I’ve been out of touch with my computer keyboard lately as a lot has been going on. David came from Korea on December 1st. He will be with me till the end of my time in India, and is studying mridangam here (the primary drum of carnatic music). David and I had to move from my teachers house shortly after his arrival, and so I spent quite a bit of time in the last week of November looking for a place where we could live, practice, cook, and not pay a small fortune. Finding accommodation for 2 musicians in any city is difficult, but in a foreign country it becomes a little trickier. At the time Chennai seemed to only accommodate long-term residents who could guarantee a years stay to house owners, short term workers (who were just looking for a place to sleep in same sex hostels, and rich tourists or business people). It seems that a bed in Chennai varies from 50 cents a night to $200 or more. You can have just the bed with a 9pm curfew, or AC, room service, and a bunch of people trying to carry your bag. There is not much in between. In the end the problem of looking for a place where we could both practice turned out to be the solution. If you ever want to feel welcome in a foreign country develop an interest in their music, and make a serious attempt at studying it. My answer to the question “why did you come to Chennai?” has never failed to be well received even by Indians who know very little about carnatic music. They are proud that their music has inspired enough interest in a foreigner for that person to take time out of their life to come and study. I didn’t realize what this would mean to the locals when I came here, but it has turned out to be a great advantage including granting me access to the place we are staying now. My search for an apartment gained me a couple new friends, (most signifigantly Priyanka, who I really got to know through the help she gave me in my apartment search). Priyanka spent hours with me on the internet, and on the phone looking for short term places. She actually found a couple places that would have been great (and her help made me much calmer about the situation). Priyanka is a friend of Sundar (David’s friend who picked me up from the airport). I had a couple nice evenings with her, her husband Ragu, and their little baby Meera. She has taken me to the most foreign (or I should say western restaurants I have seen here.)Visiting her is kind of like visiting a oasis of layed backness set against my experience of the more traditional Hindi Chennai living that propels the carnatic music scene.
The apartment David and I finally ended up in I found through Trina (a violinist I met in Montreal who studied canartic music in Chennai a couple of years back – one of my primary inspiration for coming here). Trina put me in touch with 2 young musicians she knew when she was here. One of them came up with a flat in a building owned by an older musician/scholar Dr. Karaikudi S Subramanian who directs a music school/center called Bhraddhavani specializing in world music research, and children’s music education. Dr Subramanian hosts national music students through his center, trains local children in canartic music. He is also developing an education program in carnatic music for local schools. It seems that I could have come here through Dr. Subramanian’s center in the first place. It would have made things a lot easier, but doing things myself has certainly been an interesting though sometimes difficult experience, one I would not trade in for an easier one. Now that I have moved to a different neighbourhood I realize that the entire city of Chennai is not as bustleing or as completely foreign as I had originally perceived through the vantage point of west mambalam. Our new neighbourhood R.A Puram is a little more yuppy. There are a few restaurants with foreign food (including a Korean one – actually we are living in the neighbourhood were a lot of the Korean’s here with Hyundai have settled), a café that sells coffee without milk and tons of sugar, not as many street vendors, not as many fresh fruits and vegetables, bigger houses, more visably rich folks, and a whole lot less people wandering around in the streets. There are still a good number of animals wandering around on the streets including some chickens, a couple of dumpster diving cows, and a dog who we have for better or worse made friends with. This neighbourhood is one of sharper contrasts. Our street is made up of middle class apartment buildings, and mansions, but the street next to us is butted up against a filfthy river, elevated train tracks and rows of simple huts with roofs about as tall as me. There are lots of cows in the slum. I think that is were the dumpster diving cows, and stray chickens come from.
The place we are staying doesn’t have a huge kitchen or a gas stoveL I was very lucky with my teachers place, and the stove here is just an electric hot plate with no temperature control (just on and off), but I’ve gotten used to the challenge. I can always get into limited perameters when it comes to any art (including cooking).
I’m very glad that my first impression of India was coloured by the bustling, and relatively un-westernized neighbourhood of mambalam. There haven’t been any religious or wedding parades marching down the street since we moved to R.A Puram, but we are much closer to the location of the majority of the concert venues for the music season in Chennai (which officially runs from Dec. 15 to sometime in January, but infact the frequency of concerts had increased substantially by the end November.
At this point there so many concerts, and so many of such high quality it is enough to almost make you sick. It is exhausting trying to keep up with our schedule of practice, lessons, and concerts. There are also lectures on music as part of the music season (many of them are in English), and we have been encouraged to go to them. We have attended a few now, but they are for the most part disappointing. The music is great here, but there seems to be a tendency among music scholars to use flowery language to describe things, spend a lot of time aurally paying homage to the masters, and include very little enlightening information on the topics they are speaking about. I wonder if the lectures in Tamil are any better. I’m assuming they are. Anyways the music is great, and going to lectures is tiring and cutting in on our practice, so we are limiting ourselves to concerts now. The music itself has got to be the best teacher.
The music season is as amazing and as overwhelming as it sounds. The only thing I know that comes anywhere close to it in intensity is the Montreal jazz festival, but even that is only 2 and a half weeks, and does not have nearly as many venues, and although concerts are very cheap it does not compare to the accessibility of the music season here. Imagine 40 + venues, 3-10 concerts happening simultaneously from 8am to 11pm over a period of 2 months with tickets being available from 0 - $2 for every single concert. It’s amazing, but tiring. A new friend Navaneet (one of the guys I met through Trina) said, “it feels like you are reeling in music”.
The main disadvantage of the new apartment is that it is a little far from my teachers house which means either a long morning walk or grappling with auto drivers for a decent fare. This is no easy task, since white skin might pretty much just translates into “loaded” as far as most Indians are concerned. It is somewhat true because the money made in most “white-skinned” countries is worth a hell of a lot in India. David and I chose to walk almost everywhere much to the disappointment of auto-drivers who regularly offer us unwanted rides (seeing us a prime targets for high fares). It is annoying to be looked at as lazy, ridiculously rich, and greedy. I take pleasure in all the actions I can make which may dispel the stereotypes Indians have for white people.
