Ramamurthy - From Bangalore To Brooklyn

From Bangalore To Brooklyn

A Look at Life, People, and the Arts

A Collection of Essays

By

K.K. Ramamurthy

Foreword by

Kiran Ramamurthy

Select Books, Bangalore

We write to taste life twice, in the
moment and in the retrospection.
- Anais Nin

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my father K.B.K. Rao, the founder of Select Book shop and my mother Radha Bai.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all the people who helped me to put this book together, particularly my wife Kamala (Kammu) for proofreading the essays, my son Kiran for writing the foreword and my sons Praveen and Arun for editing articles and Marie for typing.

Published date: January 2012

Printed at:

Glossy Prints

No.8, 1st Cross, 3rd Main
20, Bannerghatta Road, Pukhraj Layout
Adugodi, Bangalore - 560 030
Tel: 080 - 2212 8796 / 4218 5146
Email:

Publisher's Note

The primary purpose of a publisher, in my opinion is to promote new writers.

The books published earlier by us happened to be the reprints of various classics like Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy's magnum opus titled Time and Eternity ; also F. Schon's several philosophical art related works. This time we are publishing the writings of a promising new writer who happens to be my brother.

Editing and indexing is as much cumbersome as it is fascinating. I had once an opportunity to work with a great scholar Prof. S.K. Ramachandra Rao, while we were planning to edit and publish a revised version of a great religious text "Srimad Bhagavatham"; earlier published by G.A. Natesan, a noted publisher from Chennai.

The editing of this book is done by my nephew Kiran Ramamurthy. The task of editing may appear simple but editing several articles is a skillful task like assembling flowers of different sizes and varied hues during flower arrangement. Kudos to Kiran Ramamurthy.

K.K.S. Murthy

(Select Books)

FOREWORD

Pa has terrible handwriting. He'll defend it, when it's insulted, and he honestly seems to like itbut it was always a problem for the rest of us because he abhors typing. Over the years, as Pa began writing these essays and reflections more prolifically, and we were asked to type up the manuscripts, we began demanding that he read them aloud, so that we wouldn't have to chase him around the house to ascertain the meaning of whatever inscrutable text we were wrestling with.

And then, working with Pa's stories became a lot more enjoyable. I can remember so many afternoons and evenings, sitting together in the living room at the house in Morganville, with Pa reading his latest creation next to me. Over the years, we developed a pretty good rhythm. He'd read slowly, listening to the clicking of keys, and wait for the brief pause to signal our move to the next passage. When we came up against one of those impossible to spell Indian words that tested my knowledge of phonetics, he'd just spell it out immediately so that we could move along, and I wouldn't have to be embarrassed by how bad an Indian I am. When the transcriptions were done, we'd sit and talk about the piece's strengths, and the sections that might require revisiting (which might never actually occur).

And over the years, the stories took on more complexity, and Pa's voice and craft kept developing. Originally, the pieces were discussions of music, celebrations of artists he admired, or opportunities to memorialize people he had lost. But eventually, these stories became maps of his life and ways to make sense of his experiences.

The stories are organized into four chapters, the first being entitled Life in these United States. A few of the early stories, Alls Well that Ends Well, Kamala and Jayanthi go to Harlem, and Hema Malini and Marlon Brando deal with Amma and Pa's initial forays into becoming Americans in Queens during the 70's, full of the cultural misunderstandings that got them into jams and some of the blind luck that got them out. This chapter also introduces Select Book Shop in a few of the stories. For readers who may not know us, Select is a dealer in rare, out-of-print and antiquarian books which was originally owned by my grandfather, K.B.K. Rao and currently run by Pa's brother K.K.S. Murthy and his son Sanjay. It's a treasure chest for book lovers, serenely tucked away in a cul-de-sac behind one of Bangalore's busiest intersections. The shop figures prominently in this book, as it has always been an important part of our family's identity. The rest of the opening chapter covers a wide variety of topics and includes some of my personal favorites, like Leo Tolstoy Meets Steve Jobs and Root CanalDesi Style.

The second chapter, entitled Bangalore Days, focuses mainly on Pa's student years in Bangalore in the 50's and the 60's. Memoirs like Chinmayananda and Vinoo Mankand depict some of the new and exciting experiences of his youth, while other pieces like Lambretta/Vespa and Espresso present life amongst the Bangalore hipsters looking towards the West. The other half of the stories in this section examines his journeys back to Bangalore later in life and offers his view of the nation from afar.

The majority of chapter 3, entitled On Music and the Other Arts, presents essays and discussions on the great passion of Pa's life, Carnatic Music. Many of these pieces have already been published in various journals on South Indian Classical music through the years and all of them are collected here. Many of these essays are vociferous in their support of the underdogs of this musical community: the accompanist, the woman, the Kannadiga, the violinist. And refreshingly, these essays and editorials are not written from the perspective of a criticwho aims to carve out his own space in the conversation among artistsbut he writes as a fan and lover of the arts, with full respect for the incredible musicians who have devoted their lives to this amazing tradition. But of course, Pa finds inspiration in many other arts, as shown in pieces like the opener to the chapter Appa and the Movies. I remember how fired up Pa was when the Satyajit Ray festival came to New York a few years ago. He sat through hours of movies and couldn't wait to talk about them afterwards.

While a handful of the stories in the final chapter, Biographical Sketches, have a humorous or lighthearted tone, most of the pieces eulogize some of the most important people in Pa's life. A large segment of the chapter is devoted to one of Pa's closest friends and employer of over 30 years, Mr. Joseph Falco. My brothers and I met him only a few times and had less than a paragraphs worth of conversation with him, yet we've always held Mr. Falco in the highest esteem, as he was an incredibly accomplished man. In the essays on Mr. Falcoas he does in some of the other pieces in this chapter like Indru (1924-1994), Jattu, and Aji (1922-2011)Pa celebrates the finest attributes of great men and women, and shares the lessons he gleaned which will inspire any reader.

I love these stories. For me, they have provided invaluable insight and understanding into a man that I greatly cherish, admire, and respect. But I think that this is a book that will appeal to a lot of different kinds of readers. Indians who are members of his generation, will enjoy the opportunity to reminisce about the wide-eyed excitement of being in New York in the early 70's. And there is a beautiful nostalgia in this collection for an older, sleepier Bangalorea place that is basically lost now but so attractive in the imaginations of the people that were there. But I also think that these are stories for anybody, and not just those of his own time and place. Oddly, Pa's jokes are far more successful in writing than they are in conversation, and these stories are well-crafted, thoughtful, and fun to read. As readers, you can move through the first two chapters chronologically, and get a sense of the path his life has taken, or you can skip around. Each story serves as its own entity, not relying on its predecessors in the book.