Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
A simple Puzzle for you & your kids
Here is a puzzle for you ...
Imagine you are in Africa. You have been tied hanging on a tree with a rope anchored on the ground, a candle is slowly burning the rope, and the lion is waiting for you to drop and be his lunch.
Your survival hinges on the rope staying intact, there is no one around to help you. What to do now ..........
Imagine you are in Africa. You have been tied hanging on a tree with a rope anchored on the ground, a candle is slowly burning the rope, and the lion is waiting for you to drop and be his lunch.
Your survival hinges on the rope staying intact, there is no one around to help you. What to do now ..........
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Masala Dosa Personality Test
There are many ways to eat a masala dosa ..What ever the way one eats; there is a very good reason for doing that. It shows some traits of the person that is you...
Case 1: People who open the masala dosa and eat it: These are the people who are very open about their life. Everyone one the persons friends would know all about him/her. I have generally seen guys do this rather than girls. Some people think that it is a gross way of eating but in truth, these people are just portraying who they are and how their life is.
Case 2: People who start from both end and approach the masala later: These are the people who like to wait for the exiting things to come to their life. Sadly when the times comes, they are not too interested or just do not know how to enjoy it to the fullest. These are the folks who just want life as either dry or exiting. They just do not know how to phase their life and enjoy it no matter what. There are two types of people within this group
Case 2.1: People who do not finish all the masala: These folks just do not care as much for the fun times as they are already brought down by the harsh reality of life. The dry periods in their life has left them with so much scars that they do not want to be really happy when the time is right. They just take only as much as they needed and end their life. A very sorry state indeed.
Case 2.2: People who finish all the masala with the little dosa they have: These are the folks who just are the extremes. They just go all out in life. No matter it is dark or bright. They may not enjoy life to the fullest but they sure make sure that they get every single good and bad thing out of life. Sometimes these folks are really hard to get along with. They are either your best friends or your worst enemies. They do not have a middle path at all.
Case 3: People who start from the middle and proceed to both ends: These are the people who like to get right to what they think is their best part of life. Usually these guys finish of the good portions in a hurry and get stuck with nothing but worst parts of their life. The thing to note among these people is that the tendency to burn out very early in their life. Like the above case, there are two kinds of people in this group too.
Case 3.1: People who do not finish the dosa: These folks are really the saddest of people. They are the ones who tend to end their life as soon as it hits the bad patch. For them, they only need and want the best things in life and nothing more. Typically, they are not prepared or tuned to life as a whole. They just want to enjoy from first till last. Sadly, no one in the world can live without even an ounce of sadness in life. Not even the richest of the richest. But to self destruct at the mere sign of distress is very bad. That is what these guys tend to do. Some learn to live life but most of them do not.
Case 3.2: People who do finish the dosa: These folks are the typical human beings. We all enjoy the greatest of times in life and push the sad parts thinking about the great times in life. Typically the plate is clean and nothing is left for fate or in life. Happiness and sadness are part of life and these guys know that and are kind of prepared for it. Life is not always happy but there are moments of happiness here and there.
Case 4: People who eat the dosa making sure that the masala lasts for the whole dosa: These people are very rare. These are the people who like to attain balance in their life. It is hard to displease these people and it is hard to make them really happy. They like their balance and are very protective of it. Sadly these are the people who tend to be lonely as anyone else may upset the balance of their system... Perfectionist to the core and are very careful. These guys do not make the best company but are needed in any group to make the group from going hay wire.
Case 5: People who do not share and eat the dosa as if it is precious: These folks are very protective about their life. They do not want anyone to come and interfere in their life. They like to hide their true nature and intensions for their benefit. Beware of such people as they are in every group for their own need and nothing else.
Case 6: People who offer their first bite to others: These guys are overly friendly. They do anything to be part of a group and make everyone feel like the group is important than the individuals. They are the glue that holds any group together. They are very friendly and bring the best of all the others in the group. They go out of their way to help other friends. Most groups should have a person like this and they are the ones who plan the group outings and other group activities. Once this person is out of the group, typically the group slowly falls apart.
Case 7: People who take one or two bites and then offer the dosa to others: These guys care about friends and friendship but they take their time to get into the group. They take their time in making friends and they typically are very committed once into the friendship. These guys like to always be in the side lines and typically do not jump into anything in life. They always take their time to analyze the situation and then make a decision. These guys take the better safe than sorry approach.
