Hyderabadi Durga Puja

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Durga Puja is back here again...and none too soon. We have been looking forward to it...little Ishani in particular.


Of late I haven't moved from Hyderabad at all. And rarely went out of our little locality except to my friend NP's place in Khairatabad once in a while. Weekdays I drive from our apartment complex to the nearby Lily School, Diptishrinagar Bus Stop, and the Petrol Station by the My Home Jewel. Otherwise I am confined to my bed on which sits my laptop on its stand in a corner.


But I am game to travel to the Durga Puja Pandals in October...a couple of hours drive in unruly traffic. 


The attractions for me there are:


1. Dhaak: This is one music that hasn't suffered fusion for all the 50 years since I first heard it at KGP. It remains the same, like myself.


Here is Aniket in his inimitable description of his experience once:

...The sound of the dhaak reminds me of a time when I was visiting my cousins in Delhi during DP, and the purohit had been gifted a bottle of scotch. He had finished half the bottle, and kept it somewhere, and then the bottle went missing. It transpired later that dhaaki had finished off the rest, raw, and the dhunuchi dancers had to literally face the music for what seemed like forever...

Here is the link my son sent just now of this evening's dhaak:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sQG4HPep8c&feature=youtu.be 

2. Ambiance: For lay outsiders like me the best way to capture the ambiance of Bengal is to visit the nearest Durga Puja Pandal. I haven't traveled much, being  a cot tomato, so I don't know if any other state has an equivalent site for their ambiance...other than Tamilnadu in its Classical Music Concerts.

3. Food: One or two stalls of authentic Bengali food are found here. The rest dozen sell fusion biriyani, noodles, popcorn, chow mien, bottled soft drinks, and packed chips and kurkure.

So we were happy that, after the last few days of rains, we woke up to a morning sunny and dry. But it turned cloudy and drizzly at noon and that was a dampener. But the skies cleared up by the evening, perhaps because the supercyclone off the Orissa coast sucked up all the moisture.

So my son drove Sailaja, Ishani and me to the most famous DP Pandal here this evening. 

I am agnostic and tone deaf but learned not to be put off by either, continuing my woolgathering in the midst of religion and music.

As my folks entered the Pandal looking for a closeup seat, I drifted to the tea-stall and had my cup of cheer.

And returned to the Pandal and sat on a broken chair outside, within reach of the Sound of Dhaaks. And could have spent a couple of hours undisturbed...the beats are ever uplifting.

After half an hour my son led us to the Bengali food stall and asked me what I would have...and I took no time answering:

"Loochi-Alur Dum and Mochar Chops"

And when the loochies arrived in a shiny synthetic plate I saw 8 of them stacked one above the other and was wondering what to do with them all. But when turned over, they turned out to be only 4...the other 4 were their mirror images in the glistening plate...a nice sales gimmick. Last year I couldn't quite see them at all due to cataract...and was untroubled.

Ishani relished her Mishti Doi and later, popcorn.

And then we went into the Entertainment Hall.

Wherever I go in India, whether into train compartments, or food-stall queues, or music halls, I find people attacked by the grab-and-hold virus for the nonce. I don't understand this well enough, having been a weakling since childhood, which handicapped me in the Great Indian Rat Race...but at the end of it all, I don't find I lost too much. 

The musical extravaganza on the stage was again typical. So many instruments in the background, most of them drums, kettle and bass, and brass thalis taking the occasional spanking.

The introductions of the 'famous' local artistes took more time than the artistes themselves. Much hoo-haa and hoopla.

And with what end-result?

We once again had the old Bollywood number Satyam Sivam Sunderam...with a hint of Shatyam, Shivam, Shundaram. Maybe a remix...I think that is what it is called.

And then there was this sudden lean thin gent with a mustache taking his seat in front of what I counted were a dozen tablas of all sizes and shapes. He was at the center of their semicircle. Apparently he was fusing his sundry tablas with the band-baja behind him. This reminded me of the glasses and cups of water at different levels we used to lay in front of us in our childhood, and beat them with a spoon, and showed off to our mom that ours was a Jalatarangini or whatever.

And this mod-tabalchi was uplifted and encouraged by a pony-tailed, ear-ringed person beside him strumming a guitar...maybe Hawaiian, or is it Zambian? I couldn't quite establish the sex of this guitarist, we sitting in the back row...but I was curious...Ishani had no doubts:

"Look, granpa, it is a MAN...look at his tummy!"

Anyhow, the item soon came to its inevitable end. And all the while I was noticing two girls (without doubt this time) in their late teens in the row in front of us. They were gossiping away for all of an hour totally undistracted by what went on on the stage...they were the true yogins...I was nowhere near them in total absorption.

We then took our paans and chai and left the place.

At 11 when we were by the Cyber Towers, my son halted the car in the curb and asked us all to keep shut for half an hour...he had a trans-Atlantic meeting scheduled beforehand. And he took it on his wife's Samsung...

That was the hi-tech end of our low-tech DP for the day...

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Last Laugh

Every once in a while, there was this huge gent coming up on the stage and announcing like the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar:

"Beware of pick-pocketers! Beware of pick-pocketers!"

This reminded me of Prof Sikand who once had an argument with an Andhra gent who was narrating his quarrel with his neighbourer. Sikand objected:

"There is none called neighbourers...all you have are your neighbors"

And the gent rebuked Sikand:

"Haven't you heard of laborers? So what is wrong with neighbourers?"

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