Someone had a launch of an Ojos de Brujo album right here in Chennai, and didn’t invite me! :(
Poem
Published for the first time online (to my knowledge, at least), the poem that much, much experience shows is probably your favourite from me. With notes to boot!
MADRAS WEEK AT VANILLA PLACE
Celebrate Madras/Chennai city’s 369th birthday with seven evenings of photography, folksongs and poetry! Seven nights of still life, song and sinful spoken word, saluting our city by the sea.
August 18 2008 – August 24 2008
MADRAS WEEK EVENTS AT VANILLA PLACE, MYLAPORE
CURATED BY CHANDRACHOODAN GOPALAKRISHNAN
AND SHARANYA MANIVANNAN,
WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF THE WORLD STORYTELLING INSTITUTE.
PHOTO EXHIBITION AND SALE
Opening night: August 18 2008
Time: 7pm
From August 18 to August 24 , organised by Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan and The Chennai Photowalk. Photos are of Chennai, as seen through the eyes of the photographers who participated in the first nine photowalks. All photos exhibited are available for purchase.
The Chennai Photowalk is a movement of the residents of Chennai to preserve the city’s heritage in the form of photos. Young and old, professional and the hobbyist, photographers of all description meet, walk and capture a view of the city mostly overlooked.
“THE SEA STORY”: A SPECIAL PERFORMANCE ON OPENING NIGHT
A special storytelling drama with folksongs by the Nochikuppam seafishing community, facilitated by the World Storytelling Institute and hosted by Eric Miller.
“The Sea Story” summary: One evening, a mother sings a lullaby to a child (Thalattu pattu). That night, some men go in a kattumaram to fish in the sea (Rowing pattu).
One man is lost in a storm, and some women on shore lament for the lost man (Oppari pattu). Finally, the lost man re-appears – he was rescued by a sea-turtle! – and the community members are filled with joy (Celebration pattu).
SPOKEN WORD READINGS AND OPEN MICS
From August 18 to August 24 at 8pm every night, hosted by Sharanya Manivannan.
August 18 – “Cities+Pride” (Opening Night)
August 19 – “Cities+Envy”
August 20 – “Cities+Wrath”
August 21 – “Cities+Sloth”
August 22 – “Cities+Greed”
August 23 – “Cities+Gluttony”
August 24 – “Cities+Lust”
Local poets both famous and soon-to-be-famous explore the idea of cities as hubs of sins from different angles. Debauchery or divine redemption? A bit of both is promised each night, along with poetry and prose both original and admired. Performers include Kuttirevathi, Vivek Narayanan, Deesh Mariwala and Sharanya Manivannan.
Open mic readings are open to all. Please contact sharanya.manivannan@gmail.com.
About the organisers
Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan is a writer (of prose, poetry and carefully worded commercial fiction) and a photographer (of people, places and the occasional abstract) from Chennai. His great-grandfather was an epigraphist, translator and the first Tamil novelist. These genes, always unpredictable, waited three generations to surface in Chandrachoodan, causing him to take a great interest in his city and its heritage. Which in turn took form as a monthly photowalk.
As a spoken word artist, Sharanya Manivannan has performed to critical and popular acclaim at dozens of venues, including an abandoned pier, a cemetery and the 11th century Borobudur Temple, as well as more conventional locations. Her book of poems, Witchcraft, will be published this year, and carries a foreword from celebrated Sri Lankan-American poet Indran Amirthanayagam that describes it as “bloody, sexy, beguiling as in a dance with veils… a glorious, chilling and sensual debut”. Sharanya is committed to the creation of a spoken word scene in Chennai, and regularly co-organises and hosts events that encourage the open mic format, in which anyone willing to share their work is welcome.
