Imagine if you have grown up somewhere in the UK instead of say India or Singapore. The movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai or let's say Jeans may not have meant as much to you as the BBC comeday Goodness Gracious Me. You may have learnt about Asha Bhosle only from the hit song by the band Cornershop. Maybe you do not care about Bollywood movies at all and would rather name people like M. Night Shyamalan or Ismail Merchant as your heroes. You may not have seen the movie Salaam Bombay by Mira Nair, much less heard about Pather Panchali by Satyaljit Ray. Maybe then, it is understandable if you proclaim the movie Slumdog Millionaire, played mainly by British Indian actors who speak impeccable English, as a wonderful film portraying poverty in India?

Jai Ho... and so it is indeed for A.R. Rahman at the Oscars, where he won Best Song and Best Original Score with the movie which has become a phenomenon in itself. It certainly must feel like a great moment for many as he incorporated some words in Tamil for his acceptance speech, in front of a predominantly white audience - "Ella Pugazhum Iraivannukey". (Poltically correct as he was, he had also included some words in Hindi - Mere Pas Ma Hai, and as we all know, it is always a good idea to mention the mother at an award show, that's something universal.) I personally feel very happy for him, for he has come a long way indeed, from doing music for Tamil movies and Hindi movies, even a Chinese movie once, and now this, becoming the first Indian musician to win an Oscar. But the way his personal triumph is celebrated in India leaves me somewhat bemused and amused. In fact I was rather embarassed when A.R. Rahman left the stage saying 'God bless' and those sexy Indian dancers were standing there posing in their pink costumes, shaking their hips for the audience.

Let's be clear about this - you can bet many would concur when anyway says this - the heyday of A.R. Rahman was when he exploded into the scene in the 1990s as a musical genius, doing music for movies like Roja, Bombay, Indian, Jeans, Dil Se (or Uyire in the Tamil version), Taal (featuring Anil Kapoor in another unlikeable role long before Slumdog), Sangamam and Alaipayuthey. Since then he has become established as a household name and remained a consistent and reliable music director, still deserving as an inspiration to a younger generation with musical aspirations, but... Well, let's just say this, a song like Jai Ho is so slight in its melody that it is simply something fittingly used for end credits, in fact it is a reject from the movie Yuvraaj. It is named a 'best song' now only because suddenly there is an idiot-proof movie about India that even an American audience can understand, and for them it's like, hey, I've never listened to any Indian song before but this one has a nice groove, let's be generous to these dark Asian people for once and give them an award! That's all to it. Imagine if your family has been running an Indian restaurant for generations, and one day you do catering for some western tourists and you give them some vegetarian burgers, Manchurian noodles and Kulfi; just because these white men come praising you for what you have served them, should you suddenly become proud of being Indian? Anybody who feels that way would just make my stomach turn. Well, ok, like A.R. Rahman said, he chose love instead of hate, and there he was on stage at the Oscars. Fine, a song like Jai Ho may turn out to be a good entry point for non-Indian audience who would not care for Indian popular or classical music otherwise. But to me it's like, thank God there is so much more in Indian music than this.

The winning formula of Slumdog Millionaire is really quite simple. It is much like an English guided tour in the incredible land of India - give the tourists some familiar or stereotypical images that capture their imagination, like the Taj Mahal, the slums in Mumbai, the dhoby and so on, but try to tell the story in English so that they will feel a bit more at home; when it comes to the characters as small children, no problem, you can have Hindi, they are so cute and lovable anyway, they can even shake their heads like how Indians normally do, the white folks won't understand the expression but they will find it cute too. And don't forget the dirtiest toilets in Mumbai, you can never go wrong with a scene like that, the audience is just dying to see how terrible and filthy life can be in India. (Anyway director Danny Boyle is so adept with it since he has already filmed the dirtiest toilet in Scotland in his early career.) Of course the film also benefits from a story based on the novel Q & A by Indian author Vikas Swarup, about a young chaiwalla who makes it big-time by becoming the greatest winner ever of a TV quiz show - this premise of the movie is just genius as a way to introduce a western audience to the history and culture of India. No quiz show in real life would ask such a simple question like what the figure of Lord Rama holds in his right hand. But it would be something new and fascinating to non-Indians, not to mention of course that it is a narrative device leading to a scene of inter-ethnic riots in Mumbai. No point for guessing that they would also include a question on cricket. This narrative structure of the story tied to quiz questions on India is a great way of enticing the audience to discover India as a cultural tourist, it gives one instant gratification because just by watching the movie, you experience the sensation of decoding this exotic land bit by bit, without actually having to read any history book on India, which will just give you a headache (is it any wonder most tourists prefer to read the Kama Sutra?). Now, in case it still doesn't sound convincing enough as a winning movie? You top it off with a sensational title which incorporates words like slum, dog and millionaire, and there you have it!

