What would you think if I sang out of tune?

Why does the Antakshari show on Star One, which has been designed to be a battle across the regions, not feature a team from South India? Most upsetting. I know many South Indians who are complete Hindi movies/music junkies. And given that it is widely rumored that we are spiritually, mathematically and musically inclined, I am not sure why we are not part of this TRP’s quest? So what if we have funny accents (sometimes) and are likely to come up with some incorrect usage?

I mean, if at all, it should make for even better television!

And even if we have imported the North Indian beauties and idol worship them in our cinema we have also exported some of our own “talent”, especially of the musical variety isn’t it? SP Balasubramaniam, Hariharan, Shankar Mahadevan, Kavita Krishnamoorthy, Suchitra Krishnamoorthy (?!), Sunita Rao and of course, AR Rehman! Not to forget all those tunes that Anand Milind religiously copied from Ilayaraja.

Anyway, back to the show, I found the team nomenclature annoyingly clichéd - Central Ki Jaan, North Ki Shaan and so on.

And oh, whenever there is some mention of the North team one can hear a faint strain of some Punjabi music - Ting-a-linga-ling-ling. Other North Indians must protest this erosion of their identity via bad television

But Antakshari is such a wonderful game isn’t it? From family get-togethers to Diwali parties to campus hostels in the middle of nowhere to mind numbingly boring weddings to Maine Pyar Kiya, everyone enjoys a good Antakshari.

One has played enough and more Antakshari growing up and much of my recollection of socialization with family, friends, neighbors and peer group in place of study/ work has some Antakshari associations. It used to be and continues to be such rowdy fun.

In my opinion, the best part about Antakshari is the inherent democratic nature of the game.

The rules are very amenable to be changed. Should the song that the next team/ person sing be with the consonant or the word or the vowel?

And while Antakshari possibly owes its origins to the thriving music output of Bollywood cinema, there is always the option of changing the language and I daresay create further chaos by making it multi-lingual. I used to hate Tamil antaksharis though, I mean, my cousins thought that my Tamil was very Delhi(?!) and non cousin Tamilians thought, I was singing in Palghat Tamil(Hmpfh!). No win basically. Hindi Anataksharis were certainly the best. The most comic would be English Antakshari. It sounded insanely funny and I suppose the English music repertoire of most people I knew then, was limited. It was mostly stuff that one picked up from the just launched Times FM radio station and a show hosted by Roshan Abbas called Livewire. Of course, this included very very lame pop music. You know gems like, Mysterious Girl I wanna get close to you. I think many years before one saw a shirtless Salman Khan, there was Peter Andre. I have a very vivid re-collection of the video, the joys of being a C&S Household. I know, I know. All of this was essential for the transition from girlhood to womanhood. English music constantly challenged some time tested beliefs. When going to and want to transformed itself into gonna and wanna. Or the fact that all sounds like Ttttt suddenly transformed to Dttt and o to aa. And of course, there was the mortal fear that someone might actually ask you what does, drove the chevy to the levee mean.

Ah, innocence!

Back to antakshari, sometimes when the teams are feeling particularly evil we can also incorporate radio and television ad jingles. I faintly recall once when a team of evil chitappas (dad’s younger brothers) were tripping the team of chittis (the better halves of the chitappas) on Na. After a while, a clever chitti improvised and sang, Na koyi dar, Na Ghotala. Jab lagao Harrison Tala. Of course, a minor war ensued and all that, though I did think it was particularly clever. But see, so what if those jingles never win awards or sell the products, at least for those two minutes it had a place in the spotlight and helped shatter male bastion. Speaking of awards, Radio finally has a place in the sun with the Kaan Awards. High time too given the number of really cool jingles that one gets to hear these days.

Undoubtedly, the best part about antakshari is the fact that it is really the best opportunity for toneless but passionate singers to masquerade as rockstars. Very briefly of course. There is also large empirical evidence (as suggested by TV contestants) that the quality of singing has an inverse relationship with the skill that a person possesses as an Antakshariar. I suppose if one must win the sur, taal and other minor details are compromised.

Anyway the question to be asked is - why is no team from South India on this show?

I am thinking that a big part of why the South Indians are not part of this Great Challenge is because of the team names. The four regions already have – Aan, Shaan, Jaan and Maan. I don’t think there are any other phonetically similar sounding Bollywood movie titles left for the South to take.

