Mar 22, 2016 Climate Change is Real!, Daily Life
Climate Change is Real: Day 4 of my Lone Vigil
©March 22nd, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
So, today:
Woke up at the sound of the alarm. Groaned. Hit the snooze. Woke up ten minutes later. Didn’t make coffee. Made chai instead. Let the dog out, then back in. Reached the Warren Intersection at 7:44. Not bad. Perhaps, I’ll actually make it there by 7:30 by the time Friday rolls around. All I have to do is stay up all night. Right! Oh, for the fashion-watchers out there, I wore old, baggy sweat pants over leggings, two pairs of old socks, purple T-Shirt, blue sweater, pale blue jacket, and an unnaturally bright purple beach hat. I even found a minute to slash on a smear of lipstick and streak some eye-black on. Got to give the commuters a little colour, at least!
The sun was a beautiful lemon, the sky shone a blazing blue, the clouds looked nonplussed by all this cheerfulness, and stayed away. The drivers drove by, looking stolidly ahead, unwilling to make eye-contact. I didn’t want to look at them, anyway, since I was fussing with ear-buds (I hate those things!), and adjusting them. Then, sipping my chai, I sang with our beloved teacher’s voice, an echo from 1994, when he was alive. Raga Bhatiyar was on today’s menu. I’ve adored Bhatiyar since the first time I heard it on a Ravi Shankar record, when I was a teenager, and studying the sitar. It’s a grand raga – I picture it as a Being dressed in deep gold-fringed purple raiment, moving solemnly on the horizon, lighting lamps. I love the leap from Sa to shuddha Ma, and the turnaround from Pa to Ga, and then that inevitable Pa Ga re Sa, and then that haunting, eerie Ma theevra taking us through Dha, Ni, and high re, misleading us into thinking we’re in wilds of Marwa land, then deftly taking us back to the paved roads of the Bilawal thaat.
Sargams, aakar, gamak taans, and then, Hari, Hari Nam, Le Tu Mana Mere, a beautiful composition urging the listener to “Say the name of God, and in so doing, cut away all the accumulated sins of a lifetime. While taking God’s name, cross the ocean of life. Tell your heart to take this advice.” Transliterated from Hindi, it reads:
Hari hari nama le tu mana mere
Ja su katata saba paapa ghanere
Nama leta bhava paara utarata
Yaha updesha kara hirade tere
Hearing my Guru (Shreeram G. Devasthali)’s voice steadied mine. It’s uncanny. I started out with a horrid, raspy voice, not much improved by a few weeks of poor sleep. By the time half an hour passed, my voice rang like a bell, and I could feel the restraints falling off. He’s still teaching me, though he’s been gone for fourteen years. Thank you, Guruji.
By now, the cars were slowing down, as more and more of them clogged the roads. Now, I got a few smiles, nods, waves. Nice. It’s nice to be acknowledged. I saw a small van go by which proclaimed that it was a “White Glove Domestic Services” vehicle. White Glove, indeed! If anyone worked at growing food, or cleaning up the mess of the world, they’d need millions of those. Instead, why not just get dirty while cleaning up, then wash up? I saw another small truck that said it was some sort of plumbing and drain company thingy. I’m afraid my morning mental fog hadn’t dissipated, and I read it as “dumbing and brain.”
I could relate for a brief moment.
Then, I’m embarrassed to say, a man drove by in an SUV, rolled down his window, and said something. At first, I didn’t catch it, because I was singing, then I realized that he’d asked, “What’s that for?” To my horror, I couldn’t explain it in the second or two I had, because he was still driving, so I said, “It’s hard to explain it now!” And he drove on. Damn! I lost the chance to say, “Look it up,” or “Our actions as humans are contributing to a climate catastrophe, and we need to change our way of life, and our habits as consumers,” or, “Do some research on Global Warming, and find out how scientists are predicting terrible consequences of our human activity not just a hundred years in the future, but in a few decades,” or …
But no, I stood there, and lost the chance to speak! (I hope he comes by tomorrow – I’ll have a response prepared. I’m still new at this. Wish Warren had been there!)
Another man drove by, gestured to me, rolled down his window, and tossed out … YES! A CHICK TRACT! Hurray! Having heard Warren’s account of this chap, I’d been hoping to see him, and lo, here he was! He was sent my way to prevent me from going to hell (snark!) Yay! I restrained myself from pouncing on it with unseemly eagerness, and picked it up after he’d driven off. I put it in my pocket, to read it later. Am going to take a look now. Hang on a moment …
… Wait! It’s GONE! Where did it go? I swear I put it in my pocket! Now, I’m doomed. (Sigh! I hope he throws me another one soon.)
Another fat car rolled by, with a large man chewing on, get this, a CIGAR! An apt analogy for our dying planet.
