Symphony in Blues

Symphony in Blues
by Vivek Menezes


June 11th 2010, and a bright midsummer evening in Moscow. We’re in one of the iconic buildings of the Russian capital, the opulent Hall of Columns, with its spectacular crystal chandeliers ablaze with light for Russia Day, that country’s equivalent of the American 4th of July. This year, there’s more reason to celebrate – it’s the finale of the Festival of the World’s Symphony Orchestra’s and the audience of tuxedoed sophisticates is hushed, rapt with attention and focused on the familiar music ringing in their ears.

It’s Beethoven’s ultimate masterpiece, the 9th Symphony, so central to music history that the original format of the compact disc was expanded from 10cm to 12cm specifically to fit it. The audience sighs almost imperceptibly when the ‘Ode to Joy’ rings out, the rousing chorus on which the official Anthem of Europe is played. It’s undoubtedly the most familiar and famous single piece of music ever written.

But zoom in closer, and you realize there is something decidedly unusal about this symphony orchestra that’s deep into Beethoven’s magnum opus. They’re not Russians, or Germans. In fact, they’re not from any of the cultures that sustain western music, or even from the Far East which has embraced it so successfully in recent generations. In fact, we are looking on at the international debut of the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), a four-year-old operation that’s sponsored by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, the “fulfillment of a dream” of Khushroo Suntook, the NCPA chairman.

“I grew up listening to the ‘Ode to Joy’, and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony” smiles Ashley Rego, a 25-year-old violinist who has been with the SOI since its inception. “Moscow is known for producing the best string players in the world, so playing there is just a great honour.” Rego is one of several Goans who play full-time for the SOI, but a close look at the rest of the players reveals that Indians constitute just a handful of 109 members. In fact, the SOI is a grab-bag of musicians from 14 different countries, with a particularly large contingent representing Kazakhstan, the home country of the SOI’s music director, Marat Bisengaliev.

The Kazakh came to the attention of Suntook in London, where he impressed the NCPA official at a concert he happened to attend. He was invited to visit Mumbai with his orchestra, and eventually to set up the SOI in 2006. When this ambitious new venture was launched, there were only 10 Indians recruited to play in a crowd of musicians from the ex-Soviet Union. After four years, there are now 15 Indian regular players, so a bit more than ten per cent of the total contingent, but still a considerable distance from constituting a “national” orchestra worth the name.

The Moscow concert does constitute a milestone for the SOI, and bodes well for the future development of a classical music culture in the subcontinent But forgotten in all the hoopla about this “pioneering Indian orchestra” is that it comes after long decades of purposeful stifling of western classical music in India, and a full 52 years after the first proper symphony orchestra in India was founded, and then disbanded. What’s more, the Indian Symphony Orchestra that performed several times in 1951 and 1952 under the baton of the visionary Anthony Gonsalves was constituted entirely of Indians, and even played a repertoire of “raga-based symphonies” that remains completely unique in the history of western classical music.

**

Most people don’t realize that so-called “western music” was being played by Indians in India, and already well-established hundreds of years before the sitar was invented, or tablas made an appearance in what would much later become enshrined as Hindustani music. Wrong-headed nationalists like to trump the credentials of the music that emerged from post-Mughal north India as somehow more “Indian” than, say, a violin concerto. It’s an absurd and ahistorical argument, completely ignorant of the history of India’s western coastline.

For thousands of years, the Konkan and Malabar coasts have been engaged in trade and cultural exchange across the Arabian Sea. Every discrete trading community from the Meditteranean all the way down the East African coastline came and went from the ports of this spice coast. Christianity had established permanent roots in India before it arrived in Europe, there were significant Christian communities all along the Konkan and Malabar coastline many centuries before England, Spain or Portugal even saw their first convert.

So there must have been so-called “western” music played in this part of India long before Alfonso da Albuquerque seized Goa in 1510 (many years before the first Mughal set foot in India). However, it is the spate of church-building that he set off that really gave the music Indian roots. The Portuguese proved indifferent to most kinds of education, for themselves and for their subjects as well. However, they did see a need for many musicians to play church music in the wake of the coerced conversions that created hundreds of thousands of Konkani Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Within months of his conquest of Goa, Albuquerque was already beseeching the King of Portugal to furnish organs for the churches that were coming up at full speed all over the new Estado da India. Within a generation, western instruments were rooted in Konkan catholic practice, church services were accompanied by the same mix of instruments as Europe: cornettos, violas, harpsichords.