If it's sounding like I'm slamming the movie here, well, a thousand apologies. I've actually enjoyed it much more than one particular British movie about South Asians, namely Brick Lane. And I'm not even discussing whether the original novel has misrepresented the Bengali community there in real life, all that has been done. I would just say that if the movie is anything to go by, the novel by Monica Ali is probably more hype than anything. It is basically about a woman who has married in her teens to a man twice her age and moved to the East End in London to live as an obedient housewife until she learnt a bit more independence by doing a sewing job from home, and soon she finds her woman's liberation by having affair with a delivery man. That is so lame and predictable and it just fails to win my sympathy because I think there are more interesting immigrant stories even in Singapore, like how Bangladeshi workers are exploited and repatriated for no fault of theirs, or how south Indian workers are paid by a warped practice in which they have to return half the official salary to the employer every month. The artistic design of Brick Lane seems simply to be banking on the social aftermath of September 11 as a fashionable topic and to make the characters complex and contradictory. Hence you have this housewife falling for the young man but disapproving of his terrorist tendencies and refusing to go further with him, and you also have a husband who quotes British philosophers and disapproves of Islamic fundamentalism but eventually decides to return to Bangladesh thinking that things will not be the same again for his community in Britain after September 11. Is the intention simply to confuse and frustrate the reader or audience so that one may call it a sophisticated piece of work?

Slumdog Millionaire, on the hand, is thankfully a story that does not take itself so seriously. As we are watching it, we can all laugh about how Amitabh Bacchan is worshipped by his crazy fans in India, for instance. (By the way, I've seen the man in person too, it's no big deal.) Of couse, just by watching the movie, you would be none the wiser as to what the problem is in this massive country. You would just think people there are crazy and enjoy killing one another. Actually, I thought it would make an interesting scene if only some question like this is asked as part of the game show in the movie: say, what was the name of the British cartographer who drew the border between India and Pakistan within a matter of weeks? But I guess the British audience would not appreciate the joke too much. Then again, I must say there was one question in the movie that was rather interesting - it was about the Adam's Bridge between India and Sri Lanka, a shrewd and subtle political reference. Unfortunately it is so subtly tucked into the film that one could easily have missed it. It somehow echoes the state of awareness in the world for the Tamil region in Sri Lanka - largely muted. Incidentally, the British singer M.I.A. of Ceylonese Tamil origin, whose music is also featured in Slumdog Millionaire, who has been nominated for Oscar as well as Grammy, has also appeared on PBS talking about the issue of genocide in Sri Lanka, a comment which later saw a response of criticism from the Sri Lanka foreign minister. (Her father by the way was a founding member of a student organisation in support of Tamil Eelam.) But the Oscars did not turn out to be a similar platform for her views. Anyway, it seems not long ago that Tamil Eelam supporters were full of hope that they could go the way of Kosovo, but by now hope just seems ever dimmer and the comparison just seems ludicrous, for western interest is simply not there.

Politics aside, I have also enjoyed listening to the music of M.I.A. and I would always insist that culture in the periphery of a diaspora can be equally valid, though in this case I must say A.R. Rahman is more like the kind of music I can listen to on a regular basis. Her music is basically hip-hop-based with some Asian and African flavours here and there, and the kind that will appeal more to a British rather than American audience. Oh, if we are still on the topic of Sri Lanka and Tamil Tigers, there is a novel that may be worth reading, entitled Love Marriage, written by V.V. Ganeshananthan. And if you really think you have a soft spot for poor kids in India, there is a 2004 documentary film Born Into Brothels about children of prostitutes in Calcutta, it is now out on DVD. But of course as we all know, as well illustrated by the Slumdog phenomenon now, fiction will always have more appeal than reality.