Case 8: People who wait for others to make the offer first: Typical people I must say. They are unsure about everything. Even if they wanted to offer, they will wait till the other person offers the food first. If the other person is silent, so are these people. They are the followers. They do terrific idea, they will pitch it to someone else and get their advice before proceeding. Sadly, most of the elderly world like these types of people.
Case 9: People who offer dosa only when they cannot finish it on their own: You all may be familiar with these kinds of people. People who are very generous only when all their needs are fulfilled. These folks are selfish but at the same time not misers or greedy. They just want to satisfy themselves before they give it to the world. They typically do not stuff themselves nor do they tend to starve. They are very good people who would give you the best of advices in life. They would make sure that you are not sad following their advice.
Case 10: People who offer the whole dosa and eat from others plates: These folks are other extreme. They know what they want, they get what they want but they cannot enjoy what they want. Instead they tend to settle for other things in life which satisfies the needs but does not satisfy the person completely. These guys are termed as born losers cause even when they have the thing they wanted, they can't stop others from stealing it from them. So next time you sit with a person eating a masala dosa, look closely and see if he falls into one of the above categories. You may be surprised as how much it reveals about the person
* Enjoy eating Masala Dosa.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Watch the rare wonders of nature…….
Watch the rare wonders of nature…….
The classical natural wonders are huge and hard to miss - vast canyons, giant mountains and the like. Many of the most fantastic natural phenomena, however, are also least easy to spot. Some are incredibly rare while others are located in hard-to-reach parts of the planet. From moving rocks to mammatus clouds and red tides to fire rainbows, here are seven of the most spectacular phenomenal wonders of the natural world.
1) Sailing Stones
The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley have been a center of scientific controversy for decades. Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to hundreds of yards at a time. Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and surface ice account for these movements. However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions. Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour would be needed to move some of the stones.
2) Columnar Basalt
When a thick lava flow cools it contracts vertically but cracks perpendicular to its directional flow with remarkable geometric regularity - in most cases forming a regular grid of remarkable hexagonal extrusions that almost appear to be made by man. One of the most famous such examples is the Giant's Causeway on the coast of Ireland (shown above) though the largest and most widely recognized would be Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions are exposed to air or water.
3) Blue Holes
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Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters. They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers are able to explore some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life due to poor water circulation - leaving them eerily empty. Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been discovered, preserved in their depths.
4) Red Tides
Red tides are also known as algal blooms - sudden influxes of massive amounts of colored single-cell algae that can convert entire areas of an ocean or beach into a blood red color. While some of these can be relatively harmless, others can be harbingers of deadly toxins that cause the deaths of fish, birds and marine mammals. In some cases, even humans have been harmed by red tides though no human exposure are known to have been fatal. While they can be fatal, the constituent phytoplankton in ride tides are not harmful in small numbers..
5) Ice Circles
While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion. As a result of this rotation, other pieces of ice and flotsam wear relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an essentially ideal circle. Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at times be found in clusters and groups at different sizes as shown above.
6) Mammatus Clouds
True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system. Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers - appearing around, before or even after severe weather.
7) Fire Rainbows
Friday, March 6, 2009
Amazing Facts
A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue. i know some people who can do some amazing stuff too.
Giraffes have the same number of vertebrae in their necks as humans. Their lips are prehensile, their tongues are 21 inches long, and they cannot cough.
Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying
Galileo became totally blind shortly before his death.(probably from looking at the sun too much)
As of 14.10.2003, only 0.6% of people actually sign the guestbook. Its true. Over 120,000 visitors. Yes, the statistic did go down.
Goldfish have the memory span of about 3-5 seconds, thats why you can leave them in a small jar and they wont get bored and you can also over feed them till they kaput.
If you leave a goldfish in a dark room for years, it will turn white. (be reminded of the RSPCA though)
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit
If you rubbed garlic on the sole of your feet, it would be absorbed and eventually show up on your breath (unsure)
If all the gold in the ocean were mined, every person on Earth would get about 20 kgs of gold each. Thanx clem
When glass breaks, it showers TOWARDS, not away from the force that broke it. To reiterate, I will repeat it again one more time, to recap, TOWARDS the force, not away.
People drank gold powder mixed in with water in medieval Europe to relieve pain from sore limbs.
Giraffes have the same number of vertebrae in their necks as humans. Their lips are prehensile, their tongues are 21 inches long, and they cannot cough.
Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying
Galileo became totally blind shortly before his death.(probably from looking at the sun too much)
As of 14.10.2003, only 0.6% of people actually sign the guestbook. Its true. Over 120,000 visitors. Yes, the statistic did go down.
