The wheel of time keeps on turning, it waits for no one. How time flies, it feels as if Thaipusam was just a couple of months ago, but now Pongal is already here. Singapore being a multicultural city, there is one festival after another non-stop. While Deepavali decorations are still shining bright in good old rustic Little India, Christmas light are also up in swanky cosmopolitan Orchard Road. And before Christmas carols have really faded away, stalls selling Chinese New Year decorations are already rolling out to the streets with a blast. And now once again it is time to wish Happy Pongal to cows and girls alike. This year I just saw that there is some huge and colourful pongal pot decorating the bazaar in Little India. And while I was passing by the shops I suddenly had this urge to buy one of those earthern pots. Not that I will know how to make pongal myself. Until now I don't even know what exactly is the secret behind pongal, the sugar or the milk or what extra ingredients. It's like when something is there you just eat, you don't even think whether it's prasad or what, food is food.

Apparently in India Pongal means so much more than just having your sweet rice and sugarcane. There is big celebration. There are dances performed traditionally at Pongal, like Kummi and Kolattam. I was just reading a chapter on folk dance in a dance book, and it gives an interesting definition of folk dance as a form of collective expression, often reflecting daily lives of the society at work or at play, and often in correspondence to different times and events of the year, to the cycles of nature. In this case of course it is the time of harvest. I guess in Singapore people have no concept of seasons not only because it is a tropical place but also because we have no farmers here, in fact we are all urban folks so removed from nature, we are not able to feel the wonders of nature, how different plants respond to the cycles of the year and so on. But if you just stop and think for a moment, isn't it amazing? Everything in the world, from the planets revolving around the sun to all plants and animals, has a sort of rhythmic cycle to it. I suppose women would be more aware of natural cycles than men? Men just need to know when to go work and when to come home, madness on Monday, bottlenecks on Friday, and relaxation during weekend. Women have an internal biological clock, their moods wax and wane like the moon, and they are the ones who give life from one generation to the next.

We tend to think Bharathanatyam whenever we think dance. Actually folk dance is also part of the same cultural heritage that should never be forgotten. It can be a pure joy to watch too. For sure there is no complicated rhythms of calculated jathis and tirmanams, just something simple like step, skip, step, skip. But hey, if the dancers are really into it, it can feel like your heartbeat itself skipping. The quick swing of the shoulder and turn of the torso seems so free, as light and natural as ripened crops bending under a breeze. And a quick glance over the shoulder does not look for the audience's gaze, it's more like one heeding the joyful call of a bird in the distance. It all looks so carefree - but be careful, as they are doing that gypsy move, jerking their hands and elbow side to side, or doing that fast twirl with a careless smile, they may well be stealing a piece of your heart away!

Sometimes you can afford to let your hair down a bit. Think about it, most non-Indians wouldn't be able to tell the difference between classical Indian dance and folk dance. You can bet they will enjoy watching a folk dance rather than Bharathanatyam. I mean I once had a Chinese taxi driver telling me he is impressed how sophisticated the rhythms and movements of Bharathanatyam can be. But other than that, if you look at the local media, it's like even people working in the national newspaper here wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Bollywood and Bharathanatyam, and they probably can't care less. (Just recently, they used a picture of a Bharathanatyam dancer to publicise Bollywood party in a pub.) It's like after all these years of national education and efforts to promote racial harmony, there will still be people who say Indian dance is just running around trees. Anyway, Bollywood is Bollywood. During the last Deepavali, I saw a bit of this movie on TV where some amorous thug is checking out the character of Asin up and down, and the camera imitates his roving eyes by hovering around her chest. After that I told myself that's it, I will not waste time watching another Tamil movie until something really good comes. I mean you may argue that in these movies the bad guys will not come to a good end (after a lot of chasing and fighting of course), but what's the point? The movie in the main is already encouraging the cheapest form of fantasy. So never mind such entertainment. Folk dance on the other hand is always valid as a traditional art form. Say somebody living in a village will never get to learn classical dance, but does some folk dance, that's also something. Most important thing is doing the best you can. Incidentally, I just heard that a Muruga song that some of my fellow dancers are now learning is in fact written by an anonymous taxi driver. Isn't that something?

Time is a funny thing. It will not be the same thing to two different persons. It all depends on how you make use of it. You can spend a whole day daydreaming, or you can spend it to do a lot of meaningful things. It's like in dance, you may be counting the same length of time in 8 beats, but if you're doing first speed, you just cover say 4 steps, and if you're doing second speed, you cover 8 steps, and third speed will be 16. In the long run that makes a vast difference! You know this story about Lord Krishna disguising himself as a sage and challenging a king to a game of chess. What he asked for if he won was to have one grain of rice in the first square, two grains in the second and so on. The king hearing that thought that was such a small request, but he when lost the game and started adding the grains, he realised the grains reached like one million by the 20th square and one trillion by the 40th square! The king then learnt his lesson. Talking about mathematics, I just learnt something else interesting about tala cycles. In Carnatic music, when you do first speed, you sing sa re ga ma pa da ni sa in one cycle, and if it's second speed you sing both arohanam and avrohanam in one cycle, third speed means twice arohanam and avrohanam, fourth speed means four times. But in Hindustani music it's actually so different, whereas ekgun and dugun seem similar, being single and double time, what you call third speed would effectively be chougun which is quadruple time here, and what you call fourth speed would be athgun or eight times. Tigun or triple time in Hindustani music means like completing three times in one cycle, so what that means is you will have to divide 16 beats into three! My first reaction was, how can that possibly be done? It sounds as impossible as trisecting an angle with compass and straight rule, the old Greek problem that is impossible to solve. Well the solution is in fact simply to count dha dhin dhin dha in triplets. Definitely takes practice!

I digress too much. Guess what I just want to say is, what matters most about annual festivals is probably not how much you enjoy the festive food. What I like is how these festivals mark time, for time is something you can easily lose track of; how they remind us to be mindful of life, to keep starting from a clean slate and be fruitful.