The world on a sitar string

Can a wall of PRs and spin-doctors suppress youthful exuberance? No, says MALA KUMAR, who went to check out Pandit Ravi Shankar and his favourite disciple, daughter Anoushka. This was the Pandit’s first visit to the City in a decade.

Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash

Will the mantle fit?

WOULD BRINDAVAN’S Krishna be as popular if he had not played the flute? Would the flute-playing Venugopala be as loved if it were not for his colourful personality? Which brings us to the question: who is greater, the art or the artist? There are no straight answers, and that is the mystique of art.

But when it comes to sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, one thing is clear: you can’t separate the man and his music. The diminutive man, who charms people with his disarming smile, humour, and graciousness, is also the man who makes magic with the strings of the sitar. Whether we know him as a Bharat Ratna, MP, sitar maestro, or the man who dared to flaunt his unconventional lifestyle, he has undoubtedly been one of the musical ambassadors of India. Whatever his foibles, love him for moving us with the tunes for “Saare jahan se acchaa” and “Miley sur mera tumhaara”. Bangaloreans got to enjoy his music when SPIC-MACAY Foundation hosted a concert by him and his daughter-shishya, Anoushka, at the Chowdaiah Friday.

“I’m coming to Bangalore after 10 years,” said the Pandit, at a press conference earlier at the gracious Taj West End. “I’m going to miss many of my old listeners who won’t be able to come to the concert for various reasons. But I hope the younger generation of Bangalore will come to the concert. I can still remember the beauty of playing to a small, intimate gathering at places like the Gayana Samaj. It was excellent. But now, we are on tour most of the time, with concerts in big halls, and I miss performing for select audiences consisting of 200-300 music lovers.”

Well, the City’s young and old did enjoy the maestro’s music, Anoushka’s sitar strains in Raag Madhuvanthi set the mood for the evening.

“I’m thrilled to be both teacher and father to Anoushka,” said the proud father, who married her mother Sukanya Rajan, seven years after she was born. Which parent wouldn’t be thrilled to see a daughter receiving rave reviews from the world press, though many critics would carp that she is bereft of true talent? But then, that she has been the youngest and first recipient of the British Parliament’s House of Commons Shield is indeed something to strum about. So is the fact that she has been the first woman to perform at the Ramakrishna Centre, Kolkata.

“Awards are great for the ego!” exclaimed the ebullient Anoushka. So is she a talented instrumentalist, or actress, or Carnatic singer, or classical dancer, or the lucky kid of a famous father? At the press conference, she came across as a media-savvy, warm, professional musician, and concerned daughter repeating the mediapersons’ queries into her father’s ears, and smiling at her mother sitting across her. On stage, she was a confident artiste.

“A famous artiste once commented that if he closed his eyes and heard me playing the sitar, he would not be able to tell that the player was a woman!” revealed Anoushka, who was brought up in London and Delhi, and graduated with merit from Encinitas, California. “As Ravi Shankar’s daughter and as a sitar player who is young and female, I’ve got quite a bit of attention. Though I enjoyed it at first, I started feeling frustrated with these little things. It’s music that matters most to me.”

Anoushka’s resum
 looks great. At age 13, she made her performing debut in New Delhi. The same year, she entered the recording studio for the first time to play on her father’s recording, In Celebration. Two years later, she helped as conductor with her father and George Harrison, former Beatle and Ravi Shankar’s friend and frequent colleague, on the 1997 Angel release, Chants of India. In 1998, her first solo recording, Anoushka, was released followed by Anourag in August 2000, and Live at Carnegie Hall in October 2001. She assisted her father on his Grammy Award-winning album, Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000. “I’m going to take more time over my next album,” said the girl, who was in a lovely salwar kameez. “Indian clothes make me feel so nice and feminine,” she said in an aside.

“As artistes, we’re always happy to perform for good causes. I performed for a fundraising concert organised by Trudie Styler for the Tibet Foundation Peace Garden in London along with Madonna, Vanessa Redgrave, Lulu, Bryan Adams, and Alan Rickman,” said Anoushka.

She also performed at the World Economic Forum, organised by Quincy Jones and Phil Ramone along with Bono of U2, Lauryn Hill, and Peter Gabriel. At the performance she premiered a new piece composed by her father titled “Mood Circle”. She took part in the star-studded Rainforest Foundation Benefit Concert in Carnegie Hall, organised by Sting and Trudie Styler. Also performing there were Elton John, Patti La Belle, Nina Simone, and James Taylor. That evening was dedicated in part to the late George Harrison, and Anoushka performed a short piece composed by her father in his memory.