By the seventeenth century, the native Goan’s expertise in church music had already become legendary. In 1683, the Italian traveler Sebastiani attended a mass in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and marveled “it was celebrated by seven choirs with the sweetest instrumental interludes. I felt I was in Rome. I could not believe how proficient these Canarese are in this music, how well they perform it, and with what facility.”

The centrality of music to the distinctly Goan mode of churchgoing was underlined by an historic 17th century decree by the Vatican. Rome declared that unlike the rest of the entire world, only the diocese of Goa would be allowed to use instruments (violin, clarinet and bass were specifically named) in their religious ceremonies which commemorated the three days of great mourning that culminate in Easter Sunday. These instruments and their practice had become that ingrained in the Goan way of life – a full hundred years before the first sitar is recorded to make an appearance in history.

The musical history of the Goans was again dramatically influenced in another direction when the British occupied the territory during the Napoleonic Wars that culminated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In that period, the British were delighted to encounter the Goans. They had no dietary taboos, so many became cooks to the colonialists. They were familiar with western clothing, so many became tailors across the Empire. And there were very many who could play western instruments, so thousands of men picked up their violins and trumpets, learned to play ‘God Save the Queen’, and trooped out of Goa to become professional musicians in Rangoon and Karachi, Aden and Singapore and all across the British Empire even to London’s famous Ritz Hotel (where a Goan pianist still tinkles away at teatime each Sunday).

Via the prism of this history, it seems extremely ironic that the Symphony Orchestra of India in 2010 has just a handful of Indian musicians scattered among a host of foreigners. It didn’t have to come to this – there was a Goan orchestra playing at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai as far back as 1916 and another in the 20’s called the Bombay Chamber Orchestra (led by the German, Edward Behr) which received huge acclaim from foreign visitors. Later, Dominic Pereira became the concertmaster of another promising fledgling orchestra full of Goans, the Bombay Philharmonic. Without interference, these musical shoots would have certainly flowered into a first-rate indigenous classical orchestra. But politics stifled the opportunity, and generation after generation of piano and violin and trumpet players from India were silenced, or forced to migrate to the West.

Some became subsumed into Bollywood. The Bandra-based editor and brilliant researcher, Naresh Fernandes has brought that period to life in a series of landmark essays. He writes, “until the 1980’s, India had no pop music save for Hindi film songs. Millions memorized and hummed the compositions of C. Ramachandra. Shankar and Jaikishan, Laxmikant and Pyarelal and SD Burman, whose names rolled by in large letters at the beginning of the movies. But the Sound of India was actually created by Goan musicians, men whose names flickered by in small type under the designation “arranger”. It’s clear. The Hindi film classics that resound across the subcontinent and in Indian homes around the world wouldn’t have been made without Goans.”

The last serious attempt to form an indigenous orchestra in India was also the most promising. It came from this world of Goans in Hindi cinema, the brainchild of Anthony Gonsalves, revered teacher of a generation of Bollywood composers, whose name was later immortalized in ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ by his grateful student, Pyarelal.

Gonsalves, an acknowledged musical genius, developed an abiding love for Raga-based music. “It struck me very hard in my heart and mind,” he is reported to have said. He became impassioned with creating symphonic music from ragas, and wrote several pioneering pieces of music in this vein including ‘Sonatina Indiana’ and ‘Concerto in Raag Sarang’. In 1958, Gonsalves paid all the bills to constitute 110 musicians into the Indian Symphony Orchestra. They made their debut in the quadrangle of St. Xaviers College in South Bombay.

The photographs from that day are extremely impressive, but also heart-breaking when seen in hindsight. 110 beautifully dressed Indian musicians playing symphonic music with tremendous gusto, with an impossibly young-looking Lata Mangueshkar and Manna Dey singing along with great intensity. Standing majestically atop his lectern, baton in action, Gonsalves is poised and leonine. He looks very very happy.

