Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Brunch
THE RHYTHM OF STILLNESS
Mridangam player BC Manjunath explains how konnakol, a Carnatic percussive technique, can calm your mind (and maybe even cure your cold)
When you’re a pintsized musical prodigy, perhaps starting with the mridangam at the age of four is not the greatest of ideas. Too small to hold the instrument then, BC Manjunath thus began his music lessons with konnakol vocal exercises – the foundation of rhythm in Carnatic music.
Today, Manjunath swears by konnakol. It’s the best teaching tool ever for online classes, he says, remembering his recent three-part webinar with Boston’s Berklee Indian Ensemble, helmed by the director of the programme, Annette Philip.
“It’s an easier way to communicate while teaching music online, when you’re looking into the camera and speaking rather than sitting with an instrument,” the 44-year-old Bengaluru musician says.
KEY COMMUNICATOR
Born into a musical family, Manjunath’s father was the veteran mridangam artist
Dr BK Chandramouli and he learnt the mridangam from Vidwan KN Krishnamurthy.
Now, he has spent 22 years as a mridangam player but still believes konnakol is the best way to begin learning music.
You could say konnakol isa more staccato, percussive version of a cappella. “Think of it as one of the voices of mridangam, which you echo vocally,” Manjunath explains. “It’s one of the most sophisticated percussions due to how intricately detailed it is – it shows the cellular form of rhythm.”
SLOW AND STEADY
As you master konnakol, you can attain a speedy and expressive crystal-clean recitation of the intricate rhythmic patterns. But learning it has to be a slow and steady process.
“You can’t learn it overnight. It needs to literally get under
—BC MANJUNATH
your skin. There are about 50 to 60 basic lessons and there’s actual formal science behind learning the art form,” Manjunath says.
This ancient art form is now being picked up by musicians around the world, because it’s something anyone can do.
Though it was earlier also used in melodic ensembles, the that happens after regular practise,” Manjunath reveals.
THE SCIENCE OF IT
The scientific secret behind konnakol is this: it has a lot of syllables structured in such a way that they induce internal vibrations in the singer’s body. “And so I have never had any
Recently, I was looking at the list of people I follow on Twitter and suddenly I came across the name of Rituparno Ghosh, the Bengali master filmmaker who passed away in 2013, at the age of 49.
I did not know Rituparno very well. I had met him only once – in 2010, at the Berlin Film Festival when I interviewed him for his film Aarekti Premer Golpo (2020). But I was a big fan of his remarkable films, examining the human condition. Rituparno was one of the celebrities who followed me on Twitter from about the time I joined the platform and we had a few interesting conversations over the years. Those conversations are saved on Twitter. I can search for them and read them whenever I think of him.
TOUCH THE STARS
One of the advantages of a social media platform like Twitter is how much access we have to celebrities. We can follow anyone from the Dalai Lama to Bill Gates and Shah Rukh Khan. This connection can also take an ugly turn. We recently witnessed a lot of hate being spewed against some celebrities on Twitter following the tragic death of Sushant Singh Rajput.
I am a star-struck journalist. I get excited if a celebrity writes to me on Twitter. I briefly imagine that we are “friends.” It has happened a few times for me with Amitabh Bachchan (he follows me), for instance when I tweeted something about the French classic film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and he wrote back that it reminded him of his college days.
Shah Rukh Khan (he does not follow me) once reacted to my posting of a sign outside a Bangladeshi barbershop in Jackson Heights, New York City. The sign had an image of Shah Rukh from Main Hoon Na (2004), along with a few white kids’ faces with sharp haircuts. When I tweeted, “You can get a haircut that will make you look like one of these white kids, or else just the regular @iamsrk,” he responded, “I would go for the regular @iamsrk. Think that will suit me the best…”
ALWAYS HERE
But it is a strange, comforting feeling to find celebrities who have passed away still following you
THE TWO WORDS, “FOLLOWS YOU” PLACED IN SMALL PRINT NEXT TO THE PERSON’S TWITTER HANDLE
PROVIDE SUCH COMFORT
on Twitter. Two words “Follows you” placed in small print, next to the person’s Twitter handle. I know they have died, and will never respond even if I tag them in a tweet, but in the Twitterverse they still follow me. That time, those conversations we had, are saved unless someone deletes the celebrity’s account.
After I found Rituparno Ghosh on Twitter, I went searching for similar accounts of celebrities who had died, but we still followed each other. There is one of my friend and filmmaker Manish Acharya. Manish directed the hilarious comedy Loins of Punjab Presents (2007), and he and I did voiceovers for an animation film called Sita Sings the Blues (2008). Manish died in December 2010, after a horse riding accident in Matheran.
And there is Mona Kapoor – Arjun Kapoor’s mother, who died from cancer in March 2012. I had never met her, but we followed one another on Twitter. Every time I would tweet about a snowstorm in New York City she would express concern, since her daughter was a student at Columbia University. She had a lovely presence on Twitter and an endearing way of ending her tweets by writing “Rab Rakha.”
In February 2012, she sent me a direct message about her cancer condition and asked if I knew any doctor at New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. I told her I would get back to her. But a month later, I woke up to find out that she had died in Mumbai.
Her Twitter account is still open. And there is a lovely photograph taken in a garden, her long hair and a blue shawl covering her right shoulder.
And then there is Irrfan Khan. I am not sure when we started following each other on Twitter. It was a few years before I set out to write his biography in 2018. Irrfan was very active on Twitter. In fact, he even announced on Twitter that he was suffering from a neuroendocrine tumour.
I had quite a few exchanges with him on Twitter, including when I reviewed Paan Singh Tomar (2012) and praised his performance in the film. He tweeted back saying, “Thank U. it took more then a decade to get a part like pst. He s my inner voice. (sic)”
It was a brief tweet. The typos indicated that Irrfan had typed it
IN THIS VIRTUAL REALITY WORLD, ONEDOESNOT WANTTOLOSE THE CONNECTION WITH PEOPLE
WHO HAVE PASSED AWAY