SURESHKUMAR P. SEKAR
Researching Audience Experience, Audiovisual Culture, Audiovisual Essays
As this NLPG project is about combining video essay and memoir (personal essay) forms, I have provided in this page examples of both a video essay "Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope" and a personal essay "Rahmania". Both are published works. I have also included an unpublished personal essay "Prelude".
VIDEO ESSAY
PERSONAL ESSAYS
Rahmania
​It has been a week since this new A. R. Rahman song was released on iTunes. I heard it once. Only once. I couldn’t hear it again. I shouldn’t hear it again. I just can’t let this song play on a loop in the background while I’m doing something else. It is not that kind of song. This one demands a quiet ambience and my undivided attention. I have not been able to give that to this song. The world around me would not allow it.
Yet, I thought I’d listen to it now, maybe once, just once, on my way to work. I take a bus and I find myself a window seat. Outside the window is the city of Bangalore—India’s Silicon Valley. A commute by public transport in Bangalore is one through a barrage of sounds: buzzing bus engine; the whoosh of the passing vehicles; the incessant honking in the peak-hour traffic; the chitter-chatter of the fellow passengers; the effervescent voice of the radio jockey booming from the stereo system inside the bus, and a symphony or rather a cacophony of several other indistinct sounds emerging from invisible sources. Noise-cancelling headphone cancels little on Bangalore roads.
I relax, recline, wear my headphones, move my fingers over the click-wheel of my classic iPod. Tick, tick, tick. I find the song, press the button at the centre of the wheel, and enter the song’s universe.
The song begins. He sings first, then she whispers. Her voice husky, angelic, intimate; there’s moisture everywhere: in her tone and singing, in the dense backing strings and the soundscape. She sings as if she is speaking. Or rather, she speaks as if she is singing. She calls for him. It sounds both a command and a plea. He was kidnapped and is now being held hostage for ransom in a land far away. She wants him to come back. Before she completes singing the first three words, the driver of the bus I’m in applies a shuddering brake. Someone has tried to suddenly cross the road in front of the bus. The high-pitched screech of the tyres fills the deliberate stretches of silence between the three words she just sang. The jolt pushes my body forward and pulls me rudely out of the song and lobs me back into the real world. I switch off my iPod. I shouldn’t listen to this song. I shouldn’t listen to it now.
I reach my office, an air-conditioned space insulated from the noise of the world outside. But work has been hectic this week and it is going to be hectic today. I don’t think there will be time or space for music. I did a bit of coding, a bit of gossiping, a few emails, some conference calls and meetings, then I find myself doing nothing for a few minutes post lunch. I disappear from my desk. I grab my iPod and seek refuge in the toilet. And now creeps in the worst of all noises, the voice inside my head: it screams thoughts related to work. I tick the boxes on a virtual checklist in my mind. I think about the status reports I am yet to prepare, time sheets I have to fill, and the piece of code I have to peer-review before the end of the day. Meanwhile, the song’s been playing on loop, with me paying no attention to it. I gather myself. I sit up straight, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. The song calms my mind, slowly takes me in. The cloud of thoughts clear. Finally, in the toilet, I listen of the song, pay attention to some of its sonic details, but only to some of it.
I hear these: the orchestration is dense, there are layers upon layers of instruments, and yet the whole somehow feels sparse—instruments floating as cotton clouds around the delicate main melody. The song arrives at that line where the poetry sets a fantastical scene of romance: a sky that has a hundred moons and a flock of bluebirds flying everywhere. It is in here the contour of the melody reaches its romantic summit. The song is pivoted at this peak, and throughout its length, all else in the song ascend and descend towards and away from it. The song smoothly ebbs and flows and I ebb and flow along with it. The man is now singing. He is requesting the vast skies to bring back the past, bring back the time they spent together, bring that time back to here and now. Then there is a pause. Stillness. Silence. A sudden burst of a jarring, comical jazz tune disrupts the silence. It is my mobile ringtone. My project manager is calling. I answer. He wants me to send the weekly status report immediately. I run to my desk. I couldn’t listen to the song again at work. I must wait till this evening, wait until I reach home.
A few hours later, I’m home. I rush to my room. Change my clothes. I’m getting ready to sit with the song for a while. I have big Bose speakers in my room, but I can’t play the song aloud on those. The windows are open, and the landlord is living downstairs. They may not like the loudness. But I can’t close the windows either. It’s summer. It’s too hot inside. I need some fresh air. The Apple earphones too are of no use, because the sound of the ceiling fan sneaks through the gap between my ears and the earpiece; it is an unwelcome accompaniment to the song. So, I go to the terrace. There is no one here. There are a few stinging mosquitoes, but that is only a small inconvenience I must bear to listen to this song in solitude for a few minutes before I go to bed.
