Doctor, Musicologist and a fan

That was an unforgettable Sunday afternoon.

 

A professional Doctor, a Musicologist (also a music director in some ways) and Yours Truly – all three of us huddled in a small room with nothing but pure music for company. And to keep us steady and sensible, there was this copious flow of ‘fermented liquid extract of barley malt and hops’, supplemented with unlimited supply of hot short-eats. The downpour outside was hardly anything when compared to the one inside.

 

It began with the 1970s AIR releases of Dr Balamurali Krishna’s concerts. Soon we moved to Hisham Abbas and not happy there, we tried the fusion by Sikkil Gurucharan and Anil. It was good but we were in search of ecstasy. I played some of Abida Parveen’s haunting Sufis. The director then explained some of Swathi Thirunal Maharaja’s great compositions. My doctor friend went nostalgic and started crooning the 1980s IR numbers and explained soulfully how he missed singing that great hit of the 1990s – from the movie Criminal. It seems he was to have sung the song but it ended up in SPB in Telugu and Udit (or Kumar Sanu) in Hindi (even if it was just track singing, its an honor boss, I thought)

We discussed what was creativity. We understood how VishalShekar’s nearly national-anthemic ‘My Name is Shiela” had its sheer-coincidental roots in Tommy Roe’s ‘Sweet Little Shiela ‘ or they mentioned something else also which I don’t remember. And how ‘Munni Badnaam’ had many previous versions in our own folk music. I wanted to listen to that “Launda Badnaam..” but could not lay my mouse on. When I mentioned my favorite Pritam’s name, the three of us fought fiercely to reel out songs that have already appeared in history in a different geography. What hurt me most was that the songs of Metro have already been copied by famous singers many years ago (hahahahah). For every hit number I mentioned, the two had one original composition to back up. It looked they had come prepared to counter me everywhere but it was worth learning. Imitation after all is the best form of appreciation I explained.

To prove that my knowledge of music was not less, I started strutting out songs in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and some Malayalam. They corrected me every now and then (hmmmm). Either my lyrics was totally wrong or the tune, messy.  I have started believing that doctors and engineers and chartered accountants make brilliant musicians than the ‘Arts’ guys like me (well, I should actually not be an example for any activity – the other will always look great).

We wound up when we realized what was cooked for lunch was soon running the risk of becoming our following day’s breakfast.

Ps: missed my alter-ego GK on this day. We have done such excursions a number of times in early 2000!!

To hedge $500 a barrel

The cassandras are back with a vengeance it appears.

Someone already asking if oil is headed towards $500. I was laughing with derision when oil was at $85 and my somewhat namesake said it would hit $150.  It did and i ended up eating barrels of humble pie.

Well the issue is not about whether we will go to $500. This piece is about a nice article that has a back-tested proof of a 1:1 correlation between a basket of equally weighted currencies (long) against the dollar(short).   I am not able to lay hands on the original article. And even this chart is not mine. I saved the chart but lost the original article. Visually atleast the correlation looks great...

Chal Diyay

Surfing sometimes helps. Came across this collection of fusion and i would say with humility this particular number in Yaman (yamuna kalyani) did my Bose proud.

Javed Bashir - what a voice. A must for all music lovers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY_LzIAG4gc&feature=player_embedded

Rains are most beautiful here

That sounds more parochial, right?

Rains are beautiful, wherever you are. Having moved to Mauritius recently, i asked my colleagues when was the Summer here - they said i am well here in the peak of summer. I couldn't believe.

Rather than struggling to explain why i was adumbrated on a summer day, i attach a snap of the road i take to reach my office. Its breathtaking - the sight of literally wading through a sea-surrounded land and driving between mountains... God's own second country!!???

Astrology Again

Rahu and Ketu start their movment after a prolonged period of stationary or less-mobile phase between November 2010 and Mid February. This should relieve the pressure for a lot many of us especially for those whose ascendant is around that mystic 8 degree (and an orbit of 1 degree). These have been tense and testing times for some.

