The over-bridge connecting the railway platforms one, two, three, four, five, and six at Borivali Railway Station is usually crowded, conveying travelers between platforms in the same rushed manner as conducting them toward the exit to the east where they’ll descend the stairs to platform six before exiting the station.
Anxious to board the trains announced on the speaker or hurrying to exit the station to beat the rush heading for scarce rickshaws or buses outside, travelers will rarely break stride or cast a glance elsewhere before making their way about, unless an exception waylays them.
And today it appeared in the form of a firm voice emerging from the corner of the over-bridge, calling out even as the crowd moved and broke ranks in an age old Mumbai tradition –
“Today is Nag Panchami, today is Nag Panchami”.
It’s just as well she called out because the coiled Cobra (Nag) in her basket was barely visible in the flowers and garlands covering it, the raised hood barely noticeable along the curve of the projection.
She sat with the cane basket holding the Cobra, most likely made from copper, at her feet, her hand at the ready by a tin of milk she served up on the metal Cobra’s hood from a metal stirrer wound with cloth to soak up milk, in the same motion a passing traveler made in bringing up a coin as an offering to the serpent on the auspicious day of Nag Panchami, among the first festivals gracing the month of Sravan.
On Nag Panchami day, devotees offer milk, not necessarily in the belief the Cobra will drink it but more from the symbolic value associated with milk as a revered offering to deities on auspicious occasions.
“Today is Nag Panchami, today is Nag Panchami,” she called out each time a rush of passengers made their way up or down the stairs. Some folded hands in prayer in front of the Cobra, revered in Hinduism as much for protection from its lethality as for its role as a protector, depending upon the contexts it’s seen in or assigned.
Short of time as they go about their daily lives, it suited many travelers to pay up and have milk offered on their behalf to compensate for their inability to make time to visit a Shiva temple and offer milk to the Nag (Cobra) themselves. Meeting half-way is cultural. The middle path is comforting.
She called out again.
“Today is Nag Panchami, today is Nag Panchami.”
Her voice had begun to crack from calling out all day.
As I took the stairs down, it became apparent yet again how a city bursting at its seams will seek to delegate faith for want of time. And in doing so it reveals how, even when pressed hard consistently, it will seek to hang on to tradition in a desperate attempt to retain what remains of an identity derived from the culture of a people, of a past, for an uncertain future.
Note: Shortly, I’ll post on Nag Panchami celebrated at Borivali’s Omkareshwar temple, and Jogeshwari’s Jagdamba & Kalabhairav temple.
Prem Utsav 2011 is currently underway at the Sathaye College Auditorium in Ville Parle (E), Mumbai. Over ten days, Mujeeb Khan’s theatre group, IDEA, is staging 75 plays adapted from Munshi Premchand’s works, ending July 31st, on the legendary Hindi and Urdu litterateur’s birthday. It’s an experience like no other. Go over and watch them.
If I needed any further confirmation that Mujeeb Khan was charting a path of his own and playing by his own rules, I didn’t have to wait beyond the minute after the lights went out at five minutes past eight to realize it myself.
Last weekend, just as the sixth and the last play of the second day at the ongoing Prem Utsav 2011 in Ville Parle (E) got underway at the Sathaye College auditorium, I’d noticed the artistes of his theatre group, IDEA, filter into the rows to the front, free of the costumes of parts they’d essayed through the evening in a series of plays dramatized from Munshi Premchand’s stories.
I sighed in silence. So, there would be no curtain call, no names of artistes read out to the audience to the sound of applause at the end of each play, nor at the end of the day. Until then I had hoped to learn of the identities of the artistes against the roles they had performed if only to applaud the verve they had brought to each of the six plays staged that day.
They had performed spiritedly even though they had struggled occasionally to come to grips with the language of the legendary Hindi litterateur, a finesse in nuances and tone never easy to master in today’s age of Bambaiyya Hindi of ‘Kya Bey, Kettey Bey and Tu Kaiko, Mee Baiko’ variety, but at no point had they flagged in their enthusiasm or loosened the grasp of their characters, essaying their roles with a passion that must’ve done their mentor and teacher, Mujeeb Khan, proud as he looked out the window of the projector room to the back, his eye as unwavering upon his wards performing on the stage as over the audience engrossed by the unfolding drama.
