Look Ma, no hands!*

My last trip to perform filial duties to the people who contributed to my DNA was sort of kick in the butt of sorts.
Suddenly I realized that the lady was not as agile as she used to be. Giving an occasional cough recovering from the common flu, she moved slowly to dutifully complete her duties as a the half contributor to the built up of her offspring who manifests occasionally for a peek. The duty that she had performed all her life for him until he was strong enough to fly off the nest. I thought she appeared fragile with a slight stoop and restricted right shoulder movement.
Recovering from recent repeated bouts of ill health, he, on the other hand looked haggard further exaggerated by the three days' unshaven stubble. Gone are full bodied arm and shoulder muscle mass, he walked slowly yearning for coordination affected by failing eyesight and sluggish blood flow.
Man, it hit me! They have now gracefully slipped into the geriatric population.
Hey, I am not spring chicken myself. With thinning greying hairline with a near visible scalp and soon to hit the half century mark, I hope to be level headed and rational. The world changes around us. We do not have to change with them. We have to just to accept their change and play their tune. You cannot change the world. Insisting on doing so will only cast a label on yourself as a loony, a grumpy old man, living in the past, suspended in time, etcetera.
I gazed deep into their eyes, reminiscening and thanking for all the good times, hoping that the gaze will transfer my soulful gratitude for lending their supporting hands during the falls from my baby steps. Being inadequate in extrovertly exhibiting affection, I was hoping the deep gaze will transfer my inner unexpressed desires. Suddenly all the good times just flashed before my eyes. In those memories they appear so youthful and gay. Secretly (but cursing myself for thinking so), I was hoping that that was not the last long gaze.
After all their guidance either directly or indirectly all those years, now I can say, "Look Ma, No hands!"

*Urban dictionary,
An accomplishment,
Something to say to one's mom after or during accomplishment of something that would usually be done with more than "no hands".
- "Look ma no hands!", when riding a bike with no hands
- "Look ma no hands!", when an insurgent blows up your humvee on a mission in Iraq and you lose your hands. (ref, the wire 5th season) sic. 

Intergalatical Intraplantetary communications?

Scenario in a clinic in Kuala Lumpur, a bustling metropolitan city where LMFAO (by fluke a band with such a baffling name got approval to perform as the censors were not not to SMS language savvy) performed and its citizen carry around their latest digital accessory, latest being Samsung Galaxy 3 as i-Phone is so passe.....

Spinach, Bayam (Spinacia oleracea) 

A doctor trying to explain to a patient who had starved herself to keep herself slim to mimic her favourite Hong Kong and Taiwan stars and had become anaemic with low iron stores in the body....

(translated from colloquial Malay, bahasa pasar)...
 

Doc: Your blood level are low, 9.9 g/dl, I'll give your some iron tablets to take regularly.

Patient: Will I feel 'heaty'?
Doc: Sometimes you'll feel constipated maybe you can take on alternate days. Also take a balanced meal with things like red meat and green leafy vegetables like spinach.
Patient: What is that?
Doc: Bayam. It has small leaves and it looks this (draws with his limited drawing skills)
Patient: kangkung, ah? (Ipomoea aquatica, water spinach, river spinach)
Doc: No, bayam is cooked with garlic and oyster sauce in Chinese restaurant. Bayam also has a red variety.
Patient: Kai Lan, ah? (Chinese brocolli)
Doc: No.
Patient: I'll Google it!
Doc: Great!

Google: Inter-species communication? 

A few seconds later, the doctor thought, maybe I should have told her about Popeye and how he becomes strong after consuming spinach, but then..... (Different generation, Popeye has not been on local TV for more than 3 decades!)
Yet another use of Google - to communicate between species!