Concern is Egypt. This country will be passing through a phase of greater uncertainity and strife beginning this week and well into early  March.  12th Lord Mars is combust and conjunct Sun in 9th.  Shudder to think any further!!

Another Tower of Justice

A friend forwarded a link that had this small story (reproduced below).

  

For hardcore geeks, the WikiLeaks saga should serve as a stimulant to a new wave of innovation which will lead to a new generation of distributed secure technologies (like the TOR networking system used by WikiLeaks) which will enable people to support movements and campaigns that are deemed subversive by authoritarian powers. A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. “Like many people”, they blogged, “we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”

 

They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet. 

 

What’s exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, before the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of innovation is needed. 

I liked the concept very much. While we do not live in a repressed society, we sure come across day-to-day petty instances of oppression of the weak and fallen or violation of rules and laws or similar such instances when the heart silently bleeds for justice and we get into a mode ‘I know what is right but I cannot help in any way’. It is still worse if we are ourselves victims and do not have the courage to raise a voice, fearing tyranny of the ruler. I have often vicariously lived the thought of going to the huge entrance of a mighty king's palace and pulling the chains tethered to a huge bell that symbolizes ‘The Justice Dispenser’, raising the noise and running away without a trace

Some of my all-time favorites – Part 1

I once had a driver. He always gave me the impression of a frustrated Formula-1 driver – someone who never had the right mix of crew, car, sponsor, luck and above all flexible rules to help him make it to the top. His passion for treating my car as a toy was an understatement. He believed God gave him the right leg only to push the accelerator out of the car. He equally believed that the brake was a redundant spare-part in a car. He would horn anyone to death if he or she came in his way. He would hardly talk, once behind the steering wheel. He never brooked the moving presence of any object ahead of him. He was endowed with the eyes of a hawk, reflexes of a cheetah and the impatience of an African leopard. It is sheer coincidence these comparisions are with the Animal kingdom - the emphasis is on his superior faculties. All these characteristics paled to insignificance in front of his humility and sincerity. He would crush his watch to dust if it showed him he was late to an appointment. And would want to abolish the currency system if anyone tipped him. I dreaded the prospect of seeing the first of any month fall on a Sunday or Public holiday - for i would not know if he would drive me to the cliff of a hill for delayed payment of salary. The risk was equal if i paid him a day earlier - his principles of life would not want him to accept any favor.

One fine day he decided to quit – preferring to work on his farm fulltime. I couldn’t buy a farm for him so let him go. Where will i find another one like him.

[This is the first in the series of my experiences with certain ‘different’ people. Will keep introducing them with a tinge of humor, whenever i find time]

Your's Frugally

In one of its recent articles, EWI talks about ‘frugality fatigue’. I liked the phrase. I like Socionomics and some of the recent research articles in this area are quite fascinating.

The write-up further analyses how the ‘Americans are spending again – whether they can afford or not’, how the common man is consumed by ‘The urge to splurge’ and how the current generation could be different from the one that lived through the Great Depression.

Am not too altruistically inclined to sit on a judgment as to which is most virtuous and why a rational person should be fatigued to save. We (the subcontinent) belong to that minority in the financial world that believes in saving for the generation-next. My dad struggled all his life to save for me (and he need not have done that by any stretch of imagination). My in-laws do that for their daughter. Collectively, me and my wife do it for our daughter. The saga continues. We specialize in inflicting on us maximum pain for minimum comfort. We would plan an extravagant tour of the world and convert all our savings into tour money and would all along be striving to bring back as much as possible, unspent!!! Well, that is frugality at its best (not worst).

If it is true that frugality is being given an unceremonious burial and the world is spending its way out of the current financial crisis, then let me look into the diary noting of my dad and grand-dad and great-grand-dad to find out which school of economics they all belonged to.  And write again about the virtues of being frugally wise.

