I was at the Kailash Kher concert at the IIM-Bangalore grounds on 29th Jan 2012. This is a fabulous time of the year for music. From October to February as the weather cools down across India, it has been the tradition to get the musicians to strut their wares. This is show time folks. From Indian classical music concerts that start in the evening and end up in the wee hours of the morning, these concerts have seen the launch (and demise) of many a musical career. Some of the conferences like the Dover Lane Music Conference has a cult following. Chennai has its famous Kutcheri circuit where each year the maestros rub shoulders with the young artistes who are unafraid to experiment with form and structure of what has been the traditional definition of Classical music. There are Jazz fests, the universities have their share of rock concerts as part of the cultural festivals. All in all it is a happy time to be around.

I have had the opportunity to hear Kailash Kher live during a concert of AR Rahman in Nov 2007. (Read about it here). During these four years Kailash Kher has become a lot more established as a singer. Thanks to all the Reality TV shows we have seen him on prime time. His band Kailasa has some talented musicians. Kailash is releasing his fourth album Rangeeley (colorful). Watch him do an acoustic version of the song with the two Kamath brothers (Naresh & Paresh) who play rhythm and bass guitar for Kher’s band and do the back up vocals.

Kailash Kher has a few hits to his credit. Saiyyan is certainly one of them. I like the music but I don’t think much of the lyrics of the song. He sings passionately and has an awesome range especially when he hits the high notes he does a great job.

Kailash certainly sounds better in the recorded and mixed tracks that have been processed in the studio than during a stage performance. He has a unique sound. So where is the catch? I think he is a good singer and a poor performer. Every great singer is not necessarily a great performer. Performers have the ability to take the audience along with them. They speak to them, they laugh, they respond to the catcall… it is all of that.

Kailash Kher is awkward to say the least. He switches between the language that he can communicate in ie Hindi to one which thinks he OUGHT to communicate with ie English. He is awkward in English. His humor is puerile and all this takes away from the performance. A performer may have a pre-determined list of songs that he/she intends to perform. If the crowd requests for a specific song, a performer will rework their own sequence. The humor of a performer is spontaneous. Singers tend to use canned humor and it inevitably fails. Kailash struggled to connect with the audience. At the IIM-B concert he tried to and tried too hard but hit the false notes in trying to make up his mind between being a good singer and being a performer. Performers have charisma. They have attitude. They are not afraid to speak their mind. They are not afraid to lead. This is what Kailash Kher lacks.

Lata Mangeshkar is a great singer but she is not a performer. She is an amazingly gifted singer. Three generations of Indians have grown up with her voice. Her sister Asha Bhosle is a natural performer. Asha B will narrate anecdotes, crack jokes, share amusing insights and quirks about her co-singers, pull the leg of other artistes on stage and even mimic her elder sister Lata-didi’s style of singing. Sonu Nigam is a performer. His ever evolving hair style moves from cool to crazy every month while his wardrobe could be the envy of a clotheshorse. That he is an awesome singer makes him a performer par excellence. The other performer is Shreya Ghoshal. I am fan of her voice. It also helps that she is edgy in her views and stylish – all of which makes her much more than a singer. The tabla player was always supposed to be in the background with the sarangi player or harmonium player who accompanied the classical singer or instrument player. That was the case until Zakir Hussain came along. He is a performer par excellence. He brought up the stature of the tabla and moved it from the backdrop to one that got as much of the audience attention as the main artiste. That is what a performer can do to an instrument.

What should a singer do to become a performer? Be unafraid to experiment and have a point of view. I think … for starters.

The Bollywood film Taare Zameen Par was perhaps a coaching class that the nation attended, on understanding, how to deal with a kid with dyslexia. It showed us the frustration that parents encounter because of their ignorance of the child’s condition. They believe that their son is plain lazy and is shirking work in school.  The movie brought awareness of learning disabilities and jolted the audience to ask whether they were being just as unreasonable with their children as the father in the film. They realized that the father’s tyrannical behavior was driven by ignorance of his child’s disability.

Parenting is a complex task. Parents use information and put it in the framework of their family values as they bring up their young ones. While values remain relatively stable, information keeps changing rapidly. New information makes us question our own assumptions, world view and beliefs. New information changes the conversation between parents and children. Handling someone who is thirteen needs very different parenting skills than someone who is nineteen though both maybe clubbed in the common category called teenagers. Handling a teenager today is very different from someone who brought up their children in the seventies or eighties. That is because the parent and progeny both have new information about the world and this impacts their behavior and choices.

Taare Zameen Par

For example, if parents do not understand the meaning of rating symbols on the video games they buy for their children they may be unwittingly exposing their children to inappropriate content. Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings are designed to provide information about the content in computer and video games so consumers, especially parents, can make an informed purchase decision. When this information is held against the family values, the parents can take the decision whether their child should be exposed to the violence level that the game contains.

Chances are that your parents never took lessons on parenting. You might argue that they did a fine job without taking lessons. That was a world where information was changing gently and therefore the parents’ world had a very large degree of overlap and similarity with the child’s. Exposure to the family values through parents was enough to ensure that the children would be confident enough to carve their own path.

The customs and childrearing practices and the caretaker psychology have a profound influence on the child’s development. Parents need to have the same information that their children are exposed to, so that they can have meaningful talks at the dining table. Today this information gap reduces the effectiveness of parents.