“It’s wonderful to be in Bangalore,” gushed both father and daughter. Anoushka was here earlier to act in Pamela Rooks’ film Dance Like a Man. The Shankars are now busy with the upcoming world music centre in New Delhi, and their hectic concert tours.

Anoushka is also championing her father’s Concerto No. 1 for Sitar and Orchestra, which she first performed with conductor Zubin Mehta. In July 1999, she premiered a new work for the sitar and cello, written by her father, with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at the Evian Festival. In January 2001, she made her conducting debut at Siri Fort Auditorium in New Delhi. She conducted a 22-member orchestra performing a new and intricate composition of her father’s titled “Kalyan”.

At Chowdaiah, Anoushka surprised the audience with a deftly rendered Carnatic piece, “Raghuvamsa sudha”. “I started learning Carnatic vocal from my mother much before I started learning sitar from my father,” she said.

During the three-hour concert, Panditji played his favourite Bihaag and the duo brought the house down with a medley of ragas and folk music. “The rapport that we share on stage is inexplicable,” Panditji once said. “There definitely seems to be something telepathic when we play together.” “Spirits… some drink it, some channelise it towards God. I feel it when I play the sitar. Music is spiritual. It is so personal and yet it is something I can share with so many hundreds of people,” said the octogenarian in his soft voice.

Though Anoushka is his most famous student, the maestro did not forget to remember his old Bangalore student N.R. Rama Rao and others. At no stage was there a mention of Nora Jones, Anoushka’s half-sister who walked away with five Grammies. Anoushka, though she was in the running, had come a cropper.

The representatives of 25-year-old SPIC-MACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth) had requested the press to keep off the artistes’ personal lives. Strictly no personal questions, was the diktat. But surely they must know that youthful exuberance, however protected by PRs and spin-doctors, cannot be suppressed.

Off the dais, Anoushka happily pushed aside her kameez to show us her pretty navel jewellery and the tattoo on her back.

“I love red!” she exclaimed, flashing her red-painted fingernails. That the same fingers, burdened with such a formidable legacy, have worked ceaselessly and lovingly on a sitar is what makes the vivacious 21-year-old loveable too.

Hindu On Net

Berating Bush at the Oscars

The Academy Awards threw up a few surprises this year. Though artistic upsets are understandable, what was astonishing was the strength of the anger against the war, writes GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN.

A winning performance by Nicole Kidman in “The Hours”.

DEMOCRACY is still alive in the United States. In perhaps one of the darkest moments in its history, when President George Bush chose to trample democratic norms by his aggression towards Iraq in shocking disregard for world opinion, Hollywood stood defiant on the Oscar night. The film fraternity used the podium to condemn the world’s most powerful leader.

And, they could get away with it. Freedom of speech is still a beautiful reality in the U.S., where citizens take pride in the fact that their nation rests on the unique pillar of liberty. And, at the Oscars presentation, movie men and women were both restrained and brazen in telling millions of people around the globe what they felt about their Government.

Most of the stars who walked into the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles last Sunday evening literally dressed down as a mark of sorrow for what was happening in Iraq. If diamonds gave way to flowers and peace dove pins, bright colours were largely shunned in favour of black and shades of pastel in a ceremony that is invariably marked by glitz, a ceremony where top designers sweat it out to show off their spunkiest styles.

In any case, celebrities though walking on the red carpet did not pause to pose for cameras and questions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to do away with this traditional number.

Michael Moore’s moods … receiving his Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine”.

There were some directors, actors and actresses who however thought that this was not enough. They spared no words. Michael Moore — whose work, “Bowling For Columbine” won a special prize at Cannes last year and the Documentary Feature Oscar on Sunday — was the harshest critic. He invited his fellow documentary nominees on stage, saying that they were there “in solidarity with me, because we like non-fiction, and we are living in fictitious times…We live in a time where we have a man who is sending us to war for fictitious reasons (seems true, does it not, for Washington is yet to find Saddam Hussein’s evil arsenal)…We are against this war Mr. Bush. Shame on you.”

Bold and provocative though Moore was, his film was disappointing. On the surface, “Bowling For Columbine”, appears to be an uncompromising look at the pathology of violence and fear in America, where the number of guns is said to outnumber that of voters and television sets. Moore, who shot the docu-drama soon after the Columbine school massacre, loses his sense of balance when he tries to examine issues such as race relations, the gun lobby, and the country’s historical propensity for destructiveness. At the end of the movie, the question was whether Moore had toed the line of Charlton Heston (the star of “Ten Commandments” and “Ben Hur”) and his National Rifle Association.