Gajamukha, Vinayaka, Ganapathi, ... the elephant-headed deity Ganesha with so many names is said to be the remover of obstacles and hence always the first Hindu deity to be prayed to. He is incidentally said to be the one who wrote down from dictation the Mahabharata, with the tip of a tusk broken from himself. Sadly, with all the positive qualitites like intelligence which we like to associate with the elephant like this, there is a story seldom told of this majestic animal which is rightly an eternal symbol of India. In fact, it is probably because the animal seems so revered that one does not realise it has become an animal most badly abused in India, precisely for the sake of religious worship. You would probably not spare a thought for this as you see impressive images of the grand Thrissur Pooram festival, where elephants stand in a row amidst the fanfare with big crowds thronging about, to the tumultous sound of not one but many many chenda. It would never occur to you that these elephants have to travel for hours under the hot sun, walking on hot tar road without the luxury of footwear like what we human beings have; that in fact they are going without food and water for hours as if we are deciding for them to perform a penance.

A documentary entitled The 18th Elephant, which I happened to see some days back in a little screening here (its director and screenwriter were actually present), tells the sad stories of elephants suffering precisely such abuse in India. Narrated in the first person from the point of view of the elephants, the documentary in Malayalam reveals how badly elephants have been treated in the name of religion, in the hand of mahouts who have no love for them at all. They walk uncomfortably with their legs chained, sometimes with spiked shackles, and when they so much as make noise or try to shake off the chains that are binding them, they get shot with bullets to tranquilise them. You can easily imagine how inhumane and brutal that is if you put yourself in the shoe of such an elephant, made to perform tasks as a prisoner with your legs chained 24 hours a day. But apparently those people who are keeping elephants for religious and non-religious purposes never think even for a minute about animal rights. So much for a culture that supposedly preaches ahimsa. As the film puts it through imaginary words of the elephants, all those rituals performed with all the chains and burdens on the poor animals are totally incomprehensible. All that the elephants can feel is vedana - pain. One may ask whether these rituals can be monitored with proper guidelines so as to ensure better welfare of the elephants. Or better stiil, one may question if such practices should just be stopped altogether. Apparently a temple like Guruvayur actually keeps as many as 55 elephants. Are such things necessary? I also heard, incidentally, that a study by a foreigner has already shown that elephants in Indian temples tend to be ill-treated. There are about 800 captive elephants in Kerala.

The most gruesome part of the documentary shows that elephants have also been maimed or killed in countrysides by greedy farm owners of today who encroach on the natural habitats of wildlife and then decide the elephants need to be punished if they try to take food from these new farm lands. What they do is so cruel it's unthinkable. They disguise little bombs in the form of food which would explode in the mouths of the elephants, leaving them better dead than alive. And of course, that would facilitate the greedy people in tearing the tusk from the semi-conscious elephant and then selling it as ivory to make a fortune for themselves. The biggest joke is that some of this ivory will be carved into figures of Ganesha. Is that our idea of reverence for gods and nature, our idea of being one with nature? Now you can argue that Hindu practices of offering and wearing flowers or breaking coconuts show a tradition of love for nature, but this? This and any religious practice that involves the abuse and torture of elephants should only be called primitive. It is not reverence for the elephants, it is like killing an animal or a child to perform a sacrifice and steal energy or strength for our own well-being, it is a form of exploitation and it belongs only to the darkest manifestations of Hindu culture that needs not be. I almost feel now like I can no longer listen to a Ganesha Stuthi or watch an elephant dance the same innocent way again. Maybe you can say the drunken elephant who was in the story of Krishna fighting his evil uncle Kamsa just had to be killed and his tusk used to impale Kamsa. But that is old mythology, go find some philosophical meaning in it. Religious practices can change for the better. Thousands of years ago animal sacrifice might have been common; in fact Indians were apparently known to eat beef too until King Asoka who believed in Buddhism decided to put a stop to it, and now we all know of not eating beef as part of Hindu culture.