But right there is where the story ends, and a giant door was slammed on the future of symphonic music in India. Idiotic nationalistic paranoia held that Goan musicians like Gonsalves were suspect because they had “foreign names” and played “foreign music.” Walt Disney came calling for this brilliant composer and asked him to score a movie for them with Indian governmental involvement. But ministerial clearance never came: the I&B minister told the shocked young Goan point-blank, “Christian musicians cannot represent India.”

Anthony Gonsalves was crushed, and bewildered by this questioning of his Indianness. He disbanded his orchestra, and went abroad for a lost decade before returning to retirement in total isolation in a Goan village by the sea. His unique raga-based symphonies have never been performed again, and the musicians in his orchestra scattered into obscurity. One day, his symphonies are certain to be rediscovered, championed as great pioneering works, and played in India, perhaps even by Bisengaliev and his crew of Kazakhs and other nationalities in the SOI.

**

It was a combination of historical ignorance, juvenile vindictiveness and cultural insecurity that killed off Anthony Gonsalves’s brave attempt to root symphonies in the Indian musical lexicon, and the same forced conspired to exert the absurd blanket ban on all imports of western musical instruments that held sway for a sold 40 years, before being relaxed in 1995. “The import restrictions severely hampered the growth of music in this country,” says Christopher Gomes, the managing partner of Furtado’s Music, which has remained in the vanguard of music education in India since 1865, and is by far the largest distributor of imported instruments in the country, with 15 showrooms and outlets from Mangalore to Nagaland.

“Demand for the music never went away. There were always many students who wanted to play the piano or violin,” Gomes says, “but there simply weren’t enough instruments remaining after 1947 to allow the music to spread naturally Since the rules began tio change in 1995, he says the demand has rapidly accelerated with each passing year, “liberalization has meant that supply can start to catch up to demand, and now it’s obvious that this music has a very bright future in India.”

Just a few days before the SOI performed in Moscow, Furtado’s joined with the NCPA to organize the John Gomes Memorial All India Piano Competition (named after his father) which was judged by two eminent international pianists, the Canadian Paul Stewart and the Vienna-based Goan, Marialena Fernandes. Gomes says “Paul and Marialena were both really impressed by the young talent that’s now beginning to come out of India. It’s significantly better than just a few years ago. Now we’re seeing that young people envision their future in music. It’s only going to get better from here. My company is going to support these positive developments in every way that we can.”

Like Marialena Fernandes, the London-based soprano Patricia Rozario is another Bombay-born musical prodigy with Goan roots. Rozario persevered to study western classical music in the difficult days of the instrument ban, and eventually made her way to the Guildhall School of Music where she excelled, winning a Gold medal and many other prizes. She’s now established as one of the leading operatic singers in the UK, with a unique style (she often wears a sari on stage) that has inspired a host of the best contemporary composers to write works especially for her. With Sir John Tavener, it has become a unique collaboration - he has written more than thirty pieces of music exclusively for Rozario to bring to life.

In 2009, Rozario decided to nourish her roots. Along with her husband, the pianist Mark Troop, she toured Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Goa to identify young singers with potential. Rozario spent days in auditions, listening to scores of singers, and picked out those who could benefit from her mentoring, and perhaps make it to an international standard. She agrees that “there is a great deal of promising talent in India now. And there is also much more interest in this kind of music, which can only grow with exposure.” Rozario she promises to return each year to continue training singers, and has also promised to help them seek training abroad when merited.

**

Across the subcontinent, in the hillside cities and towns of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, there’s another hotbed of vocal talent that’s quietly developing to critical mass, and making the classical music world sit up and pay attention. Like Goa, the roots of this movement can be traced back to the church.

The North-East’s tryst with Christianity tracks back to the rainy June day that the paradoxical figure of Thomas Jones walked into Cherrapunjee, and immediately set Khasi history on its ear. A carpenter’s son from Wales, Jones was an avowed evangelist, but didn’t actually convert a single person while he was in India, and was eventually kicked out of his own church for conduct “derogatory to the character and calling of a missionary.” Yet, on the 150th anniversary of his death (in 1991), more than 250,000 Khasi Presbyterians gathered to celebrate his life. Meanwhile his “mother church” back in Wales boasted less than 5000 adherents in the whole country.

