Adieu September, Come November!

In the early sixties, a movie starring Rock Hudson took the Hollywood buffs by storm. It was ‘Come September’ in which Hudson was co-starred by Gina Lollobrigida. She was not at all as hard on the eye as her name was on our tongue! In fact, many young men including yours faithfully had acute insomnia thinking of her! Poor Hudson died of AIDS and I wouldn’t know if Gina has been able to keep herself away from the proverbial bucket till date. It was a wonderful comedy with a couple of lilting tunes. The theme song ‘Come September’ was a chart buster for a long, long time. The famous Tamil film ‘Anbe Vaa’ starring MGR and Saroja Devi was a carbon copy of this movie. The title ‘Come September’ related to the annual holiday that Rock Hudson took every September which made him very chirpy. ‘Come September’ was also the title of a famous speech delivered by Arundathi Roy in the US on the first anniversary of the bombing of the Twin Towers by Al Queda.

November has almost the same effect on me as September has on Rock Hudson in the movie ‘Come September’ If you are one of those like me who have spent considerable time in Chennai, you too would understand the importance of November. Chennai has only two seasons, as the ace Cricket commentator P.Anand Rau would often say, namely the hot and hotter. That would make sense to the polar bears among you who would consider a temperature in excess of single digit as a furnace but for the seasoned tropical beasts like me, the 25°Celsius would be Paradise Regained indeed! That is the Temperature that Chennai would be having from November to January. Even if the onset of winter is delayed by a few days, people would take out their sweaters smelling strongly of naphthalene balls and dust them off allergens and dead insects.

Here I must tell you that I am not much of a sweater man. I always believe that going about in flimsy apparel in biting cold weather is one way of creating a macho image. I further believe that knitting is a sure way of keeping off the onset of arthritis of the fingers for older women like Martha Wilson, the affectionate neighbour of Dennis, the Menace. Wool is a protective gear provided to sheep by the Almighty to keep off cold and I guess that we can do that by better means than wearing the ridiculous stuff! If at all I am forced to wear a sweater by my mom, I wear one under my shirt but certainly not over it.

Coming back to my November story, I assure you that apart from the extremely benevolent weather conditions, there are many other reasons why I love this season. This is the time when the noise of the petrifying crackers die down finally except for some occasional bursts at some wedding or funeral processions. The air torn apart by the dreadful crackers gets laden with soothing music with the advent of Isai Vizha (Music festival). We can see lots of people with a shoulder bag thronging the auditoriums making copious notes of the songs rendered by the musicians. It is a very common sight to witness faces that suddenly light up on identifying the Raga that the musician is essaying. There will be small wagers like an ice cream or a Cadburys on guessing correctly what song would follow the ‘alap’! It is also the season when the homing NRIs fix up the alliance for their sons and daughters.

I also have a personal reason to be happy with this season. It is the time for the pilgrimage to Sabari Hills when every other person will wear a beard like me. This means that I merge with the populace like the common man of R.K.Laxman. No more quizzical looks at the growth that outdoes the growth on my head. No more inconvenient questions which range between if I have any dermatological problem or any bereavement in the family. I can tell you from my personal experience that the beard at 60+ is not considered a positive sign at all. A couple of decades back, the same beard, of course of a different hue, elicited such pleasant queries like if there was going to be any addition to my family or questions of concern like if my girl friend has ditched me!

The last but not the least is that I make children extremely happy with my Santa Claus-like countenance! The absence of red coat and black trousers does not bother them and they tend to view me as a ‘desi’ Santa! What can give me greater happiness than the fact that I make children happy? I am totally with James Boswell when he says that ‘He who pleases children will be remembered with pleasure by men’ and I hope ‘women’ too!

 

Dear Indhu
I feel very pampered by your quick-fire replies! Your repository of songs appears large enough to fill the Grand Canyon! I have heard this awful duplication of the Come September tune but the way you pull it out of your memory makes you something like the close cousin of the Super Computers that they use in Pentagon!

