Fangirling in the 30s and 40s

Rather unusually for someone my age, I had a taste for Indian music from the 1930s and 1940s.  These were the kind of songs that did not even make it to Chitrahaar/Chhaya Geet. Sometimes an old movie would screen on Doordarshan or one might hear a KL Saigal on the radio but on the whole even in the 1980s when I was young, few TV and radio stations ventured beyond the 1950s. Part of the reason for my tastes was my uncle R.  When I used to to go to my grandparents place from hostel, sometimes we would be alone and he would be playing an old song that would burn itself into my brain and I would get addicted to the singer.  He had the oddest tastes and an excellent ear for music so one could never tell what he would choose to play. This was how I was introduced to MK Thyagaraja Bhaghavthar, better known by the moniker MKT. 

Even though their tastes had moved on to the Tamil dramas on television in the 80s and 90s, my grandparents would indulge me now and then with cinema and music tales from their youth if I pestered them enough. Sometimes my grandfather would rent a MKT video for me and though these films were hackneyed I would watch them for the music.  And to listen to the spoken Tamil of the time. And much to my mother's chagrin - because she wanted me to be smart and up to date - I wanted to dress like an old time heroine - in a sari, pallu tucked in, hair in a plait - post any such viewing (I still tuck in my pallu!). Unconsciously perhaps I was deeply influenced by my grandparents because it seems strange that I wanted to be part of a time when they were young. A time they didn't feel particularly nostalgic about. Or perhaps I just had an affinity for that time.

Your average 1930s/40s hearthrob

I want to lick that postcard-Average 30s Tam girl.

My grandfather had seen and heard MKT sing. He was a goldsmith's son according to my grandfather and dazzlingly good looking. His voice of course was divine. This fact was corroborated by my grandmother who spoke pityingly and sometimes witheringly about girls who went into a swoon and daze at his very mention, who kissed the little postcards of his that they slyly bought and no doubt were writing some very erotic fan fiction in their heads and diaries. Even married women were not immune to such immature behaviour according to my grandmother - whether she liked him or not I cannot tell because she portrayed herself as above such frivolities as succumbing to masculine charms. If it was today, those girls would have set up a MKT tumblr. For while notions of masculine beauty may change, the rules of fangirling do not. 

The eyes, that smile!

In one of the movies I saw (Haridas) TR Rajakumari played an oomphy lady who took the hero for a ride before repenting and renouncing her wicked ways as was the case in movies of the time. My mother had mentioned her beauty and my grandfather had added on information about the many men left devastated by her charms, she was after all Tamil cinema's first dream girl. All of this was no hyperbole, on screen the actress was stunning.  It was an alluring beauty - she reminded me a bit of MS Subbulakshmi - but with the sex appeal amped up.  And not in the least bit in a sluttish kind of way, she just looked like a woman who a man would do anything to have.  Or for that matter the lesbian tumblrs that I see in constant meltdown over some actress of the other - if they had existed in the 30s - TRR would be their girl.  Or at the very least everyone's girl crush, she's certainly mine.

Sometimes when I would visit, my uncle would be in that jokey melancholic mood that was a trademark of his. He would then say well soon I shall be old and alone in this house with just a glass of alcohol and MKT singing.  That was not to be.  But as long as that house exists and an MKT song plays in it, he is bound to be there somewhere around, eyes closed and listening to the music,  momentarily free of the tangled thoughts of his mind while he lived. 

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My 30s/40s playlist below. MKT sang a lot of devotional songs - which I like - but I will stick (mostly)  to the more romantic ones:)

1. Manmadha Leelai with bonus Rajakumari.  Not the best dancer in comparison to some others of her time but that blown kiss (about 3.13) was quite a sensation. As it should be, coming from the Princess of everyone's dreams!

2. Vadaname Chandra Bimbamo

3. Krishna Mukunda Murare

4. Radhe unaku kovam

5. Ellam Inbame

And a bit of Saigal

1. Babul Mora

2. Do Naina Matware

3. Madhukar Shyam hamare chor

And a sample of Kanan Devi and MS songs of the time:

1. Ami Bonoful

2.Tum Bina Kal na Aave

3. Engum Nirathaiye 

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Drinking Ladies

There seem to have been a a lot of drinking ladies in Ancient India. There are apparently plenty of sculptures of drinking women. And plenty of verses going on a fair bit about wine being a major beauty enhancer, in Kalidasa's plays for e.g. and especially in the Sattasai. (no face in the gutter modern women in the old texts!).

The above extract is from Malavikagnimitram.  Iravati is kind of famous for making a dramatic entry in an inebriated state in this play. Though who can blame Iravati, the second wife? There is already a senior queen, Dharini. And there is pretty Malavika who the king is courting and who is so going to be the king's favourite. And there is poor Iravati with only a maid to extoll her flushed with wine beauty. And a few passages where she berates the useless Agnimitra.  Who likens her to a crocodile while Malavika is a lotus flower. Pity Iravati didn't employ the crocodile teeth!

So what is a woman to do? All my sympathies lie with Iravati. I say ditch the King, get an ancient vibrator and embrace the bottle, it is far more constant!

[X] [X]

A. Madhaviah's Padmvati

The National Library in Singapore stocks more than a few Indian titles that are not so readily available in India. Or at least I haven't spotted them in the usual bookshops. One of the books I borrowed from the library was Padmavati, one of the first few novels in Tamil. Apart from the milieu and the time it is set in, it is not very interesting as a novel. In fact it made me wonder if a certain timidity is inherent in Tamil Brahmins that makes for safe literature. In Bengal for e.g., the novel was already established when Padmavati was written. And despite certain conventional elements, Bankim's works are complex and morally ambiguous. OK Bankim is a master but you get the drift. Padmavati on the other hand tends to get a bit preachy and the characters are a bit black and white. And despite being billed as a reform movel about the education of women the novel is really about the friendship between the eponymous Padmavati's cousin and later husband, Narayanan and Goaplan. Nevertheless it was fascinating to me because the whole world of Tamil Brahmins at the end of the 19th century is captured in the book. And it speaks of the types in the community that many of the character traits described in the book are familiar to me from my own relatives and acquaintances. And of course it has the usual Tamil Brahmin male preoccupation with devadasis though of course the upright hero doesn't succumb to their wiles. 