Goldfish have the memory span of about 3-5 seconds, thats why you can leave them in a small jar and they wont get bored and you can also over feed them till they kaput.
If you leave a goldfish in a dark room for years, it will turn white. (be reminded of the RSPCA though)
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit
If you rubbed garlic on the sole of your feet, it would be absorbed and eventually show up on your breath (unsure)
If all the gold in the ocean were mined, every person on Earth would get about 20 kgs of gold each. Thanx clem
When glass breaks, it showers TOWARDS, not away from the force that broke it. To reiterate, I will repeat it again one more time, to recap, TOWARDS the force, not away.
People drank gold powder mixed in with water in medieval Europe to relieve pain from sore limbs.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Indians have a reason to cheer - OSCAR
The Indian Oscar
Unlike the earlier Oscars this years Oscar gave lot to rejoice for Indians. A bunch of awards for Slumdog Millionire and Smile Pinky in short documentary section. ‘Smile Pinky’ is a 39 minute-long documentary about a cleft-lip girl and her struggle for joy in an alienating society. Though both the films, Slumdog Millionire(Danny Boyle) and Smile Pinky( directed by Emmy-nominated producer Megan Mylan), the film crew contains mostly Indians.A R Rahman got 2 oscars for Slumdogs music(best original song(Jai Ho) and original score). Kerala born Resul Pookutty bagged Oscar in Best Sound Mixing category for his work on Slumdog Millionaire. Pookutty hails from Vilakkupaara in Quilon district, Kerala.
READ THE STORY OF A R RAHMAN ... CILCK HERE
THE OSCAR LIST
Smile Pinky
Made in Bhojpuri and Hindi, the film is directed by Emmy-nominated producer Megan Mylan, and also talks of Ghutaru, a similar social outcast due to his facial deformity.
The curing surgery is simple, but seemed out of bounds until Pankaj, a social worker travelling village to village, crosses their path. The film was shot in the village and G S Memorial Plastic Surgery Hospital where Pinki was actually operated by plastic surgeon Subodh Kumar Singh.
Resul Pookutty
The name Resul Pookutty has become almost synonymous with sound direction in Hindi films, especially after the success of Sanjay Leela Bansali's `Black.' Resul was recently in Thrissur in connection with the second Thrissur International Film Festival.
Resul hails from Vilakkupara in Anchal in Kollam district and it was fate that landed him in tinsel town, that too in Bollywood movies.
Joining the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune "was a turning point in my life." Resul passed out from the Institute in 1995 and moved to Mumbai, the dreamland of Indian commercial filmmakers.
"That was a natural immigration as a graduate of the institute. Ninety-five per cent of the technicians of the Mumbai film industry are alumni of FTII, Pune," points out Resul. "After my graduation from Pune, my interest to specialise in sound became clear, and today I feel I am successful, both aesthetically and commercially," he says.
Importance of sound
Until recently sound artistes were merely considered as sound recorders without much significance in the industry, but Resul's generation totally changed it into sound direction. Rajat Kapur's `Private Detective' was his maiden work and after that his career graph accelerated. His recently released films include `Black' and `Mathrubhumi - a national without women' by Manish K.J. (this film, an Indo-French venture, eamines the issue of female infanticide). `Missed Call' by Mridul Vinay and `Mixed Doubles' by Rajat Kapur will be released soon.
AR Rahman's Journey to Oscars
The Mystic Master
Music and spiritual surrender are the two big themes of AR Rahman’s life. As he returns with the Golden Globe, SHOMA CHAUDHURY explores how the public gift and private search intersect to create magic
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BEFORE THE gift, there was the prophecy. After their first child — a girl — was born, an array of astrologers told the disappointed Tamil music composer, RK Shekhar and his wife Kasturi, that they would soon be gifted with someone extraordinary: a son whose name would illumine the world, a musical genius whose soul would arc across the sky.
Dileep Kumar was born just over a year after on January 6, 1966. The name — AR Rahman, mysteriously wrapped in instant and acetylene fame — would come later, but by the time he was three, the signs were firmly in place. He was, indeed, the fortunate one: he could play the harmonium before he could speak; and soon after his birth, his father inexplicably began to prosper. The word spread. His sister Kanchana, the elder one, music coursing in her blood too but born without prophecy, remembers her father taking the little boy to Sudarshan, a reputed music director, when he was four. “I hear your child can play anything,” Sudarshan challenged him, “let’s see if he can do this.” He played a particularly complex piece, then covered the harmonium with his veshti to make the playing more difficult — a kind of surrogate blindfold — and handed over the harmonium to the young boy. The calm little boy executed it perfectly. Humbled, Sudarshan leapt up and embraced the child.
