Want to break guitar strings in good company?

Recently we saw the development of large affordable housing by the Swarnabhoomi group of companies in Chennai. They had a huge parcel of land outside Chennai on which they launched an ambitious plan to build a1000 houses or more. To make it even more attractive for future residents the group decided to develop around these houses an educational centre. The first institution that got going was the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music (SAM). Compared to the usual practice of establishing schools and colleges to cater for the never-ending demand for engineers and doctors this was a bold departure.

A couple of years ago there were hardly any institutions for young musicians to sharpen heir skills but now SAM would be the institution which can groom and even discover new talent. Shyam Rao a drummer and professional musician in Chennai was picked by the group to head the venture. The chance to work with world-renowned musicians is what prompted Shyam to join as a faculty member. Shyam feels that it is very important to be initiated into music correctly. The present system is for musicians to claim a grade by passing the Trinity college examinations. This we hear is not entirely the best way so SAM is focused more on the students and not so much on certification. Right from the start they had no fear that it may be difficult to attract students as Shyam was convinced that they merely had to set up a good school of music and the students would come automatically.

The quality of musicians who have passed out from the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music is good. AR Rahman has actually used them in his work which says a lot. Musicians attending a course also get the opportunity to interact with musicians whom they would otherwise never have met. As one person said "I got to break a lot of guitar strings with big time musicians." What he meant was that he had the chance to interact with them on a social level too. SAM comes out like the kind of place where one would love to go and just hang out.

It was AR Rahman that made his career.

Playback singer Srinivas says that he was virtually forced into becoming a chemical engineer because in his family everyone was a qualified engineer. He says he had no option but to become one himself. He worked for a full 10 years in an engineering company and even tried his hand at marketing until he decided that enough was enough and walked away from his job and tried his hand at singing. While at college he had started singing and it was no doubt the female following that he had that made him opt for that as a career.

After he started singing for the movies he found that most music composers were content in getting a singer to sing the song exactly as they composed it but the one man who was different was AR Rahman. Srinivas said that he used to try and put every singer in a corner only so that the singer would have to think out of the box and contribute something on his own. It was that one trait that set him apart from many of the other composers. Srinivas says his growth as a singer was also because he chose not to concentrate only on playback singing. His foray into non-film music and stage singing exposed him to a larger arena. He even started composing songs on his own. But it was his first experience singing a song for ARR that stayed in his mind.  Srinivas had responded to ARR’s call thinking that he was going to get a full song but on going to the studio he was shocked to find that he had been called just to sing chorus. For a full-fledged playback singer that was like being called up on stage and then being insulted.

On hindsight Srinivas said he was grateful for that one opportunity to sing chorus because that opened his mind to the endless possibilities in music. He has pretty strong views about the reality shows that are popular today on television. He is not in favour of judging singers just for the way that they can faithfully duplicate an original song. He looks for something special from the singer; something that highlights his own character. According to him a contestant cannot be expected to be just a Xerox copy of the original. Srinivas has very many more original ideas and one can see in the conversation that he has a mind of its own and is not prepared to take anybody’s word unless he is convinced. Listen to him as he explores the world of music in India.

Hard work and all is all fine but you need luch too.

Santosh Sivaraman passed out of Vivekananda College in Chennai. His parents and family were all professionals in some field or the other but he didn't do any of that because he wasn't quite ready for it. Those days most people hankered for a job in a bank or to become a civil servant or a doctor or an engineer but Santhosh confessed that since he was not particularly bright though he never did well in academic fields. He always did better outside the classroom.

In spite of being a backbencher in college he had some of the finest brains sitting on sides of him in class. In his defense he says it is almost always that backbenchers turn out to be the leaders of the future. He was one of the lucky few whose father’s allowed them to take a room and stay outside of college hostels and even his home. He admits that he never ever wanted to work; which is strange coming from a man whose father was in the army.

But now in a strange reversal he continues to work while his more famous classmates and associates have all retired. What happened was fortuitous. One day he read about glass at the US Consulate library and right after that he came across a man who knew how to bend glass tubes for making neon signs. He got him to make a little glass Ganesha and he gave it to a friend who ran a small souvenir store. A doctor bought it for the princely sum of Rs 100/-. That was the start of his present business, which is making and exporting hundreds and hundreds of glass Ganeshas. He hit upon a clever idea of involving unemployed women to canvass for orders. So these ladies went out and sold them to customers in all sorts of places. Places that he could never have accessed. Santhosh had no idea of what he was getting into on that fateful day when he came across that man bending glass. Listen to his fascinating story of luck.

