Dar Lage Toh Gaana Gaa...

They say an average person fears public speaking more than they fear death. At least that's what Seinfeld says. In my lexicon of useless information, there's even a word for this fear, Glossophobia! (from the Greek word Glossa meaning tongue).

My own source of terror is singing in public, probably only topped by the mortification of hearing my own singing voice. Any intentions that I could have possibly harboured of leading life as a wandering minstrel were nipped in the bud, thanks to my mother, who fondly recorded her pubescent son once, while encouraging him to give vent to his singing urge. Poor mom didn't realise that apart from Michael Jackson, no one has yet mastered the art of staying contralto post the age of 13!

That tape was played just once in my hearing and then I fled the room. My singing muse has never had the courage to show its face in my conscious mind yet. That tape probably still exists, and is being used to ward off evil spirits in a house far far away.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, with such a buildup to my historical aversion, it was a complete & utter surprise when last Saturday, I found myself singing! In a stranger's house. Hindi songs. On Karaoke. Will the ignominy never end?

Thankfully, there were just 2 witnesses to my crime against humanity, not counting the maid, who incidentally was singing an aria to herself while making Indian food in the kitchen! Figure that out!

Was I drunk? Could Bacchus be the one to conveniently blame for my lapse? Not really! Mine kind host had offered me his lavish hospitality, but I had limited myself to a wee dram of Glenfiddich.

I had been invited for dinner by an ex-colleague who had recently gotten married. A very interesting match it was too, the couple being from different countries, different religions, different marital statuses before this one... you name any tradition, this couple broke it! Any topic of conversation in this particular social setting was a potential minefield, especially when a clunky person like myself was concerned! Just ask my wife; she's been trying to housetrain me for years. But I think all women secretly love having such socially inept hubbies to shout at and moan about to their friends, than they would let on!

The couple was very nice and gracious, the food was pretty good and the conversation was freeflowing and interesting (and very measured, from my side!). Contrary to all my apprehensions, there was no awkwardness at all while we chatted about various things, primarily because the couple were very much in tune (and dare I use the sappy word, Love?) with each other.

Then while at the dining table, I happened to see some strange contraption on the sideboard and asked about it. "It" was the karaoke attachment, which was promptly plugged in for a demo for the guest of honour! You just can't beat North Indians, especially Punjabis, for warmth, impulsiveness & an innate urge to show off! :-)

That "demo" went on for an hour, with the husband and wife both promptly grabbing a wireless mike each and singing out the lyrics of old hindi songs from the giant screen on the living room wall. I obviously declined all offers to being involved in the singing, and had to make ridiculous excuses. But there's no punjabi like a persistent punjabi, and hence I had to make my own contributions to the city's noise pollution.

After a couple of halfheartedly sung songs, I think I began to hit my stride and even secretly enjoyed the music. The funny part: all songs were accompanied by a random sequence of stock photographs, preprogrammed in the karaoke machine. So, while "Rafi" was singing a classical tune, the background shot would be of the Eiffel Tower or a hill in Scotland! Quite amusing.

It was almost midnight when I rose to bid adieu to my hosts. So after a lifetime of Singlossophobia (clever coinage, eh?), I finally found I could in fact enjoy singing loud in public.

Just goes to show you that life is full of surprises. There's no end to enriching and discovering yourself.

Be that as it may, I am still looking to destroy that tape!

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Courage

"What is courage?"

The story goes that a prestigious college had this as a question in their application form. The students were expected to write long essays in response. According to legend, one student, when faced with this question simply wrote the sentence 'This is courage.' and sent in his application. He was selected.

You know what I think courage is?

Sending the T-shirt below to the धोबी for ironing!



I haven't been able to muster enough courage for it, even a week after I washed the shirt! Read more!

And the Oscar for Best Dad goes to...

So who make the best screen dads? Who are our role models for how to be kind, stern, responsible, loving, strict, wise, playful...the qualifications list for daddy'ism goes on.