I was recently reading this excellent book entitled Being Indian by Pavan K. Varma, who makes very sharp social observations and criticisms on Indian society. One thing he said was that "traditional Hindu society had no real concept of moral problems. Any action considered wrong in a certain context is condoned and even lauded in a different context." He also quoted a book (The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society, by Richard Lannoy) which said: "India has no developed indigenous ethical system - it has concentrated more on the mystical apprehension of an ultimately reality which transcends good and evil than on differentiating between good and evil acts." The special concept one finds in Hinduism instead is dharma. And Pavan Varma adds: "Dharma is an undefined and ehemeral ideal... A man can do no wrong if he acts to protect his vadharma, conduct that is right for one's jati or station. He cannot be held accountable for actions that are a part of his ashramadharma, conduct that is right for one's stage of life. He canot be penalised for transgressions made in the interests of kuladharma, conduct that is right for one's family. And finally, almost anything he does would be justified in a situation of distress or emergency, when he would be guided by his appadharma, conduct that is right in moments of crisis." Now I hope this isn't the right interpretation or it implies that being Indian means shirking all moral judgements and leaving everything to fate or karma, and that also means we definitely have a lost cause here then.

Filmmakers of The 18th Elephant clearly run the risk of facing hostility from the community as their message can easily be twisted and wrongly interpreted as anti-Hindu. If you do an internet search on this film you can see how a report about the film in The Hindu newspaper can be phrased so conservatively in order not to offend the religious public. That sadly may just perpetuate the romantic idea of love for elephants without people realising that elephants are best left on their own to roam free. And please, religion itself is not the object of criticism here. I for one still like the image of Ganesha, especially the symbols of Pasa and Ankusa. But the lesson there is that we should apply the rein and the hook on ourselves, to exercise self-control and avoid unnecessary desires so as to go on the right path.

For the first time ever, like a dream come true, I have finally seen a performance by Kalakshetra here in Singapore last month. But at the end of it, I was like: is that it? I mean I was very impressed by the dancers' impeccably precise execution of all dance sequences, tirmanam and all, the way their arms are raised to equal angles with equal spacing between their bodies during a nattadavu, the perfect circles they form now and then, absolutely no sloppiness like what you may be used to in watching amateur performances. It was also a joy watching six to eight male dancers on stage in one go, with their veshti beautifully wrapped around in two or three tiers; I mean if you cull all the male dancers from whichever group you can find here you can count them off in one hand, maybe two if you include non-professionals. And the effective lighting design gives the Kalakshetra dancers an extra aura, the amber light giving a lovely warmth to the girls with their heavy garlands, the blue background matching the blue veshti of the guys so divinely as fitting for a dance drama devoted to Krishna. But still, something seems missing despite the picture-perfect beauty of Dasaru Kanda Krishna, a work set to music of Purandaradasa, depicting several scenes of Krishna's life...

I must say the show affords beautiful tableaus on stage, like how a few gopis would be plucking on one side and a few others talking and laughing on the other side, and then you have one gopi bursting into the scene breaking up a couple other gopis and making one U-turn to reach another group, all the action orchestrated with well-calculated timing. When they do the usual elephant and crocodile story which otherwise can be enacted by a solo dancer, they end with an elaborate tableau of a dancer as elephant, a dancer doing the crocodile with open jaws, then the divine manifestation by another dancers, and extra dancers would be flanking on two sides, raising their arms with palms up towards the centrepiece. It's like they have the manpower and they will use it to match western ballet in grandeur (sans those fake houses or fake forests which western productions would invest heavily on, we Indian dancers don't believe in such things). But ultimately, you realise that the songs are just a loose collection of compositions with the theme of Krishna rather than an opera with the dramatic structure like in western classical music, and what it means is that after a joyous stick dance somewhere in the middle, you don't have anything like an action-packed final showdown for climactic scene, it's just one nice song after another. I read that this dance drama was performed for the ISKCON and I imagine such gentle subtlety might be perfect in that context, but I think people like me just have not reached that tranquil or transcendental state of mind to meditate on the messages behind the dance instead of watching how human bodies can move. In fact I'm reminded somewhat now of those colourful illustrations in the Bhagavad Gita painted by western devotees - it's most exquisite, even awe-inspiring, but somehow so distant from me. I don't know how to say it but, it's all too clean, maybe?

Kalakshetra's current director Leela Samson (a most splendid dancer herself, I heard from an alumnus who was under her), who incidentally choreographed this production, has said, and I quote, that "the Kalakshetra style is a way of rendering an adavu, the insistence on touching the toes in a particular way, taking the bend to its fullness, stretching the arm to its completeness, the emphasis points, the manner in which you take a turn...". Well the result is very evident on stage of course. But it should be pointed out that when Rukmini Devi founded Kalakshetra at the Theosophical Society 7 decades ago, when she devised a sequence of adavus to be practised with clarity and smoothness, she was actually taking the cue from ballet exercises. In fact the story worth repeating is that Rukmini was prompted by the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova to discover her own Indian tradition in dance. So this dance form which we like to trace all the way back to Bharata Muni, as if it has never changed in 2,000 years, is in fact catalysed by foreign ideas in the form as we know it today. Makes one think how it would be like if we attempt now to make Bharatanatyam movements a bit less clean instead, say by imagining how the devadasis used to do it?