The Bollywood conspiracy or what?

Out of sheer boredom and to test my various conspiracy theories, I decided to do some quick research to understand this phenomenon better, drawing a cross section of South Indians across life-stages, I asked them, why did they think this exclusion had happened?

Erudite Mallu Colleague thinks it’s a Marketing Conspiracy. Why? Because the chief sponsor of the event is Colgate Maxifresh, which is the gel toothpaste variant. South Indians are apparently known to prefer hard-working white toothpastes and therefore the sponsor don’t think it is worth having a South team in the fray. And besides South Indians like to do (Kya aap Close Up Kartein hain, remember?) Close Up I believe. Such littleness!

Retired Indian Railways colony uncle thinks that it is actually a Political thing. As in Jayalalitha going to UP and giving a speech in Hindi has made Mayawati most insecure and she is worried that her Chief Ministership might be at risk should JJ decide to conquer UP. Really, I believe there was some SMS poll doing the rounds. Speaking of which, did anybody get the SMS on how we should send messages to support various Presidential candidates. From Narayanamurthy to Shabana Azmi, everybody is just one SMS away from the big job!! I say, someone ought to start a campaign for JJ. From Poe’s Garden to Mughal Gardens or some such. But what is with this SMS for President, SMS for making Taj the wonder of the world etc? Next they will probably have a reality show on TV, complete with auditions and stuff to pick the President!

Back to the research, Gult friend and VVS Laxman supporter attributes the South Indian exclusion to the World Cup fiasco. He thinks that people are in denial or dislike of all things Dravidian.

Given that the trend was so clear, I stopped the survey with this. I asked the same people if they wished to have the South Indians included as part of this contest.

Sample 1: Train Uncle: Yes
Why? Because there are so many Naarth Indians in South Indian cities, they must also get a chance. Why should they be left out?
Ummmm

Sample 2: Toothpaste Mallu: Yes
Of course, Of Course. But no Indi (Hindi) songs, only Tamil and Malayalam songs.
Errrr

Sample 3: Gultix: Yes
That is brilliant. They must encourage South Indian baays and North Indian girl’s teams.
Hmpfh!

Sigh. This is why. This is why. The enemy always lies within us. It is time to let go of those demons and put an end to maps getting redrawn, perhaps?

And somehow, maps make me think of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines when he talks about psychological distances and physical distances between countries and cities. Can cultures and the people part of those cultures, be constrained and fixed within boundaries of maps and times?

I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines [...] They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony [...] a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free - our looking-glass border.

A particularly favorite part of the book and one that stayed with me for long after I read it was:

I have my own secret map of the world, a map of which only I knew the keys and co-ordinates, but which was not for that reason any more imaginary than the code of a safe is to a banker.

Paati

I have always wanted a filmy paati. You know the type who will sing you songs with a hundred musicians playing in the background. Or like the type who would break into a dance at the slightest provocation. The type who would tell you stories that were about charmed almost unreal times. The type with whom you could share all those thoughts and fears that your mom would never understand. The type who would transfer all her love into powders that you use to cook or mithais soaked in ghee and always garnished with much affection.

Yes, I always wanted such a person in my life.

Of course, I had two of them. The real ones. And a number of others whom I adopted along the way – the next door neighbor paati, best friend's paati, the real paati’s sister, the other paati of my cousins. So on and so forth.

As a child, I used to feel a bit annoyed with the Tamil language where the – Dadi/ Nani distinction was not made unlike in Hindi. And to add to the confusion, both of my real paatis were named after two derivations of the goddess of wealth and prosperity. However, one began to refer to them as – Lakshmi Paati (the paternal grandmother) and Paati (the maternal grandmother).

Lakshmi Paati was a fascinating person like every paati out there. She was the mother of nine children and the grandmother to twenty-one grandchildren. All her daughters wanted to be like her. All her sons wanted their wives to be like her. All her daughters-in-law hoped to learn to cook like her.

She was the person who ruled the house and was the only one capable of belling the cat (the thata). There were many things that made her special. She was a great cook and made the whitest, thinnest and crispiest dosais. She sang Anamacharya Kirtanas wonderfully well. She was a puritan Tamilian at heart and would spend most of her evenings sitting in the backyard cleaning the rice and singing, Asai Mugam Marandu Poche. She was a bit of a romantic and had a special fondness for all things beautiful – music, homes, people, food, saris.