Another Malaysian Icon

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1619102,00.html#ixzz1zwiFyArs

Grace Notes
By Liam Fitzpatrick

TIME magazine

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Paul Ponnudurai (1961-2012)

CREATIVE GENIUS: Ponnudorai deconstructs,

reinvents and performs old songs with a 

singular passion 

A man who is quite possibly the greatest musical interpreter of our time performs every weekend at Harry's—an ordinary bar in a Singaporean shopping mall. There, before a half-empty room, while soccer matches are screened and waitresses ferry beer and fries, Paul Ponnudorai sings with astounding virtuosity, accompanied only by his Spanish guitar. His voice swoops and growls with the range and soulfulness of mid-period Stevie Wonder, and his fluid, polyrhythmic style of guitar playing appears to have little precedent. But it is his choice of material, and the inventiveness with which he arranges it, that cloaks Ponnudorai in the aura of genius.

Ponnudorai's style is to deconstruct a hackneyed standard, reassemble the parts in startlingly creative ways, and then perform it with a passion that nobody has previously dared. Thus the campfire dirge Five Hundred Miles becomes a spine-tingling R&B ballad, dripping with anguish. The Beatles' chirpy Can't Buy Me Love is transformed into a complex jazz exercise, incorporating some of the Karnatakan rhythmic phrases of Ponnudorai's South Indian ancestry. The Cascades' saccharine Rhythm of the Rain metamorphoses into the purest Burt Bacharach, with unexpected chord changes and lush melodic lines.

Comparisons could be made with José Feliciano, the Puerto Rican singer-guitarist who had 1960s hits with stylish remakes of songs like California Dreamin' and Light My Fire. But Ponnudorai is better. His ability to dice songs up, look into their hearts and perceive the common veins connecting every genre has won the attention of top international players who go to Singapore on tour. Harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, drummer Billy Cobham, guitarist Tommy Emmanuel and vocalist Bobby McFerrin have all been in the audience. In 2002, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis showed up at a performance and was so taken by it, he grabbed his instrument and leapt onstage to play alongside a startled Ponnudorai, who did not recognize him. "He told me 'Ever since I got off the plane I've been hearing about nothing but you,'" Ponnudorai recalls. The pair jammed together for the next two nights.

Marsalis was referring to the buzz Ponnudorai generates among local and overseas musicians. Among the public, it is another matter. If you watch Ponnudorai play, there will typically be a handful of fans near the stage. Everyone else will be at the other end of the room, noisily drinking and making a mockery of Singapore's reputation as a city at the forefront of smoking cessation. The kind of musician that the world produces only a few times in a generation is in the house, but the laity barely notice.

Given that his life has already seen enough hardship and redemption to warrant full bluesman stature, Ponnudorai is unfazed by the indifference. A Tamil by ethnicity and Malaysian by birth, he grew up in the tin-mining town of Ipoh, the youngest of 10. Ponnudorai's parents were too poor to buy him a metronome: he learned his exquisite sense of timing by playing along to the creak of an old ceiling fan. Naturally left-handed, he taught himself to play on a right-handed guitar because it was cheaper than a model strung for left-handers (and this is how he still plays). A car crash in his early 20s ("we were road racing and I drove my car into a ravine") gave him the limp that he still walks with at 45; in his head are two drainage holes, covered merely by a thin layer of skin, bored during brain surgery, the legacy of another smash that almost killed him. He will sit and drink Scotch after Scotch with disconcerting ease and tell of a bluesman's life—of scrapes with jealous musicians wanting to cut his fingers off, and of playing to audiences of gun-toting triads in Kuala Lumpur nightclubs. And like so many who have flirted with the devil, he is a product of the church.

"I grew up soaked in the brine of the Bible," he says. "As Lutherans, we would go to church and sing as a family." His father was a locally famous countertenor, but in fact the entire family was talented and the house never silent. If it wasn't one of the children playing guitar or piano, it was classical Indian music or the Beatles on the turntable, and the Johnny Cash Show on TV. "I used to watch my brothers and sisters and pick things up," says Ponnudorai. "At 6, I was playing guitar."

At 14, Ponnudorai was good enough to win a national TV talent contest, playing an instrumental rendition of Killing Me Softly. But despite this early success, he had no thoughts of becoming a professional musician until lack of money stymied his desire to read English literature at university. At a loose end, and with the family having moved to Kuala Lumpur, he persuaded his mother to let him earn a few ringgits by playing a couple of hours a night at a bar where one of the older Ponnudorai boys was a regular. "That was 1979," Ponnudorai says. "I walked into that bar and I haven't walked out of a bar since."

