AtlantaToLA

    Saturday :
    Saturday night, around 7 PM, we started. Just as we started, our son Amey gave out violent protests   and started crying and writhed his way out of his car seat. He is not a tantrum child. Something was   definitely bothering him. We had taken him to the doctor on friday as he was wheezing and the   doctor had given us medicines to use during the road trip but had advised against the need to shift    to flights. So we gave him his medicine puffs and he instantly subsided.
Having been packing till late night 3 AM friday night and with just four hours of sleep to credit,
 I was very irritable during the drive. I would fight the light in the ipad games my daughter was playing.  Before the drive picked up, Niya wanted a restroom break. I stopped at the petrol bunk next to "Salvation Army"  headquarters, I believe I have chanced here on an earlier drive as well.
     I held the thin string of attention that I was capable of and got us to the next state Alabama.
 Claiming that as a win, we got to a rest area and had our dinner. Sajan's mother Jaya aunty had prepared   potato baji, curd rice and tamarind rice for us. Homely. Easy. Quick. After a pleasant dinner round, with   a happy stomach, we continued on for a while. Divya had taken a night-out on friday with cleaning the room  and I also deserved a full rest to start fresh. So we decided to sleep it up uninterrupted at a "Hilton Garden   Inn" somewhere in Alabama. A lovely dreamy sleep. 200 miles done. Only.

       Sunday:
       Fresh as morning flowers, we plodded on through many states , starting late at 11:30 am.
  The real journey had started. Niya was very excited and was counting the states we were passing through   - Georgia,Alabama,Mississippi,Tennessee,Arkansas,Texas,Oklahoma.
  I have done one tank non-stop on my return trip from KeyWest to Atlanta earlier. Next
   level for the challenge would be "how many full tanks can you do in a stretch". Our VP at work had done   a non-stop 48 hour road trip from San Fransisco to Atlanta when he had relocated to Atlanta. Against that    premise, I had set myself a target of three tanks. One and a half tanks into the challenge, as we hit    Monday 5 am, Divya pulled us over to a "Red Roof Inn" at Amarillo, Texas as the kids needed rest.Texas is  where the 75 mph started and I tried to keep it at 85mph. However, it is a fact that the further I was    into a drive stint, harder it was for me to keep up with the curves and with the roads rising and falling  blocking my view. I was mostly in the company of heavy trucks. I would overtake them when the roads were straight   and abruptly slam the breaks when I hit curves, the trucks clearly must have been annoyed. I still had many more miles to go. I had not hit my limits. I had done 1000 miles exact in this stint and had another 1000 to go. Would I have done another 1000? I will never know.
       Bijibal's beautiful malayalam movie songs that were playing in the split screen with the other half being the map had a very crucial role to play in keeping the drive pleasant. The impact that software makes to life is impressive. There were times when lack of signal would cause the songs to  stop but the map would continue to work. Such thought around caching is second nature in software  industry. However, that was a nice direct delivery of the thought. Anybody could go from anywhere    to anywhere using google maps and for free and for all. Songs from the malayalam movie - Charlie,     the tamil movie - Thangamagan were the other frequented ones. Ghazals soothed some portions. Amey  repeated some of the songs he liked - O re Sawariya from "Om Shanthi Oshana" was one of them. He  would say the words as the bgm started.
     
