Emotive Articulations, Part 1

General disclaimers: If you've made it onto this distribution list, it's because I thought you might enjoy hearing about my Asia trip from time to time. Because I'm being charged by the hour to use this computer, I'm rushing to write this e-mail, so please excuse any imperfections. If you rather not continue to receive these travelogues, please let me know--I won't be insulted--and I will happily remove you from the list. I'm not that arrogant to think that the whole world is interested in reading of my travels and travails. If you write me back, it will probably take me quite a while to reply. Please be patient. I can't always find an Internet center with reliable and cheap connections.

India disclaimers: Whatever appears as factual in this story, may not be. I don't have the time or means to fact check everything. Different Indian sources would tell me different things anyway. If you spot anything you think is patently wrong, feel free to let me know about it. Please forgive the immoderation of this installment. Considering it's about India, excess is apropos. I've been struggling with this one, folks. It covers the first half of my India trip, and it's taken me three months to finish it. Yes, this is the first installment since the one I wrote about Hong Kong six months ago.

I'm enduring India. I wish I could report otherwise. This is the country I was most excited about when I first set out on this crazy trip. More precisely, I'm enduring the state of Tamil Nadu.

I've been holed up in Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai (a.k.a. Madras) for almost seven weeks. It's a city of six million people, with an infrastructure sustaining maybe six thousand. Madness. Why do I stay in Chennai for so long? Other travelers ask me that. Most travelers barely last a day. The traffic is beyond belief. Pollution from diesel fumes smothers the senses. Walking anywhere, I have to devote my entire concentration to avoiding disaster. I could lose my toes to the motorcycles, autorickshaws, cars, ox carts, Ambassador taxis and buses that choke the streets.

The sidewalks consist of broken rubble, slabs of upended concrete or see-saw-y stone sewer covers. Wherever the sidewalks are relatively intact, they are occupied by homeless people. The Indians call them "pavement dwellers." Those who are strong enough hold out their hand, calling "Ma, Ma." They make their appeals with hollowed-out eyes and teeth stained red from betel nut, an addictive chewable substance that produces a mild, very mild, euphoria. The streets are also inhabited by cows, which the Hindus consider sacred animals. With my Western bias it seems that if cows are so sacred, someone should find them a nice pasture somewhere instead of letting them graze trash heaps.

Most people use the gutters for walking. My eyes must be riveted to the pavement to avoid rubbish, urine pools, cow droppings and dust of the ages. It took me a week to cross the streets in Chennai without having heart palpitations. A walk of 15 minutes would require a half-day's recuperation. I finally start making use of the autorickshaws. These are three-wheeled contraptions, like a motorcycle in front with a bench in the back enclosed by yellow metal sides and a black roof. The autorickshaws are metered, but most drivers refuse to use the meter. Instead, the cost of every ride must be negotiated in advance, which requires knowledge of the city and a willingness to insist on a fair price. The drivers rarely speak more than a couple of words of English or know where anything is. I ask the proprietor of my hotel, what's with these drivers? None of them know the city. Are they from Sri Lanka? No, he laughs, but they're new to Chennai--fresh from villages--here to earn a living.

The alternative to the autorickshaws is worse: the public bus. Destinations are rarely indicated in English. The stops are far apart. The buses have no doors, just openings. They are so jam packed that men lean out the front and back entrances-hanging onto whatever handholds they can grasp. I take the buses only when I'm sure of where they're headed. The women are usually herded towards the front of the bus, so there's some refuge there, providing I can fight my way out again.

There's very little in Chennai by way of sightseeing--a couple of government museums, a couple of historic buildings. Chennai's beach is the second largest urban beach in the world (the first being Miami or Rio de Janeiro, I wonder?) But the city isn't oriented towards the sea. While navigating the streets I have no sense of being anywhere near the coast. The "Marina" is a journey of a few kilometers east of the city center. At sunset, the beach is the prime entertainment locale for the city's poor, who have nowhere else to party or breathe. Access to the beach is restricted to a couple of narrow pathways, lined with vendors, ending near the shore. "Madam, madam!" Everyone wants to sell me something. Their camphor lamps cast a golden glow over the piles of roasted chickpeas, plastic key chains and pens.