My own nominations would be:

In Hindi movies:

- Balraj Sahni: An example of this great man's portrayal of a father is "Paraya Dhan". But how does one forget "Garam Hawa" or "Waqt"? Or "Kabuliwala"?

- Nazir Hussain: "बेटी, आज अगर तेरी माँ ज़िंदा होती.." The quintessential maudlin & tormented father. :-)

In Hollywood:

- Danny Aiello: Apart from being a fine movie actor, he played Madonna's dad in the "Papa Don't Preach" video.

-John Goodman : Check out "Coyote Ugly".

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Into The Light

A couple of days back, a friend gave me a nefarious time-soaking device: Season 1 and the pilot DVDs of Battlestar Galactica. It's coming to an end right now in the US, and I have not been that fond of SF serials anyway. But when I started watching it, I just couldn't stop at one, as the potato chips ad goes!

What really gripped my attention was the title music for the pilot and the episodes. Both have operatic voices singing some strangely familiar chants. And it dawned on me that these are the same mantras that we have known for a long time.

The pilot uses the chant "Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamayaa". Having heard and read this one so many times, I was finally curious to delve deeper into the exact meaning and significance of this phrase. A little bit of research told me that this is part of a complete chant, as below:

"असतो मा सदगमय; तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय; मृत्योर मा अमृतं गमय; ॐ शांति शांति शांति"

"Asato Ma SadGamaya; Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya; Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya; Om Shanti Shanti Shanti"

Meaning:
"O Lord, Lead Us From Untruth To Truth, Lead Us From Darkness To Light, Lead Us From Death To Immortality, Om (signifying the sound of the Eternal) Let There Be Peace Peace Peace."

This chant is taken from the Third Brahmana of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.3.27).

The things we have to relearn from foreign shores! Even the link above is to the Max Muller translation of the Upanishad. Well, knowledge doesn't really belong to anyone, I guess!

Okay, this was just the pilot. The episodes use a different chant as their title music. More on that in a separate post. Read more!

Scotland trip in pix

Balmoral Hotel: View from my hotel window

Queen Margaret's Chapel window

Fly, the terrier

The famous Glenkinchie copper stills

The whisky tasting chamber

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Scotch & Sailboats : 5th day in Scotland

Day 5

August 23rd

This was to be the day of the pilgrimage, the day we were all waiting for, the day we would go to visit the motherlode. A visit to the scotch whisky distillery. Every person's brain had just 2 words flashing in big neon lettering: FREE TASTING!

An hour's bus journey through grassy fields and small villages brought us to the Glenkinchie distillery at about 10am. The distillery itself seemed somewhat small to me. It was just a couple of buildings close to each other. Not much bigger than a couple of large barns stuck together. Not what you would expect of a multimillion, multinational business.

But then, midway through the factory tour, one realises that all that is needed for a whisky distillery is a couple of giant fermenting vats which can be housed in, you guessed it, a couple of big barns. That, and the right water, the right soil, the right climate etc.

How whisky is actually made is quite simple: Soak a lot of barley in water and let it germinate. Then dry it out with smoke. Mash the lot and dump it in huge vats (tuns) filled with warm water and let it all ferment & turn to warm smelly mush. Cool and then distil in copper vats. Keep distilling continuously till the whole liquid becomes highly concentrated. Fill in oak casks and then store it cool dry place for maturing. The maturing period determines the quality of the final whisky. Different aged whiskies are then mixed together to get blended scotch. Alternatively, a whisky from a single batch or a single distillery can be bottled straighaway & sold, as a Single Malt.

The fumes inside the tun chamber were so strong that one of the guys (the same person who was relieved at not having won the whsky bottle) was overcome by them, and had to retire outdoors to get some fresh air. As for the rest of us, we though we were in beer heaven! The smell was exactly like that.

After checking out the shiny copper stills, and me having asked a couple of intelligent (!) questions, we came out into the whisky tasting room! At long last! There was an entire wall of different whiskies which were there to be served and enjoyed. I tried out a couple of unusual ones, asking the master for advice. Don't really recall which ones I tasted. One of them was a rare Caol Ila, I remember.