We have coaching classes to learn languages, to get into colleges and even some on how to win reality shows on television. But we do not have classes that help parents become well informed. I suggest coaching classes to help parents get in sync with the world their children live in. These classes could possibly help in getting parents to realign their own assumptions to current realities. Why not have experts who can update parents and help parents be more effective today.

Every parent wishes the best and nothing but the best for their progeny. That means learning, unlearning and preparing themselves actively.  Parenting is an ever evolving role. Parents pass on the values that they model through their behavior. That cannot be taught by anyone else.
Should we only depend on popular cinema to educate people on parenting? Think about it.

————————–

Watch the film Taare Zameen Par here <click here>

This is the sight I dread the most when I travel. Knowing my luck, I have no difficulty finding my seat on the flight even if I do not have my boarding card. I just have to close my eyes and follow the sound till it cannot grow any louder. Then I open my eyes and yippee I am in the seat right next to someone howling his (or her) guts out. What is worse is that this kid – the one crying and traveling next to me – will not stop until I have started running along the tarmac once they let me out of the plane.

It is a bit like I have my own version of Newton’s Law. The First Law of Travel that says, “A howling kid will always be seated right next to you – when the plane is full.” There is the Second Law of Travel that I have coined. “A howling fellow passenger will continue to howl until the plane has reached its destination.” Newton has three laws of motion. So do I. The Third Law of Travel says, “The howling fellow passenger is most likely to cry louder if you are feeling sleepy.”

Once I even gave the howling kid the chocolates I had kept for myself. The shameless fellow ate the chocolates amid loud sobs and then just resumed crying. The doting parents just looked at me and said, “He just doesn’t like traveling with strangers.” I tried explaining to them that the kid was right. They should not have picked up just any kid at random to accompany them. The mother just rolled her eyes and said to me, “We ARE his parents. You are the stranger that is upsetting him.”

Yeah yeah yeah… I know what all you unreasonable folks will say. We were all kids once. Be patient. Be nice to them. They represent the future. Well, if that howling piece of childhood is in any way representative of the future, it would be my turn to cry.

——————

Image Courtesy: Creative Donkey

I have always been fascinated by stories and more specifically, by funny stories. In India we have had a long history of humorous stories from every part of India. I used to marvel at Birbal’s wit and presence of mind when I would hear how he managed to outwit the king each time. Gopal Bhaand, Tenalirama and Sheikh Chilli – who was born in Pakistan & eventually moved to Haryana are other humorists who have influenced what tickled our funny bone then.

Every King had court jesters. With over five hundred princely courts imagine the number of jesters and wits there would have been. But why do we not hear about the others? I have often wondered whether we have evolved on this front. At the outset I must confess that I find the Comedy Circus variety of humor to be somewhat crass and actually not so funny despite loud thigh slapping laughter by the hosts/judges to convince us that if you aren’t laughing out loud, you haven’t got the joke. Yet humor is never intended to appeal to everyone. there is rarely a joke that everyone finds funny.

Detective Moochhwala by Ajit Ninan

Humor is very situation specific and context specific. What you find funny as a ten year old may not be so when you are older. Some humor is specific to a region or social class. Each language has its own notion of humor as does each class of society. The breadth of humor one appreciates is a by product of the extent of exposure one has had to people who are different. As Indians have become more confident, we have learned to laugh at ourselves.

Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself or herself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self assured person. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment have expanded the variety of jokes we laugh at today. You see more comedy shows on TV than we did a few years back. YouTube and the Net has given us access to more brands and flavors of humor. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare.

The flavor of humor varies dramatically in a country as diverse as India. Jokes or anecdotes about other castes, professions, rich people (usually misers) etc all succeed because they play on popular stereotypes. I have had friends from the North Eastern states of India who have a very distinctly different brand of humor than the people from other states. Kerala has produced more cartoonists than any other state. There is huge repertoire of humorous stories in Bengali that I have grown up with. I have read and heard a great variety of humor in the Hindi language that is very specific to the social scene of the Hindi belt. We have a common pool of jokes about regional stereotypes. Think of all the jokes about Mallus, Bongs, Sardars, Marwaris, Gujjus, Parsis… the list goes on. Humor is about the ability to tap into our vulnerabilities and insecurities. We all enjoy laughing at what makes others vulnerable.

What is the one thing that makes you laugh?

—————

You may like the article in NY Times that says why Political Humor is Incendiary

Read the article on Page 7 of the DNA Newspaper dated 8th August 2010

Radiolab is just amazing when it comes to telling stories. They have a way of making very complex ideas and concepts come alive by the use of sound effects and banter between the hosts. In this episode the two hosts talk to two Ironman competitors, Julie Moss and Wendy Ingraham to find out how they do what they do. Just to get you to understand what the Ironman is all about. An Ironman Triathlon is one of a series of long-distance triathlon races consisting of a 2.4-mile (3.86 km) swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bike and a marathon 42.195-kilometre (26.219 mi) run, raced in that order and without a break. Most Ironman events have a strict time limit of 17 hours to complete the race, where the Ironman race starts at 7 AM, the mandatory swim cut off for the 2.4-mile (3.9 km) swim is 2 hours 20 minutes, the bike cut off time is 5:30 PM, and all finishers must complete their marathon by midnight.

So why do some athletes succeed in doing what is considered by many as the ultimate test of human endurance. They all talk about the inner voice that nudges them to get up. This voice prompts the athletes to say, “I don’t care what it takes I am going to finish the race”. The voice that says, “Keep moving forward.” The real self of the athlete has no limits.

So it sounds strange to say there are no limits of the body.