For, when I returned on day four of the ten day theatre festival celebrating Munshi Premchand’s works he remembered me as the ‘person who was photographing scenes from the plays the other day’. Mujeeb Khan apparently misses nothing in his presence. Bearded and clad in a kurta, his fingers were quick and his gestures, expansive as he made his point to the actors on some aspect of his craft.
There was applause aplenty at the end of each of the six plays staged at the auditorium, just that the actors would remain nameless to the end, the audience having to make do with a sheet of paper listing names of all student artistes involved in the 10-day theatre festival, oblivious of the parts they played in each of the plays.
Apparently Mujeeb Khan placed greater emphasis on the staging of the play, the characterization of roles, the timing of dialogue delivery, and their precision within the constraints of the Hindi language of the late 19th and early 20th century, possibly of greater significance than the names of artistes. He takes much pride in his wards. And I assume the reverse to be equally true.
Moreover there was no curtain for a ‘curtain call’. The end of each play was sounded by an echoing gong that followed a lights out lasting marginally longer than those between a change of scenes within a play. It took the audience some time to distinguish between the two but not after they’d applauded prematurely in the lights out between scenes with the applause they had reserved for the end of play.
But no one minded it. The scripts were taut, the actors dedicated, and the performances energetic, making up for the occasional slip; the themes Munshi Premchand wrote about of the India of his time remaining as relevant to the times of the audience as his own even if their prevalence was not as pronounced an urban reality as it was in the milieu Munshi Premchand grew up in in the present day Uttar Pradesh to the north of India.
In my interview with Mujeeb Khan when I returned to Sathaye Auditorium two days later to ask him a few questions about his craft and his mission, Mujeeb Khan would characterize Premchand’s themes as ‘timeless’. He was right.
Poverty, Widowhood, Child Marriage, Feudalism, Worker Exploitation, Alcoholism, Relationships, Greed and the like are enduring in their centrality to society, and equally independent of time, geography, and milieu. Munshi Premchand’s skill lay in the persuasive way he wrote about them, constructing stories that draw readers into the narrative, living the characters in their moments of despair, enlightenment, and deliverance.
The entry was free. Mujeeb Khan explained it away saying his theatre group wanted to bring Munshi Premchand’s works to the people and had no wish to ‘sell’ Munshi Premchand. Just as Premchand’s works were ennobling for their themes and treatment, so was Mujeeb Khan’s intent, and dedication. Different, surely.
The Sathaye Auditorium is located in the campus of Sathaye College on Dixit Road and seats 150+ Mumbai theatre enthusiasts, small by Mumbai theatre standards but significant for its existence as a part of the college.
Soon after the three of us made our way to Sathaye College, at walking distance from the Ville Parle (E) railway station, theatre goers began to filter through the gates. A security guard sat in a white plastic chair by the board listing the schedule of plays for each of the ten days of the theatre festival, answering queries from visitors as to the starting time.
“It’ll start at 5:30 pm,” he said without tiring of repeating it each time someone stepped through the gate. “Are there tickets for the show?” “No, the entry is free. There’re passes though,” he would reply. At which some got flustered at not possessing passes for the shows. It’s easier buying tickets at the counter than chase after passes for entry. “Where does one get the passes for the shows?” “There,” the security guard pointed to the door of the auditorium.
Dutifully, people stepped up to the door and pulled at the handle. The door would not budge. A little later, another theatre-goer pulled at the door handle. It still would not budge. The attempts stopped only after someone who knew better informed the others that entry is first come, first serve. And the doors retained their handles.
Eventually I did not see any passes given out and we got in without any. I assumed passes would be of use in the event the auditorium was packed to capacity. It wasn't that day.
Strung between supports framing the approach to the door opening into the auditorium were motifs from Munshi Premchand’s milieu – kerosene lantern, woven baskets, and a tarazu. The latter was a constant in the undercurrents his narratives wove for, in the end, realization, and repentance had to balance out the straying from the righteous path for the message to go out.
The scales of justice had to tilt the right way. It was in the journey bridging both ends of human character, including the greys in between, that Munshi Premchand’s masterly portrayal of the human condition was essayed. And which Mujeeb Khan had sought to dramatise. He had come a long way, and he had a long way to go.