Of course, Moore would explain this by saying that the gun culture and the bloody mess in Iraq are separate, and a tacit support for personal weapons does not indicate a nod for Bush’s, in some ways personal, agenda in Iraq.

But the moot point here is not so much Moore’s inner contradiction as it is the freedom he enjoys in gunland to mouth the severest of indictments against his President and be applauded for it. There was more of this as the Oscar ceremony sailed into the night. Adrien Brody — who clinched the Best Actor honour for his title role in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist’ — amazed everyone. Nobody expected him to walk away with this statuette, and at 29 he was the youngest to have won it, beating veterans such as Michael Caine (“The Quiet American”) and Jack Nicholson (“About Schmidt”). As musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who lived through World War II by hiding from the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto, Brody lost 14 kg to look like the real-life pianist.

When Brody came to collect his piece of treasure, there were more surprises in store. Refusing to be intimidated by the gong meant to drown his voice because the time allotted to each winner was up, Brody said: “My experience in making this picture made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanisation of the people in times of war, and the repercussions of war. And whether you believe in God or Allah, may he watch over you, and let us pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.”

In what was also seen as an upset, and, more important, a fearless move by the Academy to recognise talent, and distinguish it from the talent’s personal life, Polanski was adjudged the Best Director. He ran away from the U.S. in 1977 following a statutory rape charge, and was expectedly not at the theatre to receive his Oscar.

On the futility of war… Adrien Brody (left) “The Planist” in Roman Polanski’s (right) film.

“The Pianist” is yet another dramatisation of the Holocaust by a man whose own Jewish family died during the Nazi tyranny. What was most appealing in the film was the touching twist at the end: a German officer finds the pianist in a rundown house, asks him who he is, and when Szpilman answers that he is a musician, the Nazi commands him to play the piano lying in one corner of the room. The Jew plays, and the music changes the hardened soldier, and Szpilman lives all over again. Polanski’s creation happily sounded the right notes for the large Academy voters, who probably saw an answer to war and conflict in “The Pianist”. At least, they could not have missed the futility of picking up a gun to solve a problem.

If Polanski was a first time winner (he was nominated earlier for “Chinatown” and “Tess”, and got a writing nod for “Rosemary’s Baby”), so was Nicole Kidman, though it was widely anticipated the she would be the Best Actress for her 30-minute role as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours”. Sporting a fake nose, Kidman came closest to being beaten by Renee Zellweger in the musical “Chicago”, which thumped up six “Little Men”, including one for the Best Movie.

Based on a play written by a Chicago court reporter and first produced in 1926, “Chicago” is the first musical after the 1968 “Oliver” to garner the top prize. Although its helmer, Rob Marshall had done a stage version of “Chicago”, he is new to cinema. ‘The film, unlike “Moulin Rouge”, has a soul, and the crime thriller grips you with not just its magnificence, not just its razzle-dazzle of crooning and tap dancing (Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who got a supporting award, and Richard Gere, with not even a nomination, had to sing and learn to dance), but also with its slick picturisation. Marshall weaves the story of two murderesses and a clever lawyer (who tells them that if they cannot be famous, they can certainly be infamous) into an elevating, spirit stirring operetta. Its cinematic qualities remain intact; rather they glow.

Yet, Marshall did not wear the Best Director’s crown, in a strange dichotomy in the way the Academy thinks and acts. Can a man who helms the Best Film not possibly be the Best Director?

Perhaps, it is this state of contradiction that helps the Americans to thrive and rise above dark clouds. As Barbara Streisand said, “I am happy to be living in a country that guarantees every citizen, including artists, the right to say and sing what they believe.” And, indeed, the Oscars provided the right pep for the artistic tribe to berate Bush.

Hindu On Net

“The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers”

THERE IS just one word to describe this film — spectacular! In terms of its visuals, grandeur, the effects and the sheer size of the production.

The battle between good and evil is hugely potent for story telling, and in this film, the abundance of it fills the frames for close to three hours. And the breathtaking landscapes and awesome creatures created out of a fertile mind are spectacles to behold.

Director Peter Jackson takes up the second part of the trilogy where there is much uncertainty in Middle Earth.

Joining the Fellowship Of The Rings, protagonists dwarf Gimli (John Rhys Davies), the elf, Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and human Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the narration follows their run into the rolling hills of Rohan, a kingdom of noble cavalrymen.

