Love music? Love the blues? You will love Shillong's Soulmate

Thank you, Shubha Mudgal, for introducing me to music and musicians that I did not know existed.

Mudgal, the noted singer of Hindustani classical music, writes a regular column called "Music Matters" (a clever title that) in Mint Lounge. It is from reading Mudgal's most recent piece that I learnt of Soulmate, the Shillong-based band, and Tipriti Kharbangar, Soulmate's lead vocalist.

That's Tipriti above, performing Voodoo Woman with Soulmate in the US last year. After you watch this video you will have no trouble understanding what Mudgal meant when she described Tipriti's voice as "gut-wrenching and intensely tuneful".

Tipriti also sings in Khasi, her mother tongue. Here's Mudgal's observation after listening to Soulmate perform Shillong (Sier Lapalang):

I had no idea what the words meant but there was this give-it-all-you-have abandon and sense of conviction in her voice that was both stunning and riveting at the same time. In fact, there was this lament-like quality about the song, but not a resigned lie-down-and-cry-your-heart-out kind of lament. It was a wild, uninhibited howl-like lament that brought down an attentive hush on the listeners.

Coming from an accomplished vocalist herself, that's high praise indeed.

TIPRITI KHARBANGAR. Photo courtesy: Baia Marbaniang/Ivory Cottage Creatives

Read Shubha Mudgal's column in its entirety here: "Talk to the Blues".

• UPDATE: Five minutes after I posted the link to this post on the Facebook wall of Commitscion Baniaikymaw Lydia Shanpru, who hails from Shillong, she returned the favour by sending me links to some Soulmate tracks on in.com. Thanks so much, Baniaikymaw. 

• UPDATE (June 22, 2012): Commitscion Nishal Lama not only commented on my Facebook link, but he also provided a link to Soulmate's music on MySpace: "Thanks for sharing this one. They are simply amazing. In fact, one of the best blues bands from India. I am lucky to have seen and shot a couple of their gigs in Bangalore. Tips and Rudy make an amazing couple. I remember Shubha Mudgal mentioning one more artist from Assam, Angarag Mahanta, in of her pieces in Mint. You should check him out too. Cheers!" And here's the MySpace link: "Soulmate".

• UPDATE (February 9, 2013): Mint yesterday featured Tipriti and Rudy in "Love Issue 2013". Read the article to know more about the couple: "Shillong sung blue".

DNA's headline blooper

Ramesh Prabhu

22 hours ago

Occasional rant No. 1:

Headline in DNA today — "Empower mothers to control children's sexual abuse"

"Control" as in, say, "control a child's access to the internet"? Meaning allow the child access to the internet but exercise control over the websites the child visits.

Is "control" the appropriate word in that headline? Shouldn't it have been written as "Empower mothers to prevent children's sexual abuse"?

 ·  · Share

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  Nikita Kothari, Suhani Jain-Sethi and 3 others like this.
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    Ramesh Prabhu Also read: http://goo.gl/oseJ1.
    

    
    

    THE READING ROOM: 50 Facebook rants to make you think about bad English vs good English

    engageentertainenlighten.blogspot.com
    

    This blog is for students of Commits, a media college in Bangalore, where I teac...See More

    
    

    22 hours ago ·  · 1 · 
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    Ankana Sinha Also Sir, correct me if I am wrong, doesn't using the word control also suggest that you are allowing it to happen but in a measured way?
    

    21 hours ago · 
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    Ramesh Prabhu That is the point I am trying to make with my internet example above, Ankana.
    

    21 hours ago ·  · 1
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    Ankana Sinha For once we agree ;)
    

    21 hours ago · 

How mature do you think you are?

"Maturity is the ability: to do a job whether you're supervised or not;
to finish a job once it's started; to carry money without spending it;
and to bear an injustice without wanting to get even."
~ Abigail van Buren (often misattributed to twin sister, Ann Landers)

(My view exactly — except I have never been able to articulate it as well as Abigail van Buren, who, way back in 1956, founded the extremely popular advice column, Dear Abby. To read the column, which is now being run by Abigail van Buren's daughter, go here.)

