A good book reading is much like a good hostess: warm, inviting and adept at introducing her like-minded guests to each other.

And so it was with the Fresh off the Shelf session at the David Sassoon Library Garden today evening where the mosquito-coils burned steadily, the mikes all worked well (a *huge* improvement from the Smorgasword) and the house was packed. Six recently published (and one still in the process) authors, read out excerpts from their books to an attentive audience, which was familiar with some of them, hadn’t heard of some, but were equally receptive to all of them.

The first reading was by Jerry Pinto (who was also the moderator for this session) from his book, Reflected in Water. Jerry introduced his book with the tongue-in-cheek claim that it wasn’t really his book although he did have copyright of the arrangement of pieces. He then read out a couple of paragraphs from his book, peppering his reading with anecdotes from Goan life and even managed to cajole a member of the audience into singing the opening bars of the popular Goan song ‘Ghe ghe ghe ghe, ghe re saiba’ (which was immortalised for a majority of the Indian population, by the then young-and-fresh-faced Rishi Kapoor in the film Bobby).

The next reading was by C. Sriram, author of The Long Reverie of Partha Sarma. In a pale lavender shirt, with his hair neatly combed, Sriram could have easily passed off as the CA/software-engineer-next-door, that is, until he started his reading. He began his reading with the mock-warning “This is going to be depressing” and it turns out, there was only a little mockery involved. While it didn’t quite have the audience reaching for their prozac, the few paragraphs he read out did manage to mellow the audience down a little. He acquiesced, in reply to a question from a member of the audience, that “First time authors cannot resist the attempts to be dramatic.”

The third reading was by author Amitabha Bagchi who really is an engineer (from IIT, no less) but looks a lot less like it, than C.Sriram. Amitabha’s book Above Average, is, in the words of one panelist, ‘another one of those IIT books’ (we presume he referred to the Five Point Something genre, if that can indeed be called a genre) but we beg to differ. For one, the writing is a lot more polished (and yes, we can say that from just a couple of paragraphs). Amitabha’s reading was quite entertaining as he got completely into character with each of the…uh, characters that came up in the reading.

Sampurna Chatterjee (also apparently known as ‘shampoo’) read out some of the poems from her book titled Sight May Strike You Blind, which we found pleasant, if a little surreal. Sampurna mentioned that the title had something to do with the fact that she is ‘utterly hopelessly myopic’, but tragically enough, we have forgotten what the exact correlation was (sorry!). She ended her reading with a quote that she says she has learnt to follow in her own life: “The road runs on, it is you who must learn to stop.”

Right after Sampurna’s reading, the crows (which have made an appearance at the festival before) congregated overhead once again and decided that Peter and Manisha (the editors and publishers of The Coffee Table Book) needed to be serenaded, and launched into the effort heartily. Thankfully, they (the crows) did not have mikes while Manisha and Peter did. Peter and Manisha, in their new (and spiffily-dressed) avatars as publishers, first spoke to the audience about Caferati, its origins and its strengths as a forum for budding writers. Peter stuck to reading the introduction after which Manisha read out one story from the book.

The next author to take the stage was Ambarish Satwik who has written a book bizarrely titled, ‘Perineum’. He opened his reading with a slideshow of “schematic diagrams (of previously mentioned body part, also, book title) because showing the real thing would make it smut”. Ambarish came across as someone who knew his material in and out and was an engaging reader. I was almost upset when he stopped and came *this* close to pushing him back on stage and forcing him to finish the story. His book though, is still in the process of getting published and will be in the market possibly in the middle of the year.

The last speaker for the evening was graphic novelist Sarnath Bannerjee (author, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers), who wisely let his pictures (illustrations actually) do most of the talking. The presentation was a fabulous combination of voiceover, sound effects and of course, the illustrations. Now I’m not very familiar with the graphic novel genre, but I know a good story when I see it and this was very good. It apparently took Sarnath three-and-a-half years to complete and the process was, in his own words, immensely complicated.

So thus we came to the end of another wonderful evening of literature and I will sign off with a plea to all those of you who are fat of wallet and large of heart, to support your local Indian authors and buy their books (originals only though)!

If there’s one thing that I don’t like about the Kala Ghoda festival, it’s that it makes me wish I could be at three different places at the same time. For the last two days I’ve been running from one program to another, usually arriving sometime mid-way between the second show which usually leaves me desperately craning my neck and standing on my toes so that I can see over the heads of the crowds. It usually doesn’t help.

(Note to self: Grow taller)

But really, I found myself wishing that there could be some way to stop the tallest people from standing right in front of the stage and leaving all the poor vertically challenged souls (like me) with only a partial view of the stage, and cursing their VC genes. Wouldn’t it be great if seating were determined by height? So if you were over six feet tall and wearing headgear which added another foot to your height, you would sit in the back row and yet, have the perfect view of the stage because only shorter people would be allowed to sit in front of you. See? That way everybody’s happy!