       Monday:
       Having made up for the late start with a long drive on Sunday, Monday started off with
    over-confidence and we stopped at "Texas Tea" to buy water followed by a buffet at Furr's. Time just flew while the service and food was not all that great. However, it did make sense to make some sort of a stop at every state on the way to get some sort of an impression about the place over what you get looking at the empty landscape from the road. Arkansas shopping  felt different from the Texas buffet stop. Arkansas was striking at how big the people were  and as I looked over from person to person, the consistency was striking. Two people could not  cross each other in the isles without stopping.
        Sleep is crucial. Sunday morning, I had started after a full rested sleep. Today, I just
     had slept from 5:30 AM to 10:30 or so. That started telling on the trip as soon as the trip
     started. The fear of the curves set in pretty early. And Amey was not well. So we stopped
      multiple times to take care of him. However, we quickly got to the next state  New Mexico from Texas. At one of the gas stops, we went into a gas station next to a Dhabha where a Sardarji was shopping. No smiles were exchanged though. Albuquerque was probably the most striking city that  we hit during our trip. We passed through in the evening and the city lights were very impressive. Civilization seemed to have flown in through all those twining highways. Some portions reminded  us of Hebbal flyover back in Bangalore.
         We hit Arizona as well Monday night and the drive was about getting to a place to rest for the night.  There was no ambition to go all the way tonight. Stopped at a "Rodeway Inn". Called my parents while having   breakfast the next day. This motel was operated by a Patel. It is impressive how spread out the Patels are in the Motel industry. We would have stopped at atleast one Patel-operated hotel in most of our weeklong trips. Five hundred miles today.
         Meanwhile, we were getting phone calls/emails from our apartment in California as I had signed up   to arrive on 20th instead of 22nd. This was a buffer overlap. However I had not let them know upfront.

      Tuesday ( December 22nd)
         As we had gotten off the road in good time on monday, I got a decent sleep. Amey had gotten a lot  of attention on Monday and was visibly a whole lot healthier. Amey's change in health suddenly changed the  scene completely. We were one happy family all over again. And we had a challenge to meet today. We had to  cover the remaining five hundred plus miles and reach the apartment office before it's closing hours of 6PM, PST.
    It was almost like a day job for me. Start at 9:30 am and drive on till 6:00 pm.
     Hoping for an uninterrupted drive, I was rewarded as the dashboard indicated that fuelling needs to be done.  Another full tank.
        The drive through Arizona was the most pleasant one of all the states. Started with plain landscape marked in the distance by windmills. The plane-ness gave way to a little more drama with plateaus and mountains again lined by windmills. We could see wind mills on the other side of the mountains as well hovering over the mountatins at every last tenth of it's circles.
         Weather presented itself in all it's variety today as well. I had been advised on taking the i10 and not the i40 on the trip as the i40 had already seen some snow recently. I had inadvertently landed on i40 taking suggestions from  Google maps without making checks. The snow capped mountains in the distance were initially exciting, replaced  by left over snow right next to the road on both sides, replaced by live snow as it fell right then replaced by the fears of a potential road block. We were seeing upside down vehicles on the side, potentially slid the previous day. Snow clearing vehicle was cleaning the roads. Visibility was scraping the drive. Abruptly, the scene changed.
         Now, it was more picturesque, no snow, smoother roads. Arizona is a beautiful state. True to the observation  that there is something telling in even a small experience of getting a sandwich at a McDonalds, the walls were lined with   black and white photographs of native americans. The cigarette ad at the pump had a native indian as the logo.
         After the snow round, now it was time for winds to really show up. I had very little faith in the weight of  the car anyway. There were signs that read "GUSTY WINDS" while the car was swaying around harmlessly as traffic was less. It is impossible to keep the car on the lane when it gets into the right currents. The saving grace was that not many people were relocating from Atlanta to Los Angeles while we were. It was during these winds that our daughter   Niya just has to take her restroom break. With that down, we swayed on through the winds into california.
       As soon as we entered California, it was time for fuel and the fuel was a striking 3.65 $ a gallon to contrast with a 1.66 $ a gallon at Arkansas and many more 1.xx$ on the way. We were still paced to be at the leasing office before 6 PM  PST.However, we still had to move fast. Again, this was the best day of the trip. I was driving on full attention, with kids  playing in the backseat. California presented it's own landscape, distinctly different from Arizona, more yellow and just as
     beautiful. We hit the city traffic before long and arrived on time at the leasing office.
         We got the formalities done quickly and did get into the apartment before 6PM. Divya's family was being kept informed  through Whatsapp messages as were some of our old neighbors and friends at Atlanta. And yes, we were pleasantly surprised  at what Cerritos presented. There was a section called "Little India" which is full of Indian shops. The small-town old-town  and the green feel of the place at once won our hearts.