At the shore, people are standing around chatting and arguing. The women are dressed in sarees, the men in Western-style trousers and buttoned-down shirts. Kids run around squealing. Horse owners lead their nags by the bits, soliciting rides. Some people wade into the water up to their knees, the women soaking their sarees. The few people who fully immerse themselves in the water are risking amoebic dysentery. All in all, *not* a relaxing beach.

Perhaps I stick around simply to test my adaptive abilities. It is *such* a difficult environment. If I can survive Chennai, the rest of south India will be a walk in the park. In truth, my staying has more to do with my dogged effort to make sense of Tamil culture. The city has a concentration of academies and concert halls for showcasing the Karnatic performing arts. In south India, this aesthetic has evolved over the last 1,500 years or so as a way of celebrating Hindu deities through dance and music. Originally, performances took place in temples. They were not created as entertainment for the masses--they were dedicated to the worshipping of God and his many incarnations.

The musical and dance genres were preserved through the centuries by maintaining the purity of the forms. The compositions and choreography were orally passed from guru to student. The size of the audience and the audience's response was unimportant. Even now, there's little applause at the end. What matters is the mastery of the technique. Also critical is the authenticity of the performer's religious sentiment and its perfect expression. Hours of practice and performance are proof of spiritual devotion.

Karnatic classical music is acoustic and performed by small groups. The instruments include flute, violin, veena (a stringed instrument), tabla (a double-ended drum), tambora (a long, fretless stringed instrument that drones in the background) and often a vocalist. Karnatic music is one of the most complicated forms of music in the world. It's built on melodious combinations of notes (ragas) that are oscillated in very precise ways. Improvisation is key to the performance but only within a strict set of rules. The major dance form in Tamil Nadu is the bharata natyam. It's usually performed solo by a female dancer who is accompanied by a small ensemble of musicians.

Chennai's annual classical music and dance season runs from the beginning of December to late January. The city becomes an orgy of performance--as many as 20 concerts taking place every day at different venues around town. In my US$4/night hotel room, at the Dayal De-Lodge, I wake up late, do some pseudo yoga and then scour the English-language newspaper "The Hindu" for the arts listings. In the late afternoons, I head out for the concert halls.

I've seen about five different bharata natyam dancers and a few concerts. The music concerts can last up to three hours. I try to focus on the melodic improvisations of the vocalist or violinist and the counterpoint produced by the drums. The music is engaging for a while, but then I nod out. To my untrained ear, it all sounds the same. The bharata natyams are more compelling than the purely instrumental concerts. The performances are grueling. The women dance barefoot on a concrete stage, almost continuously, for an hour and a half or longer. Bells are wrapped around their ankles. They stamp their feet down hard on the concrete to make the bells sound. The dance demands endurance, but also acting ability, strength, grace, coordination and intense emotional involvement.

The stories behind the dance are based on Hindu epics--the"Mahabharata" (1st century BC) and the "Ramayana"(3rd or 2nd century BC). These epics contain stories of the exploits of gods and demons. The stories have been made into TV serials, so many Indians know at least something about them. Some of the dances have plots, while some are just outpourings of divine love for Shiva or Krishna or some other deity. I understand nothing of the content but enjoy the spectacle--at least for the first hour. After that, I weary. The mudras (hand gestures) and facial expressions change so rapidly, it's exhausting just watching them.

Another aspect of Karnatic heritage is the temple art. The best artifacts in the temples themselves were either stolen or carted off to museums around the world. The Government Museum in Chennai houses an august collection of Chola bronzes from the 9th to the 12th centuries. These bronzes appeal to me even though I'm not a big fan of sculpture. My favorite piece is of Ardhanareesvara--an incarnation of Shiva--who is half-woman, half-man. This statue dates from 11th century. The artist has carefully attended to the anatomical details of the hermaphrodite in both front and back. You can see the differences between the male leg and the female leg, the male shoulder and female shoulder. It's quite beautiful the way the sculptor blended both sexes into one form.