The king, Theoden (Bernard Hill), has fallen under Saruman’s (Christopher Lee) deadly spell through the manipulations of his spy Wormtongue (Brad Dourif).

Eowyn (Mirinda Otto) is the king’s niece, who recognises a leader in the human Aragorn. And is also drawn to him as he is to her.

Gandalf (Ian McKellen) has been reborn as Gandalf, The White, following his fight with the Balrog. He reminds Aragorn of his destiny to unite the Rohan people with the last remaining stronghold of human resistance — Gondor. If all this were not enough, the three of them are also hot on the heels of a group of fearsome Uruk Hai Orcs, who have kidnapped two hobbits, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd).

The malevolent Saruman, creator of the Uruk Hai, has openly allied with the dark lord Sauron, the once omnipotent forger of the Ring Of Power. While the latter is still massing armies, in the wasteland of Mordor, the former is on the move, dispatching a group of wild barbarians to burn Rohan’s villages.

Meanwhile a 10,000-strong army is marching towards Edoras, where Aragorn and his companions find themselves.

The hobbits, Sam (Sean Astin) and Frodo (Elijah Wood), are marching towards Mordor for completion of the mission of destroying The Ring in the volcano of Mount Doom — the journey is slow and treacherous.

The Ring is beginning to drain Frodo of all his energies and he is getting increasingly obsessed with it. Enter Gollum, the computer-generated, twisted creature, who becomes their companion through sheer compulsion. This creature delivers a full-fledged dramatic performance — on the one hand, he is a withered creature poisoned by centuries long contact with the Ring, and on the other, he is devious and full of awful plans to divest the Ring from Frodo. These two sides of this character clash rather brilliantly as the good and the bad collide and argue. In the close-ups, this oddity is almost mesmerising.

The film moves on till the time Aragorn convinces King Theoden to fight with him at helms deep and destroy the hordes that will be in the kingdom before sundown. Forty-five minutes of action follows where the battle is of epic proportions — and also shows what really is at stake — hundreds of cowering refugees, and a few hundred brave men against a snarling horde of bloodthirsty monsters. Thankfully, the crafty wizard Gandlalf who returns to help saves them. Astride a magnificent white horse, he is a sight with his long white hair and flowing white robe as his steed gallops into the battle.

Though filmed with awesome detailing, the battle is long drawn out — and no matter how grand the spectacle, one gets tired of so much action.

With snow-capped mountains, sparkling lakes and monstrous forests, the film abounds in visual beauty. The places look like paradise till the weird creatures start making their appearances. Enormous flying dragons, hyena-like creatures, animals with sharp teeth and talking tress are part of the wild fantasies of the writer. In fact, Treebeard, who looks a bit weird and comical as the talking tree and who refuses to take sides initially but later agrees to fight, is symbolic of the destruction of trees and vegetation.

CHITRA MAHESH

Hindu On Net

Sachin, Amitabh in Billionaires Club

London


March 26.

Film actor Amitabh Bachchan and cricket star Sachin Tendulkar are in the United Kingdom’s list of top 20 Indian billionaires.

This is for the first time that Indians living in India have been named in a U.K. rich list of Asians.

The chairman of Wipro, Azim Premji, whose wealth is estimated to be Rs. 176 billions, is leading the list, which was published by the weekly, Eastern Eye.

Amitabh Bachchan and Tendulkar share the 17th spot with Rs. 2 billions.

UNI

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Fairdeal bags Jhankaar Beats’ overseas rights

Our Bureau

MUMBAI, March 26

PRITISH Nandy Communications Ltd (PNC) has sold the overseas theatrical and home video rights of its forthcoming film Jhankaar Beats to Fairdeal International.

Jhankaar Beats will be released in theatres worldwide this summer. Jhankaar Beats, directed by first-timer, Mr Sujoy Ghosh, stars Juhi Chawla, Rahul Bose, Sanjay Suri, Rinke Khanna, Riya Sen and Shayan Munshi.

PNC has also recently sold the satellite broadcast rights of its films Sur and Bollywood Calling to Star TV for telecast.

The company had reported a net profit of Rs 1.03 crore during the December 2002 quarter. In the September 2002 quarter, the company had a net loss of Rs 1.41 crore.

During the current fiscal, PNC’s release in Kaante helped it to return to profits. The company expects to end the current fiscal on a positive note.

The share price of PNC ended today at Rs 18.40 on BSE against the previous close of Rs 18.80.

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