It is part of an annual ritual for music teachers and students to celebrate Thyagaraja Aradhana by gathering to sing and play songs by Thyagaraja, ending off with the Pancharatna kritis, which are considered the crowning achievements of the composer. This year also happens to be the 160th anniversary and we had a celebration at the temple earlier this month with different groups taking turns to perform. Now some Chinese university student who is interested in learning more about Indian culture witnessed the event and asked me later: was that a music competition? I laughed, feeling very amused. Why do people think that whenever different arts groups come together, it means competition? I replied that it's nothing like that actually, we had different Indian groups there but everybody was just coming to pay tribute to this great South Indian composer who has been honoured as a saint.

Well you can't blame people for not being in the know, especially if they are from another culture. Anyway most people around us would be more into movie songs than classical music; it is a sign of our time that even temple musicians can be heard playing movie songs at weddings - appadi podu podu podu and stuff like that. So I bet a majority of people would never have heard the song Jagadanandakaraka if not for the movie Anniyan - where incidentally Sudha Ragunathan is seen in a cameo singing this first song of the Pancharatna kritis. Purists would probably frown at the scene, where you see the movie actress planting herself in the temple crowd pretending to be singing behind the maestro. It also happens to be the very movie where you hear some nonsense pop ditty about coffee and capuccino. I shall not comment on those songs in the movie then. But I must confess I do enjoy the story of the movie itself, for after all it features probably the most patriotic serial killer in Tamil movie history since Kamal Hassan's Indian. Sometimes you really feel the society needs a superhero like that to punish people for being corrupt, selfish and inconsiderate. The movie is also very clever as it virtually portrays India as a case of schizophrenia, part bureaucrat, part trendy wannabe, and part pious, God-fearing devotee - taken together as a person, he would simple not be able to come to terms with himself.

Anyway, let's go back to Saint Thyagaraja. He has been described as a bhakta of Lord Rama. He wrote songs almost exculsively about Rama (with my limited knowledge, I am familiar with just one nice exception of a song - Shiva Shiva in Raga Pantuvarali). He has apparently written many songs about visions of Rama. Jagadanandakaraka is well-known for containing 108 names of Rama. Now a thought just struck me the other day when I was reflecting on the significance of Thyagaraja Aradhana as a spiritual experience for a music student and as a social event. Thyagaraja was a bhakta who had visions of Rama in various aspects, referred to in his compositions. Great singers and musicians recount such visions as they interpret works by composers like Thyagaraja, and they invoke Thyagaraja. The music artistes among us look forward to a darsana of these musical celebrities, while music students like us must look up to our teachers first. Meantime most people are virtually deaf to classical music. When you think about it, the bulk of people in the world are just so insignificant and so far away from divinity. But that's just one way of perceiving it of course. Actually, anybody can attempt to reach out to divinity in his or her own way, whether through the arts or through good deeds like helping the less fortunate. I have an impression that some people think of bhakti in terms of just performing rituals of worship and singing and chanting of names of deities. But that has to be just a narrow understanding. Incidentally, I remembering read some analysis in the internet highlighting that Thyagaraja's love for Rama also meant an admiration of Rama's positive attributes and virtues such as courage, qualities which we as individuals can also emulate. Wasn't Gandhi himself, who uttered He Ram to the last day of his life, inspired by Rama's courage and adherence of satya and dharma? Perhaps a God-fearing devotee and an art practitioner, a peace-lover and a fighter, can indeed be one person, and it's not going schizo!

Water is the last film in the famous (or notorious) trilogy by Deepa Mehta, a trilogy which has spanned a decade now, beginning with Fire, a story about two sisters-in-law who give up on their husbands and end up in a lesbian relatioship, followed by Earth, a story about ethnic riots during the 1947 partition. When I caught the long-awaited movie in the cinema last week in a very limited run, I had forgotten details of the previous two movies. But I do carry a memory of them being powerful stories and I expected no less from this latest (actually from 2005). The director has summed it all up herself long ago in an interview: "The trilogy is about elements on one level that nurture and destroy us. They are very tangible elements. Fire is about the politics of sexuality, Earth is about the politics of nationalism and Water is about the politics of religion." In terms of the visuals, she said that the scripts evoked certain colours, in Fire it was orange, white and green, whereas in Earth it was terra cotta, red and yellow. Well, for Water, you can easily guess that the predominant colour is white, a symbol of purity, as the Ganges river at Varanasi - which is the story setting - would evoke, but above all purity in a specific sense that is demanded very much of women and little of men.

The first few scenes of the movie already set the tone for the depressing movie, set in the 1930s. It starts with a girl who becomes a widow at the mere age of 7 or so and is sent to a house for widows in Varanasi, to live an ascetic life wearing white, abstaining from tasty food and avoiding contact with other folks in the city, spending the days praying and doing penance at the river. The earlier part of the movie concentrates on how how the little girl is bullied by the mean ones among the elderly widows, and how she strikes up a friendship with a kind old widow who would reminisce on the delicacies she used to enjoy as a child, as she does not even get to eat something as simple as a ladoo now . But the story's main character turns out to be a young and fair widow who falls in love with a charming young man. It is a forbidden love, obviously, but that said, the romance ends in a tragedy so cruel, you feel like questioning the film's creator whether it's absolutely necessary. You may also find the intended cultural cliches in the movie not to your taste, though you know what the director is getting at. For example, the lover played by Jon Abraham quotes Kalidasa's Meghdoot, the famous fantasy of sending love messages through clouds. (When asked how one could believe in such fantasies, he replies: how do people believe a statue can answer prayers?) He even plays a flute while waiting for his beloved to meet her at night! (Lord Krishna comes to mind.) For me, I have to say it just feels like a movie cliche when the young woman lights up a lamp to go out in the night and you hear a song going "piya ho...". (Music of the film is by A.R. Rahman, incidentally.) But sometimes a cliche can be used effectively, and that's what I feel about that powerful scene where one of the widows carries the child widow in her arms and rushes to the train station where Gandhi is giving a speech; in the background you hear a specially arranged version of Vaishnava Janto - Gandhi's favourite bhajan, of course. Amidst the crowd, she is desperately running after Gandhi like he is some deity, hoping for the child to be saved by him...