Rajinikanth laughed and Chinni Jayanth was made.

In one episode of RUMBLE featuring Chinni Jayanth I dug into the background of this very versatile actor. Chinni started out as a mimicry artist but then there are so many of them that he stepped into comedy. The real difference between Chinni and other film comedians is while most of them can imitate what has already been done by an actor he can get under the skin of the character and show you how they would have acted in any kind of situation. That takes unique talent. Unlike many others he started comedy in college. That was different because most Kollywood film artists have never been to college. In his first film while working as a character artist he used to pass the time of day on the sets by imitating other crewmembers. He used to do it so well that his costar who was none other than Rajnikanth used to laugh at all his antics. That gave him the conviction that he could entertain people with just his comedy and soon he took to performing on stage. His first show was in the town of Virudhunagar. Many people would remember the early days of Chinni Jayanth when he started doing commercials. The very first was one where he imitated Rajnikanth in a Tortoise brand mosquito coil ad. Then one day he set out to become a producer. Revathy who was a famous leading lady in Kollywood cinema helped him tremendously. She went out of her way to support him in making a movie called Chinnapulla.

He says cinema making has now changed from being a sprint to a marathon. Your competitors have increased greatly and nobody knows who will win. He says filmmaking has also become a gamble. Chinni says his one performance at a major stage show when Rajnikanth, Kamal and Amitabh were in the audience changed his life greatly. As the show was almost entirely in Tamil he realized that the star from Bollywood was looking completely bored. That's when the organizers talked to Chinni and asked him to do something, which could entertain Amitabh Bachchan also. He went on to do a stand up version of Kaun Banega Crorepati to the delight of everyone. Taking a leaf out of Rajnikanth’s book he too always tries to inject morals into his comedy.

All in all Chinni is a fascinating person and you will enjoy listening to his priceless imitations

Don't aim to make cult films. Only a few watch them.

One lazy afternoon I watched a Tamil film called Oram Po at Udhayam theatre in Chennai. I had decided to duck into the theatre to escape a really hot afternoon. The show had started when I entered and as I found my way to my seat the noisy crowd of students were having fun throwing peanut shells at each other. I had chosen Oram Po because I thought it was a flop movie but when my eyes got used to the darkness I realized that the hall was full and the audience was roaring in laughter. Later I contacted Pushkar and Gayatri the directors of the film and they readily agreed to be interviewed. It was interesting take on the art of film making by these two young filmmakers. Pushkar feels that being considered as makers of cult films is actually not a good thing as such films are seen only by a few people as opposed to mainstream cinema which is watched by people in the hundreds of thousands. Gayatri and Pushkar are married to each other after they met during college in Chennai. Their friendship developed then into a longer-term relationship. They discussed their college days while doing a course in Visual Communications in Loyola College. They felt it was a very interesting course when compared to doing a regular degree course. After they went for a short course in filmmaking to the United states they came back to dig deep into their own experiences while growing up in Chennai and it was those little experiences including auto rickshaw racing and bike re-modeling that gave them the seed of an idea for making the film Oram Po.

The film starring Arya and Pooja was a huge hit. It also featured John Vijay who was first seen on television and then worked for FM radio. He is probably the quirkiest actor to appear in Tollywood films. Pushkar and Gayatri’s second film was called Va Quarter Cutting, which turned out to be a delightful movie that could simultaneously be considered mainstream and cult film. It went into the details of a dry-day (alcohol free) in Chennai. These are usually days on which National leaders were born or died or achieved a career milestone. The Government of India tries to promote abstinence by declaring the occasional alcohol free days. The film was also a trip into the criminal underbelly of Chennai. SPB Charan and John Vijay play critical roles in the film in which two people go in pursuit of a bottle of rum. Gayatri and Pushkar are trained filmmakers as opposed to somebody who went into filmmaking just because it was their passion. They are now working on their third movie and listening to the script it promises to be a riot. Listen to them as they talk about their life thus far.

Nobody gets taught in College. You have to learn on your own.

Very often it is not the hero but the character actor in a movie who walks away with all the accolades. This is all the more true when we talk about Kollywood films. Heroes in our films are always super heroes swinging from the rafters, kicking the villains in their nuts spewing fiery one-liners and romancing the heroine all at the same time. So when a villain turns up on screen who can take a kick in the nuts with a wry grin we can’t but stand up and applaud. John Vijay got into the entertainment business by accident. He signed up for a Bachelor of Arts from MCC a well-known college from Chennai but was chucked out for his shenanigans. So to pass time he signed up for a course in Visual communications in another college.

