Like most great experiences, this one too was unanticipated. I had no idea that the exclamation mark in that email entitled ‘Kohima!’ would translate to walking in the clouds heady with melody, learning Assamese folk songs and laughing so much that your dentures threatened autonomy. As a new addition to the SPICMACAY Mumbai chapter I had attended meetings with somewhat trepidation at my lack of a definite reason to do so. At the Kohima convention I found that reason. But that is only one entry in my endless inventory of finds such as love for the dextrous dhol dancers, my capacity to drink steaming cups of chai at any hour of the day, lilting voices of the genteel Naga community and fabulous friends (including my good friend Rice who stood by me through dal and taal), not necessarily in that order!
The North-east is one of the most beautiful parts of India. Its natural beauty is largely preserved, perhaps because most trains take 52 hours to reach there. It is only if you brave through a long and arduous journey that you truly begin to deserve and appreciate the magnificence of this undulated terrain.
At 7:15, LTT (where our train began its feat) saw a scurry of young people and their assorted family members make a beeline for the B-3 compartment. From a list of 20 confirmed we were down to 9. PD (Priyadarshan), Nirubhai Anjani (Niranjani), Bachpan (Yash), Sanganmaili (Saili), Dhanu (Dhanashree), Prof Anand Rao, Laxman and I. Abhishek joined us at Nashik. I barely knew anybody. Some people I had met for the first time in my life. Little did I know that in just a few hours I’d be sharing more than a bed-spread, a balti and endless bak bak with them. They say that you only get along if you have things in common with other people. Ironically enough in this trip I got along with a lot of people because their life experiences were most uncommon and removed from my own. When chatter or classical music didn’t unite us, ‘Mafia’ the great leveller did. While each one of us took turns at making spirited pleas as ‘innocent citizens’, the game was also an effective revelation of the infinitude of human stupidity. While my vociferous ‘lawyer’ tone got most of the compartment running for the mute switch others like Maijo (a fellow traveller from Arunachal Pradesh who joined in the revelry) unwittingly publicized their identity by declaring, ‘haan healer’ to whoever cared to listen :) It is fitting here to mention that this seemingly endless flow of energy came to us by rapidly consuming large quantities of delicious food that our collective parents had wisely thrust upon us. I reached out to the window to gaze at the scenic wonder that is Assam and before I knew it my 52 hours had melted into Guwahati station.
We hauled our luggage and made our way to the youth hostel (we still haven’t figured out why Netaji’s statue mounted a horse right outside the hostel) guided ably by our new found train mates Maijo, Tracy and Romero. Then we made our good selves habitable less by soap and water and more by reassessing the definition of ‘clean’ in our mental dictionary and sat down to a staple diet of dal and rice. That evening we hopped from the bazaar to the Brahmaputra and from tomato sauce soup to sound sleep. Next morning Kalakshetra and an unusually rainy Guwahati greeted our happy lot. I loved the museum and its green environs and in the blink of an eye it was 1 A.M. and I was standing at the platform waiting for the Brahmaputra mail to transport me to Dimapur which it did.
Dimapur’s blazing blue sky reminded me of Bombay and little green buses entitled ‘Nagaland State Transport’ took us to our destination-Kohima. When we reached the gates of Nagaland University (or Naghalendyunivercidi as the locals like to pronounce it) I felt like a Haj pilgrim meeting her Mecca. All of us armed ourselves with brooms and swept everything in the vicinity including an indignant looking wall spider and put down mattresses with a ready list for each dorm. But it is only when a thousand strong crowd made a meal of passion fruit and pickle that my heart leaped to the tune of Kohima convention, Kohima convention, Kohima convention! But I had to wait until evening to give names to the faces in this crowd as we had an introductory session of every Chapter in the country. As the Mumbai chapter we sang ‘Jayostutey’ and naturally Sanganmaili and Dhanu sent a few hearts aflutter with their magical voices :)
On 16th June 2008 for the first time in my life something other than Company Law woke me up at 3: 30 in the morning. Yog. Dr. Kiran Seth eased the grip of sleep from our eyelids as he taught us various asans until seven that morning. The sun in Nagaland holds its belly and laughs at you if you sleep for a minute more than 6. At four in the morning it is shining at you so matter of factly that you feel guilty even for thinking about sleeping.
After breakfast we went to a superbly constructed hanger and watched a musical of Naga folk dances which to me was the best dance ballet I had ever seen, until I watched Kapila Venu of course. The Chief Minister and the University Chancellor (Mr. Kannan) had come and so had Manishankar Iyer and they threw in speeches from a secretary and undersecretary as well for what reason I couldn’t quite figure except perhaps visual symmetry on the dais.