His next dozen years were spent in cover bands, trading on Top 40 hits and rock standards and occasionally touring to Singapore or Indonesia, but returning to the same smoky rooms in Kuala Lumpur. They were colorful times. "Malaysia was in the middle of a massive timber boom in the 1980s, and the timber graders were licensed to carry weapons because they were carrying huge sums of money around with them," he says. "But many of the timber graders were also gangsters. You would have to play the same song several times a night, otherwise a gangster would say, 'Why don't you give me some face?' and show you the bulge under his shirt. My record for Careless Whisper is 17 times in a row."

This is how he may have continued, a jobbing musician in a seedy netherworld, were it not for an epiphanic injury in 1992. His friend fell asleep at the wheel of a car and ran off the road, sending Ponnudorai, a passenger, headfirst through the window. Initially, he appeared miraculously unscathed and was sent home with a head full of stitches. But days later, he was unable to fret guitar chords or walk a straight line. Fresh tests revealed a massive blood clot covering an entire side of his brain, just waiting to rupture, and he was rushed into surgery. Against medical predictions he survived, but the experience left him emotionally transformed. "Things that were so important—success, recognition, accolades—suddenly didn't matter anymore," he says. "And as a byproduct of my heightened awareness after the accident, I started listening to music—really listening to it. That's when I started appreciating songs like Five Hundred Miles. There are lots of songs that many people don't think about, but they are very good songs."

In coaxing the inner beauty out of moribund folk-song fodder like Five Hundred Miles or Fire and Rain, which he performs with spellbinding verve, Ponnudorai drew on the vast musical vocabulary amassed during his barroom years, and used it to execute the material with arresting freshness. His new solo act emerged in 2000; effortlessly spanning genres and periods, and quoting songs within songs, it is perfectly attuned to ears raised on unfettered sampling, but beneath the complexity is the sincerity of a man celebrating all that is musical and the simple fact of being alive. This is the combination that lures the cognoscenti to Harry's. To date, A.-and-R. representatives from major labels have not been among them. In fact, Right on Time, Ponnudorai's blinding first album (of mostly covers but with a couple of originals), was only released in 2005, produced and paid for by a friend, the Italian blues guitarist Enrico Crivellaro. Available only online—except for the half-dozen copies Ponnudorai carries around in his bag—it hasn't sold in significant numbers. Neither Crivellaro nor Ponnudorai have sufficient resources to promote it, nor is Ponnudorai of an MTV-friendly age.

In Ponnudorai's circle of friends and family members, the only person untroubled by his lack of fame is the man himself. Since his accident, he has been content simply to make a living. "It took me a while to figure it out," he says, "but as long as I can play, I'll be a happy man." And so it happens that this remarkable musician will perform at Harry's this weekend, while most of the drinkers have their backs to the stage. It doesn't matter if 10 people are listening or 10,000. His music ascends like a prayer or a thanksgiving, an end in itself.

Ladri di Bicicilette

The bicycle thieves (Italian) 1948

In the poverty and unemployment stricken Italy in the late 40s, the neo-reality classic movie which is Ramayana of most new movie makers narrates the story of an Antonio Ricci in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood who gets a job as a bill poster but needs a bicycle to take the job. 

By selling the bedsheets around the house, the Riccis redeem Antonio's bicycle from the pawnshop.

While sticking the bills, somebody steals his bicycle.

Shattered that his only possession is lost, Antonio goes in search of the bicycle with the help of the police and his streetwise friend but in vain. Whilst walking in town with his son, they spotted his bike, and they start a cat and mouse chase all around town trying to locate it.