Blowing in the breeze, a large banner hung from the trees along an open area where students were busy playing football in their colours while cadets stood to attention to one end. A group of student cadets, probably from the NCC, had hop skipped through slush with rifles held over their heads. The rifles were vintage, most likely Lee Enfield .303, at least from where I stood in the distance. I couldn't be certain.
The banner depicted a montage of images ranging from a farmer scouring the skies for signs of rain from his parched fields, a hangman stringing up nationalists from Indian Independence movement, fields under plough, monuments, temples, and Mahatma Gandhi, each a context in Munshi Premchand's writings.
It had just rained and K and V had disappeared to a roadside tea stall for a glass of chai each before returning just as the bell sounded and the door opened as theatre enthusiasts drawn by Munshi Premchand’s aura trooped into the small auditorium.
It was an evening to remember, and an experience to cherish.
The plays we saw that evening: (1) Pashu Se Manushya Tak, (2) Zindagi Aur Maut, (3) Pachtaava, (4) Boodhi Kaaki, (5) Prem Ka Uday, and (6) Sampadhak Moteram Shastri.
Note: In the next installment I’ll post the pictures from the above plays with brief story outlines.
Plays Scheduled for 28 July: (1) Mandir, (2) Tyagi Ka Prem, (3) Masoom Baccha, (4) Dhithkar, (5) Sava Ser Ghehu, (6) Nimantran, and (7) Jihaad.
The theatre festival opens each day at 5:30 pm, and continues until 31 July, 2011.
If Mumbai needed any further reminding of the approaching Ganesh Chaturthi festival, the makeshift structures made of bamboo supports lashed together and alternately covered by plastic sheets and the occasional tarpaulin now cropping up on roadsides with colourfully done Ganapati idols on sale do an effective job of reminding the city that its most cherished, dutifully celebrated, and much revered deity, Ganapati, pot belly and all, is due a visit to their homes.
I’d have to stretch my memory to recollect any other Hindu deity as creatively rendered as Ganapati or Ganesha as the elephant-headed God is known. If he didn’t occupy the minds as much he wouldn’t find himself skillfully rendered in mediums ranging from plantain leaves, coconut shells, rava ladoos, to wood, Plaster of Paris, and clay among other material. It obviously helps to have a trunk as his most distinguishing feature.
For the sake of Ganapati, the devout will banish fish and other non-vegetarian food from their house until the time he occupies centre stage in the house, preening in decorated luxury while neighbours troop in for his blessings, and the modak of course. It's another matter however, like they say of Goans good-naturedly, that hardly has Ganapati been borne out the front door to much merriment and tears alike, the fish comes in the backdoor!
Across the road in Vile Parle (East), just as we approached the railway station yesterday, headlights from the traffic streaming past lit up the Ganapati idols on sale at a roadside shelter manned by a woman busy on the phone fielding enquiries for the Ganesha idols on sale while her assistant was showing a couple around the place. They had a difficult time choosing from the shapes and sizes on display, each as endearing as the next.
Soon, as the days pass and Ganesh Chaturthi draws near the idols disappear as families take the deity home to continue their love affair with harbinger of good.
And somewhere trackside, only interrupted by the local trains hurtling past, youth from shanties and slums neighbouring the railway tracks will be drumming away in small circles, practicing for the return journeys Ganapati will make, back to the earth from whence he sprang into the Indian consciousness.
Note: On the highway between the western suburbs of Borivali and Jogeshwari, workers in makeshift tents are busy at work on Ganpati idols, adding finishing touches before putting the Ganapati idols on sale.
Note: This year the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations will kick off on September 1.
Framed by arches of the David Sassoon Library across the street from where he stood facing the road, the flute player held fort with his tune on the pavement outside the Jehangir Art Gallery, an impromptu stage he chose to lend his burden of carrying a hundred unsung tunes on his shoulder.
Circling around Mumbai’s celebrated Art Space, the pavement conducted the moving mass of Mumbai’s humanity along in choreographed chaos not unlike a river in spate breaching its banks to the terrifying scream of its intimidating silence wreaking unsuspected violence from the force of its unrelenting movement forward.
And like a hapless tree caught in the middle of a strengthening river, the street-side flautist stood alone among his tunes, gathering his melodies around him into embracing his isolation on a busy street.
