Brig V R Khandekar
Sep-Oct 2014 Vol 4 Issue 5 64 pages
short fiction essays verse reviews
Editorial
“A lifetime of showers moistens the soul,” says an ancient proverb. These beautiful words apply more to India’s colourful monsoon culture than to any other. The charm of our monsoon knows no parallel; it obliterates all memory of the Indian summer like it never was, and heralds the beginning of the festive season, refreshing the stories that go with it. We, of course, bring you a great variety of stories, as usual! In ‘Lassi Days’, a retired judge is possessed of a longing for his lawyering times in a small town, and decides to seize the moment. Jolted into reminiscence too, is the middle-aged woman in ‘Obsession’, who is far down the well-worn, yet ever poignantly questioned path of a typical Indian marriage. Then there is the young girl with the generous smile, who learns an important lesson while on her first job in the delicately written ‘Unreliable’, or the young man with his uncertain memories and his relationship with his elusive muse in ‘Please Forgive Me’. Or the man with the relentless stories in his head in ‘My Husband’s Stories’. That’s only to cite a few! Manjushree Hegde uncovers the dazzling acrobatics of our ancient Sanskrit wordsmiths – see how poetry in their nimble hands takes the form of puzzles, shapes, palindromes, and so on, in ‘The Word Acrobats’. Planning a 65th birthday celebration for her husband ends up in a one-of-a-kind party for Sarah Rand, when they end up 6000 feet above sea level in the middle of nowhere, with celestial bodies for company! Read about it in ‘Star Party’. Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, poet, Granta author, and Man Asian nominee, shares her experiences and views with Suneetha Balakrishnan in a lively interview. The down-to-earth woman behind the recently launched Zindagi channel, Shailja Kejriwal, talks about her journey, and her hopes for the future. “The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” said Mark Van Doren, American poet and long-time professor at Columbia. Nowhere is this truer than in the teaching-learning of creative arts such as Indian music. ‘Guru Tattva’ explores the traditional roles of Guru-shishya and how they are played out in modern times, with noted vocalist Keerti Kumar Badseshi. So open that window, let the last of the raindrops in, take out your copy and fall to. You will emerge refreshed, thoughtful, renewed. Happy reading! ~ Editors facebook.com/readinghour readinghour.in
Published, owned, & printed by Vaishali Khandekar. Printed at National Printing Press, 580, KR Garden, Koramangala, Bangalore-560095 Published at 177-B, Classic Orchards, Bannerghatta Rd, Bangalore-560076 Editor: Vaishali Khandekar. Editing Support: Arun Kumar, Manjushree Hegde. Subscriptions, business enquiries, feedback: readinghour@differsense.com / Ph: +91 80 26595745 Subscription Details: Print (within India only) / Electronic (PDF): Annual subscription Rs. 300/- (6 issues) 2 years subscription Rs. 600/(12 issues). Online subscription: readinghour.in. Payment by cheque / DD in favour of ‘Differsense Ventures LLP’ payable at Bangalore. Submissions: editors@differsense.com Advertisers: Contact Arun Kumar at arunkumar@differsense.com / +91 98450 22991 Cover: Mohan M P. Story Illustrations: Raghupathi Sringeri Disclaimer: Matter published in Reading Hour magazine is the work of individual writers who guarantee it to be entirely their own, and original work. Contributions to Reading Hour are largely creative, while certain articles are the writer’s own experiences or observations. The publishers accept no liability for them. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily represent the policies or positions of the publisher. The publishers intend no factual miscommunication, disrespect to, or incitement of any individual, community or enterprise through this publication. Copyright ©2014-2015 Differsense Ventures LLP. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any part of this issue in any manner without prior written permission of the publisher is prohibited.
CONTENTS ESSAYS
INTERVIEWS FIRST PERSON Out 39 Logging nita pavitran
24 LIGHT STUFF 32 REVIEWS 15 Star Party sarah rand
44 The Word Acrobats manjushree hegde
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan
28
Shailja Kejriwal
48
LAST PAGE 59 Guru Tattva
rashmi venkatesh
FICTION 3
Lassi Days
6
Unreliable
12
Obsession
20
Please Forgive Me
25
Smell
p shukla & l luthria padma prasad
ushnav shroff nita bajoria
Trails 35 Tiger reeta mani
42
Live On Air
54
My Husband’s Stories
57
Chitti
geralyn pinto madhumita roy jyoti singh
POETRY 11 Pranavam a p govindankutty Of Sophistry 19 Artist rinkoo wadhera
27
Aham Brahmasmi
41
King Of Kings
vijayalakshmi harish mohd junaid ansari
Cover Design: M P Mohan
e v krishnan
FICTION Bangalore based advocates P Shukla and L Luthria co-author short fiction when they aren’t busy with the demands of their professions.