A tribute to the courage and commitment of a Tehelka photojournalist

Early in May, Tarun Sehrawat, Tehelka's staff photographer, accompanied the magazine's reporter Tusha Mittal to Abujmarh, the Maoists' stronghold in Chhattisgarh.

Tusha is 27 years old; Tarun was just 22.

Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhury, in her "Editor's Cut" column of May 26, told us what happened in Abujmarh:

At one level, this is a glorious story of courage and commitment. Two weeks ago, these reporters had gone into Abujmarh, the unbreached citadel of the Maoists, walking 40 km on foot into remote and hostile terrain. They had nothing but a few bottles of drinking water and some packets of biscuits. But they refused to turn back when water and food ran out. They refused to turn back even when they saw notices from the Maoists warning of mines and traps ahead. They wanted to bring back first-hand accounts of life in the villages there and they stayed their course till they got the story they wanted.

Read the column in its entirety here: "Living in cities, we walk like tourists, unmindful of the hellishness of others’ lives, until it actually hits us".

Then, three days ago, Chaudhury gave readers the sad news. Sehrawat, who, along with Mittal, had contracted a ravaging fever while on the field trip, had lost his battle for life. (Mittal, thankfully, has recovered and is well, we are informed.)

In a magnificent tribute to Tarun Sehrawat, posted on the magazine's website on June 15, Tehelka has showcased not only the photographs he took in Abujmarh but also the pictures he shot for Tehelka over the years. Read the tribute here: "Tarun always made the most difficult choices with the lightest smile".

• Also read: Tarun Sehrawat’s death has exposed the callous attitude of media organisations, writes television journalist Neha Dixit

• Also read: "Journalists in the line of fire".

Are you revealing more than you should on Facebook?

You really, really shouldn't. Not unless you want to scupper your chances of getting a good job. Not unless you want to risk being fired from that good job.

A "revealing" article on the U.S. News & World Report website by Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter confirms what I believe and what I have been telling my students for years now: Recruiters and HR executives are trawling the Web, especially Facebook, to get the inside scoop on both job candidates and employees. There are at least two methods they employ, writes Barrett-Poindexter. They research you through a friend of a friend. And they use deep Web searches.

So is there anything you can do to protect yourself? The answer is yes. Here are Barrett-Poindexter's tips:

1. Don't trust privacy settings.

2. Avoid negativity.

3. Internet conversations are (somewhat) indelible.

4. Be careful what you share.

5. It's OK to unfriend.

The article elaborates on each of these tips. Study them here: "5 Tricks to Keep Facebook From Hurting Your Job Search".

• Thank you, Pallabi Mitra (Class of 2012), for the alert.

• Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, a Glassdoor career and workplace expert, offers helpful advice on a host of work-related topics. Check out her columns here.

• Also read: "Yes, recruiters are using Facebook and Twitter to screen candidates".

• UPDATE (June 29, 2013): From an article published in Bloomberg Businessweek two days ago: "Think before you post, especially if you’re looking for a job. Seems like common sense, doesn’t it? Yet despite all the advice and warnings to be cautious with social media, job applicants continue to get burned by their online profiles." Read the piece in its entirety here: Hey Job Applicants, Time to Stop the Social-Media Sabotage.  

"Seven ways to improve your writing … right now"

James Chartrand is confident the following advice will make you a better writer:

1. Be concise and be clear
2. Keep it short
3. Stick to three
4. Watch your tone
5. Talk Food, Sex, and Danger
6. Break it up
7. Stay on topic

You may already be aware of some of the points on this list. What makes this post on Copyblogger interesting to read is the snappy writing. What James Chartrand preaches, James Chartrand practises.

Elaborating on "Watch your tone", for instance, Chartrand says it’s easy for writers to assume readers can pick up on our mood and tone from our writing:

After all, we certainly know our feelings, humor, intent, and state of mind at the time we write. But for readers, it’s clear as mud. They’re guessing at your tone — and they may guess wrong.