You 'feel like' sweating on sighting the sweater clad folks but I do start sweating. I have visited Badrinath and Kedarnath twice and I have seen there some bare-bodied sadhus when people from the plains wore multiple layers of clothing! I guess it is a question of getting used to it. But I cannot understand the need for sweaters in Madurai and Chennai!

Why the chefs? I used to marvel at the endurance of the drivers of locomotives in the past. Remember Sivaji doing it with Nagesh in Pachai Vilakku?

If Sridhar can identify Ragas by the hundreds, that puts him in an entirely different light. He keeps producing more and more proof of his 'Sakala kala mannan'ship!

I have kept this beard of mine from 1964 and it used to be jet black then. Amitab's fungus is of a more recent origin that probably started after his 'silsila' with Rekha! It was pure laziness, to start with, that made me opt for the beard. Now the only reason for my continuing it is my little grand daughter who would never permit me to shave it off!

In the olden days, an orthodox man wouldn't shave if his wife was pregnant. The beard would continue until she delivered the baby!
Sri

 

Dear Chithra
I always thought that you attended the Music Festivals to hone your culinary skills by comparing notes with veterans like Arusuvai Natarajan who put up their stalls at all the venues but it is news to me that 'airing' your Kanjeevaram Sarees was an additional agenda! Dont tell me that you too belong to the group of gluttons that make a beeline to the canteen the moment Thani Avarthanam starts!

If anyone could mistake Simmendramadhyamam for Panthuvarali, I strongly suggest that he should be less vocal in identifying Raga names in a public concert!

Avvaiyar was about the only person who reached the fourth stage of life of Vridhdha from the second namely 'youvanam'. All the rest go through all the four stages of Balyam, Youvanam, Kaumaram and Vridhdham and the experiences appropriate to every stage. And it is not unusal for anyone to run a 'reverse' of his life's incidents so that he could look at them in a different perspective having reached this far in life!

My flowing beard gives me the license to talk of woman related subjects as a 'father figure'! I am a 'Bakthiman' and my two hours of Pooja daily has possibly erased my inherent darkness thus endowing me with a 'Tejas'
Sri

 

Dear Vidya

It is not unusual that commentaries do outshine the originals at times. The commentary to Tirukkural written by Parimelazhagar belongs to this genre. Your FB to my thread has certainly stolen a march over mine in every way!

The Renaissance Man is a term that is applied to all those creative geniuses from Leonardo Da Vinci to Ravindranath Tagore (Courtesy: Sashi Taroor) and I am happy to be bracketed as one among them! I see full justification in this identity given to me by you going by the fact that all of them sported an unkempt beard like mine. There is no other common factor that could have prompted you to call me the Renaissance man besides this beard of mine! I have never felt more thankful to my beard than now after seeing where it has taken me!

When you say that you modeled yourself after Jo March, do I understand that you put on a tomboyish appearance like her? I just happened to have a look at a list of celebrities who were born in November besides little Jo. Just a few names, Aishwarya Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indra Gandhi and Winston Churchill, convince me that November is the month that one should aim to enter the world. I was late by a month!

I have worked in the Statue Branch of State Bank of India in the late 1960’s and the only misty ambience that I encountered was only in theatres filled to the brim by cigarette smoke! Mercifully public smoking is now banned in Kerala. I can relate the seasonal shift in the mind-set of the people there. Come November, more monkey caps can be spotted in Trivandrum than in Srinagar in winter! The Navarathri concerts there are an occasion to mix with the elite of the town.

I have been an Ayyappan for 14 years in a row, a compulsive habit that I had to give up thanks to the swelling crowd. When we were treated to sumptuous ‘Sastha Preethi’ day in and day out, where was the need to go to a hotel? I still carry memories of a feast I had in Parur in the mid seventies the like of which I would probably never have in my life again. My Gurusamy had prescribed blue dhotis for us and that made our group look significantly different from others.

I can’t agree with you more on that last para of yours. We remain mamma’s boys till we get married and from then on you know what! How true is the statement ‘Thaaikku pin thaaram!’ (After mother, it is wife all the way!)
Sri