Lassi Days p shukla & l luthria
M
r. Justice Khurana sat staring at the dinner laid out on his dining table. Unappetizing was too mild a word for it and being a stickler for words, he spent some time thinking up more appropriate adjectives. Unfortunately his wife was out that evening, for a gathering of the Supreme Court Judges’ wives, else he would have loudly vented his opinion on the fare provided. It would, of course, have led to a fight but at least he’d have had
the satisfaction of having placed his objection on record. As things stood, the measly daal-roti was going to afford him no gratification at all whatsoever. And the less that could be said of the ‘Salaad’, as his wife insisted on calling it, the better. Justice Khurana was quite certain that two sticks of carrots and one each of radish and cucumber did not qualify as food. None of that wonderful ranch dressing that he’d had at his son’s house in the US was available in his judicial quarters for either love or money. His wife’s love extended only as far as a slice of lemon and a pinch of salt, sprinkled grudgingly, whenever he complained extra vociferously about the tastelessness. Often, such garnishing would be accompanied with a dire warning that his insistence on salt would lead him to suffer the same fate as his ‘friend’, Justice Vardharajan, who had collapsed of a heart attack during a civil appeal final hearing.
FICTION Unreliable
Padma is a writer and painter. She lives in Northern Virginia and is working on a collection of short stories.
padma prasad
T
he young woman, who was nineteen years old, looked about fifteen with her clean, luminous complexion. Her eyes were constantly agile, with a pleasant wide-eyed intensity; she wore a bright yellow and turquoise blouse, sculpted to her hips. The man was wise enough to know that he should not let these features affect his judgment. But she also spoke with confidence and great sensibility; when he hired her, it was for these two qualities. She came to him on a Friday; he remembered this because that was his wife’s birthday. He was looking at his list of questions when she came in. He made her sit so that he could see her well with his left eye; the right one was made of glass – he had lost it in his teenage years because of a virulent infection. He asked the questions he had asked five times already that morning, and because her
answers were so new, so clearly her very own, he listened. Then he began to relax and laugh and slipped with her into her world, where everything appeared to have been created just then. Definitely, he felt, he could make something of her. Before she left, he said, “Will you be willing to start next week? If necessary?” The following Monday, when Maria Rodriguez returned from volunteering at the library, Mr. Ranjie called. He was happy, he said, to offer her the position of receptionist at Ideal Designs, Inc. Maria replaced the telephone receiver tenderly, seeing for the first time the roses that her mother had placed on the mantelpiece.
FICTION obsession
Krishnan is a professional executive who loves a good book, and enjoys writing short essays and stories.
e v krishnan
T
he tell tale throbbing behind her eyeballs sent her hunting for the bottle of Axe oil, the imported pain balm, her migraine antidote. She searched in the bedroom cupboard where she stored her multiple bottles of medicine, but could not find the small Axe bottle. She extended her search to the other bedroom and then the drawing room, but her efforts drew a blank. Meanwhile, shooting pains had started setting off little flashes of light in her line of vision. Desperate, she rummaged through the drawer of the small dresser where she normally stored her cosmetics, in the hope that she may have placed the Axe oil there by oversight. And so she had. She quickly dabbed some drops on her forehead and nostrils. As she pushed the drawer shut, a small glass bottle with a soiled label rolled noisily forward. She picked it up. ‘Obsession’, it said, ‘by Calvin Klein’. Recognition
flashed as she held the egg-shaped bottle in her hand, transporting her thirty years back into the past…
‘Obsession’, it said, ‘by Calvin Klein’. Recognition flashed as she held the small glass bottle in her hand, transporting her thirty years back into the past…
ESSAY Sarah lives in Texas, USA. She is a practising psychiatrist, avid traveller and bird-watcher, and enjoys chronicling her experiences with nature.
