BENGALURU: Drunk and a Divine Singer
... Bhairavi Kempegowda, an extraordinarily gifted classical singer whose rendering of the Bhairavi Raaga used to send audiences into raptures. The problem was that it was difficult to get him to sing; he was too drunk almost all day and all night. He lived many miles away in Ramanagara, but he was particular about visiting Basavangudi often; like all classical singers, he worshipped his guru and his guru lived in Basavangudi.
Every time he met the guru, however, the guru would hit him, sometimes with his hands, sometimes with a stick, the disciple bending down and taking the blows with folded hands. The guru’s complaint was always the same. ‘The goddess has come to you. You must sing,’ he would say, then beat him again. Neighbours would collect to witness the scene, appreciating the guru’s efforts to make his student sing; they had all experienced the thrill of listening to Bhairavi Kempegowda’s ‘Bhairavi’.
Jewel of Melodies, Pleasure
...the friendship between D. V. Gundappa and Nagarathnamma who, despite being one of the greatest classical singers of her generation, was ostracized for her devadasi past. As irrepressible as she was talented, Nagarathnamma’s gift for wordplay matched that of D. V. Gundappa’s. A classic encounter between them was recorded by DVG in his book of reminiscences in Kannada.
Recalling it for my benefit, Professor Radhakrishna said that when the two met one day, Nagarathnamma, emaciated by illness, moaned that she had become rogaratnamma (jewel of ailments).
DVG promptly corrected her by saying, ‘No, you are raagaratnamma (jewel of melodies).’
‘I suffer,’ said Nagarathnamma, ‘because I lived like bhogaratnamma (jewel of pleasure).’
Moved, DVG touched her feet and said, ‘You are truly thyagaratnamma.’
‘Dronacharya’ of Darshinis
Prabhakar, though born into the Kota Brahmin community, had neither cooking nor the restaurant business on his mind when he began looking for work in Bangalore in the 1960s. ‘He was an angry young man,’ Ravi said, angry that shopkeepers were cheating customers. He started a campaign for consumer rights, crusading against high prices, adulteration and lack of transparency.
‘But Prabhakar was not content to remain a campaigner, dreamer and planner. He wanted to get into action. He persuaded a friend in the pharmacy business to open a store called Buy-and-Save-Drugs. He said the shop should be located in an area teeming with the middle class. They found a place in D. V. Gundappa Road in Basavangudi. The shop clicked. Prabhakar then persuaded another friend to open Buy-and-Save Grocery which too became a hit.’
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Under Prabhakar’s direction, a friend opened the first Cafe Darshini in Jayanagar in 1983. Roughly modelled on McDonald’s, it had modern kitchen machinery visible from the public area. In front of it was the counter where order-takers handed over the prepared items directly to the customer. There was no furniture other than a new device: an elbow-high pole on which rested a small round tabletop. The customer was to put his plate on the tabletop and eat standing. The only staff in the public area was a cleaning boy who would wipe the tabletop clean as soon as a customer left.
....There are now no fewer than 5,000 darshinis in Bangalore, all very busy. Not one of them is owned by Prabhakar, but the 5,000 owners look up to him as an icon.’ Balu would not leave it at that. ‘Hoteliers,’ he said, ‘look up to Prabhakar as their Dronacharya.’
Rohan Murty, the Socialist Chef
He (Rohan Murty) once asked his mother (Sudha) about different types of puli, the sour kokum. She rejoined that there was tamarind and that was it. Whereupon Rohan launched into a brief speech on five varieties of puli, each with its own distinct flavour. To rub it in, he told Sudha, ‘Amma, I’d give your sambar about 10 out of 100.’ Sudha, bemused and not without a touch of pride, recalled Rohan saying one day that if he had not taken up computer engineering, he could have become a chef.
Unintentionally, Narayana Murthy passed on his early socialist ideals to his son. Rohan formed a team with the family cook to experiment with masalas. Then he insisted that the cook sit with the family at the table. Seeing the cook’s embarrassment, Rohan said the family would have the meal first, but thereafter the cook must sit at the table and have the same meal. He also made sure that the cook had a room like everyone else, with a proper bed and blinds and mosquito nets.
City’s Sought-after Mentor
YNK—no one called him Y. N. Krishnamurthy; most did not even know that was his full name—had become Bangalore’s sought-after mentor of writers, playwrights, film makers, poets and actors of both stage and screen.
...But YNK was not the pushy type. He would open doors and leave me to find the way myself. He would give me insights into Kannada literature and aesthetics, not in the form of lectures, but through jokes and anecdotes and puns.
A one-liner that found its way into local folklore was that Kuvempu did not name his sons but sentenced them. I did not get it until I heard the full names of the writer’s two sons—Poornachandra Tejaswi and Kokilodaya Chaitra.
An admirer of Kuvempu sentenced her son to Vajra Manasa Phalguna. YNK’s armoury of stories, coinages and jokes was a factor behind his becoming, without a novel or play of his own, a central figure in Kannada’s cultural milieu.
Mushroom-cut, Kuvempu Style
The owner of New Modern Bombay Men’s Parlour, V. Harish, a school dropout himself, was proud about the Kannada writers who had won the Jnanpith Award. He collected their books, displayed them on the counter in front of a wall-wide mirror, and put their framed photographs on the wall.
Then he devised specially styled haircuts—a ‘mushroom cut’ that made the hair stand up like a tuft on the skull, exactly like Kuvempu’s. He followed this up with the Shivarama Karanth Scissor Cut, the U. R. Ananthamurthy Beard Trim, the Chandrashekhara Kambar Bleaching, the Girish Karnad Eyebrow Threading, the D. R. Bendre Face Shave and the Masti Venkatesha Iyengar Head Massage. This was Harish’s way of making up for his lack of education. (His two sons completed Class X before joining the salon.)
Coming of Siddhartha
For Siddhartha, home meant his mother, Sameera, described by all who knew her as ‘a sweet and gentle person’.
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For Siddhartha, young and sensitive, it must have been unsettling to see his mother living with, and sometimes admitting to, a sense of abandonment. When Sameera told him that Vijay had married someone else, he felt as hurt as his mother. According to a family associate who moved closely with both Vijay and Siddhartha, ‘His parents’ divorce deeply affected Sid. It was a factor in the formation of his personality. He was unsure of his father when he was young.’ Sid, said this source, resembled his mother, a pointer perhaps to the bond between them.
Siddhartha’s inner torment must have been the greater because he could see that his mother was not the only abandoned Mallya. London was home also to his grandmother, Vijay’s mother who too had to deal with a separation from her husband, Vittal Mallya. Unlike Vijay, Vittal was a private person and traditional enough to have had an arranged marriage with Lalitha Ramaiah from the same Kannada Madhwa Brahmin background as the Mallyas.
But a time came when Vittal Mallya, the ‘take-over tycoon’ perennially preoccupied with the acquisition of breweries, distilleries, jam-ketchup companies and pharmaceuticals, separated from his wife. He, of course, made financial arrangements for her. Lalitha settled in London, causing no trouble, making no headlines. Years later, as Siddhartha realized, his mother too asked no questions and raised no alarm as she settled in London. He became devoted to his mother and grandmother, the great healers of a broken family.
Like his mother, Siddhartha had to reconcile with an epic contradiction in his father. While he was too stubborn for his own good, Vijay was also a sentimentalist when it came to family and faith.