It's primary interest to me therefore lies in its portrayal of  South Indian brahmins at the end of the 20th century.  In the deeply conservative community, there are two forces at play forcing some kind of change. One, modern education, largely in the hands of missionaries.  Two, the administrative setup under British rule with its minor officials who wielded a good deal of power over small communities. There are plenty of sharp vignettes throughout the novel that highlight this. To me the most amusing bit was the North-South divide i.e. the divide between Tirunelveli (the setting of the novel) and Thanjavur that is up North.  None of the Thanjavur folk in this are up to any good which was kind of amusing given my family firmly has its origins in Thanjavur. 

This illustration below for e.g. is of a naughty married Thanjavur lady all ready for a sneaky rendezvous with Gopalan. Her equally amorous husband is planning to seduce the virtuous Savitri, sister of Gopalan. Elsewhere in the novel formidable Thanjavur parents masterfully use their children in increasing their worldly wealth via marriages. What can I say, Go Thanjavur! Just kidding.

There is also a fairly long section on drama companies. There is again that faint ambivalence present in Tamil Brahmin novels.  This world recurs in so many texts but there is also a moral stigma attached to it, little good can result by entering it.  I suppose it was a concern for families - our family folklore has a relative who burned his way through the family fortune - leaving his wife completely destitute - in just such a manner.
 

The dissonance between the changes brought about by education and actual community mores occurs throughout the novel.  Because the school is run by missionaries, the students are exposed to and aspire to the values of the West. On the other hand there is the world at home and one's own culture that cannot be denied. While this manifests itself in many ways in the novel, the many references to clothing interested me.  For e.g. the below paragraph describes a groom's attire which shows the norms of masculine attire prior to Western influences.

After his ritual bath, Gopalan was decked in silk and zari, with sandal paste and kumkumam on his forehead and sweet scented jasmine in his hair. He wore jewellery too - a double stranded waist chain over his silk veshti, a jewelled pendant strung on his golden punul, the scared thread, a pearl necklace intertwined with a flower garland, diamond earrings and gem studded rings. Gold bracelets accentuated his youth and natural charm. The kohl, applied by Savithri, made his eyes appear more beautiful than ever. With lips reddened by the juice of the betel chewed and a complexion aglow with shy happiness, he looked enchanting, like Manmathan with his body restored.

For us today, the flowers in the hair and waist belts for the veshti may seem excessive and even feminine, but they seem to have been common in Madhaviah’s time. This description in fact reminded me of the way idols are decked in temples.  Gopalan’s English education makes him embarrassed to be so decked, on the other hand he is secretly pleased to be the traditional bridegroom.  And of course it is interesting that bride and groom are equally bedecked,  bar the fact that saris were probably more coloured and elaborate than a veshti.

The novel of course isn't about fashion at all. Rather it is of its time and the stray references here and there provide clues to clothing norms of the time.  For example, I often wondered about the origins of the half-sari in Tamil Nadu.  From the novel it appears that it was a fashionable outfit worn by young Christian girls. This appears in a section where one of the characters seriously contemplates converting to Christianity.

 After a few days, he began to visit the boy’s home in Palayamkottai and met his sisters who, dressed in the daring new style of pavadai, blouse and dhavani (emphasis mine), strolled about book in hand. 

That is the kind of detail that is hard to come by for folk like me who blog on history. Happily, the translated novel is available because it was done by one of the author's grand-daughters (the illustrations done in the 1950s are that of his nephew M. Krishnan). It's one of those moments where you have serious thoughts about an education that privileges English over regional languages, almost all one's literary history is a black box if a translation is not available.

A handsome young man of twenty five, dressed in a vannan washed zari veshti, muslin shirt and uppada angavastram arrived after awhile. Such was his appearance that even the old hag in the kitchen would have concluded that he was an English educated government official. Else would he wear ritually unclean, washerman washed clothes or a chandu pottu on his forehead? Without a government job, how could he have sported whiskers or acquired Tiruchirapalli footwear or a silver wristwatch. 

The illustration and text above is of a minor functionary who arrives for Gopalan’s wedding (Padmavati, A. Madhaviah). Though not senior they apparently wielded a good amount of power in the districts, far far more than a senior functionary in say Chennai, and were therefore to be appropriately appeased at all times. It's a fascinating paragraph providing visual clues of status in his dressing, both in terms of wealth and a departure from orthodox.

 There is also  descriptions of jewellery of the time now and then.

All in all despite a very weak plot, the book was enjoyable because of its familiar milieu. And of course I was over the moon with those few throwaway lines on the davani!

Shakuntala

For my clothing blog I often add relevant quotes from old Indian texts. As a result of this I have read (or in some cases partially read) more than a few translations hosted at gutenberg and archive.  One of these texts is Shakuntala, on which I blog quite often (check out the Chinese performance!). And though the story is extremely familiar to me, I am a little embarrassed that until my posts I had never read Kalidasa's Shakuntala in entirety though it is has been translated often and is a seminal text.

In fact the posts were a bit shaming and made me reflect a bit on the kind of English education that we so prize in India that many of us do not read Kalidasa, if not in Sanskrit at least in a regional language. Instead we rely on English texts, often translated by foreigners. And even if we are to go with English, we are still taught Shakespeare as a standard text though in more ways than one it is Kalidasa who is relevant to our culture and history. In fact Shakuntala's persistence makes it ideal for study, analysis and interpretation much like a play by the Bard.

From memory, Kosambi's book (Myth and Reality) states that the tale occurs as a fragment in the Rig Veda. Or at any rate in one of the Vedic texts and of course in the Mahabharata. In its earliest version, it has none of the embellishments of Kalidasa's tale. Rather it is merely an episode wherein a woman asserts her rights and makes a king accept paternity.  In Kalidasa's hands it of course turns into a classic romance (there is a first wife but let's not dwell on that here!). Shakuntala is a forest maiden, Dushyant is a handsome king.  There is a love affair, there is the loss of the ring (oh so soap opera), the rejection of Shakuntala and then the reunion.  Adding heft to this is the fact that Shakuntala and Dushyanta's son, Bharata, lends his name to the country.