I'm not trying to provoke here, just thinking of alternative possibilities. It's like if the organisers did not bring this production here this time, they could also have brought Kalakshetra's recent adaptation of Man in the Iron Mask, the old French thriller novel by Alexandre Dumas, that could really have been a scream. But guess they just want to play it safe, especially when there is so much prestige surrounding this occasion of Kalakshetra performing in Singapore, so many distinguished guests in the community coming, so many companies, banks, airlines, foundations and all supporting this show (you will never see so much corporate support for local productions, guess the rationale is that it's pointless to support groups that are still struggling, you don't get any mileage doing that), you feel as if there has never been Indian classical dance in Singapore all these years and they are showing it now to a privileged and fortunate lot. You see so many well-heeled patrons coming in their best suits or best dresses (makes me wonder how dancers in Kalakshetra have, in contrast, eschewed ties, shoes and socks in their cottage-style campus), arriving ceremoniously early to rub shoulders with others or fashionably late to just catch the show, hardly anyone having time even to stop by that little music stall set up by someone coming all the way from India for this festival (if you thought the CD prices would be daylight robbery, what pity, I must inform you all too late now that it would have been your steal actually). So, in short, the programme just had to be something that makes for a pleasant outing rather than make a stir.

All said, I think the Kalakshetra style is apparently something that has to be held up high like a monument with fine, exquisite carvings meant to last through the sands of time, as a means of preserving a heritage that might be too intangible otherwise. But if all that Bharatanatyam dancers like us works towards is that kind of precision without some casual human touch or some new themes, it may just become a form of decorative art, something like wallpaper. Our audience should learn to appreciate more contemporary works too, and by that I don't just mean performances that incorporate some multimedia or some modern theme while basically doing an entire margam repertoire from alarippu to thillana. Even within the past few weeks I have seen some recitals moving out of the classical dance format, like one using electronic music and interacting with special lighting effects, or one where the dancer speaks simultaneously and also interacts with the audience. We can move out of the confinement of a fixed mentality and keep a tradition alive by giving it some space to breathe as well, no?

Is secularisation the solution to all that tension in our society? Maybe, if people are not able to practise their religions without having negative sentiments towards people of other faiths. But if secularisation means something like the European way where people simply stop going to church, I wonder what will happening to our cultural life, like all the wonderful music and dance shows at the temples that do not cost a cent? I was just thinking about this because the Mandalabhishegam festival at the Sivan Temple has now begun and there will be lots of programmes for one and a half months, with many big artistes coming from India! Without such cultural festivals, you may have to watch the same singers at some expensive concert hall where you have to pay $50 to $100 for a good seat. Without such temple events, the only cultural festivals you get may just be some cinematic performances by playback singers sponsored by airline companies and then folk dances by primary school pupils, some noisy events where politicians like to make their appearances, far away like in the Northwest corner of the island!

