Cats and Dogs and sundry ways to avoid riyaaz

TablaGeekery

Tabla + Cartooning is double the fun.

First up, who has got my goat ?



And talking of aggressive, Pandit Big N Fat Ji is known for his uhmm... aggressive accompaniment syle.



Anaghat, a tabla composition that is brought to a climax just before the sum !!



And one I did a little while ago that is topical again as the snow comes and the sun beckons :



The puppets do a traditional tabla composition recitation :

Write a Letter To The Rivers

Anytime a pickup a book by Dr. Patar, it inevitably means a return to melody. It is as simple as turning a few pages and inspiration strikes - and boy does it take hold !

This poem - Nadiyaan Noo Khat Likho (literally translates to Write a Letter to The Rivers) touches me at so many levels. It has this one line that describes the poetic metre to use to write that letter :

kin min , chhama chham, chham chhama, rim jhim, kalala kalala

In all my years of reading poetry in various languages, I am yet to encounter something so profoundly musical. Hope you enjoy it just as much as I do.

Romancing the rain

Two Punjabi poems on the monsoons of memories.

The first, Saavan Langh Gaya, is by Shiv Kumar Batalvi. He has, no doubt, been done to death (death being his subject of choice) by just about every Punjabi crooner, dead or alive. This poem is not one of his better-known ones; yet, I feel it captures the spirit of longing exceptionally well without a ton of sentimentality.


Much thanks to Gurpreet Singh of Jalandhar, India who agreed to let me use the very beautiful pictures of Phulkari for the background. ( Gurpreet’s photostream on Flickr can be accessed here )




The second poem, Pehlaa Saaun , is one of mine that I recited at the Montreal Kavi Darbar on October 30, 2010.




The painting in the background is a late 18th century piece from the Kangra School of Art in the Museum of Fine Art Boston collection, that I happened to discover at this site. It has all the elements : the dark-clouds, lightning, one damsel in distress, two trees in a violent, erotic embrace and three snakes to add that extra zing. Forget about the newly-wed bride; I am scared.

Many thanks again to Prasad Upasani for iTablaPro – a Pandora’s box of musical possibilities, that lets me have this much fun.

Composing with iTablaPro

A word about the absolutely wonderful app (iTablaPro) created by Prasad Upasani : with a few touches on the Ipod Touch, I can fill my house with a background drone and welcome the dawn - a fresh morning; a new beginning. Sing, hum, renew the centuries-old musical compositions. Revel in the joy of something new that inevitably springs forth once one’s heart and mind are in the right place. Repeat the fun when the sun goes down with a different palette - a different raaga , a different taala.

I am as old-school as they come; but buying this app is the best $25 I have spent in a long time, for sure. It is a God-sent for us loner types when it comes to music, allowing one to work at one’s own pace and to not have to deal with the logistics and artistic-differences of collaborative work; not to mention avoid the constant juggling to keep a myriad of instruments in tune.

Here I present to you the virtual one-man-jatha : I sing and Prasad's app does all the accompaniment (tanpura + surmandal + tabla ). A brief mangalacharan (prelude) precedes each Gurbani shabad.

Saadho Mun Ka Maan Tyaago, based on Bairaagi, a morning raaga :

Har Charan Saran Kalyaan Karan, based on Kalyaan, an evening raaga :

Tum Ho Sub Raajan Ke Raaja, based somewhat on Pancham Malkauns, a late-night raaga :

An Oil Painting

No Tomorrow. Mixed-media. Oil on water.

Gulf of Mexico, circa 2010

photo credit : U.S Coast Guard

the surjeet paatar project

The Surjeet Paatar Project has been a background preoccupation of mine for the last few years. Life has chugged merrily along with its usual baggage of highs and lows, successes and failures, focused sprints and unhurried meanderings : in all of that the one constant has been casual interplay of music and poetry in the background. The project is an attempt to pick a few flowers from Dr. Paatar’s garden and arrange them into a bouquet.

Of all Punjabi poets, old and modern, Surjeet Paatar has a very special place in my heart. The sensitivity that he exemplifies in his poetry is remarkable and his canvas is so large that there is practically no issue of concern that he has not written on – poverty, globalization and immigration, terrorism, love, history, war, environment, spirituality. And in every verse, his humanistic streak is evident :

kisay de vaastey shaayad birkh banaa main vee,

issay ummeed te thal vich khadan dopahar andar

for the sake of somebody else, I too, could become a tree

with this hope, I stand in the desert mid afternoon

It was my good fortune to sing two of his poems to him while he was here in Ottawa in July 2007. I was very apprehensive because a good poem is a very delicate construct – imposing a musical framework on it can often be fraught with danger, destroying its very essence in the process. He was very appreciative and encouraged me to continue with this experimentation of weaving my two passions – poetry and music, one feeding the other.