It's later fame resulted from William Jones' translation that appeared in 1789, it's first outing in the West. Though it was hardly a forgotten text in India, Horace Hayman's Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus mentions that there are plenty of copies in circulation amongst the "pundits". Subsequently it seems to have enjoyed a good deal of popularity in the West. Not surprising given all the forest nymph bit, the romance and most of all the enduring nature of the tale which meant that it worked across mediums.  Gautier, for e.g.,  wrote a ballet, Sacountala. And it turns up at the oddest of places, including this 1914 production. On tumblr I have seen recent American school productions. Stage productions are still around. And of course Kalidasa's story, his descriptions, the poetry are still very much around us in Hindi films, albeit sometimes in a vulgarised form.

Given all this you would think that the tale is perfect for all kinds of study - from the original story to Kalidasa's treatment, its presence in modern Indian culture and it's interpretation by the West. Perhaps it is but I can't think of say my cousin's BA Lit including it at all.  More's the pity.

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My fav Shakuntala here and here (especially since it mixes it with Ashadh Ka Ek Din).

Confessions of Love

I have been keeping a record of the books I read on my break (along with very brief reviews) on my facebook page. Partly for friends, partly to record my photographs of the books and partly to jog my memory at a later date.

I cam across Uno Chiyo while doing research for my blog (surprisingly I come across a lot of Asian materials when doing the sari blog) and later found her books in a Singapore library. Chiyo's book, Confessions of Love, must be quite popular here because I have seen several copies in Singapore's libraries.

Uno Chiyo was amongst other things a novelist and kimono designer who met the artist Seiji Togo while researching a gas suicide scene for her book. He had just survived a suicide pact attempt and arrived in his best "post suicide pact chic" with a bandage on his neck, the result of a wrongly applied scalpel (both scalpel and gas appear in Confessions of Love). Chiyo promptly fell in love and moved in with the artist. And equally promptly penned a semi-fictional account of Seiji’s love affair and subsequent suicide pact with the pretty daughter of a high ranking naval official. That book is Confessions of Love. Apparently suicide pacts were quite the thing in 1930s Japan, given the restrictive marriage norms of Japanese families at the time.

The affair in the book is all interrupted stolen meetings and inaction until the failed suicide pact. In fact not much happens in the primary relationship in the book between Joji (the fictional Seiji) and Tsuyuko. Between all this the fictional Seiji tries to extricate himself from his wife, makes a second marriage in which he is cuckolded and has desultory affairs with a few modan gaaru (modern girls) along the way. Despite these desperate romantic situations, the book is surprisingly light in tone.

Chiyo’s prose is much praised as supple so it appears the translation doesn’t do her full justice. Neither was I fully convinced by the introductory section which finds the book a subtle indictment of Seiji's weak character, and by extension of the Japanese male.  Despite this the book is a strangely compelling account of an intense but doomed love affair by a writer putting down a tale known to her in an objective manner.

Chiyo died at age 99 proving that "bad girls" go everywhere and live forever:)

Notes: Someone needs to do a literary trail of the train stations that feature in 1930s Japanese books. People are always meeting at railway stations in the books I read - Confessions of Love, Naomi, Quicksand....

Pic 2 was taken in Newcastle. We found the dead bird in the garden one morning. It was perfectly formed and a beautiful vivid red in colour.  We buried it later in the day. And while I am normally not the kind to take photographs of dead things, I felt I had to record the bird's existence. Hence it's appearance alongside the Chiyo book.

Sari History

I am doing a series of posts on sari fashions 1870s onwards. Its taking a long time but you can follow the link for updates.

Secret Love Affair - Milhwe - 밀회

Knight in Silent Armour

Secret Love Affair is by no means a shabby movie. Even though its male protagonist does save our heroine, albeit not in the manner of shabby movies where they "completely flip out" to save the damsel in distress.  Rather it is an elegant, unhurried 16 episode long morality tale at the heart of which is a May-December romance. And its heroine is less damsel in distress than a damsel in unconscious wait for redemption. You maybe forgiven for the momentary thought of it being a mash up of The Piano Teacher and I am Love, with perhaps just a hint of The Beat That My Heart Skipped.  But it truly is it's own luminous thing shot through with both the romantic, poetic feeling and the absolute morality of many Korean works.  And in this it is possibly quite different from its source material.

Briefly the 16 episodes follow 40 something Oh Hye-won (Kim Hee-ae), calm and collected professional or an "elegant slave" to the filthy rich, whichever way you like it. Hye-won is a keeper of secrets that allow her a hold over her unscrupulous and opportunistic super rich employers but on more than one occasion the power imbalance is also clear.  Yet she is good at her job of leaving no trail of their dirty dealings (I shall never view music schools and arts foundations the same way again) and perhaps even relishes some of the power games as they unfold in offices and over mahjong sessions. And the job affords a fabulous lifestyle, albeit with a transparently ambitious and easily manipulated husband. That is until she meets Lee Sun-jae (Yoo Ah-in), genius self-taught pianist whose 20 year old self is incorruptible and not for sale. And as it happens, he falls deep in love, equally incorruptible, on a first glimpse of Hye-won. 

Post piano orgasm

Post piano cold shower

That romance unfolds over music. Hye-won herself played the piano as a young woman till an injury stopped a professional career. Music represents their inner selves, more than one character mentions that "Sun-jae plays like Hye-won" i.e. with a certain abandon and passion that cannot be taught. Like with Lucy Honeychurch, the implication is that if Hye-won lived as she played music, it would be exciting for everyone concerned. Just as much as with Sun-jae's playing which is also linked with the life he leads.  The scenes where Hye-won and Sun-jae play together are intentionally orgasmic in nature (a bit heavy handedly underlined by the script). Their attachment is a recognition at a deeper level of being indubitably connected, a fact recognised by Sun-jae instantly. It takes Hye-won longer to recognise this but once she does, she doesn't really turn back. In this, it's treatment of the romance is mature and made believable by the actors. Given so much turns on the two leads, they are excellent.