Thomas Jones distinguished himself – and aggravated colonial authorities– by tirelessly dedicating himself to the material improvement of the Khasis. He taught them modern carpentry. He taught them accounting. He taught them how to compute their almanac to the seven-day week. Above all, Jones learned the unwritten Khasi language and transcribed it into Roman script (with Welsh orthography!) All the tribes of the North –East believe Jones saved the Khasi language – and culture - from certain extinction. And so they repaid the Welshman by joining his church in droves. The next 100 years saw the Khasis, Garos, the Mizos and Nagas turn to Christianity in a huge wave, and right alongside the religion came the music.

The biggest city of the North East, Shillong has been called “India’s rock capital” for many years, and famously comes to a near-standstill every 24th of May when the local legend, and Khasi icon, Lou Majaw celebrates Bob Dylan’s birthday. But the choral tradition of the city is still virtually unknown, even though the Shillong Chamber Choir has toured all over the world, and won a series of prestigious awards. Right alongside Neil Nongkynrih’s sophisticated ensemble are literally thousands of other wonderful singers all across the region who have gone unrecognized up to now. All across the North-East, there are now serious choirs, which feature incredible singers with world-class talent. With a little recognition and support, the future could be limitlessly bright.

Earlier this year, the whole region saw what could lie ahead when the young Naga singer, Sentirenla Lucia Panicker was awarded the highest grade of her graduating class at the Berklee College of Music, the finest institution of its kind in the USA, and brought the audience at her graduation to its feet with a soul-stirring vocal performance. She intends on returning to Nagaland, to pass on what she’s learned to another generation. Without the kind of interference and meddling that destroyed the best hopes of generations that came before her, it is young musicians with her kind of drive who signify a hopeful future for serious music in India, and allow us to dream of a day when the Symphony Orchestra of India actually has more than a handful of Indians in it. (ENDS)


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An edited version of this article was published in the July 2010
edition of the Himal Magazine
http://www.himalmag.com/Indigenous-symphonies_nw4600.html

Through the Looking Glass: Art Appreciation 101

Through the Looking Glass
Art Appreciation 101

Margaret Mascarenhas

I’m filling in for abstract artist and art critic Swatee Kotwal who is on leave this month, with a subject she and I have been discussing for some time: what differentiates good art from bad art? What is the criteria? Who decides?

In 1995, Keio University professor Shigeru Watanabe, and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to distinguish between Picasso paintings and Monets – a study that earned him a Nobel prize. More recently, he trained pigeons in art appreciation, teaching them to differentiate between 'good' paintings and 'bad' paintings, using colour, texture and pattern cues to predefine an aesthetic set of values. In the study, watercolour and pastel paintings by children were first categorised by a panel as either 'good' or 'bad'. The pigeons were put into a holding area where they could view a computer monitor displaying the images, and taught to recognise pre-selected 'good' art through food rewards. Recognising 'bad' art was not rewarded. The birds were then shown a combination of new and old, 'good' and 'bad' painting images. According to Watanabe, “The results suggest that the pigeons used both colour and pattern cues for the discrimination and show that non-human animals, such as pigeons, can be trained to discriminate abstract visual stimuli, such as pictures and may also have the ability to learn the concept of ‘beauty’ as defined by humans.”

The idea that your children could be learning art appreciation from pigeons is surely a disturbing one, but these next stories turn the whole raison d’etre of art criticism on its head.

In 2005, the following news item appeared in The Australian:

“MORITZBURG, Saxony: A German art expert was fooled into believing a painting done by a chimpanzee was the work of a master. The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. ‘It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour,’ Dr Schneider confidently asserted.”

It turns out the painting was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo. But this wasn’t the first time the hallowed practitioners of art criticism were comically exposed as emperors with no clothes. The most notorious case occurred in 1964 when Ake Axelsson, a Swedish newspaperman from the Göteborgs-Tidningen, installed several paintings at the Gallerie Christinae, claiming they were the oeuvre of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. Almost immediately the work began to draw critical attention. Critic Rolf Anderberg wrote this eulogy: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." (Time.com) Pierre Brassau turned out to be a four-year-old chimp named Peter from the local zoo.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes and laugh hysterically.

