Music Appreciation

Last week was the annual day in my daughter's dance school. Dance students, of various skill levels and of different ages, performed for over two hours. It was enthralling. I am sure many folks did not understand the nuances and intricacies of Bharatanatyam, but that did not stop them from enjoying the spectacle. There is something in dance and music that captivates people. Albus Dumbledore remarked "Ah, Music, a Magic Beyond All We Do Here!" Einstein had said that he often thinks in Music. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister exclaimed about one of India's finest singers, M.S. Subbulakshmi - "Who am I, a mere Prime Minister before a Queen, a Queen of Music”. 

When I was young, music and dance were limited to film songs coming on Radio and the occasional TV. My parents would play Vividh Bharati's (A radio channel of All India Radio) நேயர் விருப்பம் (Listeners choice) every weekday from 8AM to 9AM, not necessarily for the songs, but more importantly for the time that they announce every 15 minutes or so. We would know that by the first announcement we should have taken our shower, the second one when we should have donned our school uniforms and so on. But what this also gave us was that it exposed us to the wonderful film music of Ilaiyaraja and MSV, beaming in the wonderful voices of SPB and S.Janaki. We did not understand the nuances of music, we did not have a formal music training, but that did not prevent us from enjoying the music. We had lesser exposure to dance, we did not fancy it much. Friday ஒலியும் ஒளியும் was our only source for film songs with video.

As I got older, I started to listen more Carnatic classical music. I did not appreciate beyond the well known songs, but I found that my friends, who were well versed in music, deriving immense pleasure from it. This intrigued me. Given that all of us are looking for ways to derive joy and happiness in our lives, here is something that is certainly giving so much joy to some folks and yet I am unable to derive any joy from this. I started wondering what it would take to get to a state where I can enjoy music beyond what I was already doing with film songs. While it is true that different people have different aptitudes, I believe music is a little more universal. All the quotes above are testimonial to this. And so, I set out to find out what it takes for someone to start appreciating something new, whether it is a new art or a new sport or even a new genre in books.

The first and foremost option is to actually try and learn that new skill. Learning to play hockey if you want to appreciate the nuances of that game, learn to sing or play an instrument if you want to learn music and so on. Personally I have found this to be the most effective way to appreciate a new area. When I started playing hockey and basketball, I really started to enjoy watching NBA matches and international hockey matches. However, this might not be possible all the time. There might also be a pretty huge price to pay, in terms of time, money and effort. At the end, we are trying to learn art appreciation only because we want it as a stress buster; the last thing we want is for this to add to the existing stress.

The second option is to listen to experts in the area who explain some of those nuances. Read blogs, listen to Youtube and so on. The problem with this is that, to even appreciate the nuance, you will need some minimum knowledge. Unfortunately, "Minimal knowledge" is not a line that you cross and claim to be on the other side; it is a spectrum. This is especially true with things like Carnatic music. It is an ocean of treasures. We do not even know if the stone we have picked up from the bed of the sea is a precious one or not. 

A more practical option is to just keep listening to music and develop the ear for it. In other words, Carnatic music appreciation (or any other skill) could just be an acquired taste. This could be time consuming and not often pleasurable at the beginning. But if one persists for a while, I believe this could be the best bang for the buck. One thing that would help here is to actually do some dedicated or active listening instead of passive listening. You cut off all other distractions and just sit down with the sole intention of listening to some songs. Just having the song playing in the background while doing dishes will not cut it. I believe if one continues this active listening, there will a tipping point sometime where we genuinely start understanding and appreciating music better.

Another option is to gamify the experience. Try to challenge oneself to identify the raagam of a random song. Try to do some pattern matching with known songs. Follow along with doing thaalam as the song plays. For those folks who like to challenge themselves, this could work better.

At this point, I have clearly not got to the state where I can confidently say that I appreciate Carnatic music as much as I would like to. But then, I am on this journey now and in no hurry to give this up. I am confident that if I keep trying, I will get better. The gains or improvements will be slow and steady, but there will one fine day I will start enjoying a lot more, without even my realising it. If and when I reach that stage, I will write an addendum to this blog. Till then, it is time to take one step at a time in this music appreciation journey.

A walk to remember

 Bennet, Sriram, Siddharth and I come from different walks of life. But last Sunday (30-Oct-2022), we had the walk of our life. A 70K walk for absolutely no reason. This was neither an organised event nor was there any prize to be won. Which makes makes us wonder if there was any reason other than to inflict pain on ourselves and give in to our masochistic tendencies. Or we are just plain crazy people. Most likely, both.