Star Party sarah rand
C
hino was turning sixty-five and something had to be planned. He has always been ho-hum about birthdays, regarding them as a function of being alive, and no great credit to the individual concerned. I agree, somewhat, but still feel compelled to mark the passing of each year with some sort of observance. I decided to celebrate in a way likely to be meaningful to him. After much consideration, I settled on a trip to the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of Texas to attend a Star Party on the eve of said birthday. To my delight, he consented, even though it entailed a 6 hour drive: Interstate Highway 10 due west from San Antonio to Balmorrhea and then due South on State Highway 17 to Fort Davis.
FICTION please forgive me
Ushnav’s work has appeared in The Hindu, Between the Lines and eFiction India, etc. He began writing at ten, and since then his love of creating something out of nothing has not left him. He is currently completing his first non-fiction work.
ushnav shroff
I
had no choice but to do what I did. What I had to do.
“Hang on to your dear life for this moment of liberation that is so sad, that it can only lurk.” I knew it from the moment we exchanged the first book. Did she? (As weeks passed, I came to realize my mistake. Dear life wasn’t a gift. For starters, it didn’t even come giftwrapped. But neither was it a curse. It was, of all things, Schrodinger’s cat.) I knew it from the moment we exchanged a book. It was the first of many to come. A book, any book, I tell you, is filled with hundreds of thousands of words. They scream the plea of the author who can’t stop putting pen to paper. Wonderful words they seem to
be. This book was filled with them, yet I had none as I passed it on to her. Lightning ran through my veins, but there was no pain. A few heartbeats pulsed by, I sighed and rifled my pockets. Searching for hope. As soon as she left, I cast an angry glance after her parting figure. As if all this was her fault. That was when I saw Hope and wondered why she cowered crying on the floor.
After being a kitchen manufacturer for nearly 10 years, Nita returned to a childhood passion for writing and has since been published in dailies and magazines.
FICTION SMELL nita bajoria
T
here is a very different smell coming off your shirt nowadays.” My wife looked at me suspiciously, sniffing at my sweat-stained shirt while I was still unbuttoning my trousers. Her unexpected comment confused me, to say the least. After an utterly trying day in office, all a man needs on returning home is a welcoming couch, and a cup of hot, aromatic Darjeeling tea. And believe me, I am not even so ambitious as to expect a loving smile or a welcome hug from my wife. Just the whiff of a cup of hot tea on our new glass top centre table is all I expect. And even if I have to wait for it a couple of minutes, I don’t complain. But why on earth was she sniffing my shirt the minute I returned home? It totally baffled me. “What is it? What smell are you talking about?” I asked, sitting on the
bed and pulling my trousers off my legs. I might as well have mused aloud to the bedroom walls. She gave me a cold, somewhat calculating look, dropped the shirt in the clothes bin and then, to my relief, walked away towards the kitchen. I decided not to give her comment too much attention; after all, there are so many other similarly irrelevant issues that she brings up every now and then which I ignore on a regular basis. So I rested on my sofa and waited for my tea. It appeared soon enough, but without the Marie biscuits! I looked up at her, about to ask for them, but found that I couldn’t. There was a question already lingering on her face. “Why do you ignore me these days?” she asked, her tone aggressive, yet with an underlying trepidation.
A Granta byline, mentors in David Godwin and Kamala Das, a Man Asian nomination in the not-so-distant past, and yet, Anuradha Vijayakrishnan is someone who likes to write rather than be a writer. The first byline for her verse was by no less an editor than Kamala Das. Her short fiction (‘Narayani’s Journey’) appeared in Granta NW14 in June 2006 in the elite company of Romesh Gunesekera and Hermione Lee. This footprint in one of the best publications of literary writing in English brought her to the notice of David Godwin, which led to the first draft of ‘Seeing the Girl’, her debut novel. The unpublished manuscript was long listed for the Man Asian Prize 2007. With so much happening just right, publishing should have followed on close heels, but didn’t. She just let her draft be, and went on with life and a career in investment banking, editing the novel over quite a long period. 2014 finally saw ‘Seeing the Girl’ in print. Anuradha’s poetry has appeared in several international publications. She is trained in music and dance and is a Chemical Engineer by qualification. Add an XLRI Jamshedpur alumnus status, a successful career in Dubai’s corporate world, and there’s a lot to ask her. Here, Anuradha speaks to Suneetha Balakrishnan in a refreshingly frank interview for Reading Hour.
INTERVIEW anuradha vijayakrishnan suneetha balakrishnan Suneetha has written for The Caravan, Indian Literature, The Hindu Literary Review, and many other publications. She writes/ translates in English and Malayalam and has published 4 translations. Her fiction and poetry have been anthologized in India and abroad. She is a certified creative writing trainer with the British Council.