By his own admission he was taught nothing in class but learnt enough by simply hanging around in the car park under the trees in the campus of Loyola College. Somewhere along the way he was spotted by his fellow course mates as a likely candidate for a film they were making. The film was ‘Oram Po’ and he played the part of a garage owner involved in auto rickshaw racing. His portrayal won him a large following. He was merely being himself but he must have been lucky for that was exactly what was required of him.

More cine roles followed, as did assignments on TV. In this interview he gives his take on life, relationships and his simple yet profound views on charity. As usual John is a riot. Though he has now been accused of being stereotyped in his portrayal, no one can deny that his zany one liners delivered in his crazed style has the audience whooping with delight. 

I first came across John when he dropped into my office one evening. He was a friend of Mathew M.C. another unique character who was sharing my office. The two of them were always up to something and most evenings would see a motley crowd of musicians, models, students and out of work artists drinking beer and wolfing down large quantities of hotdogs dripping with mayo and relish. John would turn up wearing a clean and starched dhoti and kurta topped with a brocade turban wrapped around his head. He was in the process of setting up a marketing company and his trademark wasa bottle of mineral water which he would give away to all and sundry.

Even then I had predicted that he would find a place in Kollywood and that he did eventually.

Dr Radheshyam claims a sure cure for Cancer!!!

It is not everyday that you see a man walking in through your front door and then nonchalantly narrating mind blowing stories. ‘Stories’ maybe the wrong word, instead should I say ‘as yet unverified truths’. Whatever the word I use, Dr Radheshyam who presently lives in Coimbatore doesn’t pull his punches. Within fifteen minutes of the start of our meeting and with zero drama and fanfare he said, “I know how to cure Cancer.” 

He goes into greater detail as we settle down into a conversation on camera. Except for bone cancer and cancer of the brain, Dr Radheshyam says he has the definitive cure for the dreaded disease. I am not sure what he means when he says that that cancer as all about ‘free radicals’ but I promised myself I would read up on it. He says he has cracked the cure for Cancer entirely through the reading and understanding of ancient Indian medical treatises.

In ancient India the sage Sushruta was the first to classify surgical operations. His ‘Samhita’ defines and explains surgery and its tools in his great work of 120 chapters in five parts. He describes eight different operations for surgery, like cutting, opening, scratching, piercing, inserting etc, and finally stitching up. He was both a practitioner and a teacher of surgery. His contribution to the ancient cultural heritage of India is invaluable. Sushruta Tantra became Sushruta Samhita not over night, but by taking its own time, something like a thousand years. Sushruta became very famous and soon his work was translated first into Arabic and subsequently it reached Europe through Latin and English.

Dr Radheshyam says that though he is by training an Oncologist, all sorts of patients approach him particularly when they are beyond conventional cure. They track him down to his clinic cum research center cum factory in Coimbatore. He was born in nearby Perindurai, which has some of the driest climate in South India. As a consequence of that a sanatorium had been established in Perindurai by the British to treat TB patients. He completed his basic medical degree and then proceeded to the USA in pursuit of a doctorate. After practicing for nearly three decades in the USA he felt the urge to revisit his roots and started touring different parts of India. He also started reading up on herbal cures and was increasingly drawn to the idea of making medicines based on ancient Indian knowledge.

You can listen to him explain all this and more in his own words by watching him on my interview on RUMBLE. “India is a blessed land and almost every single plant on this earth can be seen here. If they are not native, they can at least be grown here.” He first started identifying the different medicinal herbs and finally started producing medicines that could be dispensed as tablets, capsules, in liquid form or as balm. He claims confidently that he has even developed painkillers more powerful than anything existing, which will be good news for people at the end stage of incurable deceases.

He tells me that on one occasion within a period of fifteen days he raised a patient’s level of platelets from 15,000 to 250,000 and saved him from long and expensive treatment. Same for a diabetic who was referred to a hospital as one in urgent need of dialysis. Instead of requiring a couple of lakhs for Dialysis the patient was up and about after spending a more affordable twenty thousand. He then jolted me by saying that Big Pharma hates him and that even his physical well-being is threatened. He is also suspicious of large corporate hospitals, which he says only frightens people into useless and expensive treatments. Watch him and come to your own conclusions.

'One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter' What bullshit!!

The very mention of courts and lawyers send a shiver down the average man’s spine. If there is one bit of advise that is handed down the ages from fathers to sons it is this – ‘avoid lawyers like the plague’.  However the truth is that dispute resolution can only be achieved by adhering to rules and the interpretations of that is what Courts and lawyers do. It may come as a surprise to many that the study of law now includes new areas like governance, taxation, human rights and now even terrorism.

