Monday, December 13, 2010

Post-Partyem

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Yesterday, Post-Party, was a day of sightseeing for the guests. Everyone left cramping themselves into 3 cars to make the best of a sunny wintry afternoon and returned late at night after the ritual has been gone through.

Feeling they have accomplished something big to talk about and feeling miserable inside.

My son dumped them in the In-Orbit Mall in the Hi-Tech City hoping they would swipe their credit cards hastily and repent at leisure.

But folks nowadays are too clever by half: It was the Mall that was fooled....

I was alone for the 9 hours at home and slept off in fits and starts.

The mood was into Telugu lullabies, missing Ishani badly for 9 long hours.

There was one composed by my great-grandfather around the time Sepoys were mutinying in India, Lincoln was having one of his nervous breakdowns, and Autocrat was going strong in Boston gabbing away and composing delightful verses.

Due to the prevailing oral tradition, only two stanzas of the lullaby survived and passed on to me.

So, I composed two more and closed the chapter.

Adi Sankaracharya was going forth with his 12 disciples one morning and found an old man trying to learn Sanskrit Grammar the hard way.

And took pity on his futile attempts and composed extempore on the spot 12 verses now called : Dwadasa Manjari: 12 stanzas in the Manjari prosody; somewhat like the short and sweet konika of Rabindranth Tagore.

The 12 verses with "Bhaja Govindam" as the refrain are gems pouring forth the futility of worldly aspirations: 2G-Spectrum, 3-G, 4-G and N-G.

Then on each of his disciples composed one each as a Supplement...24 in all.

Anyone who reads any of the verses can at once decide if it was composed by the Adi Guru or one of his disciples. The Sankara trade-mark is all over his.

Likewise, if anyone listens to the 4 stanzas of the lullaby I spoke about, they can decide at once which are my great-granpa's and which mine: the trade mark of genius is all over my ancestor's gems...in lullabies Sense is secondary to the Sound...

Still...not all is lost...;we don't relish hilsa fish and that is a tragedy; otherwise, the original 4 would have surely survived...



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