The world thinks about money more often than sex

 

But the romance is merely a catalyst to the larger questions posed by the drama.  Though a little squandered towards the latter episodes, an ensemble cast on good form provides the underpinning to these questions.  Hye-won's workplace is an arena where female ambitions are constantly played out. From ruthlessly ambitious wives to lonely yet vicious daughters whose social position is assured to Hye-won steely in her resolve to consolidate her social position to secretaries gauche in their desire for professional advancement, the drama differs from everything I have seen in showing female protagonists who are less empowered by careers and more compromised and corrupted by the pursuit of power and money.  The men fare no better, the family space itself is not sacrosanct.  Hye-won's husband is greedy and weak and loose cannon. On Sun-jae's side, his friends have both an easy morality and a morality that is mixed with a street toughness. The plot is largely driven by Hye-won's slow move towards understanding the hollowness of her existence and attempting to remove herself from it. And it is very slow.  Hye-won is complex - and it's a pleasure to watch an actress who can go from self-preservatory cunning to softness and doubt within a few scenes - she is deeply rooted in a corrupt world but also aware that the love and moral force that is Sun-jae is going to willy nilly propel her out of it.  Sun-jae is seemingly far simpler though the actor playing him pulls off the difficult task of conveying the moral steadfastness and purity of his person so that we too can see Hye-won seeing herself in the mirror that Sun-jae provides. And his character grows through the series without losing his essential self.

No plastic surgery then

The drama also touches on the lives we should live and what really matters.  There is a lot of reference to music biographies and artists. Music in fact as they say is a character in the movie. In the absence of musical knowledge, the finer points of this, the meaning behind the pieces is a little lost on the lay viewer. Nevertheless the pieces are placed in the episodes so that each piece conveys its meaning in the context of the episode.

And the answer was get thee to jail

Because Korean dramas often tend to be moral and idealistic in tone, throughout the episodes it is clear that the conclusion is unlikely to be open ended.  As restrained and realistic as it is, the drama requires Hye-won's purification and repentance. True as the drama is to the conventions of its culture, the end episode leaves the viewer in two minds. Because there is a dark side to Hye-won. In the absence of Sun-jae, she would have continued as before. Her friends for example (a lovely, sweet counterpoise to the sterility of Hye-won's life), tread the fine balance of being part of the system and yet keeping their values. Which is an alternative Hye-won has never chosen. In fact so unerring is her knowledge of the world she operates in that in the drama's concluding episodes, it is she who has the power to checkmate before overturning the chess board.   Sun-jae himself is troubled by this, it isn't even clear to him how willing she is to walk away from this.  And he himself is utterly moral to the core, it is all or nothing. Despite the build up to her moment of facing the truth about herself and the redemptive power of Sun-jae's love (in early sequences Sun-jae cleans the floor and stairs of his house, it is evoked later in the court scene almost like a broom and mop has been applied to Hye-won's soul), there is a small part of you that remains unconvinced. Perhaps the shortened run (it seemed to have an original 20 episode run) did not allow a complete exploration. There is in fact a slightly rushed quality to the later episodes.

Sun-jae applies his charm

 

For all that it is a satisfying conclusion holding both the promise of Sun-jae when Hye-won leaves prison and much more importantly the reclamation of  her true self.  Because redemption dramas tend to be male centric - think rise, fall, soul searching, atonement - all of which require a full engagement with the world - Secret Love Affair is quite unusual and perhaps even bold in its subject matter.

Shoe Sex

While Korean movies tend to be explicit in their depiction of sex, the dramas are often restrained. There are a few kisses and barely any skin in the scenes between Hye-won and Sun-jae in the drama. It doesn't in any way reduce the erotic charge between the leads and works to the drama's advantage in being with the overall mood of the piece.  Interestingly almost all the intimate scenes occur in Sun-jae's house or public spaces but rarely at Hye-won's home.  The idea of home recurs throughout the drama. Hye-won's house is a trophy home with not a note of colour.  Sun-jae's is shabby and lived in, crowded with things important to him. The idea of the two being home to each other is brought out now and then, Sun-jae's number is saved as "Home" on Hye-won's phone and in the drama's final moments Sun-jae indicates that where Hye-won is is home to him.

There are so many layers and details to the drama that it almost demands a re-watch.   There are a few missteps. There is self taught Sun-jae (go youtube!) but you can go along with that conceit. The death of Sun-jae's mother is a bit of a drama cliche.   Throughout Hye-won encounters situations that cause her to question her own position, one is with a lady in a restaurant who I think was a leftist in her youth and cannot be bought by money.  It somehow rings false.  There is a Billy Joel song called what else but "Piano Man" amidst all the exquisite music, though to be fair it is intended to evoke a specific time in Hye-won's youth.  And so on. Still those are minor quibbles in a work that asks you to be immersed in its thoughts and pleasures. And you are more than willing to be so immersed. 

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Not that it means anything but I was a little surprised by the classical music world depicted in this drama.  Western classical music as high culture in the East is a little surprising to Indians I suppose given that a similar work in India would be rooted in our own musical traditions.

Also Korean dramas seem to have a lot of female scriptwriters who seem to be quite well known. Far as I know it is true of Secret Love Affair too. 

Photographs - 2

I think this photograph was taken sometime in 2001 at the Botanical Gardens in Kolkata.  It was a happy day.  And it presaged a period of unconditional love, unconditional hate and unconditional acceptance of the way things were.  My exterior is calm, beneath I am on an emotional seesaw but right at my core I am again calm. But never have I been flung on and off that seesaw more violently than during my relationship with P and never has my inner self returned so rapidly to an astonishing tranquillity a few years later.

For a long time, these extreme emotions embarrassed me. Because extreme emotions are undignified.  Being utterly torn, wearing your heart on your sleeve, these make for blowsy sentiments. Bottled up, stoic silent hurt is much more attractive, it can even seem more truthful.. But in all that shakeness as you make your way back to life, you find that you don't regret falling into events without a thought, without anything but some true feeling in your heart.  And when one's heart is engaged, something true always lies at the centre. Not everyone feels this way. It can be difficult to maintain relationships with exes sometimes, especially if your history together is painful or burdensome. It can be hard to get right the balance of  being true to your past feelings and at ease with your present. For some reason this has always been easy with P. 

And of course this is an attractive photograph.  Perfect for a novella based on the events of 2001:)

버스커 버스커 (Busker Busker)

K-pop is quite popular in Singapore. Not a fan. Or of K-indie music for that matter.

