Naturally, students are tensed about exams quite often. But we also learn that Anjali Tendulkar gets tensed every time Sachin is about to start batting.

Someone faked a kidnapping and his employer got tensed and called the police.

The TOI writes about many tensed people too.

Hope you have a suitably untensed weekend.

Updated to add:
This post is now a part of the red marker blogathon.

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• The Use of Tamil in Carnatic Music Concerts in London and Other Thoughts

Recently there was a concert at a temple hall, of an artist who was visiting from India and I had to take a train and then a bus to reach the temple. I waited and waited at the bus stop, but characteristic of Sunday behaviour, the bus didn’t arrive. There was this nice Tamil speaking couple at the stop and they told me they’d been waiting for the bus for at least half an hour before I arrived. As it turned out they wanted to go to the same temple and knew of an alternate route. So with their help I took another bus and we walked the rest of the way. Since it was dark and lonely, I was grateful they were around. They kept talking to each other in Tamil and when talking to me switched to English. Finally they asked me if I spoke Tamil. I said no, otherwise I would have spoken to them in Tamil! I was surprised that they would think I would carry on in English, if I knew Tamil.

At the temple, I managed to figure out where the concert was, but there was not a soul in sight. I went to the main temple and sat there, as there were many more people there, said my prayers and then asked at the reception about the concert. An elderly gentleman and lady were there and they appeared rather annoyed. I said, I’m sorry I don’t speak Tamil, I can’t read any of the signs, and they visibly thawed and told me when the concert was expected to start, smiled and were helpful.

Concert begins. Opening speech in Tamil, singer speaks and introduces the music in Tamil and the concluding speech is in Tamil, in which the two words I kept hearing were sampradaya (which I understood) and avargal.

****

I often read or hear Carnatic musicians saying that Hindustani music is better appreciated in the West. What I have observed in London (the scene may be different in places like Amsterdam) is that big name Hindustani instrumentalists like Ravi Shankar and Amjad Ali Khan draw crowds that include non-Indians, and they perform in the bigger more well known theatres. Vocalists are less well appreciated. And Dhrupad is popular amongst a niche, non-Indian audience. Otherwise one has to go to the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan or the Nehru Centre.

Often, at concerts, Carnatic vocalists speak in Tamil, or largely in Tamil. Now I understand that Tamilians want to speak in Tamil. It is a beautiful language, one should be proud of it and one should speak it. But when one is addressing an audience of music lovers/students/listeners one has to assume there will be Indians and non-Indians there who will not understand Tamil but are trying to find out more about the music. There are people here who are trying to relate to both Hindustani and Carnatic vocal music. We already have to contend with the fact that concerts are badly advertised, that people who are not familiar with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan etc will never know when there is a concert on, that they are often few and far between or sometimes in far flung places. These concerts have to be made more accessible, in more ways than one.

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• Behag

I once made the mistake of spelling the word “sutha” as sudha, but then I was just using a spelling I had seen people using on the net. The spelling I prefer the most is actually “suta.”

The spelling was simply a matter of mild amusement, until I started learning Carnatic music. So far I have learned mostly Sanskrit compositions and am getting increasingly irritated at hearing an aspirated “h” where there shouldn’t be one. I think this may have to do with the spelling and the insistence on adding an “h” where it isn’t necessary in transliterations (and removing it where it is necessary).

What is the sense in spelling Mira Bai as Mira Bhai and Kesar Bai as Kesar Bhai? Are these women underworld dons or somebody’s brothers? And where an “h” is needed as in Ananda Bhairavi, it goes missing and it becomes Ananda Bairavi!

I am sure I am going to make huge errors when trying to pronounce Tamil and Telugu. So for that I am going to check with native speakers of each language whether my pronunciation is correct and that I transliterate the words properly. I am aware that there are disagreements amongst the native speakers of these languages on pronunciation-I recently read someone proclaiming the Brahmin pronunciation was the “right” one.

Edited to add: An “h” is sometimes added to distinguish between a soft “t” and a hard “t”. But sometimes this means a word is pronounced with an aspirated “h” after the t or as the “th” in “the.”

Nikhil sent me a very useful link on the Tamil script(thanks):

Relationship with other Indic scripts

The Tamil script differs from other Brahmi-derived scripts in a number of ways. Unlike every other Indic script, it uses the same character to represent both an unvoiced stop and its voiced equivalent. Thus the character க் k, for example, represents both [k], and [g]. This is because Tamil grammar treats only unvoiced stops as being “true” consonants, treating voiced and aspirated sounds are euphonic variants of unvoiced sounds. Traditional Tamil grammars contain detailed rules, observed in formal speech, for when a stop is to be pronounced with and without voice. These rules are not followed in colloquial or dialectal speech, where voiced and unvoiced versions of a stop are, in effect, allophones, being used in specific phonetic contexts, without serving to distinguish words.

Also unlike other Indic scripts, the Tamil script hardly uses special consonantal ligatures to represent conjunct consonants, which are far less frequent in Tamil than in other Indian languages. Conjunct consonants, where they occur are written by writing the character for the first consonant, adding the puḷḷi to suppress its inherent vowel, and then writing the character for the second consonant. There are a few exceptions, namely க்ஷ kṣa and ஸ்ரீ srī.

But do Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam have the same problem? Will have to research that.

And before anyone gets annoyed with me ( I admit I have a prejudice here) I get annoyed by the way South Indian names are pronounced in the North as well, usually with the mixing up of short “a” and long “aa” sounds. Neither are a lot of people in the North bothered with the richness of the languages of the South.

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