The whole idea was floated by Bennet during one our morning runs - should we do a multi-day walk to Chennai, about 350K from Bengaluru. It sounded so exciting that we all said we should definitely do it one day. The safety catch was "one day". This is the easiest way for all of us, humans, to not say "no". Yes, but some other time. And just hope that the "some day" just does not come at all. So, it was all good. However, Bennet is one perseverant individual. He kept reminding and I opined that we should downscale this. Maybe a trip to Mysore is more realistic than a multi-day trip to Chennai. Mysore is 120Km from Bangalore and possibly doable over a weekend. We then decided that we will try this after the Bengaluru Marathon. Once the Bengaluru marathon got over, the topic came again and as we were planning the logistics, it was apparent that a two day trip would be difficult to pull off. So, I again proposed that we change this to a one day trip, for possibly around 75K. Many folks expressed interest and we decided that we will do this on the 30th October. As the due day approached, a lot of folks expressed their inability to join and it was just left to the four of us to do this trip. We decided that we will go to Harohalli, on the Kanakapura road (about 33K) and come back. I have a humorous analogy on how all this panned out at the end of this blog.

We started the walk at 415AM on Sunday, after taking the customary picture. We just decided to follow the route shown by Google Maps rather than go with the main road. It was pretty pleasant start and we were in high spirits. The only catch was that we had to keep checking the maps from time to time as we were unfamiliar with the inner roads. After we crossed the NICE road flyover, the road suddenly became a trail. Even though it was still dark, we could figure out that it was picturesque and we were enjoying the experience. We were also amazed on how Google Maps has been able to identify this route. It would have been impossible to even fathom such a trail existed if one had not used it before. The whole place was magical. And true to its magic nature, the trail suddenly morphed into a solid wall. With thick vegetation on both sides, the trail disappeared completely. Clearly, even Google cannot keep up with the speed with which we bring up new structures. As a result, we had to wade through the vegetation, climb a few rocks, cross a stream (to call it a stream is a bit of euphemism) to get back to the proper roads. We got a liberal dose of excitement just before sunrise. During this unplanned steeplechase, our shoes and socks got totally wet with all the water from the grass and plants. What is the point of these endeavours without these extra challenges anyway.

The next stretch was through village roads. Excitement here was provided by all the stray dogs. They barked all the way to glory and though none of them actually attacked, they did enough to raise the heart rate by a few points. The village roads led us to Kaggalipura road. This is a scenic road that connects BG road with Kanakapura road and is a favourite among cyclists. The road is in great condition and has enough gradients to challenge the cyclists. As the road was smooth, Sriram and I decided to do some bare foot walking as the shoes and socks were totally soggy. We thought that walking with wet socks and shoes might cause blisters. This, in hindsight, was possibly not a good decision.  Only the two of us ended up with blisters by the end of the day. As they say, the road to destruction is paved with good intention.

When we hit the Kanakapura road, we stopped for some nice idly vada. This was around 18K and we had taken about 4.5 hours. Then we proceeded to just walk on Kanakapura road. This was a road with a lot of traffic and with the sun coming out, this stretch was not as enjoyable as the previous one. To break the monotony, Siddharth decided that he will wish every passing cyclist "Good Morning" and observe how they greet back. As we were walking on the opposite side of the road, facing traffic, we could watch the BMTC buses to Banshankari passing every few minutes, testing our will even more. During this stretch, we asked ourselves why we are doing this crazy walk, instead of just chilling at home and watching Netfilx or the India-SA cricket match while sipping a good coffee. Over the course of the rest of the walk, we would have asked this question another 145 times. Ok, I made up that number, but you get the idea. That we were glad is an understatement when we reached Harohalli just before noon. A distance of 33K done in a little less than 8 hours.

After gulping down two tasty Masala dosas, we started our walk back. We decided that we will stick to Kanakapura road this time and not brave the trail, especially in the dark. Luckily, all of us were in good shape and so it was more of just putting in the time to get home. One thing that we did not realize that time (and thank God for it) was that, the return journey was almost a complete ascent. When we looked at Strava after the walk, it is apparent that from 40K to 65K (when we reached our apt complex), it was all up. So, armed with this ignorance, we started the walk back. Sriram regaled us with a lot of his stories, Bennet did some sprints in between and we just kept chugging along. As the time wore on, we were already earning for some good dose of sugar. As luck turned out, we just were unable to locate any Nandini outlets for some chocolate milk. When we finally spot one close to Kaggalipura, we felt unadulterated joy. Chocolate milk had never tasted so good. Once we got the sugar dose, Sid was so elated that he remarked that "We can do anything (that earlier looked like) impossible now".