Toward the end of his life Picasso was putting his name on ashtrays, a number of which were proudly collected by Richard Attenborough. But is it art?

The infamously subversive Marcel Duchamp, as Kotwal wrote in a previous column, initiated the use of “ready-mades” in his art installations, the best known of which was a prank submission of a urinal called “Fountain,” under the pseudonym R Mutt. In response to this article and the pictorial depiction of “Fountain”, one horrified reader heatedly objected to the publishing of such an image, deeming it inappropriate for family viewing. Though this image is one of the most well-known in modern art, and though the traumatised reader entirely missed the point of the article, which was to draw attention to the bizarre arbitrariness of critics who would define such work as “art”, his visceral response to the visual representation exemplifies my own contention: that occasionally the ordinary viewer, without benefit of an education in art history or aesthetics, can be the more reliable critic. (Though I will not endorse the notion that the right to critique includes the right to suppress, as we have seen in the case of MF Husain)

What is art? And what is the role of an art critic?

I was taught, and still am inclined to generally accept the view, that fine art (like literature) is essentially a deliberate arrangement of elements in ways that affect emotions, senses, perspectives, in ways that provide a new insight and/or experience, and in ways that transcend the limitations of the chosen medium and strike a universal chord. To elaborate, I would say that for something to be called art (or literature), it should have goals besides pure self-expression, and should do at least one, but preferably some or all, of the following through the use of skills and ability in handling the building blocks :

• communicate ideas

• explore the nature of perception

• generate strong emotion

• stimulate insight

• possess an aesthetic value

• possess a cognitive value

• facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding of something

What then to make of Damien Hirst? Perhaps the most recognised bad-boy in the global artist community, his celebrity is entirely dependent, not on any traditionally recognised set of manual or even intellectual skills, but on his capacity to generate shocking and provocative concepts—concepts, which are in fact executed by a swarm of employed artisans, a practice now being employed by a number of our own home-grown artists of repute. Add to that the blurring of the line between artist, curator, gallery owner, collector, auction house, and critic, and the nexus between all, some of whom play two or three of these roles simultaneously and quite actively.

Confused?

If we define the role of art criticism as defining a rationale for art appreciation, making art accessible, and highlighting emerging talent, this blurring of the line can be dangerous, in a way that undermines artists, corrupts the creative process, and hoodwinks the public. It is not a secret that international elite coteries comprised of established artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, auctioneers, and critics exist, whose primary objective has less to do with aesthetics or the discovery of emerging talent and its nurturing, and more to do with helping each other to stay on top of a frighteningly recessive market. In such a market turf war it is no wonder so many nay-sayers and newcomers are either summarily ignored or beaten back with sticks.

Of course, there is nothing new about art becoming the cultural capital of the wealthy, both as status symbol and commodity. And to be fair, most art education programmes and private museums are gifts to the public domain by the super-rich. Traditionally artists have required the patronage of the elite in order to work, which of course has generally been subject to certain biases, tastes and preferences of whomever is paying. But lately patronage by the big names in the international art world has assumed a circling shark quality. A number of shark observers have applauded New York-based Tino Sehgal’s successful manoeuvre to take the “ownership” of art away from the purchaser, by creating performance artworks that can be sold at phenomenal prices but leave nothing behind, not even a receipt, as a veritable coup d’etat. But though he has managed to raise his personal bank balance in an ingenious way, he hasn’t exactly contributed in any way to the democratization of art, the mantra of the street artist.

Closer to home, an especially depressing development for the emerging artist and ordinary viewer alike is the burgeoning of facile “art” critics with neither the credentials or the appropriate analytic ability, much less the honesty to actually “critique”, in the Indian press. In one of his recent blogs, Abhay Maskara, collector and owner of an up-and-coming gallery in Mumbai, ridicules in particular the latest propensity for listing “top artists” in the media. He says, and I agree with him:

“The real danger of these prophecies is that the reading public is left with too many ‘invisible gaps’ to fill and s/he is never really sure of why the artists selected actually deserve a place on some infamous list that has been thrust in their face.(sic) I think ‘list-makers’ have a certain kind of responsibility to articulate more clearly the criteria (as loose as it may be) that informs any such selection… Throwing a list of names together and seasoning it with one example each from a variety of sub-categories such as ‘modern artists’, ‘contemporary artists’, ‘women artists’, ‘diasporic artists’, ‘video-artist’, ‘performance artist’. ‘curator-artists’ may be convenient but it is certainly not convincing. Even if one were to condone the generation of such lists and look for parallel examples from the world of music or cinema, we will see that even a ‘greatest hits’ chartbuster or a box office generated ‘top films’ blockbusters is based on some logic that is not gravity defying.”

