Thursday, February 17, 2011

And Now for Something Completely Different...

I don't want to get too ponderous on the yoga because there's so much more to India. I also don't want to bore with details from my daily private Sanskrit classes with a true whiz, a man with a brilliant mind, although, like all things Indian, he teaches some things backwards (not a problem for a yogi like me). I feel truly privileged to be his student ( as I also have with my other Sanskrit teachers), plus I'm lucky that he's also patient (with my sluggish western writing skills in Sanskrit and my stilted knowledge of the language). As a surprise bonus, when we're chanting the noun declensions (24 for each word, thank you very much), I try to do as much as possible memorized and eyes closed, and when it's flowing well, I get to this strange trance-like state which I've almost only previously achieved through meditation or watching strange contemporary video art pieces; the curious part is that this normally happens when I turn my brain off, but when I'm chanting the nouns (which still requires me to use much of my limited cerebral resources), I can get to the same state. Very nice. Then it weirds me out that I'm sitting on the living room floor on a cushion with this petite-framed intense brahmin with a beard and hair pulled back in a bun, gold shiny sandalwood paste smudged across his forehead, all decked out in his finest gold-trimmed pure white bed sheets, chanting one word a million ways. Even stranger, when we chant the word cow, it really sounds like my teacher is "mooing"; the word totally sounds like a cow bellowing and mooing. And when we chant the word river, the words ribbon up and down, flowing and ebbing, and there are parts where I can even see the waters bubbling up, and rushing back. It's much more lilting when he chants this one (I don't know if he's aware of this). Same thing, we chant the word earth, and it really seems to emanate and arise out of nothing (the word earth in Sanskrit, bhu, means something that came to be), this time pulsing in waves. Now you think I'm crazy. There is a sonoral expressiveness in this language which is much more obvious and sensatory than with most languages.
So, the "now for something completely different" was really to tell of my attendance of school performance day at the school where Ratna's girls, Bhoomi and Megha, go. Really, the show was performed in the city center in the Jaganmohan Palace (beautiful, Muslim-influenced architectonic backdrop for such an event). I was expecting a nice sedate show of traditional Indian dance and song, folk songs, Karnatic dance, etc. Which it was.
I wasn't expecting the 12 huge speakers and sub-woofers pumping out music as loud as in any music festival, which was reverberating back and forth in the all wood auditorium like a wicked disco with twisted acoustics. There were traditional dances, one with the smallest children with a shirtless fat boy dressed as Ganesh with a long trunk nose and all the little children dancing around. There were also classic Bollywood numbers of crazy modern dance music (we know how much Indians love wild Bollywood drumming and fast beats) and I can't figure it out, but 2 of the medleys ended with gabber!!! No joke!!! There was even a pseudo-breakdancing number with the oldest teenage boys dressed as Americans which I found particularly amusing. Everyone knows I'm not a fan of bad dance music but with the Indian rhythms and scales, it's much much better. This video is very poor in quality (my camera is a photo camera and I didn't realize til too late that I could have gone into the orchestra pit to record) but maybe you can get a sense of the dance which starred Megha (9 years) as lead dancer. This was a traditional folk dance but still had crazy loud music. The quality of the video is dismal at best (I wasn't expecting it to start and couldn't change the quality once I'd started), so I recommend just turning the music up loud.

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