When it comes to terrorism most of us would like to lock these terrorists and throw the keys away but we also need to keep in mind that sometimes these ‘criminals’ have been wrongly punished. It is to safe guard these innocents that laws are made and why courts take extreme care to see that no man is wrongly punished. But when we see the delays in sentencing people like the Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab who killed innocent Indian citizens at the Victoria Terminus at Mumbai it creates confusion in our minds.

Most of us had felt that the Indian judicial system was nit picking when there was so much evidence that he indeed killed so many innocent people. Some felt they should have marched him to the nearest gallows and hanged him. However, the fact that the trial dragged on for years is now recognized as a tribute to the fairness of the Indian judicial system.

In this conversation with Geetha Madhavan, a leading lawyer specializing in matters of International terrorism she says hanging Ajmal Kasab should have been an open and shut case. She prefers to call a spade a spade and feels that mollycoddling terrorists or pandering to terrorist organizations is a complete ‘No No’. She is particularly incensed when she hears the oft repeated defense that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. She has a simple yardstick to judge this. If the accused has killed innocents who have played no part in the dispute then he has no right to call himself a ‘freedom fighter’.

According to Geetha Madhavan such a person is just a plain and simple ‘murderer’ and ought to be judged as one.

The expert says sharing knowledge is more profitable than hoarding it.

Is the Internet going to be the only means of communication that will exist in the future? It looks like the experts are convinced about that. According to them almost everything except physical objects will travel through the ether. Decades ago the American Television serial ‘Star Trek’ showed people and material beamed from the command ship ‘The Enterprise’ on to the surface of planets with boring regularity. But even if do not reach those levels in the short term we are going to see more and more users accessing the net for work and leisure.

The maximum usage worldwide according to surveys is for watching pornography. The citizens of Pakistan and India are the unchallenged leaders. It is not because others are not inclined to watch sex videos but because the citizens of India and Pakistan outnumber the rest. The Chinese don’t get to see stuff that their Govt doesn’t deem appropriate.

But on a serious note it is in the dissemination of information that the Internet has caused a revolution. No more stories like Ekalavya and Dronacharya. The old guru sishya parampara has gone for a toss given that anybody can access any information with or without a teacher. Nobody can be kept away from anything for very long. Even if you secure the information with security barriers, passwords and encryption it is only a matter of time before someone cracks them. The Internet has also made it possible for an individual to be gainfully employed in half a dozen ventures at the same time. You could buy and sell almost anything over the net. You could deliver the latest technological information and tips to the farmer in the remotest part of the world. It gives us hope that we could reverse what looks like the unstoppable march of rural folk like lemmings into urban areas.

The Internet could also cut out the middlemen in a vast number of trades who no longer serve any purpose. It could keep farmers in the loop whether it is for information about the weather, air temperatures, wholesale and retail prices of their produce and a hundred other bits of information. It may help reverse global warning, reduce air pollution, crime, corruption and many other modern day problems.

Earlier where could a villager or the resident of a small town go to get information on stuff like this? Could he get it from the schoolmaster or the postmaster in his village? Not likely, but now you can get all that through the mobile phone with which you can log on to the world-wide-web. This has led to a new set of entrepreneurs mushrooming all over the country. Even philanthropy has been made simple. It may not be long before a person can contribute even one rupee for a good cause while on the move.

Listen to Kiruba Shankar, a passionate votary of the Internet. He confesses that some of his earlier enthusiasm is now tempered by reality. The infrastructure needed like improved Internet speed and spread is still poor in our country but he gives you a brief glimpse into the enormous potential of the Internet.

Fat people need designer wear too.

People choose their careers in the strangest manner and for the strangest reasons. If you think that students make career choices after carefully weighing all the options you could not be more wrong. Take Tina Vincent for instance. She chose to major in History while in college because she felt that was the best way to cock a snook at her parents. If you wonder what is the logic behind that, she explains it this way. “My mother wanted me to take up a science so I chose History.” That’s how children irritate the hell out of parents.

To her surprise she fell in love with History and the rest as they say is history. She quickly realized that History was no good for careers so she started looking around. She soon went into dress designing because she could not find clothes that fitted her (she is generously proportioned). She does not like being called ‘fat’. So she felt she ought to do something to help other plump sisters who have been traumatized looking for clothes that will look good on large people. She moved from being a person making large sized outfits to making designer wear for fatties. She is now a designer owning her own couture label in Chennai.  

