Vinayak Hegde

Last year I had been to a friend’s place and seen a painting at her place which I liked a lot. She said she had bought it at Chitra Santhe. Chitra Santhe is typically held on the last Sunday of January every year along the Kumara Krupa Road. This year it was crowded and buzzing with activity and I saw several people carrying cartloads of paintings. This year, Chitra Santhe attracted more than 1300 artists and the road was choc-a-bloc with paintings of various styles. Also every other person seemed to carry a DSLR to take pictures of the artists and paintings. I did not carry my camera but the fair was a treat for the eyes. I bought a series of paintings depicting dances of India – Odissi, Bharatnatyam and Kathak. If you are in Bangalore during that time of the year, this is one event you should not miss.

Yamini is a annual Dusk-to-Dawn Cultural Festival at IIM Bangalore. Last year, I went to Yamini and it was a fantastic experience. It is conveniently scheduled on the eve of 26th January. Yamini 2010 continued till the wee hours of dawn and featured perfomances from :

• Carnatic Vocals by Nityashree Mahadevan
• Veena performances by Vidushi Gayathri
• Kathak Performance by Shambhavi Vaze (and troupe)
• Hindustani Vocals by Anand Bhate (from the Kirana Gharana)

Some of the strains of earlier songs performed by Veena Gayathri reminded me of the early blues and distortion guitar (One of the songs performed eerily reminded me of Jimi Hendrix’s guitaring). Anand Bhate’s hindustani vocal was the standout performance and had the audience begging for more. The performance continued well into the morning as Anand Bhate sang the Rag Malkauns, kannada bhajans and marathi abhangs. His was one of the best voices I have heard in a long time and the amount of control and range he had was amazing. The performances were co-ordinated by SPIC-MACAY IIM Bangalore sub-chapter.

Some of the photos from the Kathak Performances by Shambhavi Vaze and group are posted below. The complete set on flickr .

ACM Compute 2010 concluded yesterday. It is the flagship conference of the ACM Bangalore chapter. This year was the 3rd edition of the conference and more than 500 people attended the conference. The highlight of this year’s conference was the launch of ACM India. ACM wants to increase it reach in India and ACM India Council consisting of 18 leading computer scientists from academia and industry are heading this initiative.

The ACM India launch was addressed by 3 Turing Award Winners – Barbara Liskov, C.A.R Hoare (Tony Hoare) and Raj Reddy. The ACM Turing award is “The Nobel Prize for Computing” and it is rare to see three Turing Award winners address the audience at any event. Barbara Liskov is the most recent awardee of the Turing award (the 2nd woman to win it) and she spoke on the power of abstraction. She spoke about the problems early programmers faced when writing large and complex programs. She explained how she tried to solve it using abstractions similar to (what is now called) Object-oriented programming. She talked at length on how her insights and experiences with these programming problem led to design of the CLU language. CLU was the first language to implement iterators and generators (as well as exception handling). It was a good lesson in computer history listening to her. I learned later that she was the first woman to get her PhD from a Computer Science Department. (Her doctoral advisor was the legendary John McCarthy). Her presentation and the mentioned references in it make for good reading.

Dr Raj Reddy is the only Indian who has won the Turing award for his contributions to field of Artificial Intelligence. Incidentally, his PhD advisor was also John McCarthy – AI Pioneer and Turing Award winner. Dr Raj Reddy spoke about the growth of computing over the years and the challenges of reaching the “bottom of the Pyramid”. He explained why there was need to move from the WIMP-paradigm in user interfaces to the SILK (Speech, Image, Language and Knowledge) to increase the reach of computing. His Turing award lecture (”To dream the possible dream”) makes for interesting read as well.

C.A.R Hoare (Tony Hoare) was the next speaker. He is a living legend in computer science. I was looking forward to hearing him speak as I had studied the Quicksort algorithm (which he invented) and Communicating Sequential Processes paper in college. He was remarkably witty and his enthusiasm for computer science shone through in his talk. In particular he spoke about the Verified Software initiative which he contended was similar in scope and impact (for Computer Science) to the Hubble Telescope and the Human genome project.

The following 2 days, we had the ACM Compute 2010 conference and there were several hands-on Tutorials on Cloud Computing, Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 apps, Widgets and Mobile Applications. The RIA tutorial was conducted by Mrinal Wadhwa (slides embedded below) and the Facebook connect tutorial by Prateek Dayal (of Muziboo).

(Disclosure:I am the secretary of the Bangalore Chapter and am on the program committee for ACM Compute 2010.)

One of the few things that I remember from my childhood when we first got a television home (in time for the ‘87 World Cup) was a Kathakali performance. The other things I remember (other than cricket) were the Megaserials – Ramayan and Mahabharat. Ever since I saw that Kathakali performance as a child on TV, I always wondered how the elaborate makeup was done.

Kathakali is the classical dance form of Kerala which originated in the first half of 17th Century. Kathakali is derived from the Malayalam words for Story (”Katha”) and Performance (”Kali”). Kathakali stories are drawn from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Bhagvatha Purana. Kathakali is generally performed in temples during festivals. The performance starts around 9pm in the night and continues all through the night till early morning.

While at Thekkady, I booked tickets to see a Kathakali performance. I reached 2 1/2 hours earlier than the scheduled performance to see the makeup being done. All the colours used in the Kathakali makeup are made of various kinds of rocks found in the region. Oil and rice flours are used a binders to hold the natural colours together. The rice flour (along with a bit of lime) is also used as glue to hold together the “chutti” – a series of white ridges (made of matte paper) on the cheeks on both sides of the face. The “Chutti” are a distinctive mark of Kathakali along with the elaborate head-dress. The different colours of the makeup depict different attributes of the characters. Green depicts righteousness / godliness, red depicts regality and black depicts evil.