But I just can't stop listening to Busker Busker. Like anything at all from their albums. Even if it has resulted in a few Bas kar Bas kar jokes:)

Photographs - 1

Because we moved around a fair bit, home for us was just a few possessions.  Books, clothes, curios, photo albums, that kind of ephemeral thing.  About the only things of permanence was my mother's kitchen and the large wooden boxes painted Army green and stamped with my father's name and address that we used for packing.  These doubled as furniture so they moved with us everywhere.  As a result, I am far more careful with the small things that make up my life than say furniture or white goods that I see as entirely expendable.

My photo albums haven't travelled with me for a long time. They are at my father's place in Mumbai and every time I am home I browse through them and digitise them if required.  Of late, more than a few are falling apart which makes me melancholic but also reminds me that the value of photographs goes this far and no further.  Looking at them gives me pleasure, not just for the nostalgia of The Way We Were but because each time there is a difference in the way I perceive them.

The exception to photographs I keep is those of people I have gone out with.  When I was young, the intensity of a relationship was such that in the aftermath a small bonfire of letters and photographs was cathartic.  It is not that one feels less intensely as one grows older, it is merely that photographs of happy coupledom are merely that, photographs. Plus your taste for the dramatic decreases with age :).  So I was a little surprised to find a small stash of photographs dating back to the early 90s of my then boyfriend (a term I dislike but let's stay with it) that had remained behind. Partly I think because this was a time when I was learning to use a camera and I kept the whole lot of my first attempts.  R had an excellent camera, in retrospect it was more than excellent given that my parents couldn't afford even an instant camera and they were not alone in this. To his credit - and he was utterly sweet like that - not only did he teach me the basics but he let me play around with it quite a bit. A number of IIT photographs I have are taken on his camera. I guess I kept these pics for the way they are composed with identical backgrounds but are not really "couple" photographs. In a sense they evoke the mood of the time rather than existing merely as a testament of a romantic relationship. Almost I think like a Frankie magazine project.

This also reminds me that we had possibly the best kept student rooms in the history of student life:)

Newcastle

I had to return to Australia for awhile, principally to meet family in Newcastle.

I hadn't spent much time in Newcastle while I lived in Australia.  It turned out to be a pretty town with spectacular beaches and a relaxed lifestyle.  And it was good to have some downtime with family. Though my life at the moment is a LOT of downtime!

What was most surprising was the mild culture shock in returning to Australia given that I lived there for a decade and it is not long since I moved.  Partly this was because Newcastle is a very white town unlike Sydney which probably has the most diverse population of all Australian cities. Partly because it has been easy to slip back into Asian life, not that I anticipated that it would be difficult given how frequent my trips to India were in the decade I was in Australia.  At any event I felt like I was navigating a familiar and yet strange landscape . Again I had that old feeling best captured by DH Lawrence. A landscape of mystery and beauty yet somehow colourless lives. Having lived in Australia I know this to be not true, rather life is good and bad in equal measures much like elsewhere.  Yet this is the overwhelming impression left by over large houses, quiet streets devoid of people and the general lack of colour and movement in public spaces.

Additionally I had forgotten how large houses are in Australia. Previously I hadn't given it much thought but suddenly it seemed pointless, every house has a good deal of unused space, each room requires furniture and so on.  This in turn creates the feeling of emptiness, already present in a vast country. Compounding this is the poor public transport away from Sydney.

Still autumn is probably one of the best times to visit Australia. The weather is crisp and cool, the Australian light at its best and everywhere along the coast there is dense grey green vegetation broken by blue seas.

My nieces have grown. The elder one is a lot quieter though her zany self breaks through now and then. She is in school and her studies, her peers and their interests occupy most of her time. The younger one, still at home, is a scamp and not surprisingly a lot of attention is focussed on her.

The nieces are about 1000% into Frozen.  I have to confess that I dislike Disney products and Frozen is no exception.  I tend to prefer Anglo-French whimsy and gentleness (like Charlie and Lola) or original fairy tales that are dark and complex, unlike their sanitised Disney versions. Frozen is touted as a female empowerment story but in reality it is a trite tale that is so common to modern Western feminism (I can do without a man, sisters forever!) laced with Disney pop ballads that are simply not my kind of music.  Still it was lovely to listen to my nieces singing, one in her high, clear voice the other with her childish lisp.

Given Newcastle, my niece is probably the only child of Indian heritage in her school.  She is a third gen Australian and yet you can see that there are still issues she has to negotiate.  On the one hand she is (rightfully) immersed in the culture of the country. But this cocktail of Disney stories (and Australian Disney products are overwhelmingly white, its rare to spot a Mulan, Pocahontas or Tiana), fairies, gothic Mattel and the like have little correlation with how she looks. It is one thing to consume it as foreign product as one may in India, another to negotiate it as part of the culture. At the same time, her grandparents tales from Indian mythology are alien to her in some ways. The niece is a well adjusted child but also an intelligent one and you can see that her schooling experience i.e. her position in the larger society and culture at home raises some questions.

We also went shopping for the kids. Everything, and I mean everything, is gender segregated, from clothes to toys to kiddie TV shows. The entire girl section is pink, the entire boy section blue and camouflage print.  In some ways we have to feel grateful that there is no kid consumer base being tapped into in India - for the large part children watch and read and play with the same things. Having said that, the nieces do have the beach, the playground, even their own little garden all of which they enjoy and it is fun for the adults too.

Going back meant looking at everything with a fresh pair of eyes.  I don't know what the future holds but it looks like it will be awhile before I contemplate a return to Sydney. And at the moment being here, dividing time between Singapore and India, feels right.

Singapore Shrines

Some old buildings are preserved in Singapore, you see a few of these when you are walking around Tiong Bahru, Joo Chiat, Tanjong Pagar and Little India, where these pictures were taken. On many of these buildings you often find a small metal shrine of red and gold either mounted on a column or on the ground.  Its a pretty simple affair, largely joss sticks and oranges. Sometimes what looks like a yellow sweetmeat. Though pretty much identical in a way, each is also quite different.  Some are well tended, some aren't cared for at all. And in Little India, sometimes a little idol of an Indian god is added.  

I couldn't get much information about them except of course that they seem to be shrines for houses and shops, for perhaps the usual purposes like bringing good luck or warding off the evil eye.  One old gentleman was amused by my interest in his shrine but didn't speak enough English, instead he pointed heavenwards and made a prayer sign so I take it that they are some kind of domestic gods.  It's possible that these are also present outside flats but of course they are not part of street life in the manner of older structures. 