It led to the establishment of her store called Tina Vincent, which is located in a fashionable part of Chennai.  She says she would love to do more ramp shows featuring her clothes but since she only caters to large sizes she says that it is difficult to find suitable models in India. Apparently it is not enough to just find big built women but they need to be able to carry off the clothes they wear. So it is mostly models from abroad that can do that but they charge a bomb to walk the ramp in India. She says she has had a good run thus far, but admits that she still has a long way to go.  

Did a single Indian submarine bottle up the Pakistani navy?

I have always been keen on defense matters but living in Chennai I had been unable to meet any defense analysts. One day I decided to ask Google chacha if there were any defense analysts in Chennai and to my surprise I was told that there was quite a large number of them in Chennai and it even gave the number of one of them. I promptly dialed the number and a guarded voice came on line to tell me that he was in the middle of a memorial service and that I was to call him a couple of hours later. That’s how I came to speak to Commodore Shekhar  about defense matters with particular regard to the Navy and when I asked him if he would be ready to discuss it on camera he readily agreed. He made it clear to me that since he had left the Navy over twenty years ago he was not privy to sensitive information but being a keen observer and as one who continued to take an interest on matters Naval he had an opinion which he was ready to share. 

On he appointed day and at the appointed time Commodore Shekar walked into our studio. I mentioned to him that years ago when I was an apprentice officer in the Shipping Corporation of India I had met a naval officer named Lt Franklin at Vizag (Later on I came to know that Franklin’s parents and mine had known each other). Anyway Lt Franklin had invited me into his sub that was undergoing some maintenance work. I can still remember the cramped quarters within the steel tube. I remember being amazed to see that the crew of the submarine slept in bunks (or were they hammocks?) rigged up between the torpedoes. My ship the M. T. Desh Bandhu was a tanker of about 26,000 tons engaged in carrying crude oil from Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf and Vizag.

That was my only experience of submarines other than seeing movies like ‘The hunt for Red October’. Now here I had a submariner with vast experience to talk to and I was impatient to start. Commodore Shekhar had served as the Electrical Officer in the Indian submarine Kursura that had bottled up the Pakistani Navy inside Karachi harbour in the 1971 war with Pakistan.

Watch the other talks with Commodore Shekhar here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDpz-jpTRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alwbJdKxZJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuhd4q2PncE

Birth of a blog

2^nd September 2013, Chennai,

Birth of a talk show - Rumble

I’ve had a friend from my school days complain that everything about Chennai on TV was only in Tamil. “Sure I know that the city is located in Tamil Nadu and all that, but everything in Tamil, that’s a bit much!” he said. Another reminded me that I had a reputation of being a severe gas pot in school and asked me why I did not do programs in English myself. Obviously he has no idea that TV is driven by TRP’s but I thought I would give his suggestion a shot. When I did approach a few channels they politely showed me the door. Even The Hindu told me that there was no market for English programming. They had just dumped their own English language TV channel called Hindu Metro.

But then an acquaintance of mine Ravi Menon, pointed out that I could do it over the Internet for free. Ravi felt I could interview people from Chennai and post it on the net and see if it gets a response from netizens. However I did not know how to find a production house that would take care of the shooting and editing, so I forgot all about it.

Fast forward to August 2013.

Ravi the enthusiastic friend of mine (the type people call an ‘enthu cutlet’), has no concept of when to make phone calls to people. He calls whenever the mood gets him. So one night when the phone rang around one thirty in the morning I knew it was him. Much against my instincts I took the call and it was indeed him. He was all excited but then again he gets excited about almost anything. I resigned myself to listening to him blather all night about something that may have caught his fancy. As soon there was a break in his monologue I told him to call me again in the morning, cut the call, put the mobile on ‘silent mode’, placed it in another bedroom then came back to bed. That I thought would be the end of that, but I was obviously wrong. As soon as I reactivated the mobile in the morning it started ringing. It was Ravi again.

I could still sense the alcohol in his voice but he said that he called to tell me that he would speak to me later and cut the call. That is so typically Ravi. In the evening he introduced me to Suresh Menon, owner of a design shop called Sushma Multimedia that is engaged in creating works for just about anybody. He does corporate films, documentaries, designed brochures and had even directed a full-length feature film.

Ravi introduced me to Suresh at his studio located at the foot of the Kodambakkam Bridge. Ravi straightaway launched into his plan of making a talk show with Suresh’s help. On his part, Suresh told me that he had what it takes to produce small shows and that he was willing to try it out. From there things moved at lightning speed. Within the hour things were set up along with the lights, microphones and cameras.  I called my friend Rana Bubber and asked him to come over to the studio. I didn't tell him what it was all about, not that he would have cared anyway. He being an old friend of mine willingly came over after he cleaned up anothert bunch of punters at the Race Course. By now you must have inferred; Rana was a bookie at the Guindy Race Course.