The museum has many sculptures of Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, who is yet another incarnation of Shiva. I think, in the end, Nataraja is supposed to destroy the world by dancing it to smithereens beneath his feet. In the sculptures, he's standing on one leg, with the other one bent at the knee and pulled up across his thigh. His four hands are delicately poised in their mudras. The poses struck by the sculpted Natarajas are mirrored by the female bharata natyam dancer onstage. But she's not frozen in place. She's been dancing nonstop in front of a critical Chennai high-society audience. She doesn't look as serene as Nataraja. Underneath the glow of her Shiva rapture, she looks like she's about to drop.

Sometimes I think I'm staying in Chennai because of the food. Supposedly the city has the best restaurants in south India. At lunchtime, I treat myself to a thali (~US$1). This is an all-you-can-eat meal served at a "hotel." (The hotels in south India are usually just restaurants--not hotels in the Western sense.) The thali is served on a circular tin platter, lined with a banana leaf. Ten little tin cups circle the edge of the platter. They contain portions of curries and other South Indian staples such as sambal (a spicy, brown-lentil soupy dish), rassam (a salty, even soupier vegetable dish), dahl (a thin yellow-lentil mixture) and curd (yoguert). In the center, a mound of rice is scooped onto the banana leaf.

One of the tins contains a sweet. I play the game of "guess the sweet," but sometimes I guess wrong. Like the main dishes, some Indian sweets are made of lentils, rice or curd. Sometimes I accidentally dip into the sweet before finishing the savory dishes. Uggh. South Indians aren't so hung up on saving their dessert for last.

One of my favorite sweets is Mysore pak, which is never included with thalis. It's made of graham flour, ghee (clarified butter) and heaps of sugar, then baked in sheets and sliced into squares. It varies in consistency from sweets stall to sweets stall, ranging from fudge-y to crumbly. I'm tempted to visit Mysore in south central India, just to see whether the Mysore pak in Mysore is really prime. Perhaps, there's nothing extraordinary about Mysore's pak. Witness the legendary status of Boston pizza. Worldwide you see pizza joints called "Boston Pizza," when there's really nothing special about Boston's pizza at all.

The hotels serving decent South Indian thalis are crowded at lunchtime. I'm often seated with three Indian men at a table for four. The Indians dump the food out of the tins, use their right hands to push everything into the rice heap and mix it around. Then they form liquidy rice balls with their fingertips and roll them into their mouths. Outwardly, the men seem to derive little pleasure from eating. They hunch silently over their platters, shaking their wet fingers over the banana leaves.

Relatively few women eat in the hotels, and when they do, they are never alone. In Chennai, segregation of the sexes persists. It's not customary for women to dine in public unaccompanied. The men invariably stare and stare at me. I have a cultural block about eating drippy food with my fingers, so I use the small spoons provided. This practice doesn't help matters. One day an Indian criticized me for eating with a spoon. He told me it wasn't natural. God gave me my hands for eating. When people tell me I'm doing something that's "unnatural," my temperature rises. For me, what's unnatural has often been life sustaining. Plus, in my view, civilization took a great leap forward with the invention of cutlery and chopsticks.

When I need a break from thalis and shared tables, I spring for a luxurious buffet lunch at a real hotel hotel. My favorite is at the buffet at the Ambassador Pallava (~US$7). This one has a piano player at lunchtime, who plays such Indian favorites as Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" in a mechanical way. But the room is peaceful.

I restore myself from the ravages of Chennai with fine curries, fragrant rice and creamy desserts. I watch the local wheeler-dealers talking animatedly and eating furiously. I watch the colleagues eating silently as though they've lunched together every day for the past five years of corporate or government service. And I watch the French and German package tourists sitting at long tables, wondering what *their* India experience is like. I'm sure they'll be bussed out of town first thing in the morning.