We shouldn’t actually rely on the event pages of the daily news for informing ourselves about art. And newsmedia that truly want to inform the reading public, as opposed to merely titillate, should hire art writers who actually know what they are talking about, or at the very least are prepared to do their homework. As for the general public, unless buying exclusively for investment purposes, I would say, take a class, visit galleries, read art books and art magazines, and even top ten lists, if you so choose. But when you buy, always choose an artwork that moves you, even if you’ve never heard of the artist before.  (ENDS)

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First published in Goa Today, Goa - April 2010

Book Review: Another Goa

Review of Another Goa
By Simran "Judi" Silva

He shows us the positives but is not blind to the negative aspects, and shares those with us also. One comes to understand the effects of four hundred and fifty-one years of Portuguese colonial rule and what takes place afterward, as he journals with preciseness in describing Goa both in the past and the present.

It covers very specific and serious issues that affect Goa and how those issues shape the thinking of her children - the struggles of everyday life for them. Goa is very diverse, and with this diversity comes complexity. The multifaceted situations that the residents of such a beautiful land encounter need addressing and solutions attained. However, to do so, the people of Goa must band together in a united front in order to take each issue head on and work to come to decisions that all can agree with, since these decisions will affect all of them.

The questions are posed. Will the people of Goa be able to answer them resoundingly? Can they achieve a measure of success in not only preserving their homeland but also in moving forward and improving upon it? If so, it will certainly add to the betterment for not only its inhabitants but for the thousands of tourists who come to visit each year, bringing in revenue to use for further developments.

Looking through the eyes of several expatriates of Goa and what leaving and coming back meant to them, is a very enjoyable part of Another Goa to experience. Reading about Goa opened my eyes to all that she has been through, continues to go through, but also what she has to offer, and I hope to come to experience this for myself one day soon.

I will leave the summary of Another Goa to the author in his humble way. “These pages are a small effort to share with the reader—specially the reader in Goa — some perspectives which might lend to the debate about Goa. It is a small measure of ‘paying back’ to the region I’ve called home for over four decades, and to a place I have to be grateful to.”  (ENDS)

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First published at India New England - March 19, 2010

StyleSpeak: The Art of Noise

StyleSpeak: The Art of Noise
By Wendell Rodricks

It is easy to contemplate on noise here in Grenada. We arrived last night after a seventy hour journey, passing Abu Dhabi in transit for four hours and a freezing New York for ten hours. When we left New York, the runway at JFK airport was covered in a film of snow. It was still flurrying down when the plane took off. Though it was past ten at night when we landed in Grenada (Say Gren-Ay-da not the Gren-aa-da in Spain), what immediately struck me was the sound of the waves. In the silence, that is all we heard.

It reminded me of the Goa I knew. The wonder of silence. The sound of silence. That space of almost God like presence; when there is no sound. Just the sounds created BY God. Birdsong, the wind, the seabreeze, the rustling of the leaves, the sounds of animals (human included) and the waves crashing against the coast. When I moved to Goa in 1993, one night, my then tailor Tauqir appeared in the moonlight in my room; a knife in hand. I was terrified. He was even more so. "Boss", he whispered, "there is a lion breathing in my room". In any other room, we might have laughed. But this was THAT room. When I was buying the house, everyone said it was haunted (as any large home in Goa is supposedly). And in 'that' room, Mr. Braganza had passed away (As if people don't pass away in every room? I had countered at the time). We climbed in deathly silence to the room above. Right enough, from outside the Southern window, there was growl and a hum. Like an animal breathing. It rose on a growling rush and ended on a whoosh. We were mortified. I could hear it very distinctly. We went to the garden with torchlights. Nothing!