The virtuosity has never abated since. On January 11, 2009, watched by elated countrymen across the world, Rahman became the first Indian to win the Golden Globe — a coveted precursor to the Oscars — for his musical score in the acclaimed Hollywood film, Slumdog Millionaire. This may be just one more crest in the stream of awards and recognitions that have lapped around him — a Padmashree, four national film awards, 12 Screen awards, 21 Filmfare awards, among innumerable others — but the excitement around the man Time magazine called “the Mozart of Madras” has never been higher, his name never more luminous.
In Chennai though, away from the champagne speeches and applauding lights of Los Angeles, a more profound underlayer of Rahman’s music reveals itself. It is three days after the award, the maestro is yet to come home. The city is unusually quiet; the shops are closed, the roads are empty. It is Pongal and everyone is on holiday. Rahman’s studio — AM Studios — the most state-of-the-art, hitech studio in all of Asia, usually bustling with dozens of musicians and directors and sound engineers, is empty too. The four-storey white and lilac and parquet building has the aura of a prayer house, zinging with the vibration left by an intense concentration of human energy. In the heart of the studio is a large room that can host a 30-piece string orchestra. Facing it, in a glassed-off control room sits a massive mixing console — a Neve 88R, estimated to cost Rs 4 crore — a console with such a daunting array of knobs it could tune the universe. Elsewhere in the building, small soundproof rooms house gleaming pianos, synthesisers, violins, harmoniums, and drums. In a large, airy room on the roof, instruments of every conception sit waiting for the imaginations that will finally unlock their sound.
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A world to win A visbily moved Rahman accepts the Golden Globe award |
The silence is a kind of serendipity: it allows one to sense what very few people know. Rahman’s music — always new, groundbreaking, wildly intuitive, experimental, a kind of sound that masters of cinema craft like Baz Luhrmann, Shekhar Kapoor and Danny Boyle say “they had never heard before” — is deeply rooted, in fact, “sourced”, from Rahman’s idea of divinity.
When Rahman, or Dileep as he was known then, was nine, the radiant prophecy seemed to falter. His father, Shekhar died suddenly — on the very day his first film as a music director was released. The golden circle was breached, the family was devastated. Kasturi was certainly overworked, and insufficient sleep had precipitated her husband’s cancer. Although her sister and parents were part of the large joint family, there was no one to turn to. It fell on mother and son to find the money to keep the family together.
Rahman remembers it as a difficult, opaque time when there seemed to be no answers. His mother made some money by renting out musical instruments, but by the time he was 11, Rahman was more often out of school than in, repeatedly called away from the playground by his mother to record music for a fee. It should have felt like an escape: he was never particularly interested in school or playground games, for that matter. In fact, he had such low attendance and marks, he was asked to leave his first school. He went to another local one for a year, and then joined MCC. Barely a term in, when he was about 15, he gave up school altogether. He played the piano and guitar on television shows, and became a sort of “roadie” with different Malayali, Tamil and Telugu composers. For a year, he played with the celebrated Iliayaraja. It should have felt like an escape, but it didn’t.
Kanchana says her brother wanted to be an ordinary boy — sleep late, play carom — and used to resist being woken at seven by his mother to practice the piano. But the mother, fervently knocking at temples, churches, and mosques, was determined to refuel the prophecy. Suddenly, around the time he was 11, destiny came knocking again. The family met Karimullah Shah Kadiri, a Sufi pir (at a railway station, goes the apocryphal story). Karimullah foresaw the boy’s entire future and said Dileep would come to him in 10 years. “That was the turning point,” Rahman admitted in a rare moment of candour to a CNN interviewer. “Everything happened as he said it would.”
ON HIS music teacher John Jacob’s insistence, Dileep applied for a scholarship to study music in Trinity College, Oxford — a crucial interlude that exposed him to western classical music. In 1987, around the time he was 21, moved by everything that had happened to them — dreams, oracles, signs — Dileep, his mother, and two younger sisters converted to Islam (Kanchana would convert a little later).
Two years later, in 1989, he set up Panchathan Record Inn in his backyard — the foundation stone was laid by Karimullah Shah — and began to make jingles for ads. In 1991, legendary director Mani Ratnam took a chance on the untested youngster and invited him to score the music for his new film, Roja. With the divine assurance of a prodigy, Dileep proceeded to break every rule with his debut.
