A strange math: GI Bill + Henry Mancini = Lata Mangeshkar!

It is the middle of the term, and I have way too many papers to read and grade.  If only I simplified my life and students' lives by not assigning so much of writing, and instead used bubbling-in testing, right?

Nah!  Never, ever!

But, I always seem to have a great deal of inertia when it comes to this task.  I then look for distractions so that I can put off the reading and commenting and grading that much longer, even as the pressure builds within me that I am delaying it.

Following political discussions, or anything related to higher education, is, therefore, very, very appealing right now.  In this essay, I read:

it was the G.I. Bill that really gave us the Mancini we love. Without its backing he would likely not have been able to afford to study at the Westlake School of Music. There he attended one-on-one theory and harmony classes with Alfred Sendry, a former classmate of Bartok, and orchestration with Mahler’s son-in-law, the romantic-turned-atonalist Ernst Krenek. Anyone who admires Mancini’s score for Stanley Donen’s Arabesque, with its thunderously unsettling chromatic bass riff and its double harmonic (Arabian) melody line that can never quite settle on either A minor or G minor, should be thankful for what he learned at Westlake—and doubly thankful that he wanted to share it with us. If Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock served to introduce many people to the discordant ideas of late romanticism, Mancini’s functioned to popularize the yet harsher sounds of Viennese modernism. Even the lovely waltz-time theme he wrote for Donen’s Charade, which finds room for an astonishing diminished C sharp arpeggio in it’s A minor melody, can pain as much as it pleases.

As I continued reading, in the background my mind was bothered that it could not remember the Charade tune.

So, when done with the essay, I hopped over to YouTube, and easily tracked down Charade.

As the music started playing, I was immediately reminded of a Hindi film tune.  Another quick search; here is Lata Mangeshkar singing the tune that is pretty much the Charade theme. 

Now, about those papers ...

My Lost Youth. Oh, what is a youth?

Came across this Longfellow poem, while reading something way less profound, and the wonderful lines there:

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts

Advance to 1:16, if you are not patient enough, for a verse from the poem:

There are things of which I may not speak;

      There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

      And a mist before the eye.

            And the words of that fatal song

            Come over me like a chill:

      "A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

So, how about wrapping it up with this:

All that glitters is not Indian!

"I have intense positive emotions about so many things that I like about the old country" I told a friend.  One of them, of course, is about the old movie songs.  They stir up emotions somewhere deep within.  Even the songs in Hindi, a language in which all I have is a basic, survival, level vocabulary.

In fact, the old Hindi film music gets me more than the old Tamil ones do.  Music is music irrespective of the language of the lyrics.  No wonder then that I willingly go to opera performances too, even when in alien territory.

YouTube suggested this old Hindi film song when I checked in at that portal.


A lovely piece, yes.  But then I remembered the tune from another place too: Henry Mancini's Charade.


Back in India, when I was growing up, I had a next-to-nothing level of exposure to Hollywood movies, not only because those were some prehistoric days but also because it was a small town where English movies played rarely ever at the only cinema, and the outdoor screening at the local club showed movies that seemed to be at least twenty years old, if not older.  Thus, I had no reason to imagine that the music for some of the wonderful Hindi and Tamil melodies that I enjoyed could have been adapted from somewhere else. Especially from America.

There are many, many things about life that we discover as we grow up and many if them end up bursting our bubbles.  Understanding India has also meant sorting out the real from the fake, even in something as trivial as old film music.  In this case, a couple of years into my arrival here in this country, I watched Charade on television.  It was the beginning years of my falling in love with Audrey Hepburn.  To then find out that Mancini's music was what I was listening to in India in that song was one of the many instances was yet another occasion when I realized that everything that was without a question "Indian" back when I was a kid in India was not necessarily unadulterated "Indian" as I had imagined them to be.

But, why didn't they tell me back then before the bubbles grew in size?

Life is a charade, I suppose.

Somewhere over the rainbow ... what a way to get to work :)

As a kid in India, and later even as an adult, there were always two things that stopped me if I ever spotted them: elephants and rainbows.  I would watch the sashaying pachyderm for as long as it was within my view on the street.  There is something majestically wonderful about elephants.

Rainbows were rarer than elephant sightings.  If anybody said about a rainbow outside, I always rushed out to admire them. To appreciate them. Even after the physics teacher, Vasudevan, had presented us with the explanation of white light and Newton's experiment with the prism.  The scientific technical details made it all the more impressive.

After moving to Oregon, in the rainy early fall, and throughout the spring days, I have now probably seen more rainbows than I have in my entire life before-Oregon.  Yet, every time, I am impressed even more than ever.  And, then those rare double-rainbows when two parallel arcs of colors magically appear across the big sky ...oh, those are times I think I have died and gone to the heaven that the religious people talk about.

And, so, there I was earlier this morning driving to work, and off on the western sky I had a rainbow accompanying me for a good chunk of the time.  Sometimes it faded out, and sometimes it was bright.  Not a full rainbow, because there were no clouds to provide a background for the zenith.  And then for a few miles when I had to drive west, I was facing the rainbow, which by then had become an uninterrupted arc, with a light drizzle falling on the windshield.  I thought to myself, "they pay me to admire this?"

Maybe the ultimate would be to watch an elephant walk against the backdrop of a rainbow, while the tune of "elephant walk" also plays :)

On the death of seven elephants :(

Elephants were my favorite animals--now they are second only to dogs.  Anytime there was an elephant on the street, I would rush to watch the pachyderm. There was something special about the way this powerful creature slowly walked as if it owned the world.

In Tanzania, while my group mates were rapidly clicking away at the huge African elephants that were only a few feet away, I sat there in the vehicle almost mesmerized by their presence.

Which is why I am just saddened by this news in The Hindu:

Seven elephants, including three calves, were killed when an Assam-bound goods train from Siliguri rammed the herd near the Moraghat railway crossing at Binnaguri in West Bengal on Wednesday night. Five died instantly while two others succumbed to their injuries on Thursday morning. Among the seven dead elephants, three were babies and three females. The accident occurred at the crossing of Moraghat Tea Estate under Banarhat in the Binaguri police station. 

 How terrible.  As humans expand their activities into the areas where the elephants and other animals roam, more often than not the animals lose big time, as in this case.
I wish life was not like this, but fun times with the baby elephant, as Mancini created so well with this tune ...

The Pink Panther at the Hollywood Bowl

Watch until the end for a pleasant surprise :)