The World Storytelling Institute was founded by Eric Miller and Jeeva Raghunath in Chennai, in December 2007. Mr. Eric is the director of the WSI; Ms. Jeeva is the director of its section on storytelling for/by/with children. The WSI’s mission is to facilitate training in, performance of, and discussion about, forms of storytelling. In Tamil Nadu, three traditional styles of storytelling are 1) Kathaiyum Pattum (Story and Song); 2) Villupattu (Bow Song); and 3) Katha Kalak Chebam, also known as Harikatha (God Story). In cultures around the world, there are similar styles. We seek to help these styles be meaningful and useful in the modern world. Eric is Assistant Professor of Story and Storytelling at the Image College of Art, Animation, and Technology (Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad), which trains students in the design of 3D Animation, Cinema Visual Effects, and Computer-video-Internet games. He is near completion of a PhD in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia): his dissertation concerns the use of videoconferencing for educational and performance applications. Originally from New York City, Eric has settled in Chennai. He is married to Chennai native Magdalene Jeyarathnam, the founder-director of Chennai’s Center for Counseling, and they have a daughter.
Venue
Vanilla Place, No. 8/57, 1st Street Luz Avenue, near Nageswara Park, Mylapore.
All events are free and open to the public.
For further details, please contact Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan – 9884467463
Constellation of Scars — The First Chapter Published In Ghoti
The first chapter of my novel-in-progress, Constellation of Scars, is available in the summer 2008 issue of Ghoti Magazine.
I recently realised the glaring grammatical error in the first line which, because it still worked on an instinctual level, escaped me for years. All my life I will remember this…
The novel is far from over. I have worked on it in some form or the other for about seven years, but in the form it is in now for about three years. There’s much left to go.
The Venus Flytrap: Loosen Up And Love The Lungi
When our very own humble lungi made it onto the pages of the acclaimed street fashion photography blog The Sartorialist a few weeks ago, I was thrilled to bits. Cultural misappropriation and decontextualization? Oh pshaw. That Caucasian guy rocked that indigo lungi the way indigo lungis are meant to be rocked: by men with serious balls, metaphorical and otherwise.
Needless to say, I’ve been trying for awhile to get men out of their pants. And into their lungis.
Veshtis are too formal, kilts just trying too hard, regular skirts too evocative of transvestites (and if you’ve been following this column, you’d realise that would mean all amorous hopes will summarily be squashed but we could be BFFs). But the lungi – ah, how I would love to be taken to a fancy dinner by a man masculine enough to wear an indigo lungi with a white button-down shirt.
Of course, this takes quite some coaxing. I once made a guy come to college in a miniskirt (ah, the perks of being a slightly scary chick with a college magazine editorship!). He refused to take his track pants off from under the red wraparound, but not only did he very sportingly attend lectures and go out to lunch and let himself be photographed that way, he loved it. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he’s graduated to the liberating lounge-cum-luxury wear that is the lungi by now.
Then there was Lungi-Man, the superhero who fought cultural imperialism and mental colonization – and thankfully didn’t go commando as he bounded over traffic and tall buildings. Our intrepid crusader was invented for a friend who is quite severely desi-challenged (you know the type). Lungi-Man’s partner was the über-feminist Pavadai-Chatta Girl (yeah, she liked ironic statements). If I ever get tired of writing dysphoric verse and self-indulgent columns, I’ll do a graphic novel starring the two of them. Installment one: it’s laundry day, the wife’s on strike, and Lungi-Man is forced to wear the attire of his archnemesis, Veshtimeister. Things climax with Lungi-Man and Veshtimeister glowering at one other in a showdown, tweaking their own moustaches and striking dramatic poses, while Pavadai-Chatta Girl unties herself from the train tracks in her sheer boredom, then spits paan onto the both of them, staining their garments irreparably.
I guess you could say my lungi fascination started early. Some of the most fun I recall from my childhood was something called “the aeroplane game”, the key components of which are one lungi, one person to wear it, and one very small and easily amused child (two if the lungi-wearer has long legs). My father, in lungi of course, would sit down with his legs up on an adjacent chair. His lungi would fall in such a way as to create a sort of hammock-cradle, in which I could sit and swing around. I always thought I had discovered this by accident until I met a girl in my teens who had played the exact same “aeroplane game”. My guess is it may have been a common thing in Indian households until people started getting paranoid about the perceived ickiness factor of a kid being so close to the family jewels.
Some time last year, it was reported that a UK distributor had put in an order for 11,000 lungis from Kurunjipadi. No news since about what happened or is in store for what could very well be biggest fashion invasion of Europe since jodhpurs. Take heed, men of India! You can pre-empt the fashion capitals of the world starting today.
And trust me, the girls will love it.
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.