Here’s an example:

    Honey. Please.

Was I exasperated and rolling my eyes? Smiling and gently teasing? Acidly sarcastic? Or maybe just eating toast and reaching for the bear-shaped bottle?

As a reader, you have no idea unless the words around that phrase cue you into my written tone.

That's great advice. In fact, all of it is great advice. Not to mention, a treat to read. Go for it here: "7 Ways to Improve Your Writing … Right Now". Also scan the "popular articles" list provided alongside. Take a look at "11 Smart Tips for Brilliant Writing". Read "How Twitter makes you a better writer". Compare this post with mine: "Two benefits of Twitter I can think of".

• Are you curious to know more about James Chartrand? Would you like to know why James Chartrand wears women's underpants? Check out this post.

It took him just two hours to write a poem, half a day to finish a short story, and nine days for a full-scale novel.

You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.

This practical advice on writing, which I share every year with my students, comes from Ray Bradbury, the American author of more than 500 published works (so he knew what he was talking about).

For Bradbury, who died earlier this week in Los Angeles, writing was playing. "I don’t think I know what writer's block is," he said. "I never had it. My typewriter goes everywhere I go. I get up at 3 a.m. every day, head for the keyboard, laugh a lot, then go back to bed."

This gem of a quote is from The Writing Life, edited by Maria Arana, who tells us in her introduction to Bradbury’s essay in the book that it took him just two hours to write a poem, half a day to finish a short story, and nine days for a full-scale novel.

FULL OF LIFE: RAY BRADBURY AT A BOOK SIGNING IN CALIFORNIA IN 1997.

Zen in the Art of Writing, which he first published in 1990 (and which was my first Flipkart acquisition), also gives us a peek into Bradbury's enjoyment of his work. I remember taking a quote from Zen and posting it as my Facebook status update soon after I began reading it:

If you're writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you're only half a writer.... For the first thing a writer should be is — excited.

The book is packed with practical — that word again — tips on writing from a man who was clearly a master of the craft. If your aim is to write and to enjoy writing, I can't recommend Zen in the Art of Writing highly enough.

• The New York Times was exuberant, fittingly, in its praise of Ray Bradbury the day after he died. Read the obituary — and learn why more than eight million copies of Bradbury's books have been sold in 36 languages — here: "He Brought Mars to Earth With a Lyrical Mastery".

• The day before he died, the New Yorker published an autobiographical essay by Ray Bradbury, in which he described the influences that shaped his life as a boy and that later had an impact on his life as a writer. Read the essay here: "Take Me Home".

• Also read: "Remembering Ray Bradbury with 11 Timeless Quotes on Joy, Failure, Writing, Creativity, and Purpose"

• Also read: "If you love what you do, is it 'work'?"

• Also read: "In one place, everything you want to know about writing in English".

• Photograph courtesy: Associated Press.

When it comes to writing, experience is NOT everything

Here is a job ad in the latest issue of The Economist:

Vacancy: The Economist is hiring a finance writer to cover hedge funds, private equity and insurance. Experience is less important than the ability to write simply, insightfully and entertainingly. Applicants should send a copy of their CV, along with a 500-word article on this bit of finance, by June 15th to financejob@economist.com.

Now you know why The Economist, which was first published in September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress", is considered one of the world's best magazines.

• Also read: "Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and (gasp!) Lady Gaga".

The pleasure is all ours, Anjum!

Bangalore's very own Anjum Hasan will be celebrating the publication of her new book at an event at the British Council here on Tuesday. (Anjum spent her early years in Shillong and is now the Books Editor of the venerable New Delhi-headquartered Caravan magazine — but it is in Bangalore that, I like to think, she found her calling.)

Difficult Pleasures, the new short-fiction collection that was released in March, has already earned praise from critics. "The 13 stories ... are a good indicator why Anjum Hasan is widely regarded as a rising star on the literary horizon, as fluid in prose as poetry," wrote the reviewer in The Hindu earlier this month.

