The Equator Line - July - September 2015

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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.