Pathemari

     "Pathemari" is a very studied thorough effort to portray the lives of those keralite
 men who leave their families away and move to the middle east to work and save their brethren
 from the clutches of poverty. Presented against thorough research with consistent content throughout
 the  movie, it was a very satisfying movie watching experience.
       Movie starts with a fable like depiction of how Dubai came up followed by it's
 city sights. The movie then makes nice smooth transitions in time between past and present,
  telling the story of Narayanankutty ( played by Mammootty ) who, motivated by the abject poverty
   at home, takes the challenging and long journey across the seas on the pathemari( big boat)
 to find work in the middle east. The movie details out the specifics of the challenges of the journey,
  making some insincere attempts at using special effects to depict the sea storms
  which was probably the only thing that did not fall in place in the movie.
      Thereafter, the movie portrays how he wants to push the family out of poverty and
   get back home himself as soon as he can and how his family continues to push in more and
   more demands on him and  he is essentially forced into fifty years of gulf life. The subtle
   family situations that he gets put into have been chosen out of real experiences of many many
   such gulf  malayalees through all the detailed research that has clearly gone into making the movie.
      I would contend that each and every situation in the movie has been drawn out of
  real life, unaltered from multiple real people. There needs to be some conscious thought to understand  someone who you do not see  everyday. This movie is to push those thoughts into the minds of people  who are not making the heart for them.
      Mammooty has acted really well and becomes Narayanankutty. His subtle acting stands
   out beautifully. Narayanankutty has almost found a place in my memories now. I really hope that this movie serves as an eye-opener and allows at-least a few 'Narayanankutty's a fairer go at life.
      The review would be incomplete without the mention of the songs penned by 'Rafeeq Ahamed' and   music directed by 'Bijibal'. The lyrics capture the pain of the story so nicely that it can serve
    as a concentrate for the script. The music does great justice to the movie and adds another feather
    to my rising respect for Bijibal.


 Read further to know more about the story of the movie.


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 Death away from home
     Mammootty who so longs to go back to his home is unable to do so for years on
  and finally meets his death away from home as well.
   
Poverty
   The why of the exodus. Why did Narayanakutty have to leave his family into the
 far away land of middle east?
    He gets dinner from his friend's religious ceremony and packs it and brings it
 straight to him family without having any before for him. And his father slurps the
 food down without letting him take any saying that he must have had it already, apparently
  aware that he has not.
    Due to abject poverty, the family is under heavy debt and the hapless father threatens
 suicide to keep his lendors away. Under these circumstances, the two young friends are
 ready to take up the hardships of the sea with the sole intention of helping their families.

 Pathemari
   The big boat that takes such aspiring youngsters into the middle east and brings goods back.
 Siddique plays the Pathemari owner who takes this as his mission to help these young men over.

 Death in the sea
    Not everyone is able to take the challenges of the sea and some die en-route, sick.
Proper religious rituals are done in honor of the deceased. However, the body cannot be kept
 any more in the crowded boat and is tied to a heavy stone and pushed into the sea.

 Crowded boat
    There is a big number of people who are forced into making the decision of the journey
 for the sake of their families. The journey is far far from pleasant and they need to sleep
  over each other for lack of space.

 Pathemari portion of the movie is the most challenging facet of the movie.
 Sets the movie off to a really strong start and the rest of the movie nicely uses the momentum
 thus set forth and introduces many touching/ heart warming situations into the mix

 ---------------------------

Phone at the shop
   In early days, very few homes had telephone. Mammootty waits in queueu at a booth in gulf
 while his wife waits at the shop of his friend.

