An email sent in response to an article recieved on Indian Poetry, published in the Hindu.

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C,

Thanks for this piece. I think I encountred both Thayil's and S. Roy's names somewhere before in the Indian blogsphere.

I was doing an accounting at Buoy today as it has been around four years now, and discovered half of the contents I dumped/ archived/ filed/ posted over there have something or the other do with poetry: 300 odd poems of others and 400 odd pieces (I don't claim the label of a poem for any of them) of mine. I think poetry is a personal habit, a way of living. And like most personal habits, I think, it is not amenable to transfer to the disinterested.

So the poets mentioned in this article, and also poets generally speaking, have to be satisfied with this curious habit of theirs to fool around with words mostly in private time and place, and maybe even stop bitching about the reading population not giving a shit about their fingering technique. No, maybe not, poets who are not miserable or who don't suffer don't cut such dashing figures! This makes me think of Faiz's poem, "Love, don't ask me for that love again" in a sarcastic sense. All this lack of fame & cash will remain, unless of course they are (or can become) good operators and log rollers in the shady groves of American academe.

Hope you are well. -S

I discovered last night that Buoy has been here, at Antville.org, for four years now.

Incredible when I think of it, how as I get older the passage of years seem to be more compressed. When I was four years old, I remember this distinct memory of an encounter from pre-school (LKG as it was called in India): I ran into a high school boy, a fifteen or so years old, who lived around the corner from my parent's house, as I was running up and down the stairs of this school complex in play. He then seemed to be a gaint, very remote from myself in thought and feeling, and a sense of wonder fell upon me, wonder as to how I would think, feel and behave if I ever grown to be that big. I suppose somewhere inside my buzzing, and now sufficiently wrecked, brain, I still carry this sense of wonder.

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A regular skipper of stones and blog, who recently added some traffic to the miserly webcounter (it now says 53,095 hits) down on this page, made me reflect, very briefly, on the purpose of this exercise. So a bit of history, for kicks and yawns: I began putting together words, marks of punctuation etc into sentences around five years ago to mark time, to ease my way through this wormhole of self exile. This was at Diaryland.

Soon I had become more ambitious. I wanted to be able to add photos, graphics etc to spurce up the journal - I am talking about regular small scale narcissim here, which causes one to stand before mirrors thinking, "Boy! I ain't a bad lookin' fella." But, simaltaneously, I was a cheapskate too. I wanted it gratis. At that time, no blog program had anything for free. I tried Blogger, with hosting at Blogspot, and hated the ad bar they had at the top for all all blogs hosted gratis over there, I tired a couple of other places inluding a site that vanished over night, taking away my junk.

This was when I discovered Antville - a site that runs on object oriented Javad based open source software, with features such as ability to classify the stuff I may wish to dump here into categories, image hosting, file hosting and so on. It took me about five minutes to come up with the title Buoy - I wanted Eleph.antville.org but it was already taken, so I had to settle for this inexact term Buoy, which it certainly isn't on most days, good or bad.

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If someone does an archeological dig through the thousand two hundred odd entries filed here, they would discover about three hundred of these are poems by others, great and well known beings and not so well known ones, which I had stolen, borrowed, and archived here, i.e., a nostalgist's map of the belle letteres, a Big Book of Poetry.

They would also come upon four hundred pieces of variable quality and variable maturity, in various states of undress - pieces that for the lack of any better label, I filed away unded My Poems. This adds another data point to why Buoy will have to be a reculse: because its primary concern has so far been poetry; others and mines. And poetry primarly is private, reculsive; the hidden quite voice in an ear and the water in the corner of an eye.

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Since I have been meditating quite a bit on death, I wonder if Buoy's contents will be a sufficient epitaph for my passing?

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2006:08:21 Update: Ustad Bismillah Khan passed away today. :(

... 2006.06.08

Earlier today to give me company as I worked, I turned to good ol Bollywood music, with which I have been completely out of touch in the recent months. Yes, kind readers, the making of a 'firagni' goes like this. Anyway, I started looking under the list of music directors over at Music India Online (a site I heavily use for their excellent collection of Indian classical music) for A.R. Rahman, whose beat* infused music usually seems to do the trick of keeping me awake without distracting me too much.