How did Anjum get her start? Who are the short story writers she admires? What does she think of short stories? Here, in an excerpt from an e-mail Anjum sent out along with details of the launch of Difficult Pleasures, she provides the answers to those questions:

As a child, I learnt the concept early — the name of the ingredient crucial to storytelling. It was a word my parents used often and approvingly for clever people, the word ‘imaginative’. I knew that if I had to count for anything, I would have to learn to make things up. From the tidy and well-stocked shelves in the children’s section of Shillong’s municipal library, one could pick out and immerse oneself in any made-up world one wanted to. Then there were the stories that one didn’t choose but loved all the same — the English high school reader khichdi of such supposedly immortal texts as an excerpt from John Buchan’s 1910s thriller Thirty-Nine Steps or that terrifying Chekov story, ‘The Bet’ or the highly sentimental ‘The Last Lesson’ by Alphonse Daudet — set in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine which, after the end of the Franco-Prussian war, is on the point of passing into Prussian hands.

When I got to university, one of my monthly pleasures was the arrival in the library of cracklingly new copies of American journals such as Partisan Review and The Southern Review. Before the poems, I would turn to the short stories. What would impress me were not so much the stories in the stories — in the sense of the chain of events described — as the texture — clothes, food, the way people spoke, how colours were named. I envied that texture; I wanted it. I started writing poems as a way of telling stories, trying to locate the specific, the expressible in my own world.

Many short story writers I admire, such as Qurratulain Hyder or Mahasweta Devi, are not writing individually distinctive stories as much as describing in each story a slightly different facet of the same world. Several recent collections of short fiction have been billed ‘linked stories’ because a single background runs through the collection, and characters recur. But that idea of ‘linked’ is often implicit without needing to be highlighted in the older writers. RK Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories is obviously a compact — stories about tradesmen and professional men who must undertake various minor and comic negotiations in order to keep going in an imperfect world.

Perhaps this is true of many short story writers. Raymond Carver’s stories can each seem to have a different quality of strangeness but aren’t they usually about people like himself, the unsentimental, the down and out, the working poor? I’m fascinated by this ability in a short story writer — to create a world in relation to which each story is but one expression.

But I’m also fascinated by the opposite — how a single story, or even a glimpse of a single character within it, does not necessarily have to rely on larger references for its appeal. My own characters are often solitary individuals whose choices are no longer so determined by older social mores, but who therefore have to invent their freedoms. They don’t draw on a world as much as try to locate one. Have I succeeded, therefore, in making things up? Is it possible, walking down a dark street and seeing a lighted doorway, to imagine the world beyond it? The mystery of that lighted doorway is what keeps the story going. You can never walk through it, every story is a just a means of trying.

I just love that phrase, "The mystery of that lighted doorway is what keeps the story going." Back in 2010, Anjum had visited Commits for an interactive session with our students, who were so captivated by what she had to say that two hours just whizzed by... and many students didn't even get to ask her their questions. So, later, I sent them to Anjum via e-mail. You can read those questions and her responses here: "A-1 advice from an author".

For more details about Anjum Hasan's works, visit her website: AnjumHasan.com.

• I have already bought a copy of Difficult Pleasures. After I finish reading it, I'll place it in the Commits library, next to the copies of Neti, Neti and Lunatic in My Head.

• EXTERNAL READING: "The long and short of a story", Open magazine's interview with Anjum Hasan.

"Yes man" redefined... and given a new sense of purpose

Find a way to say yes to things.

Say yes to invitations to a new country. Say yes to meeting new friends. Say yes to learning a new language, picking up a new sport. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job. Yes is how you find your spouse, and even your kids.

Even if it's a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference in your life, and likely in others' lives as well. ...

Yes is a tiny word that can do big things. Say it often.

— Excerpt from the commencement speech made last month by Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt (pictured above) at the University of California at Berkeley

• Also read: Wisdom and inspiration from author Neil Gaiman's commencement speech at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and An uplifting commencement address by CNN-IBN's Sushasini Haidar.