One fine morning in Allepey express

I wasn’t able to stretch my legs. Was too sleepy to notice the three bags placed at the end of my berth. Only when the alarm on my phone started ringing that I got up. I got up to find half my berth already occupied by three bags. All typical officegoer’s bags. Same black colour. Surely placed there by, some friendly person who wanted to make sure I got up before my station. I looked around for that person to thank him. But he was no where in sight. After I got my bearings I started looking at how to get down from the top berth. I found a way.. simple way it was in the end. I just started getting down ignored the bag in between. According to physics there was no way I could get down without pushing the bag down. I was not in a mood to disprove physics theories. So, I pushed the bag on top of one persons head nonchalantly. Didn’t bother to ask an apology because invariably it was his bag, he hugged it to his bossom immediately. Who cares? I got down and faced my next problem. My sandals where nowhere in sight. I looked around at the obvious places under the seats –with very little help from the ten to twelve open ticket passengers who were coolly sitting in the seat I had booked one month ago paying 300 freaking rupees.. after I found my sandals I took up the next problem- my seat.

Note: I have nothing against bald men or their wives.

There was a bald guy sitting in my seat- well officially my seat according the ticket I had till ernakulam. Since he had occupied my seat and there was no other place to stand let alone an empty seat, I had no other option so I asked him to vacate my seat. “Sir this is my seat”. Silence .. no response, he was looking interestingly at the coconut trees passing by. May be he was hard of hearing. Tap on his shoulders. “Sir, this is my seat, please get up”. He looked at me with a sympathetic expression, moved his butt a little and showed the little place for me to sit. I was getting irritated with this bald guy. “hello, this is my place, get up”. He said something I understand. Once again “hello, get up.. you first get up, this is my seat” the crowd around started looking at me as if I just murdered him. He got up finally, I thought he would give me his seat, but he said “this is my wife so I am sitting with her”. That was it. It was the ultimate explanation anyone could give.

“so what, she can be your wife or anyone else, who cares, both of you get up”. I was so pissed off I would have said have your affairs in your house. The bald idiot guy irritated me very much. Even after I totally wrote him and his wife off, the idiot hadn’t understood the situation. I was taken aback. Dumbfounded. I was thinking “either this man is on a high or he is really stupid” (flicked this from somewhere :) ).. it was a question one would never ask after 5 minutes of argument. i never expected this. He asked me “do u have reservation?” why the hell would I argue with a 50 yr old guy, damage his family , his wife, waster my energy if I didn’t have a reservation!!!

Amrithavaahini - let us ride the music wave

“Saamaja vara gamana …” these were the exact words which started off a musical revolution in 10-c Si Apartments Edapally. Though it was not the only song in the movie “Sankarabharanam” there was some spark in that song which lighted our dead or about to die artistic instinct. I know a few eyebrows will be raised questioning that instinct of ours, but no one can deny the effort being put in to create, if not heart melting music but atleast some sound which encourages one to practice more.

The flute we bought at Athirapilli falls started the next level in our search for musical nirvana. Rajan, Vinay and me are so far the only members of this club. This club is in reality no club, it is not one which has been formed to impress supervisors, or is hyped up so much with not an ounce of substance. It is an informal group (at present only three people) trying to learn something. We may not become great artist, but we would have learnt something, we would have learnt to appreciate great musicians and artists more. We would have felt the difficulty in playing the instruments; the effort needed even to produce the basic sounds properly. We found it the hard way yesterday that playing a flute was not a joke. Even to get a simple train whistle like sound took me the better part of half an hour. Imagine me playing a full keerthana on a flute. Once we got through the initial difficulty of getting a simple sound from the flute, we started discussing the basics---

Where is the S R G M P D N in this flute … before that what is this sruthi ? what is a thaalam ??sruthi, thaalam, ragam,

Being engineers J we took a scientific approach. A band of frequencies is the sruthi (what people call elu kattai or elra kattai) or scale. Within each sruthi there are low frequencies sounds and high pitched ones. So any song can be played in any sruthi depending on the ability of the person. So that part decided we moved to thaalam, this is the speed at which the swaram or words are played. That too can vary. We were now decently well versed at these. Now came the next question where is the ‘Sa’ ‘Ri’ ‘Ga’ .. in this flute. A small book from the nearby music store helped solve this a little bit.

But we ended up with a new problem. The book told about S R G M P D N S for a 1 + 6 hole flute, and all the flutes depicted on the book had the same number of holes, while the three flutes we had either had 7 holes or even worse eight holes. It took sometime before we decided to ignore that last two holes and use the remaining six for our endeavour’s. Thus, started our music club- the club meant only for music. We are not trying to impress anyone, not trying to hide any image of not having work, there is no one drive this, no one takes the ownership. As said “Kotilo oka manushi unte chaalu ee amrita vaahini anantharanga pravahishthundhi”. Music is divine whether Indian or western.