.

One of my friends, a driver in a private company assures me that there is a clause in special driving licences issued to these privileged classes which empowers them to kill up to nine people in road accidents. He says it with a wistful sigh, giving meaningful looks at cyclists, autorickshaw drivers and scooterists, and I'm sure he cannot be wrong - especially after watching the mayhem on the Marina all these long years.

Jaga

Jagatheeswaran, Jaga to all his friends, died shortly after this tribute appeared in Chennai Online some years ago.

"I'll call him Eswar in this little appreciation, because he hates publicity and would feel extremely uncomfortable if I were to use his real name. He is a rare human being, a genuine lover of music who knows how to celebrate music and musicians and has for years silently supported the music he loves. When I last visited him, he was recovering from a long and debilitating succession of illnesses. At the best of times a slightly built man, now he was skin and bones, looking frail and helpless, curled up in his bed. He was deeply depressed; his poor health had rendered him so. Just home from a long spell at a nursing home, he was convalescing, but the path to total recovery was slow and arduous.

The one thing that kept Eswar going through this period of sickness and rehabilitation was Carnatic music. There were three little cassette recorders on his bed placed at different positions, so that he could reach for one of them without exerting himself, whichever way he had turned as he tossed around restlessly. Wonderful music was flowing from one of the players on the day I visited him - a recording of a sixties cutcheri of Semmangudi Srinivasier, T N Krishnan and Palghat Mani Iyer.

Until a few months earlier, Eswar's small ground floor flat was the regular venue of chamber concerts he arranged every month. A must on his monthly calendar was a recital by P S Narayanaswami, a fine vocalist from the Semmangudi stable, and one of the most liked and sought after teachers among today's young stars as well as aspiring young musicians. At these intimate performances by 'Pichai Sir' as he is known to one and all, the audience list usually reads like a roll call of honour at the Music Academy. Regular listeners include Sanjay Subrahmanyan and his wife, Unnikrishnan,Vijay Siva, Manoj Siva, Sriramkumar, Shashank and his family, Ranjani and Gayatri and their parents, Eswar himself and a number of PSN's disciples, besides the two providing vocal accompaniment on the day.

There is much interaction between the performers and the audience, with the musicians among them sitting within handshaking distance of the artists and encouraging by gesture and voluble appreciation. Often it's a case of Listeners' Choice and the opportunity to listen to certain nuances of particular compositions or ways of improvisation unique to his school. While the whole experience is emotionally satisfying for the lay listener, for the musicians, accompanying as well as listening, it is an academic exercise as well, serving to help fine-tune certain aspects of their music.

Eswar has been organising these concerts with great love and care, often making his own requests as to the composition of the performance. Besides Pichai Sir, other musicians who regularly attend these soirees have also performed at Eswar's drawing room. I have heard memorable recitals by T M Krishna and Sanjay Subrahmanyam there for instance. The audience is usually around 25-30 in number and can on occasion fall below ten, but that has never made any difference to the quality of music at this very special venue.

Though a south Indian, Eswar was born abroad as were his parents, and shifted permanently to India only in the recent past. Hailing from a family rich in music, he is himself a trained musician and has a very sound knowledge of music theory. A professional in the service sector, he retired a few years ago following a setback in health. A frequent visitor to Madras during the music season in the years past, he decided to settle down here and could be seen regularly at concerts, before his recent illness.

I was delighted to see Eswar at a small temple concert a couple of weeks ago. He could not stay till the end as he grew very tired, but he was totally absorbed in the music while there. The day he recovers fully and goes back to his regular routine, the many musicians who like and respect him will be happy for him -- and Carnatic music."

Ashokamitran’s Madras (and mine)

There was this unusual event at the Madras Book Club last month, featuring four books at one go. Of the four, a little book in Tamil by Ashokamitran, “Oru Parvaiyil Chennai,” was my favourite, for its brevity, its wry humour, and its understatement. It was a collection of short essays, each presenting a vignette of some part or aspect of old Madras, originally written as a series for a portal.

The speaker who introduced the book , B S Raghavan, IAS (retired), known for his ability to hold the interest of audiences of varying hues, was at his witty best while pretending to pooh-pooh the author’s unwitting claims to antiquity by reminding him he had seen Madras 70 years ago, while Ashokamitran had set foot in the city a mere 50 years ago. He effortlessly switched back and forth between Tamil and English, and created enough interest in the book amidst the audience to ensure a sellout that evening. When he began to list the book’s omissions, however, he gave the impression of expecting too much from the slim volume.

Raghavan’s remarks reminded me of a gem of a retort S R Madhu, my predecessor at a small advertising agency, delivered some years ago to a client who wanted a wealth of information to be made available in a brochure we were producing for him. “Mr Mehta”, he told him with the sweetest of smiles, “This is a brochure, not an encyclopaedia”. Today, Ashokamitran’s facial expression at every mention of personalities he had overlooked in his book, said it all.

The book event was still fresh in my mind as I drove past Tyagaraja and Jayanthi cinemas at Tiruvanmiyur on my way home. Memories of another day came in a rush as I recalled the ‘touring talkies’ days of these two theatres. They were both tent theatres of the type common in rural India, never staying at one place for more than a year at the most-to fulfil some licensing requirement, I’m sure. Watching movies at those makeshift venues could be great fun and full of surprises. An example was the possibility of a film being restarted from the beginning after it had run for a few minutes, to oblige some influential patron. Late for a show one evening, I found out that my companions, IIT students all, were such VIPs.

It was a weekend and we were offered a double delight, an English film followed by a Tamil one! It was a James Bond film, Casino Royale, and for a while, we were quite sure that the projector operator had got his reels mixed up, as the movie had many different James Bonds, including Peter Sellers and David Niven, and if I remember right, even a female Bond, until we realized it was all part of the script.

Another South Madras institution of the past was Eros cinema, which was first converted into a kalyana mandapam and later into a posh automobile showroom. (For a short while, the kalyana mandapam continued to display the Eros sign, and I was disappointed when it was replaced by a more respectable name)! My most unforgettable memory of Eros theatre was that of trying to walk out of a particularly bad Hindi film in the 1970s barely 15 minutes into the movie. I found the exit gate locked and the watchman refused to open it! When I cleverly started to scale the wall, he literally begged me to stay on, assuring me that the film would get quite exciting after the interval!

(First published on 4th June 2003 by the portal Chennai Online)