You are here: Home / Archives for college

Bob Dylan on Roy Orbison and Ricky Nelson!

Saturday, June 3, 2006 By

Bob_dylan_chronicles I have just started reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, taking it slow and easy. This is a book to savour for anyone who remembers the music and culture of the 1960s and ’70s. And the first few pages are just like his songs — evocative and impressionistic. He recalls a room full of books where he spent much of his time in his early days in New York and he writes about the books with the same feeling he describes his own hunger to hit the limelight as a singer.

What is surprising is his regard for singers who passed out of fashion because of artistes like him. He admires Roy Orbison. The passage where he describes Orbison’s unique range is extraordinary coming from him because they are so different in style: Orbison is dramatic, rising from throaty growls to sweet falsettos sometimes in the same song, while Dylan is deadpan, taunting, teasing, often in a flat monotone. But they are both great, though Dylan of course is greater by far because of his style and lyrics which are absolutely unique. But as he himself points out, Orbison can’t be boxed in as a rocker or a torch singer because of his incredible range. I love his Pretty Woman which is so different from Only the Lonely, my favourite Orbison classic which invariably gives me goosebumps. 

I was even more surprised to discover that Dylan used to be a fan of Ricky Nelson. He writes about hearing Travelling Man for the first time. Travelling Man, Hello Mary Lou and A Wonder Like You are my favourite Ricky Nelson songs. Dylan sums up Nelson perfectly. "Ricky had a smooth touch… His voice was sort of mysterious and put you in a certain mood… but that type of music was on its way out." Thanks to artistes like him — Dylan himself. It’s a pity.

Popular music has got grittier and grittier until it’s even kicked off melody now to gyrate to the herkyjerky rhythm and rapid-fire bursts of rap, which doesn’t sound like music at all to an old-timer like me. We Bengalis did have something like rap music in the olden days. It was called "kabir larai" in Bengali which means fight of the poets — "kabi" is Bengali for poet and "larai" means fight — and it was something like a poetry slam with musical accompaniments. But give me blues, soul, rock’n'roll any day.

A computer microphone for my son

I bought a microphone-cum-headphones for my son today. I will give it to him when I fly to Calcutta (Kolkata) later this month. He will take it back to his college in America. Somehow we forgot to get one when he enrolled in college last August. So he borrowed one from a friend to chat with us online on his laptop. But he will be moving to a new room when he returns to college now that he will be a sophomore. Of course, he could have bought a microphone from Wal-Mart. That’s the only big store they have near his college. But to go there, too, he needs a lift from someone. He has friends and some of them have cars. But here in Singapore shopping is so convenient. There are electronic and computer stores almost everywhere. Still I went to Sim Lim Square off Little India to buy the microphone because that’s one of the more popular computer malls.

My wife also asked me to check the price of the Encarta CD. One of her colleagues at her college wanted to know how much it costs in Singapore. At Sim Lim Square, I found the Encarta Standard costs 49 Singapore dollars and 90 cents, the Encarta Reference 99 Singapore dollars and 90 cents and the Encarta Premier more than 120 Singapore dollars. One Singapore dollar is about 63 cents. So the Encarta Standard costs 31 (US) dollars in Singapore and the Encarta Reference, 63 dollars. But the price may vary from one shop to another.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Filed Under: Weblogs Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Calcutta goes to the polls

Friday, April 28, 2006 By

The world’s longest-ruling communist government looks likely to be returned to power for another five years in West Bengal. They have been in power for 29 years now — and it looks like there’s no reversing the red tide for now. As a Reuter’s report said: “Communists draw middle-class vote in West Bengal”.

Elections are being held over five days — today was only the third day — other parts of the state will go to the polls on May 2 and 8. But Reuters is already saying the communist-led Left Front coalition of leftist parties is looking forward to a seventh straight term in office in this eastern Indian state of 80 million people. Nearly 50 million are voters and the turnout was as high as 80 per cent on the first two days. I am sure the polling stations saw the same large crowds today when 12 million people were eligible to vote in Calcutta and two neighbouring districts for 76 seats in the 294-seat state assembly.

One reason for such a high turnout must be that people believe in exercising their right to vote.

But though the state has been voting for the communists for such a long time, it does not mean everybody is a communist. There are people who are not seriously interested in politics at all. But many of them may vote for the communists because they have ensured law and order.

And people respect Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the gentlemanly, culturally inclined Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader with a spotless reputation who became chief minister of West Bengal in 2001.