He is a passionate votary of low cost housing and can talk for hours on the subject so we decided to start with that. I had never been in front of a camera except once when I played a five second part in a music video during my Magnasound days. The budget was so small that the director Ken Ghosh asked me to play the part. The song was  ‘Alone now’ by Jasmine Bharucha.

We picked a word from among the lines in the 1976 song by Johnny Wakelin titled ‘In Zaire’. The camera’s rolled and thus was born the program titled ‘Rumble’. You can see them on this link https://www.youtube.com/user/sureshmen

Racing drivers have no time for groupies!!?

Do we need to see youngsters driving their cars at breakneck speeds on city streets? I think the answer to that would be a resounding ‘No’. But for youngsters to get their need for speed out of their system we will have to let them do it somewhere else. Automobile enthusiasts claim that they drive at high speed as part of their research efforts to make a stronger and safer car. Most of the drivers point to the excellent safety records of racing car driving and say that only a very small percentage of drivers get hurt while racing on the track. But then whey they do get hurt they stay seriously hurt and end up being dead. But how can you legislate against those who are determined to take their chances.

There is a certain thrill in watching cars careening around a bend at over 300 kmph and we might as well acknowledge it. Therefore allowing people to drive their cars under controlled conditions may be better than allowing them to do so through city streets. Part of the attraction that motor sports has for the enthusiast is the presence of long legged young girls hanging around in the team dugouts. Are they part of the support team or are they there just to lend colour? Parthiva says racing is serious business and that drivers have no time for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G303DC3OaUU

In Chennai I have often witnessed youngsters on motor pikes pound past startled and frightened pedestrians. One day as I was idling at a signal on Sardar Patel Road on a busy Saturday over a dozen motorbikes went past me. Even though there were cars crossing the intersection from the left these crazies shot through the red light. Before I could react or even the lone constable could wave his lathi at them the entire lot went through. Each bike had a pillion rider too. The next day I read that the traffic police managed to stop and arrest a few of them but there were no follow up reports in the newspapers. I wondered whether they managed to stop such stupid and dangerous exploits by deranged riders? I doubt it. I think those guys must still be doing it on some other stretch of road.

I understand an enormous amount of money is spent on professional automobile and motorcycle racing. Even the prize money runs into millions of dollars but to get an opportunity to get behind the wheel of a racing car the drivers have to bring in their own funds!! Young Parthiva Sureshwaren is one among those drivers who have managed to take part in such races. You can hear more from him about this dangerous but exciting sport and also whether there are racing groupies in India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G303DC3OaUU 

Music companies want more profits.

While the Internet has made money for many it has also destroyed all sorts of businesses. The list of companies that have gone under is long and promises to get longer in the days to come. Ghanshyam Hemdev was one of the earliest to see the potential in the music business in South India and he proved it by setting up an immensely popular label called Pyramid Audio. They were one among the earliest in South India to set up a label catering exclusively to Tamil music.

He had virtually stumbled into the music business by releasing the songs of the film ‘Gentlemen’ on Pyramid Audio when other labels had rejected it because of the price. The film had music by the then musical sensation A.R. Rahman. The film was a hit and he was irreversibly sucked into the music business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHh1XFHiwpk

From the days when film music was available on CDs and cassettes at every street corner, the situation is now quite different. The arrival of the Internet made the hard copy like a cassette or a CD unnecessary. Music became digitally encoded and could be easily transmitted over the Internet to anybody anywhere at no cost. File sharing services like Napster made it impossible for the owner of Copyrights to restrict the sale geographically. In short it spelt the death of Music labels and forever changed the mechanics of the music business.

Earlier the ownership and consequently the possibility of earning were restricted to copyrights owners but with the arrival of the Internet it became impossible for anyone to track the transmission of music files. Singers started to ask for a share of the revenues. Music labels who had acquired the Copyrights exclusively through the payment of hefty sums now found themselves forced to share their revenues to singers.

Music labels argued that they have already paid the singers and did not see any justification in the demands of the singers when the singers do not agree to share when losses are made. All in all it set the stage for protracted arguments from singers and copyright owners.

Ghanshyam Hemdev explains things from a Music Company’s perspective. 

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHh1XFHiwpk

Who says it is crappy healthcare in small towns.