Dr. Paatar’s poetry is a delight to work with – it is obvious when one looks at some of his poems that these are meant to be sung. The poetic meter is amazingly precise; there is never a need to stretch or compress a word to fit a melody. I have let his poems pick the tunes for this journey together : hopefully, my musical adaptation has been unobtrusive enough to let the beauty of his words to shine through.

From his book Lafzaan Dee Dargah (The Shrine of Words)

faslaan_udaas_hoieeaan

dukkhan_bhareya_dil_paimaana

bahut_gul_khilay_ne

naa_eh_paun_hai

From his book Birakh Arz Karey (Thus Speaks A Tree)

bansari_naal_behas

roan_sau_saarangiyaan

Punjabi Poetry By Anwar Masood

One of life’s greatest pleasures is stumbling upon something stupendous. We go about the daily grind taking a detour here and there to preserve our sanity and then, all of a sudden, there is a chance discovery that causes a wholesale realignment of our neurons. Our world magically expands as do the limits of what we think as humanly possible.

Anwar Masood’s Punjabi poetry has such an impact. He crafts the words with such amazing skill and feeling that I keep wanting to listen to his flights of fancy again and again and again. Over a marathon session last weekend scouring everything (poetry recitals, lectures, interviews) available on Youtube, I picked six of my favourites. Each and every one of these is a gem; crafted with a labour of love that is visible in his impeccable choice of words and flawless delivery. Listening to him, one cannot but fall in love with words. The Punjabi spirit of no-nonsense plowing through life with gusto shines through; some things cannot be expressed in any language other than Punjabi.

We start off the proceedings with a hawker selling a Banian (vest) :

Continuing on with the theme of hawkers, we take a ride in a bus. At one point, the bridge over the Jhelum river in Pakistan was restricted to a single-lane causing the traffic to stop for some time in each direction. In a separate lecture, Anwar Masood talked about undertaking this journey many times over three years copiously taking notes and studying the people as they went about making a living selling various things. Astute observations and remarkable sensitivity, as he chisels out this classic : Jhelum Da Pul

On to Ajj Kee Pakayiye – a dialogue between a Chaudhry (landowner) and his cook (Rehmaa) on the age-old premise to what to cook tonight. We all ponder the decision daily in our lives; in the poetry of Anwar Masood, the mundane is elevated to the sublime.

Anarkali is the most famous bazaar in Lahore – Anwar Masood captures the imaginary conversation between a villager and his majh (buffalo) as he leads her through Anarkali. Simply beautiful. Anarkali Deeyan Shaanaan.

In a tussle of culinary heavyweights, Lassi takes on Chaah. Tradition vs Fashion. Old vs New. I love the forcefulness of the language that the bitter fight brings out so beautifully.

And in the end, Ambri (Mother), where Anwar Masood takes a break from humour. A very moving poem, based on his personal experience as a teacher, on the subject of domestic violence. It is not too often that one sees grown men brought to uncontrollable tears by the power of simple words.

I hope you enjoyed Anwar Masood’s poetry just as much as I do. It is impossible to be a great poet without being a great human-being : creative, compassionate, humble. I feel fortunate to make his acquaintance via the miracles of technology. Youtube is not all garbage, for sure.

Yet Another Rejection Letter

Dear Mr. Parker,

After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that the bank has rejected your business-loan application for a cannibal restaurant. In keeping with our new corporate policy of full and honest disclosure, I have highlighted the relevant sections of your business proposal that the committee feels are problematic and present a high risk exposure.

While we do not doubt your culinary creativity, as evident from the highly imaginative daily specials (pan-seared love-handles, baby bottom roast, granola-fed vegan fingers), we do not see anything in your business plan that demonstrates how you would tackle the inevitable supply-chain issues. Banks are in the business of making money and we routinely support and fund businesses that are accused of bloody murder but in your case such accusations may literally be true and that will not be good business. Breast-milk frozen yogurt for the Freudian-vegetarian market ? You must be crazy.

You state, with a zeal typical of a freshman taking Marketing 101 : I would put Cannibal Junction in the Byward Market in Ottawa, right in the middle of the action, where the propensity to sin increases as the night progresses and everyone starts to look for a quick bite. A neat little play on words, but business proposals are the last place for such trickery. Your audience is men who live in the world of finance and fine-print and they found this loading of the phrase 'a quick bite' with highly suggestive sexual-cannabalism imagery very disturbing. This did not exactly help your chances, as you may well understand.

On behalf of the bank, I thank you for your ongoing business, and I trust that we will continue to serve you in the future. Perhaps, in a few years, when genetic engineering would have advanced to such an extent that one would be able to pick a meal-mate based on looks, intelligence and flavour; you may chose to resubmit your application and we will be happy to reconsider it.