Back in the room, the sound was still very audible. I offered to sleep on the floor. Tauqir offered instead to sleep on my room floor downstairs.

Each night, we would go upstairs to hear the 'animal' breathing. It did not disappoint. At about eleven, it would begin. By daylight, it stopped.

A monsoon passed. Late next summer, my father and I went to see his friend the art collector, Max Sequeira. After two fenis, I was astounded to hear the 'animal' again.

"Stop!" I hushed their chatter. "Can you hear that?"

"What?"

"The animal", I whispered. It was clearly audible.

My Dad held his feni in mid-air. "This is the sound you were talking about? The sound you made me hear in your house?"

"Yes!". I was hoarse with shock. The animal had followed us here.

Max let out a loud guffaw and was still laughing at our animal ghost story.

Then he sobered up.

"You know what that is Wendell? The rains are coming. It's the end of May. That sound. That sound you can hear so clearly...It's the waves crashing at Chapora!"

All these years later, on some nights, I go to the Camurlim, with a sad nostalgia, a heavy sausades. There, up on the Camurlim hills, in the last week of May, I hear the waves again. Crashing on the Chapora hills; over ten kilometres away.

Colvale has become too noisy. Factories crank up their generators. The highway makes our old home tremble. The poor walls vibrate their centuries old stones and the plaster flakes off at times when a particularly heavy truck passes by.

On Sundays, we have to bear the church with it's loud speakers. And the temples with theirs in the evenings. And my annoying neighbours "reversing" car sounds.

This is not the Goa we knew. The Goa which was so silent that everyone knew everyone's life. After I pulled up a staff for a certain misdeed, my neighbour would tell me the next day "You made a mistake. He took not just the coconuts away to be sold. He also overcharged your bill at the nako. And that part when you told him to keep the light on all night. That is not right. A waste of electricity". Then she would continue "Arrey, and you know 'that' woman opposite me. Now she has started entertaining the truck drivers as well. Shameless ! And what price they are paying for drinks so late in the night? Sheesh!! Are they mad-o-what?. So expensive." The very thought that illegal bootlegging past midnight is no more taboo is a shock. And the fact that the rate has been overheard is too much to be true. As shocking as it sounds, it IS true!! As Goans say..." Ask anyone in the village? All peoples know!"

Late one night recently I was returning from Arambol. There was a rave (?) on at Mandrem. The noise was so loud, it altered my heartbeat. It was not a rave. Russians were at a shack; some dancing on a floor built in the sand. Is this legal? There were young Russian girls being ferried in the late of the night to prospective clients. Nearby Goan boys on bikes waited to take revellers home.

What has become to our Goa ?

Where is the Police?

Where are our politicians?

"Arrey baba, this is going on because of them. They get money. These Russians give them money. And girls also. Our children cannot study. Our old people cannot sleep despite being deaf. The vibration hits their hearts."

This is terrible!

This is what is going to drive away good tourists.

Better to question: "Is this the quality of tourist we want?".

These high-on-substance rave monsters?

While Kerala enjoys the cream, while Humpi gets the adventurer, while Rajasthan gets the local dance and music types, while Mumbai dines at Indigo... This is what we have reduced our Goa tourism to.

Noise pollution ..... Uncontrolled. Unleashed on a land known twenty years ago for the sound of silence.

We must stop it!

A collective WE.

ME included. If they pass a law not to play music on loudspeakers at ANY time, we must comply. Day or night. NO sound beyond a certain decibel. WE want to hear music. Real music. Not this tourist rave crap. Which keeps us awake, keeps our children from studies, keep our elderly hearts beating faster.

IT MUST STOP!

It is so easy to stop. It's not as there is no solution. The people and the Police and the Government should have the will to stop it. Put a law in place and then act on defaulters. And throw out the bad tourists who control us mafia style. Throw them out for good.

And make Ministers accountable. Their own families are the ones who endorse these evils. They need to go behind bars. If David from Tito’s can be coerced into fitting out a soundproof dance room, why can't others follow suite? Or is that because there is no Police from Siolim to Arambol, that the new beaches steal tourist away from the Calangute Baga belt? This after disco owners have taken precautions over sound in the Baga stretch. Is it fair that they loose their clients to the new unpatrolled beaches?