The stretch between Kaggalipura and Konanakunte cross was clearly the most demanding. The elevation was brutal. We were starting to tire a bit. We were all hurting as well. Sriram and I had blisters in our foot. Bennet had a back pain and Sid was feeling stiffness in his legs. So, this was one determined walk. A real test of grit. When we stopped at A2B for one more bite, we were happy to have come so far.  There was no turning back now, literally and figuratively.

When we reached our apartment complex, we had done 65.6K. When we started the walk, we thought we should do close to 75K. Then we decided to hand ourselves a 5K discount and finish at 70K. This meant that we had to walk the remaining stretch inside our apartment complex itself. I tried my luck to convince folks that we can stop early  -- 66 is a good number, symmetric and all. No luck. Then I tried to propose 67K as 67 is a prime number. No luck. The problem with all these runners is that they are so strong mentally that borders into adamancy 😀  They said it is going to be 70K and nothing short. As this effort lasted 15 hours, Garmin died for all of us except for Sid. Since a run never happened if it does not exist in Strava, we were dependent on Sid to tag us. He jokingly warned us that tagging will happen only for folks when they complete 70K. As a result, we now had to walk about 3 laps just to complete 70K and get our Strava entry. The last stretch inside the apartment complex reminded us of this Mohammed Ali quote - "I don't count my sit-ups; I only start counting when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count.”

Sriram had ordered medals for us as a surprise gift and after we finished 70K, we just hung medals on each other to bring an end to the momentous day. It was close to 9PM, a good 17 hours since we started. 15 hours of moving time. Satisfying, to say the least.

There were a couple of things that dawned on me during this exercise. The first one is the renewed admiration for ultra marathoners, the kinds who do 100s of miles or 24 hours of running etc. Leave the physical challenges, I am more perplexed on what goes on their minds? How do they mentally prepare themselves? The second was that my respect for those slow marathoners who run/walk and finish marathons in 6.5, 7 hours rose by several notches. Running a marathon in under 4 hours is one thing. But to have the resilience and mental strength to walk and complete a marathon, often when the sun is shining in its full glory, is extremely commendable. Walking for a long time is way, way harder than running one (assuming that you are able to).

By the end of the walk we still were not able to find the answer to the "why" question that we had asked ourselves 100s of times. We probably do not even want to know the answer, if one existed at all. At the end, nothing else matters than just having gone through this journey.

We do not know if we will ever do another long walk like this again, but this one will be etched in our memories for lifetime.

A light-hearted analogy of how our plan for this walk panned out.

July

Customer: We need you to undertake this project. It is called Project Chennai. 

Us: It is easy peasy. We are busy with other things now, but we will do it later, say in October.

Mid October

Customer: Status please? Are we on track for October?

Us: We thought hard and long about this. For your use case, we need to do only Mysore. Chennai is an overkill. We have 10 people and will do by the month end.

Customer: OK.

End October

Customer: Status?

Us: We know the right thing for you. Mysore is too much of a cost. You should be happy with Kanakapura. We will have 7-8 people, do not worry.

Actual deadline

Customer: Are we set?

Us: Given the time pressure and availability, we are downgrading from Kanakapura to Kanakapura road and it will just be 4 people. That should be sufficient. We are 100% sure that this is the ideal solution for you.

Now, as software engineers, have we not heard this conversation before? 😀

Decisions

 Life is all about decisions. Should I take this new opportunity or not? Should we relocate to a new location for better job prospects? Should I do the long run or heed to the imaginary injury? Should I join a class to learn something new or am I already stretched too thin? Should I stay away from that delicious cake on the table?

Some of these have high impact, life changing in some sense. Some of these do not have that high impact. Some of those affect only you as an individual; others affect your family and friends as well. Some of them are easy, the others pretty hard. However, they have one thing in common - the only way to avoid status quo and move forward is to make those decisions. 

All decisions should be consistent with your values, morals and ethics. So, if an option violates your core principles, it is a much easier decision to ignore it and identify the right choice. Such decisions are taken by default and without much cognitive overload. Unfortunately, a lot of decisions that we need to make are not that black-and-white. Taking your own water bottle to work and avoiding the one-time-use paper cups is an easy decision. But what do we do when we are out of water in a hot place and have an option buy bottled water? If you are motivated enough and extremely conscious in reducing waste, like a few of my friends are, then you will find a way to avoid buying bottled water. Buying bottled water is the real last resort and you will do whatever it takes to get water through other ways. If, on the other hand, you really do not care that much, like most people are, buying bottled water is a no brainer. In either of these cases, the decision to buy or not buy bottled water is relatively easy, though the consequences may not. However, if you are somewhere in between -- you want to avoid buying plastic but not motivated enough to face the difficult consequences of not buying, it is a hard decision.