And she was also almost completely blind. A fact, which we grandchildren got to know only many years after her death, it shocked and amazed us at the same time.

I never had a very personal relationship with Lakshmi Paati. She was my vacation paati. She rarely visited us in the sleepy small towns that we lived in, because it was too hot or too cold. So we visited her. In between meeting the two dozen uncles, aunts and cousins, one had to take time out and spend with her. My conversations with her were usually minimal, because there were other cousins who were vying for her attention and I was anyway too shy. She was always faintly disappointed with me was the sense I got each time. What song did you learn recently, she would ask. I knew what would come next, that she would ask me to sing the said new song, and that petrified me. I was an awkward eight-year old. So I would tell her, Bhavayami Gopalabalam, which was exactly what I would have told her the previous year. I could see that she was disappointed.

Next year, I will sing her a song in Raagamallika and not this Yamunakalyanai types, that would impress her.

When I was ten, she died.

My maternal grandmother, after whom I could have been named and was not, was an anti-thesis of Lakshmi Paati. Widowed at a fairly young age and still having the responsibility of getting two of her daughters married and her son settled, was not obviously easy on anybody. To her and my maama’s credit, they managed to tide over the tough times and eventually came out strong.

But when you fight many battles, even if you win them, especially if you win them, it toughens you. And add to it that you live in Bombay, the city that almost demands that you get on with it.

Paati was no romantic. She was a hard woman. She would never talk very much. And she spent most of her day cooking, cleaning and rapidly knitting or making crochet stuff. She used to be faintly obsessive about it even. And so crochet bits found its way up into our homes as curtains, door-mats, table-cloth, cushion covers, bed-sheets and even our clothes. When you are seventeen, and live in Delhi, crochet patchwork kurtis hardly seemed like hi-fashion.

She was however a fantastic cook. Nobody (not even mom), make Chakrai Pongal and Adirasam the way she did. But she never would feed them to us. She would make these things, and transfer them into containers and the onus was on us to look for them.

I would discuss with my cousin R, why is Paati like this? Why is she not the fun and enthusiastic paati?

However, when I moved to Bombay and started working, I began to meet her more often. The first time, we really had granddaughter-grandma relationship. We shared a room at my maama’s house. Of course, it was not all hunky-dory. There were many reasons why we disagreed with each other. Like, what should be the ideal speed to set the fan to in the summer months, which was basically all year? And then there was her obsession to keep checking the time all through the night. She would hunt for her torch multiple times during the night and flash it on the clock on the wall. Inevitably, in her half-sleep state, she would first flash it on my face before her shaking hands could find the clock. And if that was not enough, she would make sure to violently wake me up at 5 am, so that I, who was sleeping on the floor, could sleep on the bed now, as the day had already started for her.

The list of things that annoyed her about me, were probably far more though. Like the fact that I would obsessively keep sending SMS’s and talking with my nocturnal friends. Or that when I had an early morning flight, I would switch on all the lights, at 4 am no less so that I could do my eye make-up properly. And don’t we all sleep the soundest just an hour before we actually wake up?!

In spite of these obvious differences, a kinship developed between the two of us. And even if her body did not allow her to break into a dance or to present her love in the guise of food, she began to talk to me – about her fears of living, about wicked doctors who never seemed to have gone to medical school, about her idyllic days as a child. Yes, finally I had a real paati.

Over the last couple of years, her health isn’t the same. She suffers from among many other things, the illness of old age. And every now and then, her condition worsens a bit. The doctor asks the family to be informed, but her natural survival instinct, make her come through.

The other day, my uncle called up to tell my mom that paati’s condition had worsened. As always, mom panics each time the phone has rung since.

It is very morbid, this waiting for death. But I know families like to plan around this sort of thing. If there is a very old grandparent, and a marriage coming up in the family, there is some plan on what if scenarios. Sometimes marriages are hastened so that the grandparent can have a completely fulfilled life.

Whatever happens and whenever that happens, I just hope that she goes with as little a suffering as possible. And even if she is not exactly a filmy paati, she is a very good real one.

I suppose, at some point one needs to realize that life neither imitates bad cinema or oversimplified fairy-tales.

Though sometimes when I look at my mom and my niece I wonder, will my mom ever be a filmy paati?