Chennai, Dance, & Auto Drivers

I don’t even know where to start. It’s been a hurricane of a weekend here in Chennai (Madras). I arrived here on Thursday night and had a fantastically exhausting time shopping with Prtha all day Friday, while Kumari was preparing for her Bharata Natyam dance performance for Sunday. Went out Friday evening and got a glimpse of Chennai nightlife. Got literally less than 2 hours of sleep because I had to wake up at 4:30 am to go and help out with my dance teacher’s weekend-long dance and music event. I haven’t seen my dance teacher in 6 years! And then Sunday night we hung out with some of Prtha and Kumari’s friends till the morning hours.

Dance & My Life Crisis

I’m at a loss for words. Spending the entire weekend being surrounded by fusion and South Indian music and dance, has been very… emotionally interesting for me… I don’t know how to describe it. I spent my entire teenage years with my heart set on becoming a professional Bharata Natyam dancer and then, after a series of incidents, I slowly stopped dancing. The first big blow was an injury 6 years ago from dance that still affects me to this day. And from that point on, it seemed that everything gradually ground to a halt. The past few years, I’ve pretty much scoffed at the memory of those dreams: “Be a professional artist? Make a living doing what I’m passionate about? What world was I living in?! How could I be so naïve?! People rarely get that, why should I be one of the few? Who do I think I am to get something that awesome in life?! What was I thinking?!”

This weekend, though, it felt so real, so possible - not this self-indulgent, silly, starry-eyed, naïve, romantic, unrealistic, extravagant, grandiose, fantasy pipe dream reverie I had for myself at all. Yep – really, all those words, that’s how I’ve been feeling about my dance aspirations these past years. And being here in Chennai, where I used to study dance, being surrounded by artists all weekend, I remembered how and why this dream did not seem unrealistic or impractical to me.

Chennai is one of the main hubs of music and dance in India, both classical and fusion. There are so many artists here, living the lives of artists – they are teaching and composing and performing and collaborating. And they are very well respected for being both chroniclers of the past and innovators of the present in their respective art forms. They uphold the art, tradition, collective memory, and aspirations of their communities, both global and local, expressing and exploring both spiritual and material experiences. They reflect societal issues and concerns in what and how they choose to present their art. Of course, there are, as always, the hardships too.

My biggest issue with the classical Indian performing and visual art system here is the general approach to the teacher-student/guru-shishya relationship. Ideally, it is a support system of honor and respect. In reality I find that it is often misused. I don’t like when students basically become the servants of their gurus, in the sense that they are constantly putting their own personal interests aside in order to please the teacher. I feel that it is easy for the teacher to take advantage of this. For example, they are receiving payment for classes and training, but when it’s in conjunction with their students never getting paid performances, I don’t understand how that is sustainable. How is a student supposed to continue intensive dance training if they’re not offered paid opportunities? Also, what happens sometimes is that the teacher monopolizes the training of the student, where it is not okay for the student to train from other dance teachers in the same style. And during classes, there is a tendency here to critique, criticize, and correct a student’s dancing, and neglect any positive reinforcement or constructive encouragement. Yet so many people still continue to study dance, despite all of this. Meanwhile, I feel these things can constructively be adjusted in context with our changing society and the things we now know about psychology, education, and learning.

My injury aside, if I did decide to get back in to dance, am I willing to put up with these aspects of the tradition? If I feel I need to address this issue head-on in order to continue with this dance, am I prepared to deal with the consequences? How do I even start?

My Chennai Friends & Auto Drivers

Prtha – aka pritata/pretunia, and Kumari – aka kumomo/kumonkey. They are 20 and 21, I’m 26, and I’ve known them since they were just little wee lassies. Now it doesn’t feel like much of an age difference, whereas when I was in my late teens, they were like… 10 or something, you know. Now they’re these two silly, rambunctious, elegant, intelligent, composed, goofy, talented, awesome ladies and I admire and adore them. They’re both pranksters, so I’ve been on some level of a continuous state of amusement since I’ve arrived here in Chennai. There are times, though, that I just have to scold them in my mommy way on the rare occasion when I think they take it too far. They’re mainly pranksters with auto drivers, who are pretty hard ass here in Chennai. Other than that, they walk around Chennai being just plain silly.

Oh, those auto drivers. It’s different everywhere you go in India. All Indian autos that I’ve ever seen (yellow with a black roof, no doors, one wheel in front, two in back) have meters in them. In Calcutta, the autos don’t use their meters, but they have a fixed price. How they do it, is they have routes they go on, and they pick people up along the way and drop them off along the way. I think it’s called a shared auto or something. Anyway, in Calcutta, there’s no bargaining because it’s a fixed, fair price. In Chennai, meters are never used. And the prices are outrageous in comparison to Calcutta, even if you divide the price you pay here into 4, which is how many people the Calcutta shared auto drivers make sure they have.

And the auto drivers in Chennai are relentless. You have to bargain hard core with them. And even if they agree on a price when you get in, much of the time they will try to raise the price when you get to your destination, arguing that it took longer than it should have, some road or other was closed off or was one-way, or that we didn’t tell them the right location, blaah blaah blaah. My approach is not to get too riled up with them, to sort of calmly press my price while they assert their own outrageous sums, and then finally mutually concede to some price slightly higher then my original offer. Sometimes, we just don’t agree on a price and they drive off or I walk away. Sometimes, we find a mutually acceptable, if not ideal, price, and head off to our destination. Admittedly, I can be a bit of a softy. I’m not very ruthless – which can be detrimental, particularly when others are fully prepared to be ruthless to get their own way, which is not a rare occurrence in India. But, so far, I don’t feel that I’ve been cheated terribly except for at Kalighat, which I still feel utterly indignant about (refer to the Kalighat blog post if you don’t know what I’m talking about).