He is disappointed when someone whom he had suspicions of being the bicycle thief turned out to be wrong. Out of frustration, he steals a bicycle just parked around the corner. He tries to flee the scene but is not sleek enough and is apprehended by bystanders. The whole misadventure is watched by his son, who was supposed to take the tram home but missed it. The owner of the bicycle decided not to pursue the matter further after looking at his crying son. He told him, "A mighty good example you are setting for your son!".

Antonio walks home with his son feeling totally embarrassed. FINE ('End' in Italian).

Somebody described it as a totally depressing movie. I guess these people have not viewed the many sad movies churned out (before Slum Dog Millionaire) from Kollywood, i.e. Thulabaram and Pasi.

Post WW2 Italy

The other point of contention is the title. In the earlier English translation of the title, somebody with an inferior command of the Italian language who got his singular and plural nouns all mixed up must have done the job. Even 'Google translate' is ignorant about this. Go try it yourself. (ladro = thief; ladri= thieves). Anyway, since Antonio also becomes a thief, logically it should be 'thieves'.

What's life without masala?

Avargal (They, Tamil; 1977)
It starts with Anu (Sujatha) travelling in the mail train from Mumbai to Chennai with her son after going through a bitter divorce from her husband, Ramanathan (Rajnikanth). With the rhythmic churning of the rail coaches on the track, she recollects her miserable life living with Ramanathan. Again and again, he used to insinuate, ridicule and mentally torture her regarding her first love, Parani like a dart piercing a checker-board.

We come to know, Anu, a classical dancer, had met a musician in Chennai. They separate after father gets a transfer to Mumbai. Out of sight and out of mind, the relationship fades. The ailing father gets her married to Ramanathan, a seemingly nice executive. The naive Anu opens her heart to Ramanathan of her previous liaison. Her husband did not, however, take it maturely.

A new chapter starts for Anu, as she begins her work in Chennai. She comes to get to know the of the acquaintance of Johnny, a fellow co-worker. Johnny is a widower who lost his wife in a kitchen accident. Anu moves in the same apartment complex just to find Barani, her old boyfriend living next door.

She comes to know that all her letters to Barani earlier had been intercepted by Barani's slightly deranged sister. And Barani never knew of Anu's desperation to contact him.

The lost love re-blossoms and the couple continue to plan their earlier stalled wedding plans.Things get complicated when Johnny also develops feelings for Anu, and a new boss is transferred to Anu's office - guess who? - Ramanathan.

Ramanathan's mother who meets Anu by accident in a religious function starts working incognito as a maid in her house. Ramanathan appears to have turned over a new leaf and starts showing his pathetic face. Confused, Anu decides to go back to Ramanathan and cancels her wedding with Parani. Heartbroken, Parani leaves for the US for a musical performance.

Anu's maid who does more than her regular duties is Anu's anchor, but her cover is soon blown wide open by Anu's colleague. 

After deciding to reconcile with Ramanathan, Anu moves into her Ramanathan and his mother's house. Ramanathan's mother reveals that her son is an incorrigible pathological liar with has a fancy to play and break pretty girls' heart. Having seen it all her life, she had given up on changing him. Just then, a lady comes at their doorstep with a baby on her hip requesting for her husband, Mr Ramanathan! 

Realising her mistake, Anu rushes to Barani's house to witness his engagement with his sponsor, Gayathri!

Pulling her whole past behind, together with her matrimonial tie, the Thali, that tied her down and symbolically restricted her inner desires into a donation box at a temple, she moves to Trivandrum with the help of Johnny.

And guess who decides to dedicate her life to serve as maid to wash the sins of bearing an evil son - Anu's mother in law followed her secretly on the same train.

As usual in all K. Balachander's stories, the plot is always convoluted and socially awkward. During its release in Tamil Nadu, the movie created quite a furore in a place where movies literally meant the world to its people and action in the reel world is reciprocated and followed in the real world when the main character removed her thali to give it to the temple coffers. It symbolically pushed the responsibility to God who witnessed the ceremonial event to decide on its outcome! A little melodramatic but that is what Indians like - a little masala in their films...