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Family man Rahman, seen with wife Saira Banu, wants to spend more time with his children |
Now, on the eve of Roja, seven new names were offered to him: Dileep chose Allah Rakha Rahman, the first of the 1,000 names of Allah. Soon after, Roja was released, and as the pir had prophesied, the Isai Puyal — “musical storm” — AR Rahman was born. Wrapped in instant and acetylene fame.
Like other prodigies across time who have bent the arc of history, Rahman’s debut track was unlike anything anyone had heard before. It sent ripples through the industry and got Rahman the National Film Award for Best Music Director, the first time ever for a firsttime film composer. In 2005, Time magazine picked it as one of Top Ten Movie Tracks of All Time. “Rahman is like a weaver. With Roja, he created this incredibly intricate, complicated sound that no one had ever tried before,” says lyricist and friend Prasoon Joshi. “The Indian music and film industry had always relied on extraordinary melodies and singers, the mukhara and the antara. But Rahman played with the structure, he layered the melody with different strands of sound, he created spaces where one could listen to a single string or enjoy a beat before returning to the voice. He created a river with many side streams you could step into. It was unlike everything that had gone before.”
Over almost two decades since, the experimentation has never stopped. Director Rakeysh Mehra likens Rahman to the great Chinese travelers of 2,000 years ago, who wandered the world gathering influences from faraway lands. Western classical, Indian classical, reggae, hip-hop, rap, rock, pop, blues, jazz, opera, sufi, folk, African beats, Arabian sounds — there is nothing Rahman has not dared to meld together. No new voice he has not dared to use. No texture of sound he has not strained to perfect. The stories are legion. Of how he got Maryem Toller, a Canadian, to sing the hit song Mayya, Mayya, itself triggered by the sound of a man selling water, saying mayya, mayya — Arabic for water — overheard on a Haj trip. Of how he got R&B singer Ash King from the bylanes of London to sing Dil Gira Dafatan for the forthcoming film, Dilli 6, although King didn’t know a word of Hindi, just because he liked the texture of his voice. Of how he spotted Naresh Aiyar, who had been sidelined by judges like Adnan Sami in a Channel V talent contest, and picked him to sing the sublime song Ru ba ru. Of how he spotted Blaaze and Sukhwinder and Madhushree and Vijay Yesudas and scores of other new voices he has launched in the world. Of how he took 17 years to give his sister Kanchana — or Raihanah, as she is called after her conversion — a song of her own in the blockbuster Sivaji, because her voice finally matched the sound playing in his head.
The stories are legion; what is less known is Rahman’s understanding of his own gift. Unlike Mozart, the legendary giant TIME magazine compared him to, whose creative genius seemed to flow from some mercurial, manic yet sublimely flamboyant ego, those who know Rahman say he has absolutely no ego. A little like the shy Srinivasa Ramanujan, the untutored mathematical genius from Chennai who believed his prodigious acumen was channeled to him by his family devi, Namagiri, apparently Rahman too believes he is merely an instrument. As director Shekhar Kapoor puts it, “Rahman does not believe music resides in him, but that he sources it from a field of consciousness that exists eternally. He believes that to access or to be able to reach that ‘field’ you need to be very pious. I believe as long as he continues to believe the music is not his, that he is merely the conduit, he will have no limitations.”
The search for piety — the complete purity that will keep him in touch with his music — has meant a kind of twin journey for Rahman. On the one hand, there has been an ever amplifying outward honing of craft, a restless search for new stimuli, a mastery of technology, a constant self-education, a perfecting of the conduit. Parallel to that has been an ever intensifying private inward journey towards submission and surrender to the will of God — a destruction of ego, an effacement of self.
At the heart of this journey are two figures. Arifullah Mohammad al Husaini Chisti ul Kadiri — son of Karimullah Shah, no more than in his 20s or 30s, who took his father’s place as Rahman’s spiritual teacher after his death. Said to be descendants of Hazrat Mohammad, Arifullah’s dargah in Karrapa sharif, Andhra Pradesh, is both pilgrimage and refuge for Rahman. ‘Malik Baba’ Rahman calls him. AM Studios, set up in 2005, is probably named after his initials — Arifullah Mohammad — an educated guess, because even many of Rahman’s closest associates say they don’t know what the initials stand for.