He is a breath of fresh air after Jyoti Basu, the former Marxist chief minister.

Basu, who was chief minister from 1977 to 2001, is one of those leftist aristocrats. He was accepted as a leader, I suspect, partly because he belonged to the communist party in Britain when he went to study law there. Those colonial/Western connections count even among the communists in India. He was born well, married well, and his son did well under his rule even if the rest of the state did not.

West Bengal fell behind other states during the long rule of Basu. But the communists were far better organised than the other parties. They did good work in the villages and controlled the administrative machinery in the state.

Still, they faced a serious challenge in  2001 from a breakaway faction of the Congress party — which was out of power then but now runs the federal government in Delhi.

The communists still won the 2001 elections. That was the last time the state police forces, controlled by the communist state government, guarded the polling booths.

This time federal police forces have been deployed for a fairer election.

But this is an election the communists are expected to win fair and square. Because the new chief has done good work for the state.

Calcutta boasts new shopping malls, new apartment complexes. There are new jobs and investments. Someone visiting Calcutta for the first time may see it is a dusty overcrowded city with little remarkable about it. But we who were born and raised in Calcutta know how much it has changed since the bad old days of Jyoti Basu. That in itself deserves a vote of thanks.

Filed Under: World Today Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Shakespeare and his women

Sunday, April 23, 2006 By

Shakespeare It’s a pity Shakespeare (1564-1616) is no longer compulsory reading in Singapore schools. So many girls here have the perfect figure to play the boy-girl roles of Shakespeare’s comedies. No offence meant. It’s just that Shakespeare is taken so seriously it throws people off. Lighten up, please, Shakespeare wrote for entertainment. One may ask where’s the fun in King Lear or Hamlet. Well, for now, I will confine myself to the comedies only.

The choice may seem curious, particularly on this day which may or may not be his birthday but is certainly his death anniversary. But we all have our favourites and I prefer the comedies.

I just commented on the figures of the heroines of Shakespeare’s comedies. Obviously they couldn’t be DD cups if they had to pass themselves off as young men, which they did so well that other women fell in love with them. Much of the fun in Shakespeare’s comedies comes from the sexual confusion of the characters in the plays. In Twelfth Night, Orsino woos Olivia, who falls in love with Viola, who is in love with Orsino. No, Olivia isn’t a lesbian, she sees Viola dressed as the youth, Cesario. Now there’s no way Viola could have passed off as a youth if she had DD cups. Rosalind, in As You Like It, couldn’t have had an hourglass figure either — or she wouldn’t have been able to dress up as the young man, Ganymede. Not even her father, the Duke, nor her lover, Orlando, can recognise her.

One wonders about the men in Shakespeare’s comedies. They are silly putty in the women’s hands! Excluding Prospero the magician in The Tempest, of course. That’s why I love the comedies. They get the sex thing so right! I know, being a married man myself. Not that my wife could have ever passed herself off as a young man. Thank goodness, I wouldn’t have liked being fooled like Orlando!

But my wife has the same high spirits and vivacity as Rosalind. That’s what’s so attractive about the heroines of Shakespeare’s comedies — their wit and vivacity and high spirits. I think that’s what Shakespeare prized most about women. He couldn’t have been one of those gentlemen who prefer blondes. The Dark Lady of his sonnets had to be a brunette. She could have even been black, according to the writer William Boyd. Shakespeare, of course, expressed mixed feelings about the Dark Lady. But the exotic appealed to him. Otherwise how could his most celebrated heroine be the Egyptian Cleopatra? He was alive to sexual attractions across colour lines and their tensions too, or he wouldn’t have written Othello. But I am straying from the comedies.

My wife prefers the tragedies. After all, she teaches Shakespeare in her college in Calcutta (Kolkata). But I prefer the high jinks of the comedies. And the fun doesn’t stop at cross-dressing. There are other complications too. Think of the shenanigans in the wood near Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Act II, Scene 2 and Act III, Scenes 1 and 2.

Shakespeare can be bawdy but not lascivious. I haven’t read Venus and Adonis and his Poems so I don’t really know, but I don’t think he wrote anything as explicit as some of the passages in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. 

My Shakespeare is far from perfect but I am grateful we had to do Shakespeare in school in India. So did my son for his Indian School Certificate examination before going to college in America last year. He and I both read Julius Caesar but he also had to read The Tempest.

By the way, yesterday was Lenin’s birthday.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,