In fact now and then walking around you see temporary structures for religious purposes. The other day there was a structure with a lot of red paper objects in it, from The Billion Shop I gather its some kind of old funeral ritual.  And it's not uncommon to stumble upon ceremonies that include singing and prayer. 

The pleasures of flaneuring:)

Strathfield, NSW 2216

My first Korean drama post I think was more interesting for its description of Strathfield - or so I was told:) So I thought I might write a bit about the Australian suburbs I have lived in.

When I first moved to Sydney in 2002, I did some preliminary research on suburbs and my heart was set on Wollstonecraft or Bronte, purely for literary reasons:) And there was Glebe, where on a November day in 1999 I thought to myself one day I will live in this city. But when I saw the houses I hesitated. The rentals were high and of course that made a difference. But the charming cottages that were advertised turned out to be pocket sized and inconvenient. These were after all workers cottages in the 19th and 20th century that had gained serious cred simply by aging.  Eventually I decided to be a proper Asian immigrant and take a flat in Strathfield.

Even this was perhaps a little left-field because most Indians are wedded to the mortgage and a  proper house (preferably somewhere out west like Fairfield and beyond) within months of arrival.  In my firm, which was predominantly white, European attorneys would move to the eastern fringes with its beaches or the north shore. In fact Sydney has a enormous deal of suburb snobbery and it can be quite amusing to see the silent judgements being made when you mention where you live.  It didn't bother me, all postcodes being born equal as far as I was concerned:)

The reason for moving to Strathfield was fairly simple. It was well connected by train and it took me about 20 minutes to get to work in the city. Apart from this, it was one of few suburbs at that point that had high rise buildings and flats. There were in fact just a couple, squeezed into land along the tracks as is common in Sydney.  The buildings were mediocre - I still hold that Australians cannot design high rises, plumping for impractical open arrangements with a great deal of glass (making them furnaces in summer) intended to look like advertisements for modern city living or buildings that resembled hotels with long dark corridors.  Mine was the latter. But it was still better than the large expanse of suburbia that is most of Sydney.  The fringes of Sydney are beautiful but its interior is the death of the soul, suddenly all the anti-suburbia literature of the West makes sense.  There is a nothingness to this, as if you would be slowly numbed by these suburbs of similarly lined houses, a strip of the same shops in each centre with liquor, gambling and a supermarket predominant and a station that always led to a Railway Street. Strathfield on the other hand was an old suburb with pretty houses but the influx of immigrants and buildings with shops beneath meant that it remained lively even at a late hour. This was a big deal to me, because at this point almost all of Sydney would fade away by 6 pm.  In fact everything started early and ended early, not the best situation for a night owl like me. The other factor was my father's intended visits, I did not want the usual fate of parents in these cities, the endless wait for someone with a car to take you around to show the sights. This way he could see the city on his own time.

My building in Strathfield had a formidable Russian lady as the manager who was completely intolerant regarding the rules of the building. To put it politely she was a f**king pain in the arse. There was, as can be common in Sydney, a Russian club around the corner and a few other Eastern European structures from memory. The flat itself was comfortable, I had taken a 2 bedder as my brother was to join me later. One peculiarity of the building (and later I found of every other building in Strathfield) was that the fire alarm went off every day. The building was full of Koreans and everyone blamed their cooking practices. But given the regularity I suspect there was something a little more to it, perhaps a cosy arrangement between building management and the fireies.

As I mentioned earlier, the parts of the suburb near the station were full of Koreans.  There used to be minor gripes from visitors about not understanding signage etc. but it never affected me. It stood to reason that if you were an immigrant with little or no knowledge of English, you would aggregate in an area and that any services provided would need to cater to the local community.  Often the lack of English meant that communication was difficult, not that many people tried. This was in fact a characteristic of Sydney, even someone you see for years may not acknowledge you-initially it feels racial till you realise that everyone has had the Sydney cold shoulder and even new arrivals slip into this mode of behaviour.  A lot of folk who ran small services were however pleasant. The flower seller was a a sweet lady. There was a store that did small time repairs on clothes, handbags etc - it's a little hard to explain here that there was a joy in this because it's so hard to find in Sydney. For the most part, we didn't really eat out at the Korean places - though I always wanted to try the piquantly named Mr Dduckbocki Miss Kkochi. Instead for Asian, almost all of Strathfield, went to the Saigon Bowl - though it wasn't the best in town it set me off on love for Vietnamese cuisine. And of course there was the little clothes shop which didn't break the bank but had stylish office wear that lasted forever.  For I found that all my shopping for Sydney had been for nought, nothing was proper for Sydney mores or the weather. One thing that came out of my stay in Strathfield was that to date I know when Korean is being spoken.  I heard a lot of it and it became easy to distinguish (the alphabets too but that is relatively simple to differentiate) from other Asian languages.

Strathfield in fact also had an Indian presence though this grew stronger as you moved towards Homebush. There were more than a few Indian stores and towards Homebush you could also get cheap dosais and the like.  In this sense, it was perfect for a newbie to the city.

I lived in two of the apartment complexes in Strathfield till I moved out in 2006. The second one had a Macedonian manager who was polite and never failed to remind me that Alexander the Great was Macedonian. He had learnt a bit of Korean which meant he was popular with the residents and was in fact planning a visit to Korea when I left.  The building itself was like a plush hotel complete with indoor swimming pool.  Despite all this staying in the complexes wasn't a bad decision given the fact the burglary was fairly common in Strathfield's small apartment blocks with little or no security.

In a way Strathfield was an ideal way to ease into Sydney. It had familiar Indian elements and wildly different ones. Travelling was simple. It was easy for my dad to get around. My family in Sydney was close and yet not too close. Old relos who came around actually liked the sound of trains and shops below, unlike the natives. Signs of life as it were. My decision to go neither East nor West of the city in the initial years served me well.

I had arrived in Sydney in the somewhat contradictory states of excitement and clinical depression. These ebbed and flowed, in the beginning I was anxious to return home once I got my degree. Events back home had left a peculiar kind of hurt, the reasons were insufficient to feel so much and yet all these messy emotions were there. A lot happened in those 4 years. By the time I left I was in a calmer frame of mind, I had settled into my job, I had a degree and I had decided to stay on a bit more.