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God is music Rahman, seated at his piano, believes his creativity is divinely inspired |
(My brother is the most secretive man in the world,” laughs Raihanah. “If I ask him for a house, he will give it to me. If I ask for a studio, he will give me one, just don’t enter mine, he will say.”) But an observant eye cannot fail to miss it. A small picture of Malik Baba adorns the entrance to the studio that hosts the tuning console for the universe. There are curious palm-marks in auspicious chandan on many windows and walls — quiet signs of faith.
RAHMAN IS the most spiritual person to ever touch my life,” says Mehra. “He has zero ego, there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’ in him.” “It is true. He has a surreal influence on people,” agrees Deepak Gattani of Rapport entertainment agency, who constructs most of Rahman’s extravagantly mounted concerts and has been a friend for 16 years. “He has taught me there is more to life than we normally see. He never has knee-jerk responses to things.” “He is sent by God, kudrat ne unko banaya hai,” says singer Kailash Kher, who has toured with Rahman often. “One day you will see him in Los Angeles, standing with people like Weber and Boyle and the owners of Fox. The next day he might be sitting in a dargah among fakirs and dervishes.” “His spirituality is not something others can understand,” says his sister. “I am in complete awe of him. He is a blessed thing. God considers him a special child. He has surrendered totally — every move, every action, every thought is surrendered to God.”
This surrender has taken many forms. Absolute simplicity. Frequent visits to dargahs. Generous alms to the poor. Sleeping on bare cement or sand if necessary. A sublimation of material desire not related to music. (Rahman apparently loved cars, but never drove anything fancier than an Innova until he finally indulged in a BMW last year, 18 years after monumental commercial success.) Sometimes, for others, the forms of surrender have seemed more irrational and inexplicable. For instance, his daughter was born with a hole in her heart, but Rahman refused to have her operated. Prayers, he believes, can change destiny, so he surrendered to the healing faith of his pir. Miraculously, his daughter was cured when she was two.
(“God always looks after him. It is uncanny. What others have to knock for just comes to him,” laughs his sister. Press for examples and she says facetiously, “You might be traveling abroad and desperate for some good hot food. People like us will have to worry about going out in the cold, catching a taxi, finding a place. But Rahman will just be sitting and praying and then, suddenly, someone will come and ask him, what would you like to eat? North Indian or South Indian?”)
But in other cautious snatches from friends respectful of Rahman’s desire for privacy but willing to share their marvel of him, slowly a small trickle of illustrations pile up. Gattani talks of an unexpectedly stormy night in Bangalore. Thirty thousand people are gathered in the Palace Grounds. Rahman’s pioneering Three Dimensional Concert — staggering in scale — is about to start. A sudden squall catches everyone unaware. The backdrop collapses, the grounds flood. Amidst the panic, an unperturbed Rahman locks himself in his green room for half-an-hour. When he emerges, he tells his associates to ask the crowd what they want — have the show or postpone it. Have it, they say. On cue, the rain stops, the songs roll out. Just as Rahman sings the last bar of Vande Mataram, it starts raining again. “It was astonishing,” says Gattani. At other times, when an important decision is to be taken, Rahman retreats into himself and says he will ask for “permission”. A couple of days later, depending on how the divine consultation has gone, he calls back with either a refusal or a go-ahead. Take his most cherished project — KM Conservatory, for instance, a pioneering school of music he has dreamt of for years. Initialed after the elder pir, Karimullah? Again, no one knows. For a long while, there was talk of partnering with the government. Finally, Rahman said he would seek “permission” for the partnership. It did not come and Rahman went it alone — funneling huge sums of personal money and passion to start the conservatory on his birthday last year.
Malik Baba is the most visible manifestation of this surrender. It is to him that Rahman turns to most. Often, to a critical eye, such faith can seem to skate precariously close to subjugation rather than creative surrender. But it seems to work unerringly for Rahman. “Everyone may not understand it, and it may not work for everyone,” says superstar Aamir Khan, “but Rahman is a very spiritual person, and in a curious way, his complete surrender to his faith opens him up completely. It frees him to work.”
The other figure key to Rahman’s journey is his mother, Kasturi — or Kareema Begum, after her conversion. “Amma”, as she is universally known — a jovial, quintessentially motherly figure — has remained a powerful leitmotif in Rahman’s life. “Their relationship is like the bhakt for his bhagwan,” says Kher. He follows her wishes with unquestioning faith — “aastha” is the evocative word he uses. “If she had asked him not to go to LA to receive the Golden Globe and go to a dargah instead, I am sure he would have done it.” She, in turn, is affectionate, solicitous, the keeper of the prophecy, often traveling with Rahman on his tours abroad. Ask her about her son and she says, “He prays five times a day. He is Allah’s gift.” “Old worldly” her elder daughter calls her, momentarily dismissive, and through the crevices of the brisk praise that follows, you catch a glimpse of the inevitable shrapnel around a blessed sibling — the mistakes of a conservative family, the unintended but painful eclipses, the little neglects, the big oversights, the sisters unconsciously less precious than the boy. “We were there, somewhere in the atmosphere,” jokes one of them.