Either we as Indians have no actual knowledge of the affairs of the state or we just love to bitch about things. What else can explain our constant unhappiness with the way our people, our politicians and our political leaders conduct their affairs. Is it because we don’t see any thing good that is going on or is it because we are unable to recognize a good thing when it happens? Everyday we are regaled with stories of the wrong doings of doctors, engineers and administrators but we never give them any credit when some good work is also done. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v5hOhaiahU

The papers are full of horror stories of doctors leaving their scalpels in somebody’s belly or wads of cotton up someone’s ass. What about the truly horror stories of even ward boys performing operations on hapless patients? If you read them you will prefer to take your chances by cutting yourself open by yourself at home. At least it will be cleaner say the cynics.

But the truth is that, there is a silent revolution taking place in rural India. Take a look at the Primary Health Centers (PHCs) in the district towns. They have transformed the state of health care in many a town. Thanks to Government hospitals, sick people in rural areas do not need to make the long and dangerous trip to a city hospital. Help is at hand in their own towns and villages.

I know of many doctors who have closed their infirmary and clinics in small towns because Govt Hospitals are doing a better job. Take treatment for pulmonary deceases, that was a major killer in the past. Nobody dies of TB any more. It’s all thanks to the Government Heath department. Doctor’s who were once reluctant to join rural hospitals are nowadays quite open to serving a term in small towns as the Govt hospitals are well equipped and just as importantly, well staffed too.

Thanks to this I know of a bunch of city folks who have sold their house in Chennai for a sizable amount and moved to Chingalpet located about fifty miles out of the city. In the old days moving to Chingalpet from Chennai was the equivalent of committing suicide. Now these people after building a comfortable house in Chingalpet have invested the rest in simple bank deposits and are living a comfortable and stress free life.

Dr. Raj B. Singh is one such doctor who closed his clinic near Kancheepuram because he found that the local Government Hospital has made his clinic redundant.  Will we see an increased flow of retired folk into small towns from the big cities? Watch his interview on RUMBLE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v5hOhaiahU

What is all the brouhaha about ‘fine dining’?

When eating out is elevated to a fine art you can be sure that the prices will increase. Indians don't see through art food and they paying a huge price for it. When your mad uncle from the army insisted that you eat up the last bits of burpy vegetable from your plate you must have sworn off them forever so did you imagine those nasty veggies would turn up again on your plate but this time as gourmet food?

Did you imagine paying a kings ransom for gut clogging spinach now called epinards or repulsive snails served up as escargots? Or how about those cute bunnies turning up on your plate as le lapin? Among the peoples of the world that eat any and every type of creature there must be no one who can beat the Chinese. From my travels around the world there is no country I dreaded going out to eat as much as China. I shuddered to go to ‘authentic’ Chinese restaurants. The only way I could go through an authentic Chinese meal in China was after poring down a quarter litre of alcohol with no ice or water, all at one go. 

The Japanese or the French come in a close second. I once had a friend named Jerry Gondotra who was the Chief Mate on a Panamanian ship that had a mixed Asian crew. I ran in to him dockside in Cristobal while waiting for a boat to take us out to our ships. I was on a ship belonging to Dempo Steamships so I invited him on board for an Indian meal but he had to cry off as his ship was due to transit the canal in a few hours. Before we parted ways he told me that his ship had a Burmese cook and after eating ox tongue and ox tail for a whole month he felt compelled to ask the Captain if he would ever be served up the middle portions of the cow. I never heard from Jerry again.

Even in India we are seeing the arrival of strange cuisines on our shores. Fortunately Korean restaurants with menu cards listing dog meat are not seen here. Also uncommon are Chicken claw soup in Chinese restaurants, pickled pig’s ears in Japanese restaurants etc. As for what goes on inside a restaurant’s kitchen it is best not seen or known. Though reality, cooking shows with immaculate kitchens, pretty looking competitors cooking exotic vegetables and meats are now commonplace on TV, the reality is still vermin infested kitchens. But we know that efforts are underway to make things better. You can get to hear more from Chef Anand in a conversation with me on RUMBLE. Check his interview out on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSFZN6tDUK4

Do all Playback Singers fake it on stage?

Have you ever wondered why the ubiquitous Music shops that sold records, cassettes and CDs have all disappeared? Has music become so irrelevant to our lives that it is no longer missed? The answer must be ‘yes’ because there are no music stores around and many of my friends cannot remember the last time when they went out and bought a tape or a CD. I would say that data storage technology in the form of the pen drive and now on cloud killed off the cassette and CD.