Didn’t Make The Cut
How to tell you are doing the work you are supposed to do: when you can cut out three poems, just like that, out of your manuscript as you do the layout your style (because you’re just a control freak that way) before it goes to the designer. You know your narrative, you know what goes. You even know what stays only because some people might demand refunds if it isn’t included.
HAIKU
The cocaine of you.
The hard drunk rock and roll god
damned nearness of you.
TANKA
You with your snakeskin
heart and quarter of moon lost
in your back pocket
seam. Drummer, you ensnare me
in a mandala of lust.
HAIKU
Your love, shapeshifter,
is like tonight’s blood-ripe moon,
coyly cloaked in clouds.
Update: Oops, and there goes another one…
TANKA
Naïvely, I threw
my love into space like a
boomerang, certain
of return. But your love is
a discus, and you took aim.
Not Quite A Whale Of A Time
When the props are better than the performance and the only remotely entertaining thing in the play is an inside joke that only three people in the audience can get, well… Glad we got the cheap seats.
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin
(via Liyana)
And something appropriate, from one of my favourite films, Hedwig And The Angry Inch:
Sent To Sathyam Cinemas
Dear Manager,
I am writing to complain about a disappointing experience I had tonight at your cinema.
At around 7pm, I was at the food counter on the ground floor, waiting for my turn. A man suddenly came to the side of the woman in front of me, who was ordering and paying for her snacks, and it was clear to me he was intending to cut queue. As soon as the person before me had finished with her transaction, he cut queue and placed his order. I said to him, “Excuse me, there is a queue.” In an extremely rude manner, he claimed that I had appeared out of nowhere and that he had been in the queue all along. Not only did he profess this blatant lie, he enlisted the cashier in it, saying to him that he had surely seen him in the queue. Your cashier took his order before mine.
I made sure that I gave your extremely unprofessional cashier a piece of my mind for letting that courtesy-challenged public nuisance cut queue.
That ill-mannered and inconsiderate people exist is not the issue I am bringing up here. You have no control over that.
But what you do have control over are your employees’ responses in such situations. Your cashier was clearly aware that I was waiting in line, and that someone had not just cut in front of me but claimed he was right to do so. Your cashier chose to attend to his order first anyway, thereby not just sanctioning that boorish customer’s behaviour, but also surely allowing him to feel justified in continuing to inflict his lack of basic decency upon others.
Your cashier is an embarrassment to your company. Your cashier’s behaviour reflects badly on Sathyam Cinemas, not on him. I won’t even remember his face, but your company’s is the name I will connect to the experience.
In other words, Sathyam Cinemas encourages idiots to impinge upon the time and rights of paying customers. Is that the message you intend to send? Because that’s the one I got, loud and clear, and the one I intend to pass on to other people.
There is no point in promoting yourselves as a leisure destination when your own staff ensure that your customers have poor experiences at your cinema.
Do think about it. I, for one, will certainly think twice before I patronize your poorly-run food counters again, if not your cinema itself.
Sharanya
Update Aug 10: They responded yesterday. Their email and my reply in the comments section.
I Could Drink A Case Of You, And Still Be On My Feet
I love Tori Amos’ cover of Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You.
I remember that time that you told me, you said
Love is touching souls
Surely you touched mine
Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
(full lyrics here)
The Venus Flytrap: In The Mood For Nostalgia
I once lived in a house that had only one article of art on its living room walls: a smallish framed poster from Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love. In retrospect, it was almost a mockingly ironic statement for that home, but that’s another story altogether.
It was some years before I finally watched the film myself, and when I did, I appreciated all those things that others have spoken enough of – its simmering sensuality, its restraint and its canonical status as a paean to impossible love are but examples. But I will confess: there was nothing I adored nearly as much as Maggie Cheung’s cheongsams.
When I think of the word “exquisite” I think of Kristin Scott Thomas in The English Patient, her fine hair and features glowing in the desert in that other magnificent story of impossible love. When I think of the word “elegant” I think of Maggie Cheung in that blue cheongsam with the roses, telling the husband of the woman having an affair with her own not to get an apartment where they can meet and, clandestinely, write. From scene to scene, carrying with delicate grace a different cheongsam in each one, she held me transfixed. But the blue one – that’s the one I want.