It is still warm outside. I hear the rustle of the leaves; a slight breeze, but it has no effect on the sweat pearling on my forehead. I return to music; the vroom of the vehicles on the street whizzing past our house stabs the silences in the song a few times. I settle for a corner far from the street and sit on the rough, corrugated terrace floor. I play the song on my iPod, plug in my earpiece and focus hard.
I hear the celestial chorus. I hear those thin, sparkling bell strokes. A quiet piano riff is omnipresent and is pecking at the cheeks of the vocal melody. The sprinklings of accordion pieces around the melody evoke a dreamy, languid aura. The man sings. Her voice is sweet as honey, he says, and the strings of sarangi respond and agree with him. The strings section whirl and stir, soar and fall, flutter and float underneath throughout the song. I hear them. I hear them all. However, something’s amiss. It doesn’t seem enough. I want to go further and deeper. I want to absorb the absolute silence pregnant with all the varied sounds. I want to hear those nanoseconds of silences whence many little worlds of the universe of the song are born.
I can’t wait to watch the film this song features in in a controlled environment of a cinema theatre. The entire space will be filled only with the sounds and silences of the song. To quash the noise of the song’s visuals, I will close my eyes the moment the song starts to play. I don’t want my mind to process any new data apart from that of the sound of music and the music of silence. The film’s release, however, is a few months away. I can’t wait that long.
I decide to go home the following weekend, to my parents, to Salem, which is five hours by bus from Bangalore. In Salem, I could get the space and time the song deserves.
Friday night. I board a semi-sleeper air-conditioned bus from Bangalore to Salem. The in-bus entertainment is already on; a Tamil film is playing on a large LCD television screen dangling from the roof next to the driver’s seat. The television is connected to multiple speakers placed in the overhead baggage space that runs on both sides along the length of the bus. The atonal voice of the film’s hero espousing his ideologies is echoing inside the bus; it is the worst sonic accompaniment the song could ever have. I wear the earpiece and try to listen to the song, but I couldn’t. It feels disrespectful to hear the song in this environment; I switch off.
I reach home at around midnight. My mother insists that I eat something. I eat something. I go to bed. I remove the batteries from the wall clock in the room so that its ticking sound doesn’t become a dissonant metronome to the song. At last, I get to hear the song in an ambience I wanted.
The neighbourhood is quiet and asleep, except for the chirp of a little lizard crawling on the walls of my room. I switch off the ceiling fan and turn on the air-conditioner; AC’s hum, a constant, unwavering buzz, much quieter and less harsh compared to the fan’s whirr. I push the earpiece as tight as possible into my ears. I play the song and listen mindfully for an hour and listen more in a quasi-sleep state for another hour. I hear at once all the intricate instrumental layers of the song I gathered in parts over the past week.
I don’t know when I fell asleep. I wake up. I find the earphone cable wound around my neck. I scratch my left cheek to find a sleep mark the size of the thickness of the earphone cable. The song is still playing on my iPod.
I have heard the song. Or have I? I wish I could mute this universe once, just once for five minutes, so I could listen to those sharp nodes of silence that precedes the sound. Or, better yet, someone fit me into a space suit with this song and toss me into the cosmos.
Prelude​
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​I switched off my smartphone the moment I got home so that I wouldn’t impulsively click, like, tweet, post, follow, subscribe, share, comment, scroll, troll, swipe, chat, or stream. I didn’t faff around as I usually do in the evening—lazing, munching snacks, or bingeing on box sets. Instead, I read a book, listened to a podcast, had dinner, washed the dishes, and chatted with the neighbours who knocked on my door to return the books they had borrowed. It was a good day at work, unusually relaxed and uneventful. Three cups of coffee, some water-cooler chatter, a walk in the park after lunch, two quick meetings, usual stream of emails, a few lines of COBOL coding, and I was done. There are no pending critical tasks that might spoil my plans for tomorrow.