 Letter box
   Common letter box for the gulf laborers. Demands / Requests for money in various forms in these
 letters and the observation that only the names are different in these letters. The contents are
 same in all the letters.

Bunkers in rooms
   They don't even have a room for themselves. They live in bunkers in rooms.

Visit home
   Letters and stuff to be delivered to relatives/friends of room mates.
Vacation time having to be spent in making these trips.Everyone back home needing one gift or the other and the complaints about not receiving/ receiving less than someone else.


Cassette
   Voice recorded cassette from a wife to an inmate. Again, the cassette tends to be about needs from the wife/ the kids.

Losing mother
  His dear mother who loves him most dearly and wholeheartedly passes away while he is away from home. He just has to stand near the ocean and look towards his home.

Losing ancestral home
   First, elder brother offers to give the house to him in return for 25K Ruppees.
What that entails is quite a few months of work and exile to repay that sum of money back.
Later, another sister’s daughter’s marriage does not work out as they don’t have a home. Due to emotional demands from his brother/sister’s complaints and due to his own kind heart, he decides to give the house in the name of the sister. Next, after the daughter’s marriage, to pay the rent in a different city, mammootty is asked to pay rent for his own home to the sister and this amount is used for his sister’s daughter’s rent in trivandrum.

Making own home
   Given that he has lost his ancestral home, he dreams of building his own small home.
While that work is in progress, he dies in his sleep from his workplace in middle east. His close friend who had travelled with him in Pathemari fifty years back(played by Sreenivasan) suggests that his dead body be placed in the new home for a while as that home was his deepest desire. His son interjects and does not allow this as starting off at a new home with a dead body is not auspicious. Even death does not let him earn his place.

Neice's marriage
    For his neice's marriage, the groom's family implies that they expect good amount of dowry as her uncle is a 'gulfukaaran'.However, for the same marriage, the groom's father does not allow the date to the preponed by a couple of days for Mammooty to be able to attend. His heart is completely back in his hometown in the marriage house. However, the people back home have already
  adjusted to him going back and does not relate to his longing for the home. His telephone call is brushed off by the wife after  having him wait for long saying that she is busy with the hurries of marriage. Essentially, his role stops at providing money.

Insolent children
  His own children being disrespectful of his longing to know about the details back home. A lack of understanding that deepens simply because there is no thinking beyond what you see everyday. You don't see your father every day so you don't really think  or understand him. 

Jimmy-Sreejith Get-Together

       We have been having a string of birthday parties/housewarming parties over the
   last several several weeks. However, as we were driving to Jimmy's home for a small
   family get-together with Sreejith's family as well, we felt a sweet realization that
   this one is centered around us and us relocating to Los Angeles shortly.
   That was a special feeling in every sense 'better, greater, or  otherwise different from what is usual'.
       There was clearly good closeness in the families that had built over the years.
    The wives, the children, the husbands were all well knit. We started off with wine and tandoori        chicken.As this could potentially be the last time we meet in this setting, I decided to have some wine myself as well and I thoroughly enjoyed it and talked and talked.
        All we did was to gather around and talk and yet it felt really special. The reason is
    that in the current 'sophisticated' world, just walking over to your neighbor after dinner and
     talking is not 'proper'. In fact, all the conversations I have had recently outside work/home has been  at organized parties. Come to think of it, that is the main purpose of parties - get together and        talk.
      Thanks a lot to Jimmy/Sreejith for organizing this nice sweet get-together. I see that
    we are going to meet again somewhere west. Not a whole lot to write somehow but a moment that        I   want preserved to look back at. 

Ilayaraja medley

       Really surprised that this video has been under rated with under two hundred likes!

   I have listened to this atleast a hundred times just because it is extremely beautiful .

  I have tried singing and recording this but have failed flat on my face over and over and over again.

  I sing this song to my son Amey and it has been his lullaby song. Even today when he cries, I sing this song and he feels that he is being loved and stops crying and smiles.