Later, it was time to shop in Glenkinchie's dutyfree whisky shop. I picked up 4 bottles of various Single Malts, and only stopped at the thought of my overweight baggage which I would be having to carry to Leicester on a local flight before returning to Dubai.

Back to the hotel, we advised everyone for get a bit of rest after lunch so as to be fresh for the evening's gala dinner. It was to be the grand finale of the trip. And what a finale!

At 7pm sharp, a bus came to fetch our entire group and take us to the docks. As we got down from the bus, the group could see a red carpet laid out, leading towards the steps of the HMY Britannia. There was a huge mustachioed royal piper in full regalia playing by the side of the boat.

At the top of the steps, we were met by the blonde tour guide, Shelley Ryan. At the sight of her, suddenly every guy's tummy got sucked in and they got taller by at least 2 inches! Amazing scientific phenomenon, this.

A purser come across to greet us, since our group was being given a personalised tour of the boat. He led us to the Queen's drawing room which had a grand fireplace and an equally grand piano. We draped ourselves over various settees & sofas while drinks were served. As expected, every person had their cameras out and was busy clicking away.

After 15 minutes of posing every which way, we were led all along the boat to have a look at the living chambers of various royal personalities, including the Queen, the Duke, The Prince etc. Their quarters were sealed off and preserved in an everyday kind of scenario. The queen had a rather small single bed along one side of the room, and a desk at right angles to it. The quarters were rather small, but they would have had to be, on board a ship.

We slowly made out way through the captain's quarters, the officers' mess room and the huge dining room. There were pictures of the royal family on the corridor walls. It was funny to see all the princes as they were decades ago.

Four different Royal couples have had their honeymoons on board this yacht. Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones were the first to get the Britannia treatment when, in 1960, it took them on a 6,000 mile voyage to the Caribbean. Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips were next, cruising the West Indies in 1973. In 1981 Charles & Diana boarded in Gibraltar at the start of their 16-day honeymoon voyage in the Mediterranean. Finally, in 1986  Britannia hosted her final honeymoon for the Duke and Duchess of York who spent five days aboard the Yacht cruising around the Azores.

See the pattern? None of the marriages survived! :-)

Out on the deck, it was getting to be dark, and the lights of the city were coming on one by one. The guide expolained to us that the Queen used to sail to various countries on the yacht on official visits, and when they arrived at the destination, the yacht would drop anchor off the coast, the royal Rolls Royce that was also on the boat, would be carried to the shore, the Queen would then get onto a smaller motorboat to get ashore, and then with full pomp and show, the Rolls would carry her to the official ceremonies. 

The Rolls is now permanently stationed in a glass-sided garage on the deck, and is still always kept in full working condition.

We continued our deck tour, and checked out the badminton court as well as a huge bell with the yacht name and "1953" the year of its commissioning engraved on it.

I made a quick detour here to go to the gift shop and pick up a couple of mementoes, including a commemorative Wedgewood. The shop was doing brisk business and the queues at the counter were really long. The place seems to be very popular with tourists.

We proceeded to the stateroom where a massive table had been laid out for us, with placeholders indicating our seating places. Each placeholder had an embossed royal insignia along with our names, making it an instant collectible. It was the same with the menus, which were individually designed, with the same embossed insignia, the individual's name inside and their specific diets taken into account in the individually customised menus. The Royal treatment!

After dinner was over and the plates had been cleared, I got up to thank the group for their performance, and then handed out the certificates to the winners, accompanied with a lot of applause and popping flashbulbs. Finally we made our way out of the boat, happy and sated.

This was the final event in the tour itinerary, and we would be making our way home from the next morning onwards. I would not accompany the group which would be taking a direct flight home, but would take a short local flight from Edinburgh to Leicester.