I will be attending a unique A. R. Rahman concert tomorrow evening. Unlike the typical concerts where his iconic songs are sung, a symphony orchestra will be performing his background score works: Bombaytheme, Lagaan theme, cues from Slumdog Millionaire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the Chinese film Warriors of Heaven and Earth, etc. So, we will not hear ‘Jai Ho’, ‘Jiya Jale’, or ‘Vande Mataram’. I have been wanting to see this happen for over a decade now, an all-orchestral concert featuring the music of our Mozart of Madras in grand, palatial venues where typically Mozart is performed.
My pre-concert ritual begins, and it begins with a good night’s sleep. It’s already ten to nine. I must sleep now, sleep like a baby. I turn off the lights, lie on my back on the bed, whisper to Siri on my iPod, Hey Siri, play Gabriel’s Oboe. Yo-Yo Ma’s cello version of Ennio Morricone’s ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ starts to play. The sound of the piercing cello rises from my Bluetooth speaker like a winding thread of smoke from an incense stick, and the melody gently wafts from the corner and fills the room. I close my eyes.
I reach under my pillow for my iPod. It is five in the morning. I must have fallen asleep within a minute after closing my eyes. I didn’t hear the cello complete the melody. I get out of my bed humming the Bombay theme.
Though it has been a few years since I last heard the Bombay theme, I can play the whole piece in my mind whenever I want to, as I’ve been doing since I left my workplace last evening. I hear the bell rhythm, and the microtonal embellishments flautist Naveen adds to the melody. I hear the cry and the call for compassion in the melody. Then there is the serenading strings section, calming the nerves, caressing the wounds. The visual of a live orchestra playing Bombay theme is going to be spectacular.
While watching an orchestra play, I observe the fingers of a pianist floating over a grand piano, of a harpist gliding up and down the strings to play a glissando, of a violinist plucking the strings to play pizzicato, and of a conductor’s index finger pointing in a direction to cue in a section of the orchestra. I watch the musicians’ bodies move, sway, tilt, slouch, and straighten up as they play. The strings section offers the most engrossing visual drama in a symphonic concert. When playing a melody in unison, musicians hold their bows pressed against the strings, their hands go up and down in a sinusoidal motion, and their bodies sway as if nudged by a gentle breeze. The movements, both visually and sonically, are unidirectional. I have to see it all, observe how every single instrumental layer as it is being produced live. I need to be an ideal audience member with the unwavering focus of a high-wire stunt performer, of a player in an intense rally in a racquet sport, of a climber crawling up a boulder without harness. I, a millennial with ever-shrinking attention span, need to be a mindful monk in the concert hall tonight. It is not going to be easy.
I usually don’t go to work, or even work from home, on the day I attend a concert. I can’t allow the travails at work to affect the tranquillity I need before an orchestral music concert. So, today, being a day off from work and with a concert to attend in the evening, I’ll follow my Sunday routine. This means indulging in active boredom and intentional idling. I stay at home the entire day, for my home is my retreat. Home is where I rejuvenate and rebound in solitude to prepare for another week of utter chaos at work. I idle. I doodle. I relax doing what I want to do, by having a choice to not do anything I don’t want to do. Many things that truly matter in life have materialised due to and during this time. My off-time is full-on switch-on time, when I work for myself, on myself, by myself. Work I must, on myself, today too, to become the ideal, undistracted audience member I want me to be at the concert.
Sipping my morning coffee, I plan my workout routine. I’m not a bodybuilder, but intense exercise early in the morning has become an addiction. I must sweat until I’m sopping wet to shed the detritus of the past; if I don’t, my body becomes stiff, my mind gets clogged, and everything I do during the day feels like a slog. Like the orchestra musicians tuning their instruments together before a performance, I push and pull and pant and sweat in the gym to get my senses in tune for the concert.
As I walk towards the gym, I listen to music on my Bose QuietComfort noise-cancelling headphones. The neighbourhood is still asleep. As always, I’m the first person in the gym. I have the gym all to myself, and that’s a relief. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Small talk is a big ask. I leave my iPod and headphones in a locker in the men’s changing room. I don’t listen to music when I’m in the gym. Instead, I focus on the rhythm of my huffing and puffing, the thump of my heartbeat, and the thud of my feet on the treadmill. I try to pay close attention to everything happening within my body as I run and pedal and flex and stretch.
After the workout, I drink half a glass of lukewarm water. I feel the water flowing through my parched throat and into the areas around my chest. Everything feels right. I walk back home wearing my headphones. The iPod resumes playing a song I had paused before entering the gym. And it strikes me again—the vast difference in the experience of listening to music before and immediately after an intense workout. Now, each layer of sound—the twang of a guitar, the gentle strokes of a brush on the drum, the thick bass line, the swelling strings, the husky chorus, the colliding seeds inside the shakers—is playing in a distinct spot in what feels like a vast, endless space in my head. It’s as if someone has suddenly sucked away and unclogged all the dirt that has been muffling the sounds in my mind.