FICTION Reeta is a Neurovirologist, incurably infected with the travel bug. Her work has appeared in New Asian Writing, Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Pulse-More Voices, Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine and other online forums.
B
astard!” the tourist in the red T-shirt screamed with delight as the safari jeep jerked to a halt. “No sir, it’s not a bustard… it is a peafowl,” said Bahadur, trying his best to stifle a chuckle. “But I saw a similar bastard in Kenya,” persisted red T-shirt. “Bustards are not found in this part of the country, Sir,” Bahadur responded with practiced politeness. “There… there is a peacock right next to the peafowl, partly hidden in the bush,” Bahadur pointed out, and the other tourists in the jeep started clicking their cameras furiously. Bahadur drove on, manoeuvring his jeep on the narrow dirt tracks, scanning the jungle for signs of wildlife. Every day, he took the tourist groups on two safaris into the forest – one from 6.30 a.m. to 9 a.m. and the second from 4 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. Bahadur loved his job as wildlife guide at Tiger Trails; each day was more exciting than the last! Today he might see a pack of wild dogs chasing
tiger trails reeta mani
a spotted deer… or he may spot a magnificent pair of the raucous, yet elusive, great Indian hornbills… or perhaps he would come face to face with a leopard. Bahadur felt an adrenalin rush every time he turned the jeep into the lush green forest which he knew like the back of his hand. “Monkey, monkey!” yelled the two kids, who until then had been profoundly engrossed in a huge packet of potato chips. “They are Grey langurs,” remarked Bahadur as he slowed the jeep. In any case, he thought wryly, whether it was a Bonnet macaque, a Nilgiri langur or even the highly threatened, spectacular lion-tailed macaque, it would still be only a ‘monkey’ for this group of tourists. A huge herd of elephants diverted their attention and the group almost tumbled off the jeep trying to capture the herd on their cameras.
FIRST PERSON Nita loves playing with words. Professionally, she’s a copy-editor.
Logging Out nita pavitran
A
re you on Facebook? No, I’m not asking you to ‘add’ me. I’m just curious about your online journey. Ten years ago, I was a shy, nerdy girl, who read too many books, watched too much TV, and dreamed of going to parties. Secretly, I longed to be Scarlet O’Hara who was “not beautiful but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm.” Then I clicked my first invitation to an online networking site and I was transported into my dream. I had just moved into a new city. “Hello, Bangalore!” I announced on my wall. When the replies came in, mostly from guys, I lay low. Then a girl my age invited me to meet her. We met at a coffee shop where a band played Jazz. Soon, I met her gang of friends, all of whom she had met through the networking site. “Do you go clubbing?” one of them asked me. “I’d love to,” I replied honestly. She added me to an online
clubbing group. I was soon a regular at all the popular clubs. Motivated, I joined more online groups. I went paragliding, trekking, to dance workshops, to book-reading sessions, to French classes, to dog shows, to rock concerts, to Goa. I coloured my hair and wore pretty clothes with spaghetti straps. I got asked out a lot. I knew more people than I could remember and whom I would have forgotten had we not been connected virtually. Life was one big party. At one party, a short guy with a fancy camera told me I should consider modelling. I laughed it off. Months later, I met another girl in the network, who told me that she had been told the same thing by the same guy. This is what she told me: “I finally went to this guy’s office for a photoshoot. He took me into a room where someone was photographing a young woman. She was topless. I ran for my life!” I went numb.
FICTION live on air
Geralyn doubles as an Assoc. Professor and Head of dept. of Post-graduate English at St Agnes College, Mangalore, by day, and creative writer at night. A gifted actress herself, she runs a vibrant theatre programme for the students of her college.