The first part of the make-up is done by another artist who paints the artists face. In the second stage, the artist does the fine makeup around the eyes, forehead and the neck. After the facial makeup is done – the artist has to put crumpled starched garments with lots of frills around the waist tightly. This holds the lower part of the costume. The final stage is when the artist dons the costume and the headgear. Another trivia is that there is often a scarf like accompaniment to the costume. It has mirrors at the end of the scarf which hangs around the neck. The mirrors are used stealthily during the performance by the artist to check if he is makeup is alright and not running due to the sweat.

The story that was performed and shown in the pictures is as follows:

Narakasuravadham or The Murder of Narakasura

Nakrathundi, slave (maid servant) of the powerful demon King Narakasura, leaves for the heaven to kidnap the heavenly beauties, as ordered by Narakasura. On reaching heaven, Nakrathundi finds handsome Jayantha, son of Lord Indra. Nakrathundi, filled with lust on the sign of Jayantha disguises herself as Lalitha (a beautiful woman) and approaches with beautiful dance movements.

Lalitha (Nakrathundi) tells that she is rejoiced at his sight and by the grace of god, she will be getting a handsome husband like Jayantha. Jayantha in turn, asks Lalitha to reveal her identity and why she has approached him. Lalitha introduces herse;lf as the heavenly beauty and invites Jayantha for a sexual relationship. Jayantha humbly replies that he will not marry anyone without his father’s (Lord Indra’s) permission. Lalitha tells that she is unable to leave Jayantha and tries to embrace him with her lustful desires.

Jayantha becomes furious and orders Lalitha to leave the place immediately. Lalitha informs him that she came to kidnap him and shows her original form of Nakrathundi and tries to catch hold of Jayantha. At last, Jayantha becomes angry and cuts Nakrathundi’s ears, nose and breasts. Nakrathundi, roaring with acute pain, returns to Narakasura and Jayantha leaves the place to meet his father to inform him of the incident.

Recently I went to Kerala – a trip I had planned at the beginning of this year but could not do as I broke my arm during a trek to Thadiyandamol . I travelled to Kochi, Thekkady, Alleppey, Athirampally falls, Calicut and the Wayanad region during this 12-day trip. I travelled further along the coast to the towns of Udupi, Honnavar, Idagunji and Murudeshwar in Karnataka.

Some random trivia / observations from Kerala:

• The buses are open air with canvas drapes – the poor man’s idea of air cooled buses.
• Keralites love films. Every 500m you will find a big hoarding proclaiming the presence of a mohanlal fan club.
• Southern Kerala is thickly populated – so much so it is difficult sometimes to ascertain whether you have left the city.
• Everywhere you will see signs of influence of expats from the gulf – from majestic houses to the shops selling the latest goods (and flaunting arabic scripts). This is even more true in northern Kerala as compared to Southern Kerala.
• Because of the backwaters, using boats is pretty much a standard form of public transport – especially in the towns on the shores of the Vembanad lake.
• Everywhere around Kerala, you can see the traces of it’s trading past (and present) – from well developed ports to several large trading outpost handed down generations.

Kochi

I reached Kochi early morning by overnight bus from Bangalore and my parents reached Kochi by an evening flight from Mumbai. We were lucky to get accommodation in a home-stay that was by the waterfront near Bolgatty palace. The best part was however that the property had a licensed Chinese fishing net. It was a great experience to see the Chinese fishing nets in action. There is a hanging stretched net attached to a long poles. The net itself is attached to an intricate cantilever system with a variety of weights (attached with ropes of varying sizes). At the center of the net is a generally a light bulb which is meant to attract shrimps, crabs and other fish. The net is lowered and then hauled back up again after 15-20 minutes. The catch is collected from the larger net using a smaller handheld net and the net is lowered back. There is also a small hit attached to the Chinese net platform which is used for waiting when the net is lowered. Kochi is sea-food lovers paradise and there is a wide variety of fresh water fish available. The other attractions in Kochi are the Marine drive (an evening cruise there is recommended), the Jewish Synagogue and the St Francis church (the oldest European Church in India).

Thekkady

From Kochi we proceeded to Thekkady. The ferry on a Periyar wildlife sanctuary was closed as an overloaded ferry had capsized killing 45 people. All the hotels were deserted due to this when we reached there. We visited a spice garden nearby where we were able to see and listen about how various spices are cultivated and harvested. The downside to the spice boom has been that the natural vegetation in the area is being cut to make way for tea gardens (in Wayanad especially) or spice gardens. We also saw Kalaripattayu and Kathakali performance on consecutive evenings. I will cover that in another blog post though.

Alleppey

From the high hills and forests of Thekkady, we came back to Alleppey on the shores of the Vembanad Lake to stay on a houseboat. We boarded the houseboat at the same place where the annual Nehru boat race is held. Later on the cruise, I was able to see long snake boat used in the race. The houseboat stay was the best part of the trip – just listening to music and just hanging around the deck looking at the endless water and leaning coconut trees. The food was excellent as well with rice and fish being staple diet in Kerala. My idea of perfect idyllic holiday

Athirampally Waterfalls

The Athirampally waterfalls are located in the middle of pristine forest about 80 kms from Kochi. They are often called the Niagara falls of India. They are wide and have a fall of about 80 feet. The view from the foot of the falls is majestic. There was a lot of water gushing from the falls as we had visited just after the rains.

I shall cover the Northern part of the trip in the next blog post.