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The foundation Mother Kareema was determined that her son should become a musician |
BUT NOW it is the fourth day after the award, and late in the evening. The maestro has come home and the driveway to his house is swarming with waiting journalists. There is a comforting smell of incense in the air. The windows in his reception are curtained with white veshtis, carpets adorn his walls. It is a decorative detail repeated in all his buildings.
The Panchathan Record Inn — Rahman’s private studio, his sanctum sanctorum — is a lush, comfortable room draped in rich red curtains, alternated with white. Computers, consoles, instruments and hi-tech gizmos strew the room like books might in another’s study. It is past midnight before we meet; a journalist’s deadline looms over the meeting like a vengeful shadow and in an unfortunate inversion, Rahman is game for a long conversation, but I am in a hurry. The encounter is briefer than it should have been. Still, none of the conversations around him has prepared one for the man himself. Neat, boyish, he is incredibly youthful, light-hearted — calming in an odd way — and disarmingly open. Every account of him has steeled one to meet a man of few words — the secretive brother one has to tease things from. Instead, Rahman is willing to talk about everything. And is, often, unexpectedly funny.
As we retrace his life, it is suddenly cast in more complex light than music, prayer and simple surrender. “I did not convert overnight, nor did anyone force me,” says Rahman.
“It was a long process. I was really intrigued by the whole Sufi thing and had gone very deeply into it, puttingx aside three hours every day to learn Arabic. I was drawn to Sufism because they have no regulation, no rules, no distinction between Hindu-Muslim — they just look straight into your heart and see your love for the auliyas, the noor of the Prophet.”
THE SURRENDER, too, has a complicated relationship with the music. “When you are in a creative field, particularly something like film or music,” says Rahman, “you can be tossed between highs and lows, good reviews and bad reviews. To maintain equilibrium, you have to detach yourself and abandon yourself merely to the service of music — look at it all from a different perspective. For this, the destruction of the ego is very important. At the same time, there are ironic counterpoints. If you don’t have an ego you can switch on and off, you cannot make music, you cannot do something extraordinary. You have to be committed to the idea of excelling the standards you have set yourself, fulfilling expectations. So, there is a good ego and a bad ego. Something like music also draws you away into another energy field — money, fame, women. For a long time, these impulses used to pull me in separate ways — the desire to renounce and the desire to achieve. You can never perfect these things, but finally now, I feel I am walking in sync, with both impulses hand-in-hand.”
Over the years, Rahman admits to many moments of stasis and saturation — phases when he felt enough is enough, he had done it all and would like to renounce the world. Each time, he laughs, something would come and uplift him, raise the scales. When Roja was offered to him, he was fed up with everything he had been doing: the jingles, the recordings for other music composers in Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil. “I revered Mani Ratnam and it was my dream to work with him. I thought this would be the last soundtrack I would make, so I just did what I pleased. I wanted to have fun. There were no walls in my head, no limitations. All the young people were listening to Western stuff those days, even me, so I thought, what’s the problem, are we not experimenting enough? And I let myself go.”
THE INSTANT and meteoric success brought its own counter stasis. “I thought, this is it,” says Rahman. “I have won the National film award, now I can just live off the earnings of my studio.” But then the excitements and challenge of the Hindi film industry came calling. Rangeela first; then a flood of other Hindi films. When the stasis of that threatened, there was the spike of Elizabeth, Bombay Dreams and Lord of the Ring. The western world came calling. By the time that threatened to pale, the KM Conservatory had been born, and Rahman’s Foundation Against Global Poverty — committed to eradicating poverty in India, Africa, and now, he chuckles, even America. “With all of this, I struggle less with the desire to renounce. I have found new meaning, a new sense of duty towards living, not only towards these projects, but to my wife and kids, and even my music. I see music now as being all about love, a service to humanity — it is about sharing joy with fellow human beings,” says he.