Reading

One of the nice things about Singapore is that you get a lot of SE Asian and East Asian "cultural offerings".  Kinokuniya is not too far from my brother's place and it has a much larger stock of titles from the region (including Indian titles) than I ever saw in Australia.  I have been bingeing a bit on translated Japanese books, mostly from the early 20th century and I truly haven't had enough of them whether it is Tanizaki, Dazai or Soseki. There is a lot of non-fiction too, e.g. Essays in Idleness that I haven't got around to. Suffice it to say that one can send a few hours browsing titles.

I haven't read much contemporary Japanese literature, bar Banana Yoshimoto (many happy hours spent at Melbourne University devouring her books).  Almost all contemporary literature shelves are taken up by Murakami, a writer I have never taken to. So when I spotted Strange Weather in Tokyo, I decided to give it a spin. Like so many Japanese books I have read it is written with a spare simplicity but never feels facile or lightweight. Unfolding in bars and trips where a good deal of food and copious amounts of alcohol are consumed, it traces the growing affection between a 30 something woman in the city and the much older teacher she meets by chance. Though not as hypnotic and more quotidian than Banana Yoshimoto, it draws you in and you have finished it in one slow but constant gulp, at one point I was reading it while walking to and fro from the station:) Next up, Manazuru!

Like with Murakami, I don't get the appeal of graphic novels aka comic books either.  I don't mean to diss them but they are just not my thing. Of course the Japanese produce a LOT of this, Kinokuniya in its English section itself has titles that run into several books.  But I was attracted to Oishinbo (Japanese Cuisine) - a bit strange given my usual reaction to books about the preparation of food is:

It turned out to be quite fun, an easy read. informative but never weighed down by descriptions of food. Though getting the hang of right to left reading takes a few pages. And what is with fictional Japanese and Korean fathers, on the 1 to 10 bastards scale, they are doing an admirable job holding up the 10 end:) 

K-Drama Overload

Eun-chan and food

I feel like I have watched one too many Korean dramas. This was partially because I was knocked out by a minor illness for nearly a month and it was an easy watch to while away the hours. In retrospect it wasn't a huge number of dramas though sufficient to pick up Korean TV tropes:)  Hello My Teacher and Pasta was largely because of my Gong Hyo-jin love (I first saw her in this segment on a flight, nothing special about the segment but I noticed her and I have liked her in almost everything I have seen, the best of her work being Crush and Blush). Hello My Teacher's "noona romance" was cute and I surprisingly liked Pasta's depiction of a somewhat sadomasochistic romance. I tried Lovers in Prague (what's with lame Korean drama titles-and let's never speak of the soundtracks) but gave up despite it starring one of my favourite Korean actresses, Jun Do-yeon.  But the best was reserved for the last, Coffee Prince. It was one of those dramas that suffuse one with a happy feeling at the end, kind of like watching 17 episodes of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (though the lead actor reminded me more of Shahrukh).  It's a great ensemble cast, where the casting is right for even the small parts.  And it has a secondary romance with a girl who doesn't go in for simpering innocence or fidelity. And it is based on a novel - novels that are rooted in genres (in this case romantic fiction and with more than a nod to Shakespearean cross-dressing tropes) but try to do more with it than a paint by numbers plot are always intriguing, if the TV serial is any indication the novel is neatly plotted and well thought out. But without doubt, the thing that makes Coffee Prince such a great drama is Yoon Eun-hye's portrayal of the garçon manqué, Eun chan, who never changes colours.  There has never been a better or more adorable tomboy on film. So if you have to watch a Korean drama, let it be Coffee Prince!

I am not the greatest fan of TV dramas, it is hard for me to sustain interest even in something like Mad Men.  Few K-dramas are perfect and there is a similarity to them once you watch a few - yet they have a certain hook which keeps you watching. But I can't see anything topping Coffee Prince so I will give it a rest. Though for research sake I should probably watch the original K-drama that started it all, Winter Sonata:)

Watching K-Dramas

I miss the DVD/CD shops in Sydney, for the most part English titles here are predictable American fare and its quite rare to spot a world section. So basically no European cinema. You do see a lot of Asian titles though, particularly TV Drama box-sets, and browsing through them is educational and a tad amusing. The other day a mega sale was on and the enterprising salesman, eager to break my K-Drama virginity (well he didn't use those exact words), recommended a few.  Apparently they are quite the thing around these parts. Ultimately I went with Jejungwon because it seemed a sciencey historical as opposed to the spicy sexy court intrigue saga which many appeared to be. At $10 for 40 episodes, it wasn't exactly expensive either. Also HANBOKS! If there is one garment that I will concede right away is superior to the sari, it is the hanbok. And indeed behold their glory in Jejungwon. 

 

HANBOK LUST

In the end it turned out to be not quite the epic it wanted to be and at 40 eps it was a bit much for me but it did get me thinking of a few things. Like I had kind of forgotten that in my first few years in Sydney I lived in a suburb that was very much Little Korea. There wasn't any particular reason for choosing the suburb except it was close to work. Plus I lived in several suburbs in Sydney simply to get a flavour of different cultures.  The Koreans were considered insular but this hardly bothered me, in my experience as an Army brat it's rare not to encounter insularity.  And they were  nice enough people, there were a lot of smiles but little talk due to the language barrier though now and then someone would use a few words of Hindi.  I in turn got used to the pleasant cadences of the Korean language. The suburb was pretty much run by and for Koreans, at the cafe below staff would look a bit bemused if we wandered in for coffee.  The best part for me was a wonderful clothes store which was affordable and stocked clothing in sizes I could wear, the stuff there lasted me for ever.  Several years later I moved out to a very white part of Sydney which was a different experience in itself.