While one such hard decision is fine, making a series of hard decisions takes a lot of toll on the mind and the body. Decision making is a lot of hard work. And however "evolved" we may be, most of us tend to keep revisiting those decisions and wondering what-if scenarios, especially if things are not going the way we want. The following wonderful Thirukkural warns us against that behaviour, but then theory and practice are two different beasts.

 எண்ணித் துணிக கருமம் துணிந்தபின்
எண்ணுவம் என்பது இழுக்கு.

Translation - Consider, and then undertake a matter; after having undertaken it, to say "We will consider," is folly

Over a period of time, the strain of making these hard decisions swell up and we end up with a lot of stress that manifests itself as physical symptoms like headaches or back pains. 

Where am I going with all this is this? I have come to realize that it is extremely important for us to give this decision making quite some thought. We need to ensure that we can make more and more of these decisions the default way and confine only a few decisions to deep introspections. One sure way to do this is to ensure that we build a solid set of core values, principles, morals and ethics. Sitting on the fence and jumping on either side as per convenience will hurt in the long run. We need to really spend time thinking hard about what really matters to us and what our guiding compass looks like. There are some (or many) things that we may not care at all and that is totally fine. Since we do not care, either decision works and we are not stressed. 

Another observation that I have had is this -- often the after-effects of the decisions are not that difficult to handle. Once we are committed, we usually do what is in our hands to improve the situation. We tend to focus on solutions. It is the ambiguity of not making the decision that hurts most. Just spending an inordinate amount of time evaluating options is the killer. It is better to time box these decisions and commit by the end of it. Too many loose threads lead to losing too many hairs. 

While I have started giving this some serious thought, I will call out my favourite phrase -  "knowing is not doing". It is easy to preach than practice.

2021 Reflections

 2021 has been a year unlike any other before. The year started with a lot of hope and optimism with the vaccines around the corner and a hopeful end to the pandemic. As the vaccine administration and coverage increased over time, the hope could only increase. And then came the second wave in April/May. I have never experienced such an horrific time in my entire life. People were desperately crying for help in all directions and ambulance sirens were screaming non-stop for two months.  The second wave was even more numbing because it hit people in our immediate circle. It was a stark reminder that human life is just too fragile. I personally lost a fine and young colleague, full of life and enthusiasm, leaving a 4 year old daughter fatherless. Nothing could be more tragic. Lots of other friends and family members needed hospitalisation. Covid after-effects traumatised even after people returned back home. And finally when things started to look up again, Omicron quickly put us back in our place. As I type this, the infection has started spreading rampantly and we start the new year with much less optimism and anxiety than last year.

While the above paragraph presents a dark picture, there were also a lot of positives. Most people volunteered time, effort and money to help in whatever they could. Even in my own office, Microsoft, lots and lots of people spent time tirelessly calling the ever busy BBMP lines to get beds, arrange oxygen cylinders, schedule RT-PCR tests etc. What stood out was that almost all the volunteers were so empathetic to the affected folks. In fact, quite a few of them came back to volunteer after they themselves recovered from the illness. This was one of those occasions where so many people made that big difference in other peoples lives. On retrospection, how people reacted during those trying times definitely helped restore some faith in humanity, in otherwise a world that is only getting more and more polarised by the day,

On the personal front, one of the biggest wins was that I was able to continue my intermittent fasting the entire year. IF has been really good to me and it has helped keep my body weight and fat percentage in check. This has helped my running immensely, so much so that I clocked my PBs (Personal Best Timings) across all the different race categories. I clocked 3:38 in the virtual marathon in January and 43:26 for 10K in October. Both these times were almost unthinkable a few years ago. IF and regular training had a huge role to play in that.

Another huge positive was that we WFH'ed the entire year. This meant that I did not need to cross Silk board. Nothing can be more music to a South Bangalorean than that.

One thing where I would definitely want to improve in 2022 is in writing. My neighbour introduced me to the blog of his cousin, Bhaskar.  I was just blown away by both the quality and quantity of his publications. I do not know Bhaskar personally, but he has just shown a mirror to me, striking down all my excuses for lack of time in a single stroke. I would really like to draw inspiration from him and slowly get started here. Or at least, make an earnest effort.

Even if not annus mirabilis, I hope 2022 will be the year where we see the light at the end of the tunnel of the pandemic and life slowly limps back to the pre-pandemic days. Personally, I hope I continue to do a few things, but mindfully and consistently. Topping that list is of course reading, writing and learning music. And hopefully a sub 3:30 marathon. 

To quote Walt Disney  - "All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them". I really hope that 2022 is when I find that courage and more.