At the village nako, I can hear conversations. In a city bar, I overheard youth contemplating their future careers.

Instead of a good job. An honest job via studies and hard work... this is what they want. "Hey listen man, you have it already. We want it now. If someone gives me drugs to sell, a few Russian girls to control, an old aunty's house to sell...I'm cool. I make two to five thousand a day. Then I take a bit of coke myself on the side, do a few of the girls who I drive around. It's easy."

I see the point. But I don't get it !!

What they are saying is...Why get a degree and end up as a clerk? Why not this easy way?

Even the parents of such kids gloat ..."My baba Shaanu no... he goes Calangute. Works very hard. But gets good money. Last month gave me car. Next month we are making new house."

Obviously her prayers are answered. This clueless-to-what-her-Shaanu-does Goan lady. At Mass she prays even more fervently.

I think we need to all go down on our knees.

And pray for this noise to stop. For Satan to leave our shores. To make us realise the Goa we are loosing. To hear the birds again. To hear the waves at Chapora... in Colvale. To hear our conscience. To slumber in the fact that we can have less money but retain our dignity, sanity, uncorruption and integrity.

So that finally we can hear the true voice of God ! (ENDS)

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First published in Goa Today, Goa - March 2010

My city is better than yours: Panjim

My city is better than yours

Vivek Menezes on Panjim

The hidden secret behind Panjim’s catalogue of charms is that it is a new city that has been created with the advantage of planning. Unlike almost every other important urban entity in India, this riverside capital city of the country’s smallest state was rigorously conceived, planned and built in a spate of energy that sustained itself all through the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth.

Previously, the site of the present city had been an outlying, swamp-ridden ward of the village of Taleigao near the confluence of the Mandovi and the Zuari rivers. So it slumbered while magnificent port-cities came into being further upriver, and still slept on when they crumbled back into red laterite mud.

The last of these cities upriver was the original capital city of the Portuguese, which shot to global prominence in the sixteenth century and was larger and much richer than Paris or London of the time. But plagues sapped Old Goa, and the native elites (both Hindu and converted Catholic) wanted the seat of power to be shifted away from under the nose of the religious orders controlling the capital. These elites found support in the anti-religious prime minister of Portugal in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Marquis de Pombal. So little Panjim became the de facto capital of Goa even before it was officially declared a city, which only happened many decades later. That curiously outsized, in-between state of being persists, with Panjim continuing to wield disproportionate clout despite its minuscule proportions. Its population is just about 60,000, far less even than Goan cities like Vasco and Margao. But everything important seems to take place in Panjim nonetheless.

The city remains astonishingly pocket-sized even compared to Goan villages. You can stroll its entire length in less than an hour. A most un-urban everyone-knows-everyone culture still reigns across the city’s neighbourhoods, where a good proportion of the houses are still occupied by the families that built them a century ago.

Though the distinctive architecture of Panjim is routinely called “Portuguese”, there are no buildings remotely like these in Portugal. Instead, the aesthetic here is Indo-Iberian, a self-confident Latinate variant, a native means of cultural assertion and pride. The story of Panjim is also the story of the assimilative, ceaselessly adaptive triumph of the Goans coming into their own within the colonialist entity – they took what they needed from their contacts with the greater world, and then shaped a unique space that is all their own.

I feel the difference every day, especially when I make my daily visit to Farm Products on Azad Maidan right in the heart of Panjim, where there are only three seats. One might be occupied by a bishop, and another by a rag-picker, but all of us will gobble delicious egg chops while conversing with the genial proprietor, the 84-year-old Alvaro Pereira, whose courtly manner doesn’t betray the years he spent being sadistically tortured in a colonial jail for the crime of refusing to take off his Gandhi topi, nor his heroics after the Liberation of Goa where he stopped a lynch-mob from attacking the same policemen who had tormented him in jail.

Quite often we are joined by other freedom-fighters from those heady years of struggle that finally ended 450 years of colonialism. I listen to them switch effortlessly from liquid Portuguese to animated Konkani and back again while I sip my strong coffee, these men of principle no more pleased with the current leadership than they were 50 years ago. The cup drains, time stands still. Panjim endures, its original charms intact for another era.   (ENDS)

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First published in Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 15, February 05, 2010