geralyn pinto
I
can hear Simon saying, “When you’re deep down in a belly of coking coal, try to imagine as hard as you can, and breathe as little.” I trust anything that Simon says, of course. Every man believes his Trade Union Leader. “Simon da? Where are you? I can’t see you. You there?” When my father died, it was Simon who worked hard to see that I got this post on something called ‘compassionate grounds’. Now he’s got to be there somewhere, broad shouldering his way through fractured coal seams, his pale skin smudged to a shade between brown and bitumen and the light on his yellow helmet glowing like confidence. “Simon da! Simon da!” Someone’s calling him. The voice works its way through crooked earth tunnels and returns to me as a thick, throaty sobbing. A filthy sound. And no reply. Only the ooze-sough-gurgle of water dripping somewhere from the
coal roof and rib above our heads. It’s an infinitely reluctant dribble and it’s sending a glittering probe, slowly and very deliberately, deep into my head. There is no choice but to listen: d-ri-p d-r-o-p. d-r-i-p…d-r-o-p, d-r-i-p……d-r-o-p I’m listening. At the next tick of the clock, another d-r-i-p-………d-r-op. d-r-i-p. I’m waiting goddammit. Come on, bloody you, let’s have the next screwing D-r-o-p. COME ON! Come, on ---Drip! Drop! Drip….. Then, the silken blue of a pair of eyes and a six-foot shadow contoured by the light of my guttering miner’s lamp. “Simon…Simon da?”
POETRY Pranavam
Artist Of Sophistry
a p govindankutty
rinkoo wadhera
Govindankutty writes occasionally, in both Malayalam and English.
Rinkoo is a writer, artist, and lecturer. Her work has appeared in various magazines and 3 Contemporary World Anthologies. She is the founding editor of Vox Academia, an international journal of humanities.
Aham Brahmasmi
King Of Kings
vijayalakshmi harish
mohd junaid ansari
A book blogger and writer, Vijayalakshmi’s interests include mythology and psychology, which often find their way into her writing.
Junaid has studied English Literature and Journalism. He enjoys writing short stories, poems and plays.
REVIEWS Are you reading this?
Tim Burton: Frankenweenie Review: Priyanka Shah
Seeing The Girl Anuradha Vijayakrishnan Review: Suneetha Balakrishnan
Sick Puppy Carl Hiaasen Review: Ushnav Shroff
ESSAY The word acrobats
Manjushree lives in Bangalore and often travels to the far corners of the country. She is an avid reader and a great enthusiast of the Sanskrit language.
manjushree hegde
M
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. -Ludwig Wittgenstein
arinating in the aftertaste of Māgha’s Śiśupāla-vadha – a piece of 8th century epic-poetry that reads like a love letter to language – the thought struck me that we don’t celebrate language anymore. Sure, we discuss in plenty the ‘correct use’ of language, we rue in loud voices its ‘dumbing down’, we take pleasure in crosswords and Scrabble… but we don’t play with words. No, not like the ancient Indians did, nothing like how they delighted in linguistic acrobatics. In the name of Chitrakavya, or Figurative Poetry, the poets performed Olympian feats of gymnastics before the reader, and their words, like boomerangs, soared across the mind to swoop in for a clean strike each time. ‘Chitra’ literally means picture, peculiar / wonder (as in vichitra), and variegated. Chitrakavya, therefore, is poetry that creates wonder through a
physical arrangement of words into visual patterns or pictures. It held a great charm for all the ancients, and in a spirit of lighthearted indulgence, they worked words into patterns like lotuses, wheels, conches, wrote verses with just one alphabet in a feet or a hemistich, shunned certain alphabets throughout a verse, created rhymes and chain-rhymes, identical hemistiches with un-identical meanings, and so on. In one chapter in Daśakumarācharitam, Dandin did not use labials at all – because the hero, whose lips had been badly bitten by his passionate mistress the previous night, was unable to pronounce these sounds! Bhaţāthiri, in his Niranunāsika champu, did not use nasals for Śurpanakha’s dialogues since her nose had been cut off by Lakśmana and how could she have produced those sounds!
INTERVIEW the life beautiful shailja kejriwal
Shailja Kejriwal, Chief Creative - Special Projects at Zee Entertainment Enterprise Ltd (ZEEL), has been involved with television for the past sixteen years. She spent nine years with Star India, and three with NDTV Imagine before switching to ZEEL. She holds an MA, Comparative Literature, from Jadavpur University. She began at Star India with commissioning, then went on to Executive Producer for several successful shows and serials, then to Creative Director and Senior VicePresident. Always hungry for the creative high, she then sought new opportunities at NDTV Imagine, and later with ZEEL. The Zindagi channel, ZEEL’s first ‘special project’ is off to a promising start and slowly building a loyal fan following, eager for limited episode, meaningful, gimmick-free television serials. Here, Shailja chats with Reading Hour in a free-wheeling interview about her career thus far, and Zindagi.