Coming back to the performances.

I reached the amphitheatre about mid-way through the Odissi recital by Jhelum Paranjpe and her troupe, and until it struck me that I could actually climb up the steps of the amphitheatre, I watched about five minutes of six pieces of elaborate headgear bob up, down and sideways all together.

When wisdom and a better view dawned, I came to the conclusion that Odissi is such a pretty dance form - all feminity and coy smiles and sweetness and light. Which might probably explain why the sight of the two male dancers in that group of women, disturbed me on a very fundamental level. Oh they were good – performing all the abhinaya and the mudras and the curvaceous movements with practiced ease - no doubt about it, but it was just a *little* disconcerting to see them dance the exact same steps as all the female dancers and with the same amount of…feminity?

The Dasavatar (ten incarnations of Vishnu) piece that they - the three male dancers - performed towards the end dispelled all my ignorant notions of how Odissi was a purely feminine dance form. Those men displayed energy, and effervesence and grace and there was nothing feminine about it. They were marvelous as they went from Matsya through to Varaha, playful as Krishna, serene as Buddha and downright frightening as Narasimha.

Jhelum then performed a solo on a hymn by Salbeg - a Muslim poet who worshipped a Hindu god – and it was beautifully done. Jhelum was graceful and wonderfully emotive as she acted out the pain of the poet, who was not allowed to worship at the temple because he was a Muslim, and how he longed for his lord to grant him deliverance from his crippled earthly body.

The last performance was a pure dance piece titled Moksha, in which all the dancers performed. It was an awesome sight to see as ten pairs of ghungroo-laden feet danced, ten wrists delicately bent and ten heads gracefully swayed along with the music in perfect unison.

So much prettiness!

I think I shall now have a perfectly legitimate grudge against my parents for a) never sending me to any dance classes and b) passing on the vertically-challenged gene to the sole family member who could’ve done without it.

Now since a smorgasbord is usually either a “supper buffet with a variety of delicous foods” or a “large heterogeneous mixture”, is it okay to assume a smorgasword is a large, heterogenous mixture of delicious words? We think it is.

The event has already been written about, so we’re just putting up some random pearls of wisdom which we gathered as they (the pearls of wisdom, NOT the speakers) dropped from the stage and rolled into the audience.

“Advertising is art in the service of commerce.” - Rafeeq Ellias

“Today is one of those genuinely frightening evenings.” - Rahul DaCunha
As he took the stage without (in his words) any specific agenda other than to talk about taking writing from the ‘page to the stage’.

“I assure you there is a point to all this.” - Rahul Dacunha (again).
While taking the audience through a slideshow of the Amul butter ads through the years. The point (I think) was that, as people who work in the media, you need to communicate with your audience in a language they understand.

Concerned Member of the Audience: “What is keeping people away from theatre?”
Rahul DaCunha: “I think it’s the traffic.”

“All four of us started out in life as copywriters, which just goes to show that you never know what these copywriters will actually end up doing.” - Madhushree Dutta

“Word as text is only one genre of narrative but writing is autonomous, while other forms of narrative cannot really exist independently.” - Madhushree Dutta

“You have to write whether it is a pain in the neck or in the lower back.” - Mahesh Dattani

Delicious words indeed, no?

“We were given the choice of performing at the amphitheatre as well, but we wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the royal court of Wajid Ali Shah, which is where these two art forms – Thumri and Kathak – came into being.”

It is rare to find an artist who can not only convey her love and mastery of her art to the audience, but also make them fall in love with it. It is rarer to find two such artists and even rarer to find them amicably sharing a stage.

But that is what we witnessed at the Kathak–Thumri Milap at the NGMA auditorium today evening. Almost two full hours of enthralling music and scintillating dance. Dhanashree Pandit reminded me so much of those too rare teachers and professors, who made their classes so interesting that you’d actually bunk bunking to attend them. She didn’t just sing those thumris, she owned them – playing them out slowly at first, like kite-string, pulling, releasing, teasing and then… setting them free to fly.

And really, it was an education. For someone whose only talent (as far as Hindustani classical music goes) is being able to differentiate a Des from a Bhairav, I came away from that performance feeling like I had taans and aalaaps sloshing out of my ears (in the nicest way possible). I came away wanting to dedicate my life (or what is left of it) to music! And dance! And glory to the performing arts!

But coming back to real life.

Dhanashree began the show with an introduction to the basic thumri. She explained the birth of the thumri as a counter-development to the more complex and sophisticated khayals of the period. How folk songs from UP made their way into the Mughal courts, where they were cleaned-up, polished, decorated with Urdu words and finally presented as graceful thumris.