Music can be religious. Or it can just be spiritual, depending on where your conviction stands. Music can also just be music you connect with for whatever reason. Two weeks back I was watching a play at the Singapore Fringe Festival, entitled Eclipse, which dealt with the lives of three generations of men in a family affected by the 1947 Partition. The story is about a young Singaporean man making a journey to his father's birthplace in Hyderabad to trace his roots, only to be greeted with strange curiosity. It is a monologue written by local playwright Haresh Sharma, who incidentally is of Sindhi origin himself (hence making one wonder how much of the story echoes real family history). Anyway in this play, the father was forced to leave his homeland during Partition, like other Hindu families who have fallen on the wrong side of the drawn boundary. There was already no news from the grandfather, who had long left the family to the care of the wife while leading his own new life in Japan. The father came to Singapore with hopes of a life without all the strife for the new generation. And so we have the narrator or the 'main' character, the son, played by one UK-based Umar Ahmed, a rather cute and likeable actor who switches admirably between a Scottish and an Indian accent - he misses on the Singapore accent, but never mind. What got me puzzled halfway through was the music sung by the actor as part of the show. He opened the act by singing Sweet Home Alabama, a country-blues-rock, jumping around with a lot of youthful energy to establish that we are looking at the third generation of the family. When it came to some scenes in Hyderabad or about the earlier generations, you hear some old Hindi songs. But at some point in time, he was sitting in a chair and suddenly breaking into Mast Qalander, the Qawwali song made popular by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I was like, what is that supposed to mean, whose role is he playing? Then it was revealed towards the end that the son is gay and he actually has a Muslim boyfriend! There is even a romantic declaration of love over the phone that will make homophobes fall off their chairs and the best thing is, the father in the story supposedly approves of the relationship! This is like the movie Bombay (which is so explosive we never even get to see in Singapore) and Brokeback Mountain (oh Heath Ledger, bless his soul) rolled into one, and made into a happy ending! Amazingly, the script is so well crafted that the play did not feel half as corny as it sounds here, and one walks out of the theatre instead with the poignant thought that a love transcending all social categories and without abuse or inequality is so precious because it is like an impossible dream. And of course, what people fail to realise with all the political boundaries and religious divides around, is that all human beings basically share the same longing for light over darkness, a light that is equivalent to divinity in one form of representation or other.

I somewhat like the use of music in the play to demonstrate how music can transcend all boundaries. I can't help thinking after that about songs by Kabir, the 15th-century poet whose philosophy represents a synthesis of Hindu and Muslim concepts. I'll just copy here the liner notes of a CD recording by Jagjit Singh: "From Hinduism [Kabir] accepts the concept of reincarnation and the law of Karma, and from Islam he adapts the affirmation of the single God and the rejection of caste system and idolatry. ... According to Kabir, the entire human life is an interplay of two spiritual principles. One is the personal soul (Jivatma) and the other is God (Paramatma). He opines that salvation is the process of bringing into union these two divine principles." OK, if you do not appreciate ghazals, you won't enjoy this music, but just want to mention here.

Talking about the Partition, it is inevitable that one invokes the figure of Gandhi. Last Sunday television was just showing the movie Gandhi My Father, a movie that would attract worshippers and detractors of Gandhi alike. It is the story of Gandhi's son, who apparently had a strained relationship with him and was eventually estranged from him; to him, the father figure of India was lacking in love and forgiveness as a father at the family level. It is simply great stuff for gossip, which detractors of Gandhi will happily lap up, as if to prove the point that Gandhi's ideals could never have worked, look, he can't even run his own family well. But if you ask me, I would say that a great man needs not be perfect in every single sense, and his personal failings cannot be an argument against his social or political ideas. I never understand such modes of thinking based on cults of personality, where people will treat movie stars like gods, setting up shrines for Amitabh Bachchan or giving offerings to Rajinikanth, thinking of their idols as embodiments of perfection and expecting that they can never do wrong. Anyway, my favourite part of the movie is actually when Gandhi asks for his own son to be sued by his associate for wrongdoings, it sounds like a crazy obsession with righteousness, but hey, I think it is so wonderful because we have seen way too much nepotism in Asian society and politics. I didn't sit through the whole movie, but my other favourite scene is when Gandhi, working for a newspaper, gets reprimanded by his white boss for printing a headline describing a white man's demise as 'has died and is burned' - it sounds natural in Hindu customs but burial was more the norm in Western societies then and to Christian ears that sounded like one is going to hell!

Now let me go all the way back to talking about the ongoing cultural programme at Sivan Temple. Sunday was the Mahakumbabishegam, and then the series of programme kicked off with two concerts by one of my favourite carnatic singers, Nithyasree Mahadevan. I made it to the one on Tuesday, it was a nice concert lasting good two and a half hours, the main piece was Thyagaraja's famous Nidhi Chala Sukhama in Kalyani ragam and Mishra Chapu. After that there was an interesting song I had never heard before, it is a 'Navarasa Bhavam' song that covers the nine emotions, going from Adbuta (wonderment), Sringara (love) and so on to Veera (valour) and Shanti (peace). Just imagine the possibilities if the song is used for a dance! She also threw in some Hindustani flavour with a Meera Bhajan, Payo Ji Maine. It's not such an unusual thing of course to have a litte Hindustani song at a Carnatic concert. Perhaps musicians can try to mix up a bit more. The North versus South divide needs not be emphasised any further!

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.