Although they look nothing alike, in my mind, the cheongsam is like the saree, a garment about which I am passionate. Both are explosively sexy in their sheer subtlety. They burn slow. They smoulder. The cheongsam obscures even the clavicle, but observe Cheung’s voluptuousness of hip as she climbs up and down stairs and try to tell me honestly that it doesn’t mesmerize you more than a cornucopia of cleavage.
Maggie Cheung in In The Mood For Love is like a Shanghainese print advertisement from the 1930’s come to life. I’ve always had a love for those. Like Hindu calendar art, they are astoundingly gorgeous kitsch that few people seem to care about. Beautiful women with little roses in their hair and willow-like grace selling beer, soap and other assorted irrelevances; I wish the artistic value of these ads survived alongside their motives in the modern world.
I don’t think I will ever have a poster of that film on the walls of any house I live in again. But I will have those old prints. And when I do I will think not just of how pretty they are, but of every association they connote: bazaars I wandered in looking longingly at frames, knowing that there were no homes or walls in them that were mine enough then to place them on, people I knew, films I loved. I will dream of China.
We travel to run away. We travel, like Tony Leung in the same film, to whisper our secrets into the souls of buildings and trees and hope they never escape into the lives we return to. And sometimes we cannot travel at all, because the places we yearn for exist only as either memory or mirage, and so we watch.
Perhaps one day I will go to China to find myself a blue cheongsam with roses on it, because you can be anyone you want to be where nobody knows you. I’ll sit in some café deliberately evocative of a bygone Shanghai and think of the incandescence of my friend the poet-countertenor Cyril Wong singing Chinese opera in a small theatre in Jakarta last year. I’ll be as embarrassingly strange and guilty of wanting to possess the exotic as Nat King Cole’s heavily-accented rendition of Quizas Quizas Quizas, yes, but at least I won’t deny the heartbreak beneath wanting any of it in the first place.
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.
Poem: Frida to Sharanya
This is my favourite photo of Frida.
By the time this photograph was taken in 1938, Frida had mastered the art of the unwavering gaze, not to mention the projection of masculinity. The Trotsky and Cristina affairs that wreaked havoc on her marriage had happened; she was in the midst of her first solo exhibition in New York, and would both go to France at the invitation of the Bretons and get divorced the following year. In short, she knew by this time very well who she was and what she wanted. But here she appears vulnerable, unposed, astonishingly feminine. This is why it is my favourite photo of her. Out of the many I have seen (I have dozens more photographs to update that site with, and hope to find the time to do so soon), few have captured her this way. It is as though Julien Levy clicked his camera at the very moment the persona was dropped. It is as though he unmasked a woman famous for the ways she brutally unmasked herself.
I wrote this some time back, and read it at the Viva La Vida reading on Frida’s 101st birthday. Today was my 23rd birthday, and I thought I would share it now. It was inspired by her letters.
FRIDA TO SHARANYA
Sleep wherever is most convenient for you.
Whoever and whatever is left in the morning,
take home. Be kind. All the world is yours for
the taking, long as you know that your little heart is
theirs for the breaking. Leave lipstick on their
china and on your letters. Make sure they know
that you’re a mariposa, blue as copper sulphate,
or blue as the sea, blue as a baby stilled too soon,
darling wench, and you never really intend to leave.
Set love free like a boat with neither oars nor anchors.
Trust it. Don’t trust yourself. Accept every familiar
that comes, even if one happens to be a goat. Forgive
less of people. Remember that things come in triptychs.
Be magnificent, like Coatlicue. You only owe it to me,
but break a mirror now and then, if you can afford it.
Kiss as much as you want to, and as few. Be difficult.
It will make you more desirable. If it will help you to
let him go, cut off your hands. They will grow back.
You don’t need them. You don’t need him. The older
you grow, the more you will amputate. Dance on stumps
if you have to, but don’t stop. Wear one item of red
every Wednesday and when death comes for you,
you will go as his bride. Burn every bridge you ever
built, and build as many as you possibly can. The one
that takes you home will be the last one standing.
Sing over the bones. Go slow.
Don’t forget me.
The Moon?
In putting together some biographical information, I realised that I have read my poetry at:
1. An abandoned pier
2. A cemetery
3. An 11th century stupa
What next? How do I top this?
Sharanya Manivannan 