One criticism made by Indian critics on the movie is that it is historically inaccurate. I find that simply trivial, just as I find it amusing to hear western critics proclaim the movie as a 'majestic epic'. To me, I would call it a poetic work, but I won't have time to argue whether it should be named one of 5 best movies of the decade or one of 50 best. It's just a movie for goodness sake, you should look at what its messge is ultimately, which is spelt out at the end of the movie: there are 34 million widows in India according to a 2001 census, and many of them still life in the same way today ascribing to 'religious' rules set out 2,000 years ago - all this despite liberal ideas propagated by Gandhi about 60 or 70 years ago. I think Deepa Mehta has made her point cleverly with constant references to Gandhi throughout the movie. To add sarcasm, she has also created the comic character of an educated 'brown Englishman' who enjoys singing European classical music and quoting Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but sees no need for change in the status of women in India.

There ought to be more movies with social consciousness like this. The only thing unfortunate about Deepa Mehta is that she has become known for provoking religious sensibilities, for example by giving the characters in her lesbian story Fire the names Sita and Radha. Maybe that is why critics call her a 'self-hating Indian' and her film set in Varanasi was destroyed by a mob and thrown into the Ganges when she attempted to film Water in 2000 initially, so she had to film it later in Sri Lanka instead. There are actually other themes in the movie which need to be seen independently of the religion controversy, for example child abuse, which is something also touched on in movies like Monsoon Wedding. I would like to mention here that child prostitution is a very real issue. A study has shown that girls under 14 years of age constitute 30 per cent of 900,000 prostitutes in India. In absolute figures, India has the highest number of children exploited by prostitution in the world, followed by USA and Brazil. Now that's something an ideal world should be cleansed of.

It's new year, fireworks were exploding in a distance from my house. Inspired by the party mood, I decided to put on some CDs of party music. But I simply don't have much to suit the occasion, all I could dig out was a couple of hits collections of Shubha Mudgal and Hans Raj Hans. Anyway it's fun listening to some upbeat music I don't listen to on a regular basis. I guess I also happened to be a bit in a mood for Bhangra as I was watching Rang De Basanti on VCD that night. I have been taking a long time to watch the movie, not able to decide whether I love or hate it. My instinctive reaction was to resent the unlikely story of a British girl coming to India to direct a film on India's freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. It sounded like a lame excuse to put a blonde girl in an Indian movie for its own sake, I already hated such a formula when I saw Kisna. But on the other hand, it's also quite clever the way Rang De Basanti uses the British character to reflect on the Indian mentality, the tendency to kill one another for the smallest sectarian differences, and the fatalistic attitude of resigning to the present situation, preferring to 'adjust' instead of making changes. It's like heroic deeds belong to history and mythology and not to life as we know it.

It's very easy to contrast the western belief in progress and action with the Asian attitude of resigning to fate, the attitude that you can't stop good things or bad things from happening anyway since it's all karma. You may call it an over-simplified stereotype, but it's useful to magnify cultural differences sometimes just to learn something from it. Of course I'm not saying the western model is all perfect and ideal. Western ideas of progress are often not sustainable and have caused harm many a times. British thinker John Gray pointed out in his book Heresies that the western secular world view, what may be termed liberal humanism, is "simply the Christian view of the world with God left out", whereby humans are unique while other animals sharing the earth have no value in themselves, so "the earth is simply a mass of resources for human use". The same people would believe that with power over nature through science, they can create a better world than what existed before. The Marxist idea of the end of history, 'in which communism triumphs and destructive conflict then vanishes from the world, is transparently a secular mutation of Christain apocalyptic beliefs', Gray noted, the same true of 'Francis Fukuyama's equally absurd belief in universal salvation through 'global democratic capitalism'... what we have is myth masquerading as science". Today, the new faith is in technology rather than political action for better distribution of wealth. Governments are looking at intensive agriculture and genetically modified crops to feed the hungry, and imagining that economic growth will automatically remove poverty. But what the governments are implying is that we can all forget about political changes, when that is something that cannot be replaced by technology.

At the same time, John Gray observed that people may be getting cynical about politics due to its worst evils, for "if an absurdity like the Iraq war cannot be prevented, what hope is there of governments eradicating hunger?" The number of people who died in the September 11 attack has incidentally just been exceeded by Americans dying in Iraq. And that again is insignificant if you consider that 3,000 is the number of Iraqis who have been dying on a monthly basis in this war. With Saddam Hussein's execution, more conflicts can now be expected in Iraq, not less. Once again people in an Asian country will be killing one other to the advantage of the shrewd western powers. The same story as it has been in the colonial history of India and Southeast Asia.

I really meant to say a 'Happy New Year' to anybody who may be reading this, so maybe I should end with some humour. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, was once asked in an interview whether he thought there is evidence of intelligence in outer space. He replied: is there evidence of intelligence on earth?