Almost every car that went by had someone looking at, or speaking into, or fumbling with, a cell phone. Yes, we are profoundly distracted, but many are all also profoundly lonely. I had a brief vision of how different it would be if our dwellings looked something like this:
A town surrounded by trees, and surrounding a vast farmland and meadows, with a school and a big playground at the edge of the fields. Bicycles and electric cars. Children playing, and grown-ups and children working on the farms, or tending to animals. A potters’ row, a builders’ row, some smithies, a cooper’s row, a gymnasium, a hospital. Solar panels on all the roofs of all the houses. An outdoor performance stage which can convert into an indoor one with movable walls and tent. A lake nearby, or a big, singing stream of clear water. I picture something that would look like Sturbridge Village, combined with modern eco-friendly innovations. A highway connecting the different towns. Trading in kind, not cash. A little TOO Utopian? Ah well, one can dream, can’t one?
Okay, I’ll stop dreaming.
So, the cars went by, and I sang on at the top of my voice, and then, like a vision from a dream, two cardinals swooped around and around an oval space of trees, like flashes of scarlet, singing all the while. While it might have been young love, or lust in springtime, I’d like to think of them as hope. I continued to listen to the honey-and-gold voice of our teacher, and felt at peace.
It was time to go. Still singing, I picked up the sign, my travel mug, and my visions of the future at 8:44 precisely. I made my way back home, and then, the day’s work and my daughter’s schedule claimed me until now, at 6:40 in the evening.
This music, as Warren says, connects the past with the present. We’d love to make a bridge for it into the future. Music is not a luxury, even though it can be considered so, especially when we know that those who toil day and night can ill afford to spend it on practising music. But singing is for EVERYONE – no one should feel it’s the prerogative of a privileged few. Singing is breath. And breath should be free.
Thanks for reading! Peace out, as OPOL of DailyKos would say.
P.S. I FOUND my Chick Tract! Yay!
P.P.S. realized after my exchange with someone on FB that I must clarify that I actually DO know what a “White Glove Domestic” is – and the concept behind that (having encountered it for the first time my former school in some discussion that someone had about wanting to form a committee to ensure spotlessly clean classrooms, so clean that a white glove swiping at a counter would not pick up any dirt). I just wanted to put my own tangential interpretation on it in this piece.
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Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #ClimateVigil, #Hindustani classical vocal music, #Music as a bridge, #Pandit S.G.Devasthali, #Warren Senders
Oct 20, 2015 Ramblings and Musings
Right now, while the washing machine is sloshing clothes around, and the dryer is roaring away, I’m listening to a recorded lesson given to my husband and me by my (late) teacher of Indian classical vocal music, Pandit S.G. Devasthali. He was a teacher of Hindi at Loyola School in Pune, India in his professional life, and a vocal teacher of unsurpassed genius and generosity in his after-school private time.
Listening to him and to us singing with him, I am overcome by a nameless emotion. I left singing seventeen years ago to become a school-teacher. Now, I’m slowly trying to reclaim my roots in music. Oh, on the surface, I look like I know it, because I sing as a matter of course, but not in a deep way. Knowing is not the same as doing. In the practice of a discipline lies its power, its beauty and its truth. Leave the practice, and you have its shadow.
My teacher’s voice is the voice of utter beauty and power, urging, pulling us along in its wake, but singing in that deep way now … it’s not as easy for me as it was before. For various reasons, I walked away from the practice of it. Now, I want it back.
I want it all back.
Music is in my blood and bones and feet and hands, even in the clicking of my teeth when I’m trying to not outwardly reveal that I’m tapping a beat to a song. My mother sang to me in her womb, and I began singing in tune at age two and a half. South Indian (Carnatic) classical music is part of my heritage, sitar and Hindustani vocal music is also part of my heritage. I am Indian in my music — Pan-Indian. And the West claimed me early on, as well. The Beatles gave me dreams about playing guitar in a band and singing in harmony. 60s and 70s rock, jazz from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, R&B, Motown, music from Turkey, Persia, African countries, Asian countries … they’re all in there roiling inside me. I wrote songs, played guitar, sitar, composed music, led bands, performed my own and others’ music.
Now, I want to go back to playing my guitar in a more serious way than I have done these past seventeen years.
I want to dust off my sitar, restring and tune it – and play it.
I want to dust off my voice (okay, so I sing every day, but not in full voice, and not with the power and energy I used to have — that comes with practice).
I want to sing again.
How can I do that AND write short stories, poems, a novel? How can I do that AND continue to do all the other things — home-school my daughter, take my dog out for walks, grow our own food in the garden, tend to the garden, do laundry, clean bathrooms, sweep the floor?
I’m not as young as I was.
But I’ll take it a day at a time.
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Tags: #Pandit S.G.Devasthali, #Singing, music is life, North Indian Classical Music, The practice and discipline of music, Western music