Yours truly,

A. Stiff
Small Business Loan Rejections,
Big Bank Inc.

A Rejection Letter

Dear Mr. Parker,

First and foremost, I would like to thank you for submitting what you ,ever so humbly, refer to as your magnum opus. We are honoured that you decided to submit samples from your masterpiece to us; and not, I quote, any of a dime-a-dozen small publishing houses specializing in sustainable living, spirituality, wild flowers, hemp clothing and the Canadian immigrant experience. Unfortunately, we will not be able to publish it as the work does not meet our guidelines and requirements.

Who am I kidding ? It stinks. It stinks so bad that I feel very strongly that it deserves a personalized rejection letter. A form letter would just not do as I would really like to 'nip the evil in the bud' where the evil in question is your rather misplaced faith in your inner writer. I will be doing my fellow editors a big favour by sparing them the torture of having to read through the mounds of drivel, that I am sure, you are capable of churning out in abundance.

Where to start ? The pomposity is evident from the title itself - A Book Of Wisdom for the 21st Century. It is rather presumptuous of you to think of the problems that the book-store managers would face upon its publication (What to do with the many tons of conventional wisdom that will rot in warehouses once this is out ?) but we are all entitled to daydream, so I will let that one pass.

Let us move on to the actual content.

While I do see a very faint semblance of something remotely workable in a few of the quotations you have dreamed up (A man is known by the bookmarks in his web browser. Never trust a man who sells value-added services.); I do need to remind you that these become quotations only when these are quoted (repeatedly) by people other than YOU. As they stand, these are merely grammatically correct sentences that are being rejected by an editor as being unworthy of publication. I would certainly not be as charitable about the rest of the duds in that section.(Uneasy lies the crotch that wears a pager. Every barber is a Dalai Lama.)

No publisher in their right mind would want to open themselves to libel by accepting such tasteless limericks that you would like to pass on as some sort of aphorisms for the trademark-laden digital age :

Blackberry^TM wielding man of power,

twiddled his thumb in the shower,

for the stress from vibration

and years of radiation

had reduced to a stub 'twas once a tower

My Powerpoint^TM presentation,

received a standing ovation,

the crowd on Atkins Diet^TM

sat through all quiet

on the subject of constipation

Granted, the nonsensical limerick form is difficult to criticize and I can see how you may be naturally attracted to it but even a nonsense poem must, at the very least, have some artistic merit or redeeming quality. Your limericks have none. Sure, if I were to dissect one, there is rhyme and if I can stretch the standards a bit, there is reason; but as a whole, I find no rhyme or reason to publish such puerilities.

What I find the most upsetting, however, is your attempt at hijacking the haiku. You have taken what is a sublime poetic form and turned it into just another container for your trash. Basho and Issa would, no doubt, be turning in their graves at the travesty you unleash in these ditties :

setting sun –

commuter swears,

whither goddamn sunglasses

a cardinal sin -

to ogle neighbour’s wife

or to Google her

I suggest that you continue to publish this balderdash on your own blog and force feed it to the few friends that you might have. If you would really like to see it in print, I suggest buying a printer and making a few copies for bathroom-reading which is about the only genre I can place this in.

There are a million other meaningful pursuits that one could follow in life other than writing and I wish you success in any one of them.

Regards,

Anna Biting-Critic

Chief Editor, Lowest Rung,

High-Brow Publishing House

An Ode To Autumn

(Photo Credit : natureluv on Flickr)

The colours have been absolutely amazing this year. Not only has the spectacle been extraordinarily vivid, it has lingered on a fair bit longer than normal. Thanks to a wet summer, perhaps. It is impossible to go for a long walk in woods at this time of the year and not emerge transformed. The autumn forest can make a poet out of anyone. (You should know where this is heading)

My ode to this, the most beautiful season of the year, in Ottawa anyways, is in Punjabi. I have attempted to sing my poem in Raga Megh - the raga of the torrential rains so metaphors mix, characters clash and images flash in and out of sentimental nostalgia and a yearning to belong in nature.

rang_gulabee_laal_peelay

I recited this at the CHUP Society’s Evening of Poetry at the Centrepointe Theatre on October 18th, 2008. ( CHUP stands for Canadian Hindi Urdu Punjabi and chup literally means silence in all of these languages; which is quite apt, as one of the poets remarked that evening. All poetry is born out of silence). Hope it does something for you; it sure was immensely pleasurable to write and compose.