FICTION my husband’s stories
Madhumita is pursuing a PhD in English at IIT Kharagpur. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Out of Print, among others.
madhumita roy
M
y husband died in his sleep last night. He wasn’t very old. His death was unexpected. However, we could not help but feel that he finally managed to go where he belonged – to the afterlife, to the transcendental. I was glad it wasn’t a suicide. Our only son, Prasun, had feared since his childhood that his ethereal, wraith-like father, would one day melt into the air without leaving a trace. Instead, it turned out to be a mundane affair – a heart attack in his sleep. The dead body lay in front of us. It was a respectable death. It is important to clarify that neither was my husband spiritual nor did he suffer from depression. Instead, he was calm, quiet and smiling – an efficient worker and a dutiful family man. However, he was terribly absent-minded. It seemed he was always lost and disinterested and focused on something else. In short, his personality was unworldly. Therefore, when he left his worldly abode, it felt a little inevitable.
I had been married to him for thirty years. But I could only have a glimpse of what kept him so busy and pre-occupied. He was very guarded about his inner world. We had had an arranged marriage. As I got used to it, I realized that I would never receive his undivided attention. Initially, he would stay awake in the nights poring over a blank page. For the first few days, I thought he was writing something. Eventually, I discovered nothing was being written. I confronted him. He confessed that I was married to an aspiring writer. I asked, “But aspiring writers write, don’t they?” He replied “Yes, they do.” I said that I did not see anything written on the paper. He clarified, “There is a problem.” Perhaps, I’d scared him with my questions. His nocturnal adventures stopped for awhile. Instead, our son was born shortly.
Jyoti is a screenwriter working in Mumbai since 2006. She writes essays to clear her mind and shorts to makes sense of the world. Her grand ambition is that someday she will be able to type out a page without a spell-check.
FICTION chitti jyoti singh
A
lone bulb over Kisaan Ghar glows in the hope of better times. The train leaves at 4 a.m., when most of the village is still asleep. Chitti has packed her ‘bindle’ – of a few clothes and a rich assortment of bindis. “Dwarfs don’t need bindis. In fact, they don’t even need a face,” her best friend Binya shouted when Chitti punched her over an innocuous fight about whose bindi was more beautiful. It wasn’t unusual; they often compared their bindis and other students voted in the competition. They loved to wear bindis, even though they were confiscated by the headmaster. Binya and Chitti were bindi-wearing rebels. But rebellion is a luxury afforded by normal people; it isn’t for those whom life has rebelled against. Chitti couldn’t be a rebel; she stood out. Her friend Binya resembled everybody else. Chitti
wanted to be like everybody else. Known as the girl who named herself, Chitti was already half a story. Chatterbox that she had grown into, she could barely make any sense until she was four. As a child, she was fascinated with butterflies and chased after them, calling aloud ‘chitt-chitti’ instead of ‘titli’. Soon, to your every question, ‘chitti’ became her default answer. She only knew one word, but knew it as though she was born with it. Chitti liked her story, unaware that her story was going to change. Around her twelfth birthday, when Chitti’s parents began telling her that she was normal, she realized that she wasn’t. She started bribing the gods to make her tall. She would pretend that she could no longer squeeze herself through that tiny window in the class, that she had outgrown it, just like her classmates.
last page A student in conversation with her Guru, noted Hindustani vocal exponent, Shri Keerti Kumar Badseshi.
guru tattva rashmi venkatesh
The Ashada full moon day is of special significance in Indian culture. On this auspicious day, Guru Tattva, or the supreme element in guiding one’s quest for knowledge in various walks of life, is celebrated by paying respects and expressing gratitude to the Guru. Shri Keerti Kumar Badseshi, renowned Hindustani vocalist and respected Guru, shares his views with Rashmi Venkatesh about the significance of a Guru’s presence in one’s life. The Guru-Shishya relation is unique to Indian culture... Someone with adequate training and innate skill can be a teacher. A Guru, however, goes beyond technical knowledge and becomes a mentor and spiritual guide for the shishya. To lead and to be led, both the guru and shishya need sincerity and dedication to each other. Paying a teacher a fee and attending a class does not establish a guru-shishya relationship. A disciple (the word
originates from discipline) dedicates himself to the Guru because of an inner desire to be led. The Guru, in turn, takes the shishya as a ‘sesha’ (an integral part of his life) and considers the mentoring of the shishya as his sacred duty. Only such mutual dedication and attachment makes for a guru-shishya relationship.
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