I saw that Rahman Baba has been chugging along busily, and since I remembered something or the other said about "Swades " on a blog a while back, I decided to give this soundtrack a twirl, with only one of my ears in attendance. The music, well, was a mix of the usual Rahman's motifs. All this, till this instrumental track (wrong song title over here me thinks) smacked me on the side of the my head. Pure shehnai power doesn't get better than this, maccha. And also the seamless fashion in which the tabla, the guitar, and the vocal harmonies weave in and out the shehnai - perfect! With tracks like these, I suppose, Rahman Baba can lay claim to be the chief shaper of the post license raj (> 1990, and also post beloved Illu-Illayaraja) desi filmic soundscape.

I tried to find out who did the playing on this track. And I could only google-up only one reference to B. Madan on the shehnai, Prasad on the dholak, and Neelakantan on the tabla. Names should be named, especially in Bollywood, where musicians who play the instruments are no better than ghosts.

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Now, since I grandoisely titled this post 'Of Shehnais', I am going to spout off on this topic. However since my ignorance in the technical matters of music remains collosal, I will merely channel others on the subject of shehnai's history and the place in Indian music:

"The Sahnai is a double-reed instrument membranophone that belongs to the shawm (or oboe) family that spread from western Europe all the way to the suona in China. One of the earliest pictorial representations of this instrument is found in gandhara bas-reliefs (northwest Pakistan) from about the beginning of the Christian Era, where a straight blown instrument having a flaring bell is depicted with the player's fingers clearly splayed to stop holes on the instrument.

The penetrating sound of the sahnai is regarded as being auspicious, thus the instrument is associated with temples and shrines as well as with such occasions as weddings and festivals. Only in the last seventy years or so has the instrument been adapted to classical and light classical music.

In the past 70 years, the shehnai has made its way from the villages to the concert stage due to the sole efforts of Ustad Bismillah Khan (b.1916). At this writing he is still performing and has performed with many other luminaries in Hindustani classical music. Other noted performers of today are: Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Ahmed Hussein and Pandit Anant Lal.

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I personally associate the sound of shehnai, and also that of its sibling nadaswaram (I suppose this is the case with most desis) with weddings. Yes, "shaadi" (and the barbaadi that ensues) is ushered in on the soulful tunes of shehani. Also in my younger days, I have had the opportunity to see Ustad Bismillah Khan play in a very intimate concert. Actually, since he was already too old to play the entire concert by himself, his troupe had to do quite a bit of the heavy lifting. But when he came in, you could see how sometimes a musician and his choice/method (in this case shehnai) of making music can reach a state of perfect congurence. This is one reason that Octavio Paz, in his book of essays "The Double Flame", claims can potentially make typewriting monkeys like me potentially jealous of musicians and music.

As another aside, me thinks, Vikram Seth in his elephantine novel 'A Suitable Boy' best delinates a Hindustani Classical musician, i.e., a ustad in the character of Ustad Majeed Khan. Afterall, Vikram Seth can supposedly sing a mean khayal, and afterwards play mean Bach on a cello. Ah! sweet jealousy, please go away.

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Another image that comes to my mind when I think of this 'sannai'/ nadaswaram music is that of 'gangireddulavallu', i.e., the dancing bull folk (all politicians are closely related to them; they are dancing bushit folk!). These people used to come around my childhood neighbourhood with their colorfully decorated bull, playing a tune or two on the shehnai, make the bull do tricks such as shake its head in yes or no, Indian style, as they posed questions such as "Is the master of this house a good man, Basavanna?" There was an additonal incentive for me to like these colorful Basavannas because the bulls, especially the Mysore variety (here you can see a white brother ride a cart pulled by these Mysore bulls), that my maternal farmer grandfather used in his farm work were notriously bad tempered with a dangerous rear kick. This article in Hindu has a photo. It also, sadly, decribes how this tradition too, like many others, is slowly becoming extinct. This is a really cute photograph of a small boy and Basavanna. And in this Basavanna is performing a cool trick.

*Courtesy of that genius mad drum guru Sivamani, who lays down percussion lines four or five beats deep; listen to the sound track of 'Taal' colsely, try to discern how many of those instruments are producing some kind of a beat, and you will know what I am raving about here.