Hypocrisy of man

Finally finished frying my gelatinous grey cells with all six seasons 86 episodes of the Sopranos. The filthy flowery foul 'f' prefixing 4-lettered sentences still keep vibrating in my inner ears.
The six seasons showed the life of a couple in their mid 40s and their two teenage kids. Their relationship go through thick and thin as they battled midlife crisis, depression, infidelity, troubles arising from raging hormones from the teenage kids who think they know better than their parents who were thrice their age.
It is surprising that even though the whole saga is fictitious, it ridiculously strikes a cord with parents of teenagers even in so called less developed parts of the world like ours.
With globalisation, traditional values have taken a back seat and the younger generation are looking common universal values like human rights, self centeredness, lack of respect for elders and sanctity of 'good' values. This forms an excellent platform to showcase how these sugar craving short-attentioned, instant gratified teenage punks' inertia and laid back attitude to challenges of life. Whilst their parents would embrace life head on for survival, their offspring tend to take things lying down, enjoying the finer things if life.
The adults' hypocrisy is highlighted in their overtly sinfully bad lives. The same hand that the guys use to cross their heart in the shape of the Holy Cross is the same one that pulls the trigger of the gun that is pointed to his foe's heart. After doing their clandestine criminal and extramarital acts, they religiously present themselves at church events. With all these going on, the adults expected their kids to be disciplined and God fearing.
The show takes a swipe at the our modern life's preoccupation with psychiatry rather than rationalise our stress to it. At the end of the day, the psychiatrist stopped seeing the protagonist after her contemporary's research which suggested that sociopaths use their sessions to justify their criminal activities. In spite of all the psychological pains in the family, all of it disappeared over time as the kids grew older and more mature spontaneously with passage of time.

Tony Soprano justifies his actions as he provides for the family. The wife prefers to wear the blinkers as long as the money is there. The children feels their life 'sucks'. They lack the fighting spirit and coping mechanisms that their parents  had. The glaring difference between the two generations is poverty.

Social consciousness?

Aval Appadithaan (Tamil, She is like that;1978)

Again into movies with themes inappropriate for general Tamil film audience for its social theme and crude (bordering on vulgarity for that era) dialogue. This film was done at end era which in my opinion is considered a watershed. Gone are the days where the characters either gleam with goodness or were bad to the core. The late 70s were the time of social consciousness. Suddenly, making mainstream films in the villages dealing with bread and butter stuff was norm..Actors donned minimal make up and gone were songs and dance-around-the park routine. The birth of new music directors brought music and songs to be played in the background.
Aval Appadithaan is a black and white film with  a slighty different camera work. Manju (Sripriya) is employed in an advertising company run by Thiagu (Rajnikanth). Arun (Kamalhasan), Thiagu's friend from out of town is shooting a documentary on double standards of women position in society. Manju is assigned to help him around.
Manju is a lady disillusioned with life after growing up in a dysfunctional family with a two-timing mother and after two failed relationships. She looks at men with suspicion and scorn. 
Thiagu, an outwardly pious person, is just another blue bearded man who enjoys his drinks and his girls. The protagonist (Arun) is passionate towards his work and takes interest in Manju's life and childhood. Her explosive demeanor and explicit words sometimes frightens him. Perhaps she has bipolar depressive disorder.
Pretty soon Arun falls for Manju but it ambivalent towards her body language. After seeing Manju going out to a function with Thiagu, Arun, who by then had finished his documentary work, decides that Manju is not meant for him. He returns home to marry someone of his father's choice.
Manju who actually had feelings for Arun feels disappointed but moves on.

Some explosive dialogues:
Thiagu: (to Arun on making documentary on plight of women)
"Women should be enjoyed, not analysed".

Manju: (to a socialite who was anxious for not dressing up to be on the camera for an interview)  "You can put your social make-up!"

Manju: (In the closing scenes, asks Arun's new wife) "What do you think of women's liberation?".
Wife: "Oh, I don't know anything about that".
Manju: "No wonder you are happy".

Voice over in the end: She died today. She will be reborn tomorrow. She will die again. She will be reborn again. That's how she is. Aval Appadithaan!