For many years, Rahman’s family — wife Saira Banu, daughters Kathija and Raheema, and son Rumi, were rarely seen publicly around him. “I plan to take them around with me much more now,” says he. “Be it in my studio, my tours abroad, or on my spiritual journeys. I don’t want them to feel separate. My father was such a huge influence because we were always around him. Without him, there would have been no music in our life.”
Typical of Rahman, his encounters with the western world too have yielded deeper things than success and awards. “After my first National Film Award, the Golden Globe has mattered the most to me because I wanted to bridge that vacuum — the fact that no Indian had won these international film and music awards. But as an individual, there is only so much of fame you can take in. Very quickly you detach yourself from it, you are only there as a representative of something else, not as an individual.”
What the forays into the western world have yielded for Rahman then is an expanded consciousness. “When I went to London first for Bombay Dreams, I was living isolated in this house, making music, meeting nobody. I used to pray five times a day and try to keep my fast. All around me were these pubs and drunk kids would piss under my window. Each time I went out, I would come back and bathe. But slowly I realised love can transcend all these segmental issues. You need to find a larger perspective which bridges all these worlds — west and east, Muslim and non-Muslim, or whatever else divides us.”
Bridges — that is an apt metaphor for Rahman and his music. In a jostling, frenetically commercial world — brimful of quick encomiums and sudden deaths — it has become difficult to gauge the true merit of things. Is Rahman the Mozart of our times? We may not be sure yet, but of this we can be certain: his music offers a way to bridge that huge void between the known and the great unknown from which earthly beauty stems.
A BLOCK AWAY from Rahman’s home, his new sense of “duty towards the living” is illumining a new generation. As the maestro was flying back across the continents with the globe — literally — in his hands, on the day of the Pongal holiday, you could have chanced on a handful of young boys and girls on the first floor of AM Studio. Students of Rahman’s dream project, the music school, KM Conservatory, they pored over their computers and music sheets. Occasionally, the strains of music wafted out from adjoining practice rooms. It would be difficult to find a more eclectic group: Anurag Sharma, 16, had given up on school and traveled with his mother (another keeper of prophecy?) all the way from Delhi to rent a room in Chennai for the opportunity of studying music in Rahman’s school. Ashrita Arockiam, a 23- year old post-graduate in English from Hyderabad, was straining to put together a scholarship to study music abroad, when the opportunity to do a similar course suddenly bloomed on home ground. Saurav Sen, 32, a computer engineer from Kolkata, gratefully gave up his job, and exchanged it for a year cocooned in music.
mix of foreign and Indian faculty, exposure to Western and Indian classical music, training in music technology, and a chance to workshop with many of the great musicians across the globe is only a part of the grooming the students from the Conservatory get. Three of the 40 chosen for the full-time foundational course — all of them had to audition before they were selected — are already apprenticing with Rahman. “We put together a concert every week,” says young Anurag, “whenever he is here, Rahman sir sits in on the session. It is amazing to be able to do that.”
But before the stasis of this can set in, a new scale is waiting for Rahman: the dream of creating India’s first symphonic orchestra. “We are a country of a billion people, bursting with talent,” says he, “why doesn’t India have a single orchestra?” KM could well be the womb for that. And in nurturing all of this with love, he might finally overcome the difficult opacity of his own teenage years.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Facts of Life
- No piece of normal-size paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
- The first product to have a bar code scanned was Wrigley's gum.
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Earth is the only planet not named after a pagan God.
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A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
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The new 787 Boeing was revealed on 7/8/07 or July 8th, 07.
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Adding a drop of olive oil and lemon juice to an ice cube then running it over your face gives you better results than some expensive skin care products.
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The Germans tried to copy Coca-Cola and came up with the drink Fanta.
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Every day is about 55 billionths of a second longer than the day before it
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Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
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The largest potato was grown in Lebanon by Khalil Semhat near Tyre. The spud was 11.3 kilos (24.9 pounds)
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Footprints of astronauts who landed on the moon should last at least 10 million years since the moon has no atmosphere.
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The national orchestra of Monaco (a nation in Europe) has more individuals than its army.
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Earthworms have five hearts
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The Himalayan gogi berry contains, weight for weight, more iron than steak, more beta carotene than carrots, more vitamin C than oranges.
- Ants make up 1/10 of the total world animal tissue
- An ant can survive for up to two days underwater.
- The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its size is the ant.
- Ants dont sleep. Thanx teepo (apparently noone can be sure since they don't have eyelids, they also have no need for sleep)
- Ants taste like sweet tarts. (from experience..)Thanx RiffSingr
Thursday, January 29, 2009
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