In this issue

SONGS: A WAY OF LIFE

Once I was in Chennai in the last week of the year to write about a crucial political meet for The Times of India. When I had to return to Delhi, I realized I had to wait for a day for my flight back. Nothing else to do, I loafed around the city, light and free – in the week between Christmas and the New Year you can enjoy the lazy sea breeze in Chennai without woollens. Around TTK Road I saw something absolutely fabulous - the city gentry, in their spotless holiday best, were sauntering towards the many auditoria. The men in their sparkling white veshti and half-sleeved shirts, and the women in gorgeous saris, their long, lush hair laced with jasmine strings. From inside those buildings rolled out many a heavenly rhapsody – sonorous and layered, even a touch elemental. The instruments – both percussion and string – merged with the high-pitched, melodious voices to transport the familiar surroundings to another world, a world where birdsong and raindrops are the only reality. Criss-crossing the streets in the comforting sun, I had a strange sense of loss – of the old identity, fond attachments, everything I’d known or cared for. The city with its quaint conservatism and coconut groves existed, the subdued stone-structured temples and giant cut-outs and all, and yet, the deep resonance of the music, its unearthly waves – all took you somewhere else, an enigmatic chiaroscuro of the known and the unknown.
The month-long Chennai music festival is the renewal of a culture, a thematic structure to hold together the impulses of a society. I met the music critic of a London newspaper, here for the Margazhi season, who’d been coming down just for the music for a long time. Like him, hundreds of music lovers still descend on Chennai from all around the world to be part of the festival. The life of a people, it seems, is defined by their music.

The Equator Line Magazine Description:

The Equator Line is to India what The New Yorker is to America, Cicero to Germany and Granta to England: cerebral, incisive and entertaining as well. TEL revives an old tradition of journalism which combines new writing with a close account of the fresh developments in areas like business, culture, cinema and lifestyle.
The great periodicals of the past threw up new writers and triggered fresh debates about many issues. With the advent of 24x7 television periodicals lost their predominant position in intellectual discourse, in benchmarking our culture. A ‘breaking-news’ fever swept through India. The beauty of good writing was no longer recommendation enough. Newspapers carried more pictures and less copy. News magazines readjusted themselves to the television era with a new snappy, sharp look. And in the deluge of visual news the sensitive, sharp, upwardly mobile man seemed lost. Nothing was put into perspective for him. Nothing really tested his intelligence. The delight of surveying an altogether new horizon across the serried lines of good prose was missing!
The Equator Line is a journey to rediscover the glory of the written word. Promoted by Palimpsest Publishing House, the monthly magazine offers a brilliant spread – clinical analysis of trends, new fiction, deep examination of political events, latest in diplomacy, spirituality, diaspora, the remote and exotic captured through a sensitive camera, news from the world of books, all that and much more. When repetitive surface news grates on your nerves The Equator Line takes you on a trip to the land of good writing with an impressive line-up of well-known writers.
Waiting for your flight at the airport or in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city, the latest issue of TEL will help you rediscover your world in a new light.