With the flute pressed to his lips, the flute player had emerged from the Pavement Art Gallery that runs along the length of the K. Dubash Street in the Kala Ghoda precinct, barely breaking his stride past framed paintings of hopeful artists mounted along the open stretch, scarcely interrupting his tune along the way, hoping to interest passersby into lending a home to his many flutes that jabbed the sky indignantly at the indignity of lacking embraces.
But then Yeh Tho Mumbai Hai Meri Jaan.
As his tunes flowed outward they wrapped around passing feet without managing to slow them down, lingered by conversations without succeeding in pausing them, floated alluringly past reading eyes with nary a glace gracing them, dodged impatient taxi drivers unmoved to the passing melody, stepped past speeding traffic, and circled around invisible wakes of passing humanity in the hope a tune would find a home in an earnest ear, and a flute, a new shoulder to lean against.
Time fled past. The day grew shorter by the minute. The melodies wound hopelessly by. And a not a single flute left his shoulder.
The soulful melodies that issued forth from him thinned out before he let the flute drop, turning his head to scan passing humanity for passing interest. There was none.
Framed by the Bombay of yesterday, with time having chipped city sensibilities to the functional, the promise of possibilities the city once held out to street-side melodies had met their end in the reality of the irrelevance of the individual, and individuality.
Turning on his heels he returned the way he had come, seeking deliverance for his flutes at another street corner.
The search for acceptance circles around without ever completing the circle.
The school caretaker holds out two polythene bags to his wife at the doorway of his residence located to one corner of the school courtyard. His cat follows him to the door, out of habit and purpose, equally.
One bag holds tomatoes and greens, and the other, fish. The courtyard is swept clean and quiet. The platforms in the shade are empty of students.
Later he basks in the winter Sun with the cat at his feet. It is Sunday morning and they both have time on their hands, and paws, to pause with the Sun and reflect with the shadows while awaiting lunch.
A little under two years ago, on a rainy day similar to those buffeting Mumbai for over a week now, I stepped out of the office with my colleagues for a meeting with office bearers of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (L.I.C) in Worli.
Grey skies had blanketed the city and the rain fell intermittently. While there was respite from the skies between spells of rain, there was no respite from the pall of windswept grey and black umbrellas deftly negotiating other umbrellas passing them by, the black adding to the overall gloom, with the occasional colour floating about in the street failing to break the impasse.
After the pounding through the year, roads clung on to puddles of water, seeking relief from the humidity of a long summer. Commuters exercised caution in choosing the puddles to leap over and the puddles to walk through, often choosing the latter to avoid leaping over a puddle only to land in another with a splash.
The much trumpeted Bandra – Worli Sea Link had opened to traffic a little over a week ago, connecting Bandra to Worli across the Mahim Bay. At over five kilometers the cable-stayed bridge over the Arabian Sea had attracted joy riders soon after it was thrown open to the public, with thousands lining up for a drive in the hope they would experience the roiling sea under them from the safety of the sea bridge.
But Mumbai being Mumbai, priorities soon rearranged themselves, with matters of urgency and compulsion taking over the need for joy rides between Worli and Bandra, with the exception of those with time on hand.
As we huddled into the office transport, matters of work took a backseat in the time leading up to the moment the car lined up with the bridge over a violent sea. Rivulets streamed down the windshield, glazing over the yellows of Traffic Policemen posted on the bridge into images brushed over with effects in image software. With windows rolled up we rolled onto the bridge in a cocoon of silence save the occasional banter, the pattering of raindrops and the whooshing of rearing waves muted to the ear even as the eye sought to recreate it.
Shortly we sped over seemingly innumerable spans supported on piers before approaching the massive central tower rising into the sky, the cables descended at angles, turning the cable-stayed portions on either side of the approach into a pleasing geometry.
A few quick turns negotiating the traffic barricades and we were on the home stretch before exiting the bridge on the Worli side in quick time. I was disappointed over passing it so quickly, and I hadn’t even got a good, long, hard look at the sea as we passed over it. For a moment I doubted if it was over five kilometers long before my colleagues laid my doubts to rest. It was 5.6 kms. long.