Whither Lying

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I had my first taste of bringing up modern day children recently. We went to a zoo some weeks ago when Taarinie was not 5 yet. The zoo had free entry for kids under-5. So when I proffered the entry fee for three adults, leaving out our under-5, my little one couldn’t bear the insult (that’s how she must have thought) of free entry and shouted ‘I am 5 appa’. The counter clerk looked at me as if i had plundered a nation and people around me must have thought no less. I had to explain to the zoo authorities that she still had a week and half to go for the Fifth one and it was an accepted practice to round-off to the higher number of age once someone crossed 183 days after a birthday. It was thereafter resolved honorably

But a few questions remain to be answered. Do we parents unwittingly teach our children to tell lies? I remember having gone through such ‘honorable’ practice in my childhood without a protest. I rather inculcated that art of lying across places – cinemas. buses, trains, circuses, sports (entry barrier) – wherever it mattered. And it was an accepted form of smartness. There were friends whose great-grandfathers had once served the police, there were others who had a family member that was in the army during the Indo-Sino war – but they all clamored for some concession or the other. And these past soldiers came in handy to fetch that petty exemption. It was a veritable exercise in falsehood, beautifully cultivated under the garb of thrift. Yes, this was done to save a few pennies or thereabout for the family.

This possibly was the fountain-head for corruption in a way. I may not belong to that tribe of morally defunct characters but I know what my generation must have started off on. Over a period of time, this relaxation in moral standard morphs into moral abyss. And we are lost.

Not this generation. They appear to have started off on a much better footing. More virtuous mores.

The fall of a raja

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Ex-Telecom minister done in?

If one remembered the many reports that appeared in the press or carefully sauntered through various news items and interviews and tidbits and the investigative fare dished out by the fourth estate over the last 18 months, one is indeed disappointed. The most basic of the many questions is how come an individual – who also is a public servant of the highest order – could do it alone and be singularly responsible for a multi-billion dollar scam?

Without much ado, my simple conclusion is that the weakest in any link is always the victim. I don’t understand politics and therefore do not keep track of the strength of the voices that questioned many key decisions around -1G, 0G, 1G, 2G, 2(a)G, 3G…but there is a very rudimentary arithmetic here. The cash flows must surely have raised eyebrows long back. The delay therefore was in figuring out the most acceptable power equation before slamming out the weakest midget in the link!!

Taarinie turns Five

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Time Flies.

Even before we have gone tired of seeing her first birthday album, Taarinie comes over to cut her fifth birthday cake.  A week ago Taarinie turned 5.

Children are amazing. A girl child, all the more. I wouldn't know how terribly boring life would be if only there weren't anything called childhood.  One of the greatest gifts to mankind must be the joys of watching  children grow. And one should consider himself or herself lucky if he or she gets the blessings of God to be living with children and parents together.

Bombay Dreams - Au Revoir

Maybe you haven’t noticed, maybe you did but don’t care or maybe you are also in the same lethargy that I am in… whatever, its adieu to this wonderful city Bombay. 

I could never slip into calling it Mumbai all my life. Like i have never relished Chennai, for it is always Madras for me. It can never be Bengalooru - it has to be Bangalore. I am hardly swayed by political bigotry and jingoism.

Atleast for some years from now i will  miss Bombay. For someone so much used to inner and outer silence, the initial days in Mumbai were  indeed traumatic.  But the city had its own beauties. I started loving its confusion, its crowd, the cut-throat business mindedness, its commotion and everything one can imagine to disrupt calm.  But overbearing all these are that unmistakable undercurrent of humanity  and a rare spirit of the locals. If one is lucky to get a good friends’ circle, life is on an autobahn (like the 1974 German Band would say). I was fortunate to have that.

Looking forward, out of Bombay,  I remember these great words of my favorite author..