I quite enjoyed the fast paced violin rendition by the Mysore brothers that afternoon though the highlight of the day was Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar’s vocal which got over much too quickly. In the evening we saw a repeat of the morning’s Naga dances but even this time they were equally enthralling if not better. Later a whole lot of confusion followed as we all hopped from one intensive (a workshop where for 5 days you learn an art form of choice) to another until finally exhausted we headed ‘home’ for bed.
On day 2 (17th June) I had decided to learn Assamese folk music and the rest of the gang headed for their respective intensives such as Kalamkari, Koddiattam and Ustad Abdul Rashid Khan’s vocal. My intensive introduced me to an art form (folk music) I’d never ordinarily have learnt. But my esteemed friends were a step further. Some of them learnt how to find novel ways to escape from the grind of a three hour session and run off to the stadium to play cards and chomp on ‘chida’ making someone very much upset! Despite this we all managed a decent performance of what we had learnt, on the last day.
The next three days for me passed in a blur. I remember being in a musical daze. But then this convention was about so much more. Among the lecture demonstrations I particularly enjoyed the one conducted by Dadi Pudumjee on puppetry. In those three hours as he showed us a power point presentation of his various shows and demonstrated the work of his life-size puppets, he brought their cardboard noses and piquant expressions to life. Through Anjolie Ela Menon’s intensive on painting I realised that the paint was but a medium for the phantasmagorical imagery her pictures created in my mind. Even photography (Raghu Rai) was so much more than a click in time.
Among the vocal performances the one I enjoyed the best was that of Ashwini tai (Ashwini Bhide-Despande) simply because it was just that, no frills attached. Of course the fact that two of my friends were performing on the stage alongside added to the glee. While most people seemed to have enjoyed Hari Prasad Chaurasia’s performance to me it was a little too shrill and a little too still. But of course I am a novice. There was a great debate brewing among my friends as to whether the crowd was or was not aware of what Rajan, Sajan Mishra were doing, but I’ll leave that for another day. Everyone forgot that I had the opportunity of compeering (after pacifying an angry contender) for Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s performance but no one will forget the magic of his Mohan veena for a long time. While Madhuranjani was just about okay, the last piece from his Grammy award winning album more than made up for the lull. And you thought a guitar was used only for rock!
I will not describe the trip to the cemetery or the museum in Kohima for lets leave some lines in the schedule intact.
For the finale, we all awaited the grand overnight. As the clock struck 9 we trudged to the hanger looking like bandits covered with blankets. The night began with Ustad Dagar’s Dhrupad which ended by one in the night. I grandly declared that I was not sleepy at all even as I watched PD, Dhanu, an open mouthed Bachpan and Sanganmaili blissfully snoring. Abhishek had already left for the room on the pretext that he needed tea until Ustad Dagar fished for his dha! To her credit Nirubhai didn’t sleep a wink throughout the night. A superb Karnatic vocal rendition by Bombay Jayashree followed. I watched enchanted. I was not sleepy. Then between 2 and 4 Kapila Venu mesmerised the stage with her graceful hands and her fiercely agile face to the rhythmic beat of an instrument that looked like a pot but roared like a lion. PD, Dhanu, Sangan, Bachpan, Niru sat up, wide-eyed. I fell asleep. I slept through what was the best performance of the convention. Stupid forty winks. As dawn approached we decided to call it a day (forgive the pun) and catch a couple of hours of what else, forty winks. But PD armed with his Kodiattam moves intervened and we agreed to listen to ‘mat jao na’. No one regretted it. A hundred year old man , with no fingers, a running temperature and an upset stomach sat up and sang to the heavens above for two whole hours. Could we have asked for more? Kiran Seth had told us that there is one point in the night when one begins to see everything clearly and that’s when you catch the ‘golden bird’. Unfortunately for me, my glasses were cracked that night. But like Sharukh Khan says, ‘picture abhi khatam nahi hui hai bhai’.
The journey back home was as eventful. It began with a broken jam bottle was interspersed with rescuing harried friends from the general compartment and dashing into running trains and ended with a slightly more warmed globe, thanks to a heated discussion on carbon credits. Despite all this the train was on time.
The best way to teach a child a task is to do it yourself first. To me this logic was the central theme of the convention. It began to dawn upon me that there was really nothing I couldn’t give up. And no one told me this in so many words. I just slowly saw the pattern unravel. Often I argued over questions only so that I could convince myself how thoroughly unnecessary some of the assumptions I was holding on to were. For the first few days I battled against what I viewed as restrictions over my time and space when I was asked to wake up at a certain time or for example refrain from eating kurkure. But slowly, unknown to me, as I watched others live the motto of ‘simple living, high thinking’ with such ease, I found myself picking up litter and readily accepting the fact that I didn’t really need Maggi from the tapri. Dal, rice would do just as well. Cracked glasses notwithstanding it is here that I caught sight of the golden bird. Soar!
-Shalaka