Upon entering the main concourse of L.I.C.’s office building I was struck by how high the ceiling was. With Worli home to large corporations, private and public, the L.I.C building was in keeping in the style of buildings fashioned in Worli in the decades before modernity and transparent open spaces sectioned along temporary lines and reflecting facades came to influence architectural space in newer constructions elsewhere in Mumbai. This looked, felt, and even smelt like Babu space except for a large painting nearly rising to the ceiling behind the receptionist. It was a 1963 Husain.
Not that I needed confirmation to the fact. The lines, the colours, the figures, even if a mystery to those not well informed about the Mumbai art scene, like yours truly, pointed to Maqbool Fida Husain, or M.F. Husain as he is better known in India, or rather was known in India before his passing away in exile in faraway London a little over a week ago, just as the monsoons rumbled into Mumbai ahead of time early this month.
The Gods must have conspired in bridging the two events with a common element, the Mumbai monsoon.
The only paintings I’ve admired of M.F. Husain’s are those of the horses he painted, the lines, the strength in the lines, and the mood made for an arresting pause. Of the rest of his paintings, limited to those I’ve seen exhibited in galleries and in print, I rarely found any that distinguished itself to a layman eye, more likely ordinary than not, contrary to what many others might feel. In time I came around to believing that their value lay more in the construction of the M.F. Husain brand than any inherent elevating characteristics.
I turned my gaze at the M.F. Husain on the wall.
Dulled by inclement weather outside, the lighting struggled to reveal the painting from where I sat on the sofa with my colleagues, waiting to be summoned to the meeting.
Curious, I got up from the seat and walked up to the painting. A form rising above the masses before him revealed itself holding up what appeared to be the Sun while looking to his right at musicians playing musical instruments.
In the foreground, probably seeking a face to the faceless masses in a throng, he shows a family. For a moment I stand there, attempting to make sense of M.F. Husain’s painting from the early 1960s. I make no headway except for returning my eye to the hordes or masses populating the scene.
If the musical instrument in the scene, most likely a Tanpura or maybe a Sitar, held in the classic pose of an accompaniment in a Hindustani music recital, is meant to lend a religious significance to the gathering of the masses at the feet of the one holding up the Sun or a ball of light, I wouldn’t know for certain. My guess is as good as yours.
Whether he meant for the imposing figure holding up the ball of flame to be a leader of sorts, I cannot be sure but wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be holding light to the masses, showing them the way out or a way forward. I could only imagine the intent.
The only certainty, if I can lay claim to it, is the gathering of the masses, and to an extent the notion of a leader rallying the masses about him, either to lead them on, or give them an audience.
And before the day was out, additional elements I happened upon in the landing by the stairway before we got called to the meeting, soon knotted themselves into a narrative around the masses, and a leader. It was as unlikely a coincidence as it was an unlikely analogy. Ah! The dots one will connect when waiting to be called to work!
Where the concourse opened into the landing leading to the staircase, several writing/display boards were stacked up against a wooden cabin fashioned in the space below the staircase, each writing board belonging to a pressure group organized as an employee union, and serving as notice boards for union demands, appeals, and announcements laid in chalk, with the exception of Grahak Chalval. Grahak is Hindi for customer while Chalval is Marathi for movement. Customer Movement.
The announcement in chalk read:
*Happy News* *Happy News* For L.I.C. Employees
By Courtsey of Grahak Chalval
Montex Wrist Watch Offer
On Purchase of One Wrist Watch Get Another Wrist Watch Free*
Leather Belt Rs. 250/- Metal Belt Rs. 300/-
Offer Date: 13 July – 17 July Time: Between 12 pm – 3 pm
While I had read about Grahak Chalval before I was surprised to find its presence prominently announced in a Govt. institution. No other Govt. office I had visited before bore Grahak Panchayat’s presence as prominently as at the L.I.C. office that day, in fact there was no visible presence.
Grahak Chalval is a consumer co-operative movement that emerged in the unlikely event of angry residents in Pune burning down a warehouse suspected of hoarding essential household commodities, inconveniencing consumers by creating artificial shortages aimed at hiking prices. The year was 1974, and Bindu Madhav Joshi was witness to the frustrated mob running amok.