Thumri and kathak are apparently sister art-forms, both having originated under the patronage of Wajid Ali Shah. The word thumri itself, has its origins in dance - ‘thum’ being a bol used in kathak and ‘ri’ from the Hindi word rijhana (to please).

The pieces were presented as interactions between the dancer and the musicians - Dhanashree would sing a piece with Keka performing it simultaneously. Watching this interaction on stage was truly awe-inspiring because it seemed that they never needed to speak to each other, like they had this secret language between them which made words absolutely unnecessary. Keka would simply nod at the tabla-player and in the next second the auditorium would resonate with frantic-but-perfectly-in-sync activity from all the four people on that stage.

Keka Sinha was fascinating as she swayed, pirouetted and acted out the thumri themes one after the other. Whether they were the Radha-Krishna stories or the depiction of the eight nayikas*, she was marvelously convincing in all of them.

At the end of this wonderful, wonderful evening, all I can say is thank God for Wajid Ali Shah!

*Classical heroines of the ancient scriptures of dance.

They plucked out flowers out of thin air, called stars and commanded them to twinkle. They summoned oceans and made them dance, made rain without a single cloud.
These were no dancers, these were conjurors.

So if dance is poetry in motion, what is poetry interpreted through dance?

I watched Kolkata-based dancer Vandana Hazra and her troupe perform today and while I didn’t exactly find an answer to the above question, I came away dazzled.

I’m not very familiar with Rabindranath Tagore’s work, or Bharatnatyam, or Chau for that matter, but I know magic when I see it and what I saw on stage today was *it*. Now I know that dancers are supposed to own the space around them but these ones? They left no space. Every inch of that stage was filled with flowers, forests, stars, rain, rivers…and all of it created in seconds out of gestures and thin air. A delicate flick of a wrist made a raindrop, fingers unfurled into blossoming flowers; arms melted into fluid wavelets and waists into riverbends.

It was like watching a poem come to life.

Most pieces began with Vandana translating the poems into English for the mostly non-Bengali audience. The musicians would then take it up and Vandana would either perform solo, or with one other dancer. The performances were mostly Bharatnatyam but the poems which contained characters in conflict, had a combination of Bharatnatyam and Chau.

And it was in these pieces that the difference between the two forms was most stark – Bharatnatyam is all grace and delicacy and form, and Chau is all movement and energy and balance. The choreography was aptly done, in that, all the strong moving characters like rivers and storms were executed in Chau, and all the softer, earthier characters were in Bharatnatyam (that Chau dancer floated around on stage like she had never heard of that silly little thing called gravity, or bones for that matter!).

It was amazing to see how two distinct forms of expression could come together so flawlessly on one stage, but maybe that was the whole show was about - blurring the boundaries between poetry, music, dance, and magic.

The streets have stirred themselves awake,
the trees are dressed in flags and lights.
The air is filled with strains of song,
the dark horse rides the road tonight.

It’s the first day of the Kala Ghoda art and culture festival and you can almost reach out and grab a handful of the buzz in the air, the change is that tangible. Traffic noises are replaced by human voices yelling, laughing, talking, pavements are playing easels and this area that is usually filled with people going about their business, is now filled with artists, actors, musicians, dancers and the audience trying frantically to drink it all in.

I first visited the Kala Ghoda festival two years ago and it was love at first sight. From the huge free-for-all-as-long-as-you-paint-something-related-to-horses canvas (on which I painted a nifty little sea-horse, thank you very much!), to the plays being performed in Horniman circle. From the food stalls where I sampled the most delicious kebabs I have ever eaten, to Daksha Seth’s dance troupe which brought that small wooden stage to life. Absolute, unabashed, love, is what I fell head-over-heels into.

I missed the whole festival last year but vowed, as God and broadband were my witnesses, that come February 2007 and I would attend every single day of it.

So here I am, on day one, prowling through the precinct like some culture starved creature.

I arrive fairly early in the morning, while the stalls are still being constructed and the installations put together. The crowds haven’t trickled in yet so it is relatively quiet and I can still walk around without bumping into people (dodging approaching juggernauts of workmen bearing stage props is still on though).

I walk slowly, stopping at each stall - antique furniture, pottery from Thailand, bronze artifacts, iron figurines from Bastar - and all the while I’m taking mental notes of which ones I’m definitely going to return to (although that doesn’t help much since I’ve ticked almost all of them).

I run off to attend the writing workshop I had signed up for and by the time I get back, the landscape has changed again. Where there was an empty parking lot, there is now a white fiberglass (I think) model of an airplane mounted on a platform of painted canvases. The tree on the corner has sprouted lips (yes really! lips!) and perched up on a platform is a small horse made of recycled material.

And that is what I love most about this festival - there’s always something new just around the corner.

Update: The little white airplane (I’m told by a reliable source) is actually a model of a Mirage 2000 and is made of wood and metal and covered with khadi and not (as I’d previously assumed) fiberglass.