Tourism Ministry comes up with a “tour” de force!

 

Necessity is the mother of invention they say and the trickle-down effect of the global financial crisis has forced people to come up with innovative ideas to make that extra buck.

Not to be left behind, The Tourism Ministry has launched a new flagship initiative – Election Tourism – to woo tourists from abroad. “Come witness the great Indian tamasha,” is the tagline of this new campaign that has received hot response so far.

There are several packages up for grabs. As part of a package, tourists can accompany politicians on their campaigns as they prepare for the Lok Sabha elections scheduled for April and May 2009.

Reliving the Living Dream Concert

 

 

Martin Luther King III and Kamal Haasan

Poetry and music; India and America, Martin Luther King and Gandhiji, Western and Classical – The Living Dream concert organised by the US Consulate General – Chennai, wove all of these seemingly disconnected strands into a tapestry of hope and peace.

 

The event held last Wednesday night at the Venkata Subba Rao  Concert Hall, was arranged to honour Martin Luther King III – son of Martin Luther King, Jr – on his visit to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his father’s prilgrimage to India in 1959. His father was here to meet the Gandhi family and learn about his methods of non-violence so that he could employ them in the Civil Rights movements back home.

Auroville Marathon – A run to remember

Warning: Long Post

 

Timekeepers note down the results at Certitude

The banner along the route of the Auroville half marathon said I had seven more kilometres to go to the finish line.  The body cried, “stop,” the mind said “go” and I was proverbially caught between a rock and a hard place and felt what a rope probably feels during a tug-of-war. What confused me even more was the identity-crisis. Who was the real ‘me’, the body or the mind? I was tempted to think it was the body. 

 

As I learned at the end, the real “me” turned out to be … but wait, we’ll get to the end when we get there. Let’s start at the very beginning; it’s a very good place to start. 

The Agony and the Ecstasy

 

Gingee, December 8, 2008: 16:54.13. That is what the digital display of the watch said and no, it didn’t mean 4:54 P.M. This was the duration – approximately 17 hours – for the annual 73 km walk from Pondicherry to Gingee Fort undertaken by students, ex-students, and faculty and sports instructors of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education at Pondicherry. We began at 1:30 P.M on ‘just another lazy Sunday afternoon’, and reached Gingee Fort on Monday morning at around 6:30, having walked through the night!

Early on, it seems like a cake-walk

This Gingee walk is neither a pilgrimage nor is it a walk or a campaign for an espoused cause, it is a walk to test one’s mental and physical endurance by doing something challenging. Those who think that the whole concept is freaking crazy, are right too because when it comes to this walk the hendiatris is ‘Challenging, Freaking, Crazy’ much like ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’ is for the Olympics. I asked my cousin to join me in this endeavour and he said, “2000 years of evolution of the wheel, the motor and mechanised transport have not taken place for me to take part in this prehistoric walk! If I want to get from Pondy to Gingee I’ll take the bus.”

Sharing the rhythms of heart beats…

 

CHENNAI, Dec 2: Chennai was treated to some uplifting music when Shankar Mahadevan, Ustad Zakir Hussain, Sivamani, Selva Ganesh, and U.Srinivas performed at the University of Madras auditorium as part of the Heart Beat Concert organised by the Times of India. 

Before the programme the audience stood up and observed a minute’s silence in memory of those who suffered the terrorist strikes in Mumbai last week. The concert was also dedicated by the musicians to a common friend and colleague, sound engineer H. Sridhar, who passed away in the city on Monday.

From left to right: Sivamani, Selva Ganesh, U. Srinivas, Shankar Mahadevan and Ustad Zakir Hussain

 The concert opened with a Ganesh stuti by Shankar Mahadevan (vocal)  accompanied by U.Srinivas (mandolin). The piece began with a short alaap before its tempo rose steadily as Mahadevan and Srinivas performed an intricate jugalbandi. As they neared the climax, they were joined by Ustad Zakir Hussain (tabla), Sivamani (drums, percussion), and Selva Ganesh (kanjira). It was as if two underground streams were rushing side by side, flirting with one another, joining here, splitting there until they finally merged and erupted forth from the ground in a fountain of crescendo that ended abruptly leaving nothing but echoes – and a spellbound audience drenched to the bone with music.   

