adventures.

After the breakfast mentioned in the previous post, I studied a while in the library and then attended a lecture from AWS about battery hens. Needless to say, (refer to previous post) it was hardly filled out and we were all women! The lecture itself was pretty confronting. I walked out of there with a fiercely pro-vegan argument raging in my head, even as I thoughtlessly scoffed down a jacket potato stacked with cheese AND some cakes (yes, plural) from a bake sale. It took me a whole 10 minutes to realise something was a bit off.  I've continued to screw up almost every day since then BUT I will do this! As a tam brahm reared on thayir I guess that vegan may be a bit of a stretch but I can try to stick to lacto-vegetarianism, i.e. cut out the eggs.

Anyway. It's week four and I'm already doing an all-nighter, which is a bit ridiculous. I have a group presentation tomorrow for an assignment which involves being on talkback radio. My group is fantastic! I love them all. Highlights included:

• Complaining about my grandmother's wedding dress which I recently inherited. I'm pissed off because it's full of moth holes, and my cousins got all her jewellery
• Being smited (well I'm sure he thinks that's what happened) by Ray Hadley about Gillard and the law firm thing
• Trying to be a conspiracy theorist and argue with "the golden tonsils" on 2SM till we realised half way through that we were actually saying the same thing! 

And here's a skit we're planning to open tomorrow's presentation with:

 

Radio host: “And today we'll be talking about how immigrants cause global warming, which doesn't exist. Give us a call with your opinion on the best way to dye Julia Gillard's hair her real colour. Green.”

Punter (to themselves). “mhmmmm! I hear you sister! I'm going to ring up and tell this girl how right she is!! That'll show those lefty greeny boat people what's what!” -picks up phone-

Gandalf: “Welcome to radio 2 gigabytes. Do you wish to speak to Jalan Ones?

Punter: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I do! I want to tell her how right she is”

Gandalf: “Well she's certainly not left. YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!”

-Punter breaks down crying”

Radio Host: “Next we'll be talking about the top three reasons that women are unconstitutional”

Punter 2 (moi): “Oh no she didn't!!!” -picks up phone-

Gandalf: Welcome to radio 2 gigabytes. Do you wish to speak to Jalan Ones?

Punter 2: Why yes, I want to say how wrong she is. Was she hit on the head by a crapload of stupidness as a child?

Gandalf: Jalan Ones was never a child. YOU SHALL PASS!!!

ohhhh boy.

scientism

I woke up at 5:30 this morning for the Greens' wom*ns breakfast. That's no mean feat on a winter morning, particularly when, thanks to GOVT2603 I was already quite sleep deprived AND with no weekend on the horizon. So I was a bit grumbly as I got on to the bus, vowing to never attend another one of their events if I got bored at this one... but it was really good :) We discussed something that's been on my mind recently. A girl studying vet science from the Animal Welfare Society was complaining about the faculty and how strongly they were resisting to her attempts to inject some moral feeling the department and address some of its practices. I found it strange that this would even be a point of contention in the vet department, I mean they are supposed to be people that dedicate their lives to SAVE animals after all. The conversation branched off into scientism, which interests me a lot as an arts student who constantly has to defend my choice of studying the humanities around other Indian people. Unless they've just been stunned into an awkward silence when I mention what I do... which is fine, really, it just saves me the bother.

Science is not apolitical. Nothing is apolitical. It shouldn't be allowed to form its own ideology in society, because abstracted from its implications on the real world it can be profoundly destructive. I read a book by David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist last year, describing the reductionism inherent to how we conceptualise science, focusing on microsystems instead of learning to understand the world, or even an organism as a complete system. This fragmentation leads to a distorted, mosaic version of reality, which  hinders our ability to coherently draw connections between our actions and their implications. Reductionism also fosters the attitude that science is value free... which is really, really not true.

Vandana Shiva's (I LOVE HER) critique of modern science and its acceptance as a universal and value free system:

Instead, they view the dominant stream of modern science, the reductionist or mechanical paradigm, as a particular projection of Western men, originating during the scientific revolution. The privilege of determining what is considered scientific knowledge has been delegated by men, and for the better part of history restricted to men. By and large, this has led to the alienation and stigmatization of women as non participants. The machinist metaphors of reductionism have socially reconstituted nature and society.

courtesy: wiki :p

Shiva was a prominent nuclear physicist who became a really important figure in the chipko (tree hugging) movement of the 1970s and now she's an ecofeminist. She won the Sydney Peace prize a couple of years ago.