The next 2 days, including the weekend were spent happily in the company of the "golden haired" Maami'ma, the English cousins, boisterous kids running amok, toy trains laid out in the guest room (with their precise running schedules scrawled in spidery writing & pasted on various doors), visits to the local botanical garden (where I saw a Venus flytrap for the 1st time!), icecreams in the back garden in nice cool sunny weather. Oh, and not to forget, kitchen table discussions with a Shakespearean drama critic named Janet Jackson! (DISCLAIMER: No wardrobe malfunctions occurred during the course of such discussions). A good time was had by all.

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Highland Games: 4th day in Scotland

Day 4

August 22th

Today was the day for the team-building activity at Mavis Hall park. We had arranged for some highland games to be played between teams comprising our group members, though I had no idea what these games were. After a 45 minute drive, we arrived at the farm. 

It was a grey morning, and it had been drizzling all through our journey. We squelched our way through muddy paths into a warm cozy barn where coffee was being served. I think a few of our guys wouldn't have minded a tot of something stronger, even that early in the morning! Fly, the terrier, was running around, darting between everyone's legs and then disappearing under the serving tables. On  our way in, we have seen a few hens clucking about, and then everyone had stopped to click away. It was really funny to see the mother hen pecking away at the ground, and her brood of tiny chicks following her, stopping every now and then to peck away on their own. I joked that catching the hen was one of the highland games we would be playing.

We ambled through leafy woods to the vast clearing which was to be the scene of the intense competition between the 4 "clans". There were to be 4 separate competitions:

Tossing the Caber: You have to lift a caber (a large pole) so that it is perpendicular to your body with one end pointing to the sky. The pole is then tossed forward in the air to rotate (at least once!) and fall over to lie in the 12 o’clock position, or as near that as possible.

Weight over Bar: This involves (obviously!) swinging a wooden block over a bar which somewhat resembles the rugby goalposts. The bar is behind you and you swing the block with the help of strong ropes tied around it, over your head , letting it go at the critical moment.

Highland Dancing: Teams watch a short demo of highland dancing by pretty girls in flouncy long skirts to the tune of bagpipes before they have to dance the very same intricate steps themselves.

Welly Boot Hurling: Team members have to throw a large wellie boot towards big tyre hoping to land it plumb inside, but it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially if you are under intense pressure to score points for your team!

As one can imagine, the teams were really charged up for the competitions, and the resulting antics were rather funny to watch! Especially when pot-bellied not-so-young guys huffed and puffed while trying to lift the oh-so-heavy cabers and balance them precariously over their shoulders. Funnier still was the spectacle of leadfooted guys in wellingtons trying to match the nimble-footed steps of the young girls doing the highland jig! As for me, I stuck to the only few steps I know, the bhangra steps made famous in all his movies by Dharmendra!

After the fun and games were over and the team totals added up, there was one more little game to be played: Haggis Malt Challenge. A bottle of malt whisky was placed on the uneven grassy field, and every person had to try throwing Scotland’s national dish (or a wooden skittle as a representation) as close to Scotland’s favourite drink as they could. The person who would get closest to the bottle would win the Challenge and the bottle! Our guide, Stuart, talked us through this game, and then proceeded to give us a quick demo with the wooden skittle which to everyone's amazement (and probably his own too!) went on to bounce a coule of times on the uneven ground and hit that bottle smack on target!

Of course, none of us proved to be that accurate (or lucky?). There was a bit of a tension at the very end, when the very last person to throw the skittle inched ahead to the bootle, and was declared the winner. Later. much later, I got to know that the person who ended up losing in the end was the most relieved person. It seems that he was not too keen to handle a whisky bottle, owing to the compulsions of his sectarian beliefs. Well, it's not too often that a contest ends up making not one but two people equally happy!

A happily tired, slightly wet & bedraggled lot finally made their way to the bus, to be taken directly to the lunch venue, The Living Room, that I have written about earlier. Afterwards, it was a quiet stroll along the streets back to the hotel, for some rest & recuperation.

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