The Internet has popularized the notion that music should be free for the listener. Years ago the Government used to even make us pay an annual fee for listening to the radio. Some may remember the printed license books, without which it was illegal to play the radio. That would sound crazy to the modern day youngster. Pay for listening to music on the radio! Tell anyone that and he would wonder if you had a hole in your head?

Youngsters today don’t pay to listen to music and in any case it is available for free on the Internet. When no one pays for the music it follows that musicians will not earn any money either. That in turn means that no youngsters would want to learn to play a musical instrument. A synthesizer can, faithfully replicate any musical note from any instrument so where would that leave the violin or the flute or the saxophone? I guess we will one day sell tickets to let visitors marvel at the violin or the saxophone. Maybe they will only be seen in a museum or be used only for research.

As many singers would testify these days, even live performances are not ‘live’. Most of the time ‘performers’ are mimicking or triggering pre-programmed electronic instruments. Singers often just hold the microphone to their mouth and let the pre-recorded version play. If I remember rightly it was a singer called Betty Boo who first let the cat out of the bag. Betty Boo was a hot female pop star at the turn of the 1990s in the U.K. Her debut album, ‘Boomania’, went platinum, and she won the 1991 Brit Award for Best British Breakthrough Act. But things took a turn for the very worst while on tour in Australia the following year, when she dropped her microphone on stage without missing a note. 

Around the same time Fab Morvan won, what might well be the most controversial Grammy Award ever given out. His group Milli Vanilli was given the Best New Artist award. Months later, the label admitted that Morvan and partner Rob Pilatus weren't the ones who sang on hit songs like 'Blame It On the Rain' and 'Girl You Know It's True’. Their Grammy was taken back and the media and music industry chewed them up and spat them out just as fast as they built them up. Now it is commonplace occurrence.

Listen to the Indian singer Ujjayinee Roy talk to me about lip synching in this shocking revelation on camera on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so0wd8EB3lo.

Housing for the poor is all about good neighbourliness.

I read that there are millions of people who are homeless even in the United States. Do I hear some people saying ‘serves them right’ or is there any sympathy for the ‘poor American’. Homeless in the USA used to mean that they don’t have their own little house surrounded by a neat lawn and picket fences and all that. But then I also hear that there are plenty now who only the sky for a roof. That is quite unbelievable.
At the same time my friends and relatives in the US say that all this talk about homeless in the USA is just bullshit and ask me whether I have ever heard of emigrant Indians who live on the streets. Was it because they saved up sufficiently or is it that their needs were low? I would say a bit of both.

In the late sixties and seventies I used to visit ports in the US first as an apprentice and then as an officer on Indian Merchantman. What always fascinated me about even the smallest towns and ports were the neatly painted wooden houses with manicured lawns on every street. They were small but had a picture postcard look about them. Even the longshoremen lived well and drove large automobiles.

In contrast back in India where I grew up in Trivandrum, Delhi and Madras only the houses of the rich and powerful had a wall around it. Others were ramshackle with raggedy yards. Of course the houses we lived in were always large brick structures as my father was an I.A.S. man. He was entitled to houses that had a garage and sometimes an outhouse that contained the servant’s quarters or sometimes just a room for the driver. I don’t ever remember our house being painted or if it was ever done, it was done when I wasn’t around. The reason why I mention painting is because the exteriors of houses in India are never touched up. Windowpanes were never clean and sparkling. Even the well to do folks do not keep their houses clean, so why are we surprised that the poor do not either.

As for housing for the poor, I did not have any really poor friends or if they were poor I had no way of knowing they were poor. In any case no one discriminated in Kerala on the basis of being poor and my cricket playing friends came from all sorts of families. I assumed that they too had houses somewhere. Now when I look around Chennai I realize that we just never though about the poor, period. Housing for the poor was never thought about. Our parents never talked about it and neither did our teachers or religious leaders tell us about it.

City living is now all about living in ‘flats’ with little or no greenery around. The buildings are mostly ten storey blocks with four apartments to a floor fronting a narrow street. When I was growing up I remember drains bordering the street but now the streets are flooded even after the smallest rain and I am talking about housing for the upper middle class, so you can imagine how the poor live? Lately a little attention is being paid to housing for the poor but they always look like cheap tenements.  Is it because the occupants of these small units do not know how to live in them?

In the absence of a sense of neighbourliness you get only quarrelsome families. They should have a sense of community but sadly that is almost impossible in India, given our caste differences. I can only hope that a good religious leader will emerge someday who can teach good neighbourliness among Hindus.

Watch Rana Bubber talk passionately about low cost housing talk about it with me on ‘RUMBLE’ at