This was what I carried with me into [my] new country, an instinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was the first time, moving from one place to another, that I hadn't expected something better of the new country than I had found in the old, that I was prepared for disappointment. It was the first time, too, that I was not disappointed.

Sun Set - Chowpaty

On a Rainy day: Worli Home

When wil this torture stop

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Sycophancy comes to us quite naturally. 

Or else what could explain hundreds of discomfiture personified masses of humanity squatting beside a charkha to spin out a foot of thread. Some of them were writhing in pain trying to use both limbs simultaneously. 

What makes them forget spindle and remember charkha, what prompts them to forget their regular life of falsehood and deceit and remember that great soul once a year or at best twice and finally what makes them get under a never fitting all-white garb? Is it the need to demonstrate a loosely existing nationalism or is it just that jig before a camera. Or is it a stupid math that the voter is gullible enough to buy this presentation.

The best way to remember that ultimate soldier of non-violence is to walk bare=footed and bare-bodied a few miles on a day like this and swear before his statue that each of us will spend atleast one day per year in honesty. Am i asking for an all-impossible event?

ps:Someone called me all the way to ask what was this about and why this petulance. Today is 30th Jan. We mourn the death of a Father. The rebellion is against what i saw on DD sometime back in its news edition!!!

Incredible What

  

I am no doubt possibly world’s worst conversationalist. The most mortifying moments for me are when I have to attend a group dinner or a gathering where I have for company people besides me and my shadow. And I am happy in this cocoon life where I preserve my ignorance within me and never get exposed.. (if you are silent people may think you are ignorant. The moment you open up, you confirm their fears)

Now, I never ever imagined that I will have to sit through a session like this in my life. Not that I have strong likings or opinions about anything, but to expect an introvert like me to survive a conversation like the following must be a travesty of my faith in public life.

He: How is life in the new place? You play Golf? Or Soccer? Which is your favorite team?

Me: Life is fine – could have been better though. No I don’t play golf although I have played a few times in the recent past. I tend to hold the Club like a hockey stick and swing it like a Cricket Bat with footwork that one uses for pulling a long hop over the mid-wicket. So my Caddy told me I can never make it to the top grade and I may require atleast a thousand Pars to reach the eighteenth-hole.

He: That’s pretty interesting and funny.

Me: Indeed. I like to play soccer but don’t know where the best grounds are. I used to like ManU but since I don’t know who are its current players and its coach, I have no opinion.

He: That’s great – I can introduce you to some country side clubs.

[I, for a moment thought, if I was going to play for one of those counties. In my school days I always wanted to be playing for Hampshire (alongside Barry Richards) or Somerset (Viv and Ian) but then it required cricketing skills]

Me: Let’s see. I have other priorities for the present. Will surely let you know if I would want to.

He: Then how is this (what’s his name…) Tandulkaar doing. Is he still playing. Must be great fun watching him playing.

Me: [On a normal day I would have strangulated him but he had, among other things, the responsibility of being my pay-master]. I corrected, ‘its Sachin Tendulkar’, the greatest batsman of our times, often compared to The Don by critics. He still plays and every team in the world is praying that he retires soon. And its sheer delight (and not fun) watching him. I am lucky to have been born and be living in the same era like him (and equally unlucky to be living in the same era like this person who doesn’t keep track of Sachin)

He: That’s great. Is Shaarook Kaan acting these days. I met him some time back in HighStreet. Nice Guy. How is Aishwarya Rai doing. [And many questions]

Me: [again the same frustration..]. Yes Sharukh Khan acts. No idea about Ash, I haven’t met her in my life.

[I ended it abruptly. I detested his penchant for pronouncing male names incorrectly. I thought it was inappropriate to be asking me about such high profile individuals. And I felt quite low to realize that he considered me good only for such trivia. I would have been an equally good candidate for discussions on Solar System, Global Warming, Green Revolution, Molecular Biology, Honda’s trading losses, Jupiter’s transit into Aries, Mclaren’s dreams, Apple’s guidance for first quarter, the fate of global economy etc but why just these few issues. Was it because he thought after Independence, India has progressed only in sports and cinema.]