Gandhi apparently once said: "He who owns more than he needs is a thief." Now you can either be cynical about it and say that probably Gandhi's own wife and children would not be able to stand him with his stoic lifestyle, or you can start reflecting on how much of the things you spend money on in your life is just unnecessary luxury or pure vanity. In fact, if we now pause and think about the impending problem of global warming today, we ought to paraphrase Gandhi and say: "He who consumes more than he needs is a criminal against mother nature." Does every family need to have a car? Do you really need air-conditioning the whole time wherever you are? Do Indian restaurants need to show they are modern by serving food on disposable plastic plates with plastic forks and spoons? (OK I'm not sure eating on banana leaves is a good idea for the forests, but contributing to plastic wastes that have to be burnt, that is definitely not cool for the atmosphere.)

I was almost wondering why the recent Live Earth concerts were held everywhere in the world including China (at least on a symbolic scale) and Japan but not in a big country like India. Well maybe the Bollywood artistes would not be deemed good role models considering the way they travel to far-flung places unnecessarily, filming in Switzerland when it has nothing to do with the storyline, even boasting about filming at seven wonders of the world, when it amounts to just a few seconds here and there! OK that's not really my point here, of course western rock stars can also be accused of the same thing with their world tour concerts, certainly more than Bollywood stars holding film awards around the world. (Well there were also cases of dumb Bollywood actors poaching endangered animals, but that's a separate story.) What I mean to criticise is the modern mentality that just because you have a little money, you want to travel all the way to lands far away like Europe for a 10-day holiday, rushing here and there to take pictures even when you don't have time to find out the history of the country you are in, when you might as well relax in a nearby country in a more meaningful trip. Tourism in 'exotic' lands is something that the media needs not promote any more. It is so endemic of the modern lifestyle, that you don't have time to do anything useful after your stressful working days and you just compensate by spending your money on a quick fix through your weekly retail therapy or your annual vanity trip that make your tour agents rich while burning fuel into the atmosphere. A lot of us get into a habit of simply spending money for the sake of spending money or for the sake of keeping up an external image, instead of spending time to improve our inner well-being.

There is an interesting song by Thyagaraja, Nidhi Chala Sukhama. It sings: "Oh my mind, tell me truly, which conduces greatly to happiness - wealth or the sight of the Lord? Which gives more happiness - flattery of mere men bound up in their own conceit or the singing of the Lord...?" Apparently the musical saint sang it when the ruler of Thanjavur invited him to his court, but he declined. It is a Hindu wisdom to be against praise of men for profit; even a guru is supposed to be impart knowledge to disciples for its own sake and not for guru dakshina. Maybe such attitudes are outdated now, we all would rather talk about the 'music business' or 'arts industry' because everything is commercialised. Nowadays musicians and dancers will find it hard to reject all performances at commercial events or performances to humour politicians, especially when you can't find any support for the arts in the community. Economy rules this day and age, that's all.

How many of us would have guessed that Purandaradasa, our Sangita Pitamaha, the one who composed thousands of songs, the one who fixed the scale of Mayamalavala Gowla for preliminary music training, who prescribed elementary lessons like sarali varisai, jantai varisai, was actually a worldly and greedy businessman in the early part of his life? He was born as a son of a banker or gem stone dealer and so it was quite natural that he expanded on his family's business and amassed wealth by hook or by crook. However he then discovered music and went on a search for the Divine through music, turning from a sinner to a saint; he gave up all his wealth and went about begging with his wife and children just enough to feed themselves. That's such an amazing story, for these days it is much easier to imagine artistes who start out being idealistic and then turn into mercenary businessmen as they grow older. Maybe wives and children are too demanding these days, and everything costs money, television, PC, handphones, sports shoes, etc. Anyway thank God Purandaradasa went the opposite direction, otherwise we would not have all those lovely songs still sung after 500 years - songs like Narayana Ninna Namada (in which Purandaradasa prays that his tongue gets the essence in chanting the Lord's name) or Jagadodharana (about Krishna stealing butter and Yasoda asking him to open his mouth, which reveals the whole universe). My current favourite is Venkatachala Nilayam, set to Sindhu Bhairavi. I don't actually know the significance of the song with regards to the Lord of the Seven Hills and so on, but it is certainly the kind of song that evokes the deepest emotions, such that make us human.