Bindu Madhav Joshi, hailing from Pune’s Brahmin community distinguished by its stellar contribution to the Arts, the Academia, Administration, and Social movements, combined with other young social-movement minded Brahmin youth, including Sudhir Phadke and Pu La Deshpande, to raise in consumers an awareness about their rights and help check their exploitation by traders, eventually founding Grahak Panchayat to achieve his objectives.
He mobilized ‘Buying Groups’ comprising members who bought commodities on behalf of consumers before distributing them at their doorsteps on a ‘No Loss – No Profit’ basis, ensuring the benefits of collective buying power while putting a check on trading malpractices formerly visited upon individual consumers. Families benefited from the discounts the ‘Buying Groups’ managed on their behalf, easing financial constraints in the process. It was a rather unique co-operative movement.
Bindu Madhav Joshi’s movement eventually expanded its scope to safeguard consumer interests in a variety of matters affecting consumers, showing them the pitfalls to avoid, the rights to exercise, and the way forward.
As we prepared to take the lift, I couldn’t help notice the parallel between my interpretation of M.F. Husain’s rendition on canvas in the reception and the genesis of Grahak Chalval, the canvas of a painter converging with the reality of a social activist rendered in the consumer movement serving the masses.
In the video below, hear Bindu Madhav Joshi inform and caution consumers of the pitfalls to avoid when buying goods in the marketplace, even advising them to bargain at the counter, reminding them that the Consumer Is King.
It did not take me long, once I was hooked to the road, to realize that while destinations offer a closure to a journey, it takes a journey to open up the destination.
It was at that moment of realization that individual moments of discovery on the road strung themselves together to create a landscape of sustained beauty, encompassing culture, tradition, places, and people.
In travelling out of the comfort zone the first time, one is tempted to let the anticipation of the destination take over, engaged as the mind is in running over beautiful picture postcard images of the destination that goaded one into embarking on the trip. Then there’re logistical issues to deal with – hotel reservations, local transportation, railway reservations, and scouring of eating places among other things, aspects of travel likely to overwhelm the traveller, dulling their receptivity to moments of beauty inherent in the mundane of everyday life different from their own, and the place different from where they come from.
Yet, it takes more than one journey and more than several goof-ups to begin to widen the perspective about life on the road and beyond it. And once that happens, as it happened to me, and as it must happen to many a wandering feet, the unexpected is no longer a constraint to be gotten through, but that to be admired for the inherent beauty of the experience, the promise of the moment, and its relevance to the traveller’s own association with the land of his ancestors.
And soon it’s no longer only the landscapes that awe with their beauty, or settings that astonish with their sophistication. It begins to include everyday moments with ‘everyday people’, and everyday places with ‘everyday experiences’, mundane to the resident but revealing to the visiting traveler, tapping the subconscious into embracing the newly conscious – a singular reason why the beauty of travel transcends expectations every single time.
And I’ve had my share of encounters with people and places that’ve taken kindly to my enquiring eye, encouraged even, even as they’ve been benevolent with their time in humouring my curiosity, possibly amused as I delighted in the acquaintance made, promising to mail in the pictures made with them and return someday before waving out as I left them behind on my way eleswhere, like when I left Appu Kuttan folding his straw mat on a platform outside the ancient Mookambika temple in Kollur on my backpacking trip along Karnataka’s coast.
He had turned out to be an Ex-British India Army soldier pre-Independence. At 83, he remembered the key details.
“I did not swing guns on the battlefield,” Appu Kuttan recalled. “I served in the 37 Field Ambulance Unit on the frontlines. We took our lunch in the trenches, sheltering from Japanese planes on bombing runs.” At this juncture he raises his hands, imitating the Japanese planes swooping down to drop their loads behind British lines. Allied troops were battling to keep China’s overland supply route through Burma open while Japan sought to cut it off. The Burma campaign began disastrously for the British in the December of 1941, with thousands of Indian soldiers in the British India army losing their lives to the Japanese and disease, malaria being rife in the swamps. By mid 1945 the tide had turned, and the Japanese were in full retreat.
“We took many Japanese prisoners in Rangoon,” Appu Kuttan said, a smile breaking on his lips at the memory as he exhaled after drawing deep on his beedi. “Japanese Officers were made to sweep. They would ask us for Goodbye cigarettes,” he said. “Eighteen of us in the Army company did not smoke, so we gave the prisoners our stock of Goodbye cigarettes.”