Well things have to change. I have to start talking.'

I walked out like a cat caught in a rain. And thought to myself...'

Thyaga Brahmotsavam gets its Gloss

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There was a time when i used to look forward to every December with great expectations - for it  was when the music festival in Madras started every year. This was soon to be followed by the greatest event of all - the Thiruvaiyyaru festival. Musicians and Rasikas would set aside pride and pelf and sit together in sheer devotion and sing the pancharatna keerthanas in true earnest. It was experience most sublime. I have personally sat through those exhillarating moments during my school and college days. The number of westerners that thronged the place was to be seen to be believed.

Today, as i sit in some distant place and watch this on DD, i get the impression if it were a plenary session of a large political outfit. Politicians, their personal attendants, party workers, walkie-talkie  holding security people, safari clad bureaucrats - the list is long. Where is the rasika?

As TMK orchestrates yet another melakartha (the presence of TV cameras and foreign media has made our musicians dress conscious and they emote more than what is necessary), i see party workers planning their evening dinner, i see a senior political leader whispering in the ears of another senior bigwig about how this electorate should be taken care of when the moment comes, i see a senior musician of yester-years running around desperately (possibly he is in some committee and is heckled by the demands of the political leaders that are in the committee)... well, its like those Dubai and Malaysia glitz. There is everything for a memorable picnic but the humility that marked Thyagaiyyar's immortality is conspicuous by its absence.

Will this morph eventually into a day when this festival starts with a Srikant Deva and Imaam's fusion of some rare gana-raaga, followed by a Gaana in Sri or Madhyamavati no one will ever know,  then a jugabandhi that ensembles those great track-singing lippers... And then the festival for a few hours. 

God save the King.

Markets - Another Bet on Another Bubble

   

Back to markets again.

I should admit with straight honesty that i must have lost more money than anyone else betting on the Chinese bubble over the last few years. Therefore,  when i read the story in the following link, i couldn't help pulling out my trading log and rub my eyes again.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8261740/Hedge-funds-bet-China-is-a-bubble-close-to-bursting.html

The more interesting part of this cliched story about the bubble is that i sent in a note on Friday morning  about how i saw a possible  top-formation in CRB Commodity index (340 looks like a top to me) and how commodity currencies could come off.  I also circulated some trading themes on this set-up. And later in the day when China hiked (yet again), i thought i had pulled a rabbit afterall!! Coming as it does close to my call to sell India (both the index and the currency) and seeing them happen to a T, this report in the Telegraph gives me a kick.(for those back home, Sensex and Nifty looked ominously lower a week ago to me)

Well, a long way to go. Two things however interest me and hence all this indulgence in vanity. How will this 'sell china' funds work and how will a multi-trillion dollar reserve country respond to a crisis if ever it happens. In 2010 the shanghai index lost possibly the highest among notable economies and yet nothing happened. 

Will continue on this theme again after i cover my Oz shorts!!!

ps: squared oz at a decent gain. should not have done so given my larger perspective but then a bird in hand is worth two in bush.

The future is surely in their Hands

..

The Torchbearers of Progress

Unforgettable 2010

    

For someone who believed nothing can go wrong if you walk slow and steady, 2010 corrected me. All that i ended up realising is, accidents can happen even in the best regulated families.  Am too tired to look back and too weak to analyse. When God closes one window, he opens another - modifying the old adage to my liking.

As long as there is hope,

As long there is a direction, 

The energy to move

and the path to move along,

We have a hundred alternatives,

a thousand paths and infinite dreams.

The two posts below are the views that i get from the new window God has opened for me. 

Thanking all those that helped me in my difficult times and forgiving all those that hurt me, i apologise to all those that suffered because of me.

... and Cruising down to make Ends Meet

Golfing in the World's Best Course