A rather contrived translation (for those who could not endure more than a few seconds of the audio) is :

Autumn

colours pink, red and yellow
the season of falling leaves is here
why do you stay all cooped up inside
while nature weaves a tapestry

the ancestral trees have sent you an invitation
laying out a light-yellow bed
tis, the season of colour, busy men sleep
while leaves lose their lives

Do not be a man
be one with nature
enjoy my son
enjoy the Godliness

take off your blinds
take off your muzzle
sing Megh
dance with the squirrel

Megh raag was the call of the babeeha (bird)
Megh was the company of clouds
Megh raag was raindrops falling on the kikkar (tree)
Megh is now the colours of the maple

The Maple is dressed up as newly-wed
Take off my veil, my lover, it sings
Why grieve the passing of youthful exuberance
When it will be back again next year

Canada : According to Google Trends

A colleague recently directed me to Google Trends and I was hooked. Here is something that really appeals to the armchair social commentator in me. I can enter any word or phrase, chose a country and time and generate a chart based on Google searches for that particular word or phrase. This is really quite fascinating and for most cases, the sample size far exceeds the 1000 people that Mr. Gallup polls with the caveat that 19 out of 20 people still speak the truth when their supper is interrupted by a telephone survey.

We will start with the basics to get our feet wet. I will localize the searches to Canada and select the time to be the years 2004-2008. Nothing fancy. I enter hockey and the graph shows me that the season is far too long with only a very brief respite in the summer. There is a lot of interest in hockey during the Christmas holidays and during major tournaments like the World Cup. So far so good. I enter Stanley Cup and I can see when that occurs, just in case I live in Canada but do not talk to anyone or read any newspapers or watch any television. But take another look at the data; in particular at the list of the top 10 cities where the Stanley Cup searches originate from. There is no Toronto or any of its suburbs. I am amazed that resignation can be this qualitatively quantified !

Let us try a few more. Canadians start to think of summer as soon as the snow starts coming down and the interest peaks at around Canada Day. There is precipitous fall in the next month, brought about in no small measure I am sure, by the criminals that lure us into fall fashion. Notice also how the pointy fall fashion peaks are sliding ever so early to take a bite out of our already short summer. Oh my God, is this all real ? I need some reassurance so I will lob a few other easy ones, in particular to see if the regional splits make sense. So, OK, the prairies care about wheat, Alberta about oil and Quebec about poutine and Celine. I feel the nervous excitement that an executive must feel when he is about to make a presentation where the data nicely fits the lies that he is going to pitch.

Foliage. It seems the term just enters our vocabulary in late September and quickly vanishes a week later never to be uttered or typed again until the same time next year. Cleavage, on the other hand is a perennial favourite from coast to coast.

Life is not all fun and games though. So let us get the ugliness out of the way. Finance, investment, MBA. Notice how these words are all the rage in Markham, Scarborough, Toronto, Burnaby, Richmond Hill. So if I were the dean of a business school all tied up in knots because a third-rate magazine rated my school as merely prestigious ( the lowest of the three categories – prestigious, world-class and elite); I know where to launch my next big tootmyownhorn blitz with the works - full page newspaper advertisements of smiling alumni executrons and promise of free wine and cheese in a swank hotel lobby. Swank. Which brings me to one of the pitfalls of using the Google Trends search data - it is absolutely garbage if the word happens to be a celebrity name, which is again apt in its own way.

Fascinated as I am with what this all means, it is still a tad worrisome to think about how this data can and will be used in the years to come. But let us banish those negative thoughts, my friends. Let us not take precious jobs away from academics, consultants and policy analysts. Let us, instead, look at farts. Is it any surprise that our brothers (and sisters, for it is a scientific fact that men and women fart in equal measure) in the Maritimes are the most interested in this, rather sublime activity ? Why not, I ask. Let Western Canada worry about greenhouse gas. And now for something really disturbing : Masturbation. I know the Quebec premiers have been struggling for decades to offer effective incentives for fornication but looks like Quebecers are taking the easy way out. Taking matters in their own hands, so to speak. Stop the handouts, I say. Insert your own pun here. All I can conclude by looking at the data is that while in Rimouski, Sherbrooke or Trois-Rivieres, it is best not to shake hands with strangers. Or with anyone, just to be safe.

A sobering thought to end this fun experiment (just as it was getting real interesting) is how an article or a blog would read in a few years should the underlying assumptions change. Trends change. So, too, will Google Trends. Fashions change. The knowledge base of a society changes. But stereotypes have survived far more formidable opponents than the scourge of political correctness and likely will be around long after the impending doom and gloom. Come 2058, if the planet manages to somehow survive the relentless business of business, Newfoundlanders will still have the best sense of humour, the Spelling-Bee Finals will still be Swaminathan vs Chang, and the Stanley Cup Finals will be a clash between two teams, neither of which will be the Toronto Maple Leafs.