  This is the performance that set me down the thread of tracking all award winning ilayaraja songs and other popular songs of Ilayaraja. I used to listen much more to tamil songs than to malayalam songs for months, thanks to the inspiration from this performance.

Mithun Raju

     Bijibal, the best music director in malayalam movie industry has been drawing me into his mindspace through various songs that he has been delivering. His down to earthness and his ability to stay connected to the truth has also been inspiring me.
      When I hit on an album song that Bijibal music directed, I saw my school friend Mithun doing the guitar in it. Mithun had also figured a few months back in an 'ilayaraja medley' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj2K-lT2EgU ) that I had listened to atleast two hundred times and is the song that my son has listened to as his lullaby most. I had considered getting in touch with Mithun then and had not. As he figured with Bijibal now, I decided to connect with him.
    Mithun had sent me a facebook friend request years back.  My facebook had been deactivated for years now. I got it reactivated and contacted Mithun through facebook and he sent me his number.
     As he is essentially a busy celebrity, I cut through the crap of 'It has been twenty years since we spoke' and started off right from my school days' memory of having been to his artsy home with beautiful pillars. We had a very close half an hour conversation that was so intense in information that   I decided to capture it here.
      Mithun-Bijibal : Bijibal has been Mithun's senior at St. Alberts college. Mithun reaffirmed my belief in Bijibal's class. While Bijibal was still a student at St. Alberts, he had done an album which clearly established his class as per Mithun.
    CN : Can Bijibal become as good as Johnson?
    MR:  Johnson had much better cinematic situations to work for. Bijibal hardly has as much opportunity. Current movie situations are not as aesthetic. Bijibal is more about carnatic music and if he is given an opportunity, he is going to prove his class, no doubt.
 
Mithun as music programmer : Mithun has done the entire programming for the song 'Paapaleela' , one of the classical numbers from the national award winning movie 'Kaliyachchan'. All the sounds that you hear in this song has been programmed by Mithun. These are not done using the real ethnic instruments. These are just mixed in tracks from a huge repository of sounds. Mithun uses windows and not mac for his programming work. The industry prefers mac but Mithun has not had issues with PC yet and has been sticking with it hence. For mac, the common softwares used are 'Logicpro' and something else I don't remember. The insight I gained here is that to have a full fledged song, all you need is a singer and a music programmer. If you can get good enough at both, you can create an entire song yourself.
      Bijibal would instruct how the feel of the music should be like and Mithun would choose and orchestrate sounds against those instructions. Mithun has worked with Aashiq Abu in all his movies except 'Gangster'.

Mithun's studio :
 He just has put thermocol to absorb sound in one of his rooms is how he described.

Mithun's cinema connections :
Mithun's career has been about music programming for movies.
For the last two years, he has been working with the band 'Thaikkudam Bridge' and hence has not worked with Bijibal in his recent films.

Clearly, Mithun would serve as a wonderful source to answer all my questions regarding music. No flak , easy to get to the truth. Also, I see that he is really busy. He explained how during his days as music programmer, he would spend his entire time inside his music studio. Also, how he needs to travel to perform shown once every two days for 'Thaikkudam Bridge' now. Since he is doing stuff that I really respect, I could not keep the interaction completely as being one between classmates. Somewhere, I felt like a fan talking to a celebrity. Anyways, excited to find him and hope to take these interactions to a more meaningful level. 

Surrender to music

Crawling through music videos from recent malayalam movies is currently a habit and that is how I came back to this song. I am listening to the song over and over and over. I am not closely paying attention to the lyrics. The only word that has really registered in terms of it's factual meaning is the word 'Allah' . I am not a muslim and hence don't believe in Allah. I don't believe in God either. However, the surrender that this particular song as well as other songs of this genre brings has been very comforting. 