A place alive with the Sound of Music

“Let’s visit Vivaldi first, and then I’ll take you to Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Chopin, Schubert and the others.” If you’re wondering whether this is a dialogue from a musical sci-fi movie dealing with time-travel, I wouldn’t blame you. It could very well have been. Only, this was what Jerry Silvester Vincent, a student at the Khwaja Moinuddin (KM) Conservatory – founded by A.R Rahman – told me as he began taking me on a fulfilling three-hour-long reconnaissance of the institution.

 As it turned out, Jerry was referring to the different classrooms in the conservatory that have been named after renowned music composers! So apart from the ones above, there’s Beethoven, Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok, Verdi, Mahler and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (the room for Hindustani music classes).

Jerry playing Bach in Mozart!

A time-consuming hobby

The wall on the landing of the third floor, proudly displays a century-old Soth & Homa clock and the corridor leading to the bedroom and the adjoining workshop, is lined with antique wall clocks. Some are working, others not quite, and every piece shows a different time, unlike the regular clock shops where each one smiles down at you. The staggered ticking of the numerous clocks, almost make it seem that time moves in each one in strange and inconsistent ways. Adagio here, Lento in some, allegro in others, and halte in that one. A walk in the corridor seems like a time travel of sorts in a time-warped zone. The quarterly, half-hourly, and hourly chimes of the various clocks indicating noon, half past ten or quarter past two, in a span of a few minutes, is perhaps what is meant by bending space and time!

Corridor of Uncertainty

On entering the workshop adjoining the bedroom you find 65-year-old Promesse Jauhar working intently at his desk. A soldering iron in hand he repairs a wrist watch, looking through a monocular magnifying eye-piece. Promesse is a teacher by profession, but antique clocks fascinate him. He has been buying, repairing and selling them for over 35 years now.

It’s hard to say goodbye…

 

The five ageing leaves of Indian cricket: Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman and Kumble. Five leaves in autumn, braving the winds of change that are blowing.  Look! Two of them are falling. Oh how graciously they fall. In this journey, so short, from the branch to the ground, how they wear a final beauty. And despite the terror of mixing with the earth, want that this last fall has all the grace of a flight! 

Kumble’s 18-year-old journey came to an end at the Feroze Shah Kotla and Ganguly is bidding adieu at Nagpur as he follows suit, floating down gently, savouring every memory of a long life on a branch of Indian cricket. They have weathered storms of all kinds and have emerged scathed, tired, tested but ultimately, I’d like to believe, satisfied. It will take long to fill the gaps they have left and the branches look that much emptier and poorer by their absence.

Comfortably Numb

 

It was the day of the recent blasts in Assam. Our batch of eleven students here at the Asian College of Journalism was divided into pairs. Our assignment was to track, select and edit the day’s stories as they broke, and design a news page as if it were coming out the next day.

We set to work at ten in the morning, and tracked the stories on the internet, browsing and refreshing the sites of the following: NDTV, CNN-IBN, Reuters India, Press Trust of India (PTI), Indo Asian News Service (IANS), UNI, The Hindu, The Indian Express…

The flow of news was sluggish in the morning, and we only had some follow up stories of the previous day’s news. We were grumbling and cribbing about the lack of any newsworthy items and were eagerly waiting for something to happen. The trickle of news bored us and it wasn’t long before we were tracking gmail, gtalk, facebook, yahoo, solitaire and minesweeper with single-pointed concentration!

That is until the news channels flashed the breaking news of the serial blasts in Assam. We finally had some hard news and, in a strange way that I feel ashamed of now, (I felt it even then) we were almost glad that we had a story to track, edit and lay out on the page. It was undoubtedly the lead story, and would definitely feature in all newspapers the following morning.

Indian Ocean at the Bay of Bengal!

 

From left to right: Amit Kilam, Rahul Ram, Sushmit Sen and Asheem Chakravarty

If you are familiar with surfing, you have definitely experienced catching a wave on top and riding it smoothly to the shore and occasionally, starting just a little bit off and having the wave crash on you. In the first case, it’s a thrilling, familiar ride to the shore. In the second, you are thrown into a spin and tumble that sends the brine into your mouth and lungs. You emerge from the deeps shocked, gasping and spluttering.

Listening to the rock band Indian Ocean live, for the first time, was a series of such experiences as I rode the surf of their sound waves that flooded Chennai on 19^th October.

The band – Sushmit Sen (acoustic guitar), Asheem Chakravarty (tabla, percussion & vocals), Amit Kilam (drums, percussion & vocals), and Rahul Ram (bass guitar & vocals) – performed in aid of the “Elixir of Life” initiative of the Rotary Club which aims to provide safe drinking water to underprivileged children.