Unwanted southern comfort

The first thing I notice about Chennai is that I can’t see any Hindi anywhere. They don’t really do Hindi down here: it’s nasty northern nonsense. Instead there’s much more English on the streets than in Mumbai or Delhi, and the lovely loopy curvaceous script of Tamil, the world’s only surviving classical language, according to the Tamils at any rate.

I meet an amazing man who invented a whole new form of notation for Carnatic music, the classical sound of South India. It’s quickly apparent why the Western notation that I learnt as a kid won’t quite cut the mustard: with all the complex tonal swirls, weird scales tuned to different frequencies and crazy rhythms (seven- and five-time simultaneously is what I think was going on), any attempt to write it down in treble clef on a five-bar stave would be foolhardy.

His new system is brilliant and I learn to read the simpler parts of it pretty quickly, although since it’s designed for small children to be able to cope with I probably shouldn’t feel that pleased with myself. Strangely it looks a little like Tamil script, all fluid loops and curves. The Western system is properly Teutonic, such straight lines and sharply defined logic. I can feel a cultural theory coming on.

That evening I’m supposed to catch an overnight train to Thiruvananthapuram, a small city with a big name. This means I’m looking forward to the prospect of a good sleep to the Johnny Cash rhythm of the train, followed by four hours of daylight in the morning dawdling through the Keralan forests – i.e. bliss all round. My ticket is ‘waitlisted #1’ from two days beforehand, which local experience suggests should be fine – someone’s bound to drop out, they always do. Sadly, experience is a fool and nobody gives up a berth, so eventually I have to admit defeat and take the depressing posh hotel and morning flight option. My colleagues think I'm weird.

I ask them about fun things to do in Chennai on a Friday night. Blank faces all round: there’s literally nothing going on at this time of year. One describes it as a sleepy village with ten million people living in it. It seems there are downsides to classical civilization.


Over in Thiruvananthapuram, it’s India but it’s slightly different. Where are all the poor people? Ok it’s not quite Chalfont St Giles, but on first sight it looks like the poor here are nowhere near as poor as those in most of the rest of the country. I’m told that Kerala has no heavy industry to speak of, but it’s got universal electricity as well as the famous high literacy rates. If this is what decades of sleepy leftism brings, it seems to work. Can someone tell the IMF?