Appu Kuttan offered to share his beedi with me. It took much effort on my part to politely decline his act of kindness, an offering as valuable as any among his meagre possessions that sustained his life as a sadhu since his discharge from the army after independence from British rule. [For more on Appu Kuttan, click to read my account here].
Reflecting on the way back, basking in the humanity experienced with strangers, indebted to the warmth with which I was received, it was inevitable that I would, in time, expand Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder to include Beauty is in the mind of the beholden.
Upon this realization, the road was no longer the same again, turning journeys into destinations, and vice versa. It ceased to merely connect the beginning and end, instead becoming the connection, seamless, and continuous in the way that riding it becomes imperative if one is to make sense of the place one is headed to, and the people who inhabit it. The stops on the road or the street or an alley became equally compelling, and encounters as enlightening as they were memorable.
And nowhere more so as with the chance meeting with Ramkrishna Bhagwan Maukar on a platform built into the enclosure of a 18th century stone temple in Panchavati, the place made sacred by Lord Ram’s presence during his exile from Ayodhya.
To this day pilgrims stream in their thousands to offer prayers in the waters of the Godavari where Lord Ram bathed, and to sate their curiosity in the winding tunnels of Sita Gufa where Sita lived before she was whisked away by Ravana, stirring to life among the greatest epics of all time, aided ably by Lord Hanuman whose presence now permeates Panchavati.
Ramkrishna Bhagwan Maukar had come visiting Panchavati with fellow pilgrims bussed in from Yavatmal, soon finding himself in the temple that Naroshankar Raje Bahadur, a Jahgirdar in the reign of Peshwas, built in the Maya style.
Hanging over the entrance was a bronze bell, a token of victory over the Portuguese in Vasai presented to Naroshankar Raje Bahadur by the Peshwas in recognition of his bravery in the battle.
Soon, local tour guides sheltering on the platform from the Sun while awaiting pilgrims desirous of guides to take them around Panchavati convinced Ramkrishna Maukar in no time into lending tunes to the afternoon. Ramkrishna had carried his flute along. But before he played his flute, he sang in a sometimes shaky voice punctuated by a reluctant throat and racking coughs.
The next thirty minutes he transformed the temple courtyard into a rural landscape, replete with the fragrance of the earth stirred by his soulful rendition of lyrics that told of emotions, and sentiments about the everyday, moments that revealed the beauty of a simplicity that urban travelers will sometimes go seeking.
In between he apologized for his throat acting up as he raised his rendition a notch above. We told him he did fine nevertheless. As he strained, I told him it was okay with us if he chose to stop, considering he was old, and it was hot outside. But he would have none of it, brushing aside my suggestion and promptly singing another Marathi song, and we were only to happy to listen to him.
Eventually he expressed surprise at our interest, prompting one of the tour guides listening along into telling him that if it wasn’t for the fact we were interested we wouldn’t have sat through his singing. That seemed to please him and allay his apprehensions before bringing a smile to his weary face that must rank among the most beautiful smiles I’ve been graced with.
Then he took up the flute, and the afternoon soon rung to faraway images of an ancient land, elevating the everyday of an appreciative audience with the unexpected tenor of an unscheduled meeting with an old man from the hinterland.
Play the video below to share in the experience of listening to an impromptu session with Ramkrishna Maukar that summer day in the courtyard of an old stone temple, with idle tour guides and flower sellers in attendance.
The unexpected, if one is receptive to experiencing, is as much a beauty to behold and experience as say a river flowing through a valley in a mountain range, rivaling in equal measure with an elderly sadhu offering to share the only beedi in his possession, not to speak of being regaled with songs sung heartily from the heart.
Beauty exists in many forms, sustaining life, giving it meaning, while motivating living, even as it encourages reaching out, repeating the cycle all over again and making for a fulfilling life.
It exists as much in the faith of another as it does in the faith in another.
This post is an entry to the Indiblogger / Dove / Yahoo! India contest on the theme "What does real beauty mean to you?".
At the turn of the century I returned to Bombay from Goa, not an easy decision to make. A software company let me in, then another, then yet another. Time ran past. This time around I was wise enough not to give chase. So occasionally I take my camera along, searching for corners, finding them where none exist. And some of them are painted blue.