Doing Bharathanatyam can be boring sometimes. I mean when you are just practising dance steps mechanically, counting the beat but not feeling the music in your heart. When you are just keeping up with the steps and gestures, trying to remember everything by heart, and somehow it feels as if somebody else is dancing this but not you, you are more like a puppet at best. Shouldn't dancing be something natural and spontaneous, a form of art that is an expression of your personal feelings and impulses through the body, rather than a set of secret codes by means of hand gestures, which people who are not already in the know will probably not find time to decipher? Pardon me for saying this, but just for the sake of reflection, shouldn't a dancer simply be enjoying a dance like what you see in a movie? Take a look at that delightful dance scene of Aishwarya Rai in Guru, as she raises her arms towards the sky with joy, moving her hands freely about the wrists gracefully even with the rain splattering down, as she beats a rhythm against the pillars of a temple, or as she imitates the ducks waddling from side to side and the buffaloes moving with their horns. It's not much of a dance actually, so why does it fill one with joy watching a sequence like that? It's not just because it's Aishwarya Rai (anyway she has already gone the way of the Bachchan family now, end of story); the thing is that her movements convey a convincing sense of joy with the hellp of the music and the cinematography, so it feels as if the mountains and valleys are also coming alive with the swaying of her hips, and the audience understands immediately what it all means.

On the other hand, if it is say an annual Bharathanatyam dance show, what does it mean? Your friends coming to support just don't understand what the mudras are all about, your family is just hoping that you will look your glittery best and do them proud and have well-taken photos to prove later, while you are just struggling to execute the adavus and the mudras properly, praying that you won't forget any dance step and freeze on stage, and then hitting yourself in the head after making your blunder - it is a common occurrence, call it spontaneous memory failure or call it involuntary nervous system error. If nothing went seriously wrong, you can pat yourself on the back and then you have to quickly change, or quickly pack your makeup kit and costume jewellery and clear the dressing room and then go home trying not to think about the money you have spent tailoring the costume which you will now have to fold away to never see the light of day again for a long time. Everything is over in a flash, and you even begin to wonder how much of this chaotic affair and how much of the trouble you go through for it is purely about dance actually. Sometimes I also wonder how many girls are into dance more to please their parents than to please themselves, how many do it for activities points to get to a good college, how many just take up Bharathanatyam as a matter of course like they go to the temple and so on. It's probably a combination of different reasons. But I'm really wondering because if most girls pursue dance purely out of passion, why is it that an 'arangetram' here often means more like a farewell solo show before one gets married? Is it all a show to please other people then?

All right, I don't want to go into gender politics here so much. But I just had this half-crazy thought that perhaps the best people to preserve and promote the art of Bharathanatyam in the 21st century, taking over from the devadasis in the past, should be the male and gay dancers. For girls tend to dance for the sake of their parents before marriage and then stop dancing for the sake of their husbands after marriage. Male dancers, however, only dance for themeselves. OK, the reason that I'm mentioning the word gay here is more out of personal frustration actually. Sometimes I just feel Bharathanatyam is too decorative as a dance form. Generally speaking, you see too much of the lasya and too little of the tandava. So it can feel a bit against the nature of a male dancer; unless, of course if you're gay. I mean, if you watch the movies, male dancers are supposed to just shake their shoulders and thrust their elbows forward while stepping up with bent knees, that kind of thing. In fact, perhaps ideally I should also dance with a lungi, maybe even stop halfway and tie it up like they do in the song Vazha Meenu!

Now again I don't want to be misunderstood here. In no way am I suggesting that there is anything wrong with being gay. To me there is no big difference between a gay man and any human being in the basic fact that he, like anybody else, wants to love and be loved. You may think that gay men tend to be vain, but then straight men can also be vain in their own ways, maybe in their case they are flaunting their cars instead of their outfits, and maybe that's because they have money but no dress sense. And if a dancer happens to be gay, even if you think he is vain and narcissistic, as long as the personal touch he infuses into the dance is positive, what's wrong? And of course a gay man can also be the kindest soul around; a gay man may live a more fulfilled life than what most of us are capable of in our short lives on earth. I must also add that, frankly, a lot of gender stereotyping in dance is unnecessary.

Anyway, I've just started learning a new dance in class, a Muruga Kautuvam. Guess it's still a long way for me from my dream of a dance of Nataraja, but to think positively, you can also say it's another step in that direction. And I should remind myself to always feel as proud as a peacock while dancing.