"Phillum"--as it's pronounced, and sometimes written, in English in India--is the nation's most popular form of entertainment. India produces more films than any country in the world. The Chennai film industry generates almost 130 movies per year, exceeding even Bombay's (Bollywood's) production. Like the classical arts, all Indian films are supposed to incorporate the nine "fundamental" emotions: valor, contempt, fear, serenity, love, compassion, repulsion, wrath and wonder. If the audience doesn't experience all nine emotions in one movie, it feels cheated of its 20 rupees (~US0.50). That explains why every Indian film I've seen is three hours long. Extravagant song and dance numbers are incorporated into most films. The characters will burst into song at any pretext. I can't always follow the plots, but the costuming, singing and dancing are worth the price of admission.

Tamil film music has its own set of conventions. "Filmi" music is a hybrid of Indian classical styles and pop. The film soundtracks are released in advance of the movies and are sensations in themselves. But the actors and actresses in the films don't actually do the singing--they lip-synch. The recordings are made using "playback" singers. The industry only employs a handful of them. You can hear current film hits sung by the same voices, pumped through loudspeakers and boom boxes in almost every south Indian town and village.

"Mudhalvan" is the most popular Tamil film showing during my stay in Chennai. It stars a tall, pudgy actor named Arjun. He plays a cinematographer turned muckraking journalist. During a TV talk show, he confronts the Chief Minister on his record. He challenges the Chief Minister to end corruption and address the pressing needs of the state. The Chief Minister counter-challenges Mudhalvan to serve as CM for a day to see if he can do any better. Mudhalvan runs around solving seemingly intractable problems. The people love him. His breathless girlfriend watches admiringly from the sidelines. In the end, he offs the corrupt Chief Minister and marries the girl.

The hit from "Mudhalvan" is "Shakka Lakka Baby" lip-synched by a former Miss India. "Shakka Lakka Baby" becomes the new theme song for my trip. I hear it played all over Tamil Nadu. Thankfully, something has finally come along to replace Cher's "Do You Believe in Life After Love"--which was played all over East Asia--as my travel soundtrack.

One night I go hear India's most prominent playback singer live in concert--S. P. Balasubramaniam. SPB, as he's called for short, holds the world record in number of songs recorded-more than 30,000. He sings in several Indian languages, not just Tamil, so he works in Bollywood as well as Chennai. For this concert, he's backed by a 30-piece orchestra, consisting of both electric instruments-synthesizers, bass, guitars-and Indian acoustic instruments. The concert is three hours long. Too bad most of the time SPB isn't singing. Some sycophant named Gangai is speechifying in Tamil, giving long introductions to every song and endlessly praising SPB's achievements. During these tributes, I read the newspaper. In between, SPB's voice is honey, the music rocks, and I don't fall asleep.

I meet an Englishman named Peter at my hotel Dayal De-Lodge. For ten years he has split his time between England and India. He's part owner of a house in Calcutta (the capital of the northeastern state of West Bengal), but he adores Tamils. He says that what comes out of their mouths is exactly what's in their hearts and in their heads. He thinks the Tamils are especially wonderful when they tie one on. It's not proper for Tamils to drink in public, so they buy liquor and drink surreptitiously behind their houses. Of course the women take no part in these amusements. If I were a man, maybe I'd have a different impression of Tamil men.

It seems to me that Tamil men all think alike. Identical questions are asked of me by men all day long. It's so tedious. How is it possible that *all* of them walk around with the exact same script in their heads of what to ask a foreign woman? Do they learn this in school? "Madam, you are coming from?" (which means what country are you from, not where have you last been); "What is your good name?" (which is a literal translation of the Indian expression "auspicious name"); "You are staying where?" (which means tell me the name of your hotel, so I can know your status); "Are you alone?" (which means what's wrong with you); and, finally, "Where is your husband?" (which means if you have no husband at your age, you're a total failure). Rarely does anyone break from the protocol. The final question I might get, if the guy is more comfortable with English, is "How do you find India?" (which means tell me how great my country is). I'm finding it tiresome, thank you. Sometimes I get to hear about his brother, uncle or friend who works as a software or mechanical engineer in the U.S. I'm told how his relative makes exponentially more money there than what he would make in India. I try to explain that the U.S. is not a magical place--that it has its share of problems as well. But it's useless. India continues to suffer from brain drain, as skilled professionals emigrate to the U.S., Canada, Australia and Singapore looking for better paying jobs.