I reach home, take a shower, switch on my phone to check for any important calls or messages. There are none. I put my phone back on flight mode. I’ll be unreachable to people from work for the whole day.
The plan for the day is to follow no plan. I let myself be. I make the bed, clean the house, do the laundry, and talk to my parents on Skype. My mother updates me on all the latest gossip from our extended family. I scroll through my social media feed for a few minutes, then look up from my laptop screen and look out the window. The sky is blue, and the sun is out. I watch people crossing paths on the high street, where I live in a one-bedroom flat above a Pret a Manger. As I count the pennies scattered on my study table, I mull over the discussion I had with my mother about her mother. I build towers of ones, twos, fives, tens, twenties, and fifties. For months, my maternal grandmother has been wanting but hesitating to ask us the money she needed for her eye surgery, a standard cataract removal procedure. The cost of the surgery is less than the price of the ticket I bought for tonight’s concert. I have now transferred the money. My grandmother will be fine.
It is time to prepare lunch. I switch on my Smart TV and play a random TED talk on YouTube. I prefer passively hearing someone speak while I’m cooking, for I need to actively listen to the sounds the ingredients make as they cook through to completion. I hear the crackle as I toss the clove into the pot to check if the oil is at the right temperature. I hear the chopped onion sizzling in the heated oil; the subdued hiss as the onion cooks, softens, turns translucent, and shrinks to one-fourth of its original size; the loud swoosh as I pour water over the sautéed spices, chilli, onion, and garlic mix; the silence in the pot until the water begins to boil; the loud bubbling followed by a lull as the chicken cooks and the curry thickens.
Five TED talks—on blockchain, on procrastination, on storytelling, on global warming, on genetic engineering—later, chicken curry and rice are ready. As I open the lid of the curry pot, I see puddles of deep red oil on the surface, and I inhale the intense aroma of spices in the rising steam. Over a serving of hot, fluffy rice, I pour the spicy chicken curry. I switch off the TV. I focus on what I eat. I focus on how I eat. I eat slowly, savouring every morsel. When I scoop the last spoonful off the plate, I feel like I could have another serving of rice and curry. But I know I need to stop to avoid feeling full and bloated before the concert. I stop. On any other day, I wouldn’t have stopped, but today I do. Then, I wash the dishes, clean the kitchen counter, and sweep the floor.
I lie on my side in bed and wear my headphones. I pick a playlist I created in my iPod months ago, a playlist appropriate for the siesta, a playlist I named ‘Melancholic Ecstasy.’ I press play. A. R. Rahman’s voice rises as a soothing whisper, singing the opening lines of the song ‘Vellai pookkal’ with a solo guitar strumming along as accompaniment. I close my eyes. I don’t toss and turn or try to sleep. I need to be idle, and I am. For a moment, there’s nothing. Then, there’s music, only music, everywhere. I don’t remember hearing the end of the song I played first, but I’m already immersed in another: an instrumental piece ‘Tango for Taj’ from the film Rockstar, a piece in which A. R. Rahman blends Mughal music with Argentinian tango.
I seem to have drifted into a quasi-conscious state, entering the realm of the surreal. As I focus on the individual instrumental layers of the piece playing through my headphones, a motion picture begins to unfold in my mind’s eye. I see myriad shapes that are constantly moving, mutating, and morphing in a metaphysical space. There’s a star, a dot, a tail with a head, a bubble, an amoeba, a straight line, a staircase, and many other odd, indescribable shapes—much like the crisp images of crawling organisms we observed under the microscope in school biology lab. Like drops of ink diffusing into bulging clouds of hues in a glass of clear water, these multifarious musical shapes slowly trickle into and expand inside my mind. I’m in an interstitial state, asleep and awake at the same time, awake and alive only to the music. I wouldn’t mind being trapped in this synaesthetic hallucination forever.
I wake up, wash my face, change my clothes, and eat a bowl of rice with chicken curry again. I always have a proper meal before attending a music concert. I can’t let my hungry belly's growling noise interrupt the total immersion, a sense of losing the self, I wish to experience during the event.
I switch on my phone and send a message to my friend: Just started from home da... see you there at the venue. I slip on my shoes, put on my jacket, lock the door, and walk towards the train station.