I came across this quote in a tute presentation this week and I thought it was amazing:

"Science gives us no answer to the question, what shall we do and how shall we live?”
- Leo Tolstoy, 1898

Frankenstein stands as an important case in point. Read it

 I guess what I'm saying overall, is that we need to stop thinking about science as something which exists in its own bubble, and stop allowing scientists to pretend it is. What also pisses me off the most is when we allow its positivism  to leak into other disciplines... like economics, which is underpinned by mechanistic models, social darwinism. There's plenty more to say because it's a subject I've been thinking about for ages but I'm really tired and I have class early and I'm a bit strung out for many reasons. I probably shouldn't have even started writing this in the first place and just slept. Sleep deprivation tends to numb my brain and my 7 day (mediapol) week is a bit crazy. AND I have a string of 21sts. Speaking of which, I'm sorry but I just had to delete the previous post...

*FACEPALM*

Though I love it very much, the Indian film industry can sometimes be a bit embarrassing. REALLY REALLY REALLY EMBARRASSING, GOD WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!

It's the poster for a new (low budget) film
Rai: "Where's UTS?"  

I only watched one Indian film in the whole holidays and it had to be Cocktail. It was soooo bad. I can't deny the eye-candy though... and I'm definitely not referring to Saif here. Too many films released this year have been awful!

This post needs a silver lining... here it is:

Looks interesting, though I dislike all three lead actors.

music and carnatic music

My sudden turnaround and decision to learn carnatic music nearly gave my parents whiplash. It's such an integral part of my life now!

I decided to write this after a small-ish Hindu festival thing a few days ago when, as is customary in most religious events, me and my mum were invited to sing a few lines. We did, and from the corner of my eye I noticed the fiancee of a family friend, not accustomed our ways, flinch a little. We aren't bad singers and my mum especially is actually very good. I'm ok as long as I have her as a security blanket to overcome my natural shyness around lots of strange people. Anyway, I found it quite interesting and it got me thinking on the differences between classical Indian music and the-rest-of-the-world-music.

I normally don't think too much about what I'm writing here, but this has made me scratch my beard a bit. It's awkward. First of all, though I may have learnt on-and-off for more than ten years, there are many people I know, much younger than me with much more talent and knowledge, so I don't know if I really have the authority to say much. Secondly, I'm not sure the disparities even could be captured in words. Language is limited and art is a subjectively lived experience, after all. Finally, there's the fact that my appreciation of music, like any other form of art, doesn't involve any complicated thought process. I just let it wash over me and if I like it, I simply... do.

So then what do I write about? Well there are a few points that jump out.

Carnatic music has to be understood deeply to be loved, you can't just wander into it and like it. It's technical and complicated in its metre, tonic, the system of ragas, etc. There are lots of rules and specificities that have to be strictly followed. Yet it's far from being mechanical and improvisation is a key factor, which is really quite an important point where it deviates from Western systems of music. Also,  it relies much less on "sound", much more on melodious complexity and intricate nuances. If you don't understand this all carnatic music essentially sounds the same, and maybe, bad. What really warms me to itc is the fact that you can't dress it up with any frills or embellishments. It's honest.

I read this biography of Rukmini Devi a few years ago and there's this description by Yeats (da poet) of her bharatanatyam dance performance, but I think it's quite applicable to how I see carnatic music:

"The sheer beauty in human rhythm lifted me to a state of aesthetic bliss. The theatre was filled with a presence rather than a personality. Here there was no pandering to sensation or sentiment. Here was a call away from the half-Gods of mundanity to the celestial realm in which one becomes a partner in the divinity that shapes not only our ends but the creative beginning of things."

Whewww, not sure what he's on about in the last part but his statement regarding "a presence rather than a personality" really struck me. Here's the thing: on one hand, the vocalist is at the crux of the performance, but on the other, there's something to it all that completely transcends him/her.

 

This is all making me sound like a huge classical Indian music nerd but sadly, I'm really not. I never practice between lessons and would probably sooner listen to... you know, whatever I listen to on spotify.