The questions aren't asked solicitously. They're issued as a demand, in an aggressive or imperious tone of voice. The questions are the men's way of garnering my attention for five minutes. They don't care about me. My answers don't matter, and they offer nothing about themselves. If I ask some questions back, I don't get real responses. Just a smile and a nod, and the man moves away. Some days I can't go along with the interrogations. When men approach me in the street and begin with Question #1, I don't even look at them. I walk right by. I can't remember what sorts of questions I used to ask of foreign tourists visiting *my* old city. I hardly ever met any, even though Boston's a magnet for tourists.

What's even more annoying than the interrogations is Indian men's predilection for shaking my hand. "Hello Madam," a stranger will say, and extend his hand. Do I have to shake? I never see Indian men and Indian women shaking hands. Sometimes when I'm shaking a guy's hand, he curls his index finger under and tickles my palm. I want to slap him then. When I'm feeling generous, I tell myself that the south Indian men are socially awkward because of the segregation of the sexes. Mostly, I'm NOT feeling generous, and I decide that Tamil men are humorless blockheads, with no imagination.

The Tamil women are different. They don't approach me with questions. Usually they ignore me. In the "ladies" section of the bus, when they see me coming, they clutch their children tighter. Sometimes the women look me up and down disapprovingly. I don't meet their standards either. I tell myself they don't mean to be unfriendly, it's just that they're shy--or they're preoccupied--like women in big cities in the U.S.

Sofia is the exception. I met her at The Other Festival. Chennai doesn't support much of an avant-garde. This festival is an oddity. It's produced by a woman named Anita Ratnam whose father is some kind of petroleum baron. Daddy underwrites the festival, which is Anita's pet project. Sofia told me so. The ten-day event hosts international visual artists, musicians and modern dancers, most of which have some Indian connection. Indian performers from Chennai and elsewhere are also included in the program.

I first meet Sofia at a talk given by Cylla Von Tiedemann, the official photographer for the National Ballet of Canada. An exhibit of Tiedemann's photographs are on display that depict members of the Canadian dance company posing in Asian settings. The photos, all black and white, are gorgeous. At the end of Tiedemann's talk, I rush to the front of the room to look through a book showing more of her work. The book was published in Canada, and I know I'll have no other opportunity to see it. I have a ticket for a dance program that's scheduled to start in a few minutes. Sofia takes that moment to approach me.

"Hello, you are coming from?"
"U.S.A." I quickly glance up at her and glance back down at the book, signaling I'm busy.
"Your good name?"
"Lucy."
"Are you a tourist?"
"Yes." I'm flipping through the pages, not looking at Sofia. She's still bugging me with questions. Doesn't she see I'm not to be disturbed?
"What do you make of Chennai?"
"Please excuse me, I'm trying to look at these pictures before the dance performance begins."
"What do you think of the photographs?"
"They're great, thanks."
"What do you do with yourself all day?"

Sofia was not letting up. Finally I look into her face and realize she's serious. She's genuinely interested in me. I remind myself that I've had little opportunity to meet any Indian women. I say I'd like to talk more but can't right now because I have a ticket for the show. Sofia hands me her business card. She says she's a freelance journalist who covers photography, among other things. She asks me to call her. We can meet for a meal. I say okay.

After the dance, an audience debate heats up on classical vs. avant-garde dance. One person says that classical Karnatic dance is dead. Another person says that the Western forms are a threat to Indian artistic identity. A discussion ensues about the validity of modern dance-whether as a genre it has any value. Some claim that dance must *mean* something. Art's no good if it doesn't clearly communicate a story or a lesson to its audience. Some people argue that modern dance is too abstract and incomprehensible. They demand an interpretation from the choreographers, who stubbornly refuse to give it. The artists say that it's up to the audience members to form their own interpretations. Some of the discourse is the same that took place in New York back in 1913 at the Armory Show, the first major showing of European modernist art in the U.S. At that time, people were shocked by the Cubist work of artists like Marcel Duchamps and Picasso. I can't believe people are still discussing whether abstraction in art is legitimate.

Copyright Wonderlandİ 1999