      At work, I have not had the best of the weeks last week and hence I had reached home pretty tired.  Listening to this song over and over has cleansed my psyche. I feel much much lighter. The question is what is going on here. It is not the words. It is not the concept of god and surrender to him. However, I believe it is the surrender element that the song embodies that is healing.
      The song seems to be telling me not to fight anything and let it all be. Let it all be. Just let it all be. Just let it all be. Give up. Don't fight it. Just give up. And when you give up and when you are not fighting, you are relaxed.
        Another song that has exactly the same result is 'Kun faya Kun' from Rockstar. To my spirit, there is hardly any difference between these two songs as I listen to them back to back.  It is indeed hard work to pretend and put up a brave face when you are breaking up within. It is dishonest and you know you are being dishonest in spirit. When you shed the farce, you are freed. You are freed from the pretence and you realize that the pretence is much bigger a burden than the pain.

 
        Some days are not really nice. Yet you come home and smile and play with your kids happily. That is hard work. You don't really have to do that if the day has not been nice. Surrender, solve. Do not pretend. Do not mask.
    What are you masking?  There is hardly anything specific. But somehow there still are some things within you that are sad, that need to be cleansed. Things you don't really realize. You don't even 'know' . Such songs clean you internally. You feel less and less light and finally you are clear, totally pure. Joy.
            The below song 'Khwaja mere Khwaja' again fits the bill. I have hardly any clue what the words mean. Yet I remember listening to the song days in days out. I think it is necessary to clean yourself up everyday. Working on a logical problem at work and failing at it scars you somewhere. Struggling to find the right solution probably strains you, winds you up and you do need to unwind periodically for smoother functioning.

Physically, I feel a coolness in my head. Tension has eased out of my head and my head ache is no longer there. And I am at peace. Daily cleansing of the mind and the spirit is fundamental. Music is truly out of this world.

Surrender. 

Onam - 2015

August 28, Friday 2015 :

 Friday evening, onam pot luck dinner at Sreejith's home with Jimmy and Harris' 

 families as well. The mix was perfect as all of us were exactly the same age and it was nice to 

 feel so much understanding in our conversations.

    Jimmy and myself wore traditional Mundu and hence we mostly stayed put on the sofa 

 to keep the Mundu from slipping. Home ownership decisions that Jimmy and Sreejith had 

 taken had paid off pretty well as their respective home prices had increased. While we 

 were driving through the complex, indian families were playing badminton and it almost

felt like we were in a posh neighborhood in India. 

    As has always been the case for such get-togethers with manhattan colleagues, the 

frustrations of overwork at Manhattan frothed up. I could at once relate to it as well 

as see that my life has clearly improved after moving out of Manhattan to Deposco. 

Divya had observed how not a single day passed without me cribbing about work while 

at Manhattan and how that tendency stopped completely after moving to Deposco even 

though Deposco takes more working hours from me. 

    Jimmy was particularly open about his attempts to seek help from books like 

Alchemist , How to win friends and influence people, Simon Senek etc. I could 

completely relate to him. Jimmy/Harris are both avid cricketing sportsmen and are 

clearly particularly passionate about the game. Sreejith stood out a bit as someone 

who was less confused and took life as it came. 

    Then we shared our passion for malayalam movies, talks about going back to India 

and about the children. Generally, we were relating to each other on all these fronts. 

Meera's cousin who had just passed out from Georgia Tech was also with us. He spend some 

 time with us and also played with our kids. 

     Kids were playing. The wives were collecting the pots of curries together and set 

up dinner on plantain leaves at the dining table. All of us were food lovers and we 

enjoyed the vegetarian tradional onasadya followed by three payasams.

    Conversations continued on till sleep caught up. While the guys were talking, the 

 ladies were dividing the remaining curries into ziplock bags to be brought back home. 

We left around midnight and Sreejith's home was a bit of a mess with scattered toys.

Closing the note to take some of the packaged onam curries out of the ziplock bags 

 for lunch.