Mridangam falls silent with Palghat Raghu

When my friend Devaki called me to say that Palghat Raghu is no more, the mridangam had already fallen silent. She spoke emotionally about the mridangam vidvan, not just as a rasika. But as one who had been in touch with him often during the last three years.

She expressed all her awe about the values he lived with and handed over to the next generation. The way he welcomed the guests who entered his home, his casual 'storytelling' about the days he spent with the Hindustani musician in his sister's family in Mumbai and much more. She shared a lot of her experience with this Sangita Kalanidhi, Padma Sri artiste.
I haven't heard this good about him so far. Nor did I have any personal association with him. His daughter in law Usha and I used to be colleagues in Bank though.
On one occasion I happened to meet him. He had his deposit account in the branch where I was working then. The branch catered to business clients mostly and was not in his residential area too. Still his account with the bank could have been due to his daughter in law who was working in the branch. She was already transferred to another branch, but his deposit remained with this branch. It was overdue to be renewed and we were in a situation of partly computerised and partly manual operations. It took unduly long time to renew the deposit and Raghu had to visit the branch to get this done. He sat down patiently till we went through complex procedures and handed him over a new receipt. He smiled and said thank you after waiting for more than an hour! A gentleman was he.
Today I chanced upon the website the family put together for the artiste, personality Palghat Raghu on his 80th birthday. www.palghatraghu.org
Great website, great pictures that brought the great personality before us. I am told a girl from Kerala specially took this job last year and did wonderfully well.
Different people, different perspectives, different personalities!
May his soul rest in peace!

Pic courtesy - www.palghatraghu.org

Hand crafted paper jewellery

Yes, these are made of papers. And each one is unique as the making of the pieces involves 10 fingers. Fully handcrafted, trendy, eco-friendly and light weight jewellery.
There are gorgeous roses, colourful danglers, traditional yet modern jhumkas to go with your modern and ethnic outfits.

In June last my friend Deepa mailed me a link to Flickr with loads of paper jewellery made by her. She moved on from there to have a shelf for her jewellery in a few places including DakshinaChitra. Then came her blog updating what's she bringing out periodically.

She is not yet another 'craft aunty' or 'jewellery maami'. She calls her brand '10 fingers!'. She does her business online. The packing and despatching the hand crafted jewellery is thoroughly professional.

Now if you want to see a few samples of her work, below are a couple of them.


For orders and more details, go to her blog - http://paperjewellery.wordpress.com/

Senior citizens opt to forego their rights to vote?!

I just had to change the direction of my walk on the day of the Lok Sabha elections in Chennai. Instead of walking towards the right from our road-end, I took a left turn and walked down to Gandhi Nagar.

But it was not that simple for many of the senior citizens here.

For it is more than a walking stretch for them. And crossing the road at the Aavin Park is another they wanted to avoid. My next door 'maami' declared that her single vote does not decide the fate of the country! My another neighbour was waiting to see if any of her friends went by car so that she and her husband could join. But by evening the couple said they didn't vote!

Avvai Home on the Besant Avenue Road was the closest polling booth. But that was not meant for the residents of Karpagam Garden or Padmanabha Nagar. The school is situated in a fairly big campus and could have accommodated the residents of these two areas also.

Adyar Times did mention this in this week's edition (May 17 - 23). But how many votes were not polled due to this reason? Any audit possible so that this can be rectified in the next election at least?

YOCee's reporter programme

When I was doing my graduation, the popular Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan came up with the Student Reporter Programme. Though I was very much interested in writing I wasn't enthusiastic about being a 'reporter' as I thought it would affect my academic course!

But after 12 years my own child studying in class 3 was writing single page reports whenever he came across something interesting. He was writing in bits of papers with his pencil and was throwing them all over the living room. I accidentally saw his 'report' on an imaginary cricket match, after he saw a lively match on the television. This really opened my eyes, I should say.

Then we moved to Bombay on transfer; but the writing of young children was popping in my mind now and then. It was a dream come true when the kids in our building were introduced to the scribble magazine. The magazine saw eleven monthly issues and then came our transfer back to Madras.

When www.yocee.in was up, the first idea sparked in my mind was the 'student reporter programme'. I had to give a year to set right a few technical issues as to how the bylines would appear on the website, how do we assign jobs to the reporters, how do the reports and photos could be collected and how do the reporters meet periodically to train and get better. . .

There are still a few issues, which we still face - like - meeting the kid reporters at regular intervals is next to impossible as any six kids in the group would invariable have one or the other exam. We are still scratching our minds to find ways to overcome this and have meetings.
Simple, we could meet in small groups, you may think. But hiring a hall for such small meetings is costly and remember YOCee is yet to break even.

Still when the programme that started as passion to see kids writing is being recognised, it makes me feel happy and proud.

This is what appeared in yesterday's Times of India.

Creative writing for the young

I was not sure what the six year and eight year olds would do in a writing camp, when I accepted to do a summer camp for one of my friends.
Originally targetted at 12 year olds, the camp ended up with kids in a much younger group. But looking at the kids on day one, I couldn't resist continuing the camp.

It was partly fun, partly learning - both for the kids and me!

They learnt making their personal profile, made poetry calendar sheet, cracking a logic and making a story, news story ideas, components of a newspaper and how to write a short report!
This is the finale when they made up their daily working sheets together and took home their precious writings!