In my first few years in Sydney I used to watch a lot of Asian cinema, partly because my brother had been in Shanghai and I had spent a few weeks there. The rental stores always carried Asian titles and you could count on a few releases given this was a time when a few independent cinemas actually existed in Sydney.  Korean cinema was hyped up in the papers as must see cinema so we duly went along to see a few. Plus SBS would screen a lot of foreign cinema (sadly this is also a casualty of restructuring and changes at the station and the fare is less varied these days).  Offhand now I can recollect Spring Summer..., 3-Iron, Oldboy (probably the most well known), Il Mare etc.  Each of the movies was engaging but it left you feeling that something was not right or incomplete (I often have this feeling with Indian movies too) and more often than not if I had to compile a top ten list in those years it would have included a Chinese or Japanese movie instead of a Korean one.  I still watch Korean movies, particularly on flights. They are always watchable, beautiful to look at and stocked with beautiful people and yet its hard to find a piece that is exceptional. And more often than not they are marred by a sense of melodrama. The only exception to this is Untold Scandal, which to me is the best version EVER of Dangerous Liaisons. So it maybe that I prefer the restraint and amorality of the Japanese:) Having said that the Koreans employ melodrama very well. It never rings false as in a Hollywood movie neither is it loud and stretched beyond belief as in an Indian movie. It can be a superior work like Pieta. Or a shamelessly manipulative movie like The Way Home. But some underlying purity of intent will make you bawl at the end, promise yourself to call your grandmother often and be completely embarrassed at being taken in by its manipulation:) 

So much ink has been spilled on K-Pop, Hallyu, K-Drama and the like that it's not my intention to add to it (though no doubt my take on it is different being Indian). Suffice it to say that they are inventive and dabble in far more genres than Indian cinema is capable of but also have the "hook" that reels in devotees of popular culture.  It is a created world that is as enticing as anything set up by Hollywood or Bollywood.  There is one small difference - perhaps because the vitality of the industry is fairly recent - and that is that despite all the artifice and created glamour and melodrama, some kind of true and pure feeling runs underneath. It is there in varying degrees, in the best it is there in spades, in the worst absent.  What Korean visual culture lacks in subtlety it makes up with this. All the more because it is so much absent in most modern cinema where more often than not the only  two modes available are irony and crassness. In that context, a number of Korean films are also chaste, the TV dramas even more so. While the movies are more experimental, there is still some degree of sexual reserve.

Coming back to Jejungwon, all of this is true of the serial (which as it happens was not entirely successful). Taking in the rise of its hero from a member of the untouchable caste  to a senior doctor in Korea's first Western hospital (the eponymous Jejungwon), it opts for a broad brush treatment.  The good are very good, the bad are very bad, it is timid in its treatment of the politics of the era and the hero rarely catches a break before ultimately triumphing.  Really not terribly different from an Indian drama of the 1950s, this in fact comes equipped with a Nagesh like light relief character too.  All its tropes will be familiar from Indian cinema (this is not to say it is inspired by Indian cinema, rather there are some common sensibilities at work in Asia). Despite all this it has its pleasures. And it is subtle and moving in parts.

#EXCUSE THEIR BEAUTY

#WEST IS BEST

One of the pleasures for a history buff of course is that you can go back and look at actual events that took place (most wtf moment, what the Japanese killed and burned a Korean Queen?!). Unsurprisingly most of the Japanese in the series exist only as villains (except for the filmic cliche of a Japanese girl falling in love with a Korean aristocrat-doctor). Neither was I aware of a rigid caste system in Korea, in fact the country appears to have been in the grip of strangulating mores for a long time. It also turned out that a number of run of the mill dramas I had seen inflight (Masquerade, A Frozen Flower) were not set in some vaguely mythical past but set in specific periods of the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties (the Koreans seem to be on par with the British in their love of period dramas). As far as I can see even the costuming is specific, the hanboks of Jejungwon change with time.

The other is that its three main characters, roughly the poor, ostracised and bright boy, the aristocrat-scientist and the emancipated beauty, are nicely etched.  Their actions for the most part make sense and despite the archetypes they are cast as, they seem real and the actors do their parts more than justice. The three main leads and some of the smaller parts are solidly cast (though at times some visible plastic surgery is a distraction:)). Again despite the flaws - the melodrama and lack of subtlety principally - something runs underneath that tugs at you in much the same way as if it were real. But the most remarkable feature of the drama for me was the female protagonist, Seok-Ran (played by Han Hye-jin). Neither an aristocrat nor middle class, her character has freedom and an understanding father who allows her to make her own choices which include becoming a doctor.  Her choice of the outcast hero makes perfect sense within the context of the drama.  But at no point does the drama confine her or define her by this romance.  Which is remarkable given how much I have read about sexism in Korea and its arts (obviously not all that true or rather more complex than usually portrayed). Everything about the character is so perfectly judged that neither does it set up the progressive/reactionary doomed sexual relationship like many Western dramas (Howard's End, South Riding) nor does it go in for the complete devotion and self-abasement demanded of women in Indian dramas. Rather Seok-Ran is intellectually curious and devoted to her career, tops the exams over the two men who love her and if required chooses her calling over her husband.  None of this is shown as out of the ordinary nor does she lose her husband over it, rather throughout she is strong and compassionate and respected for it. She is an inspirational heroine in a middling drama and Hye-jin's performance never falters even for a moment.  You know you cannot be her but you would like to be Seok-Ran. It also reminded me of a movie I saw in Australia which was much lighter in tone (Private Eye) and where the actress had a small role but the character was similarly a turn of the century inventor in firm charge of her own life.

The other major factor in Korean dramas from what I can see is the parental relationship. Almost everything I have seen explores the bond from its most dysfunctional and yet unbreakable (many fathers with an undercurrent of violence!) to filial devotion, especially for a mother. Korean cinema treats this particularly well and it also embeds the romance in the context of these relationships, often in a far better way than Indian movies. Jejungwon is no different.  For e.g. Jejungwon's central scene is the acknowledgement by a son of his father and though played for effect and very weepy, it is also strangely affecting.

And on that note let it be said that no Korean man in cinema or TV land is afraid of crying-the violence, the romance, the tears must have surely resulted in many pop cultural studies  deconstructing Korean masculinity:) This being Korea the tears are bountiful and perfect, almost beautiful on the male face so to say:)  Move over Rajendra Kumar and Shahrukh, your cry face is simply no match!

#CRY FOR KOREA

#UNSPILLED TEARS FOR KOREA

I may or may not be on my way to a K-Drama addiction...we will see:) In the meantime though I do need a break from 40 hrs of viewing so you might have to wait awhile.  Next up...possibly The Painter of the Wind.