`Yekkaling' - a lost Indian tradition

First things first: A happy New year to one and all!

As the calender pages moved on and we all got a wee bit older and wiser (myself-I indeed got appreciably older), it seemed appropriate to stop and muse awhile. And musing i shall do (in fact that is what my blog is called!).

As i entered the prime of my youth (again, there seems to be a little bit of controversy here - some people have argued, and quite cogently at that, that 31 ought to be THE prime of one's youth, but thats just splitting hairs), i just looked back to see if anyone could profit from my wisdom. and it seems quite clear to me that my vast experience with human nature can help all those people who have no, NO experience at all.
but on the flip side, no one else seems to be benefiting....
so, to strike a balance, i shall narrate an experience of mine, which, i believe, will also give you readers, a glimpse into what is indeed a mystical dying art. and it is sad that the master(s) of this are neither well recognized, nor, worse, even known to the public. they seem to be disappearing like a blur on the landscape....

the story unfolds in the year 1998, December, during my first 'educational tour' from ISI. We had an 8 day tour of Shimla, Kulu, Manali, and then a return to Delhi, where some of us got off while the rest carried on to what is now Kolkata.
i didn't realize before but that trip brought to my attention the fact that my mom's asthmatic troubles had been sort of bequeathed to me as well. And what better opportunity to discover that than having to chug along with a big piece of luggage in a rarified atmosphere!
though the trip was for most parts pleasant and indeed wonderful, it was the first time i was exposed to such low temperatures and also cope with my increasing asthma. and to make matters a little more competitive, one of my seniors had, in an attempt to help me out (bless his soul), inadvertently, broken my suitcase's handle.
so if i said that i wasn't exactly in the pink of health, i wouldn't be indulging in too much of falsehood. and on the last day of the trip, as we were about to leave Manali and get back to Kalka, i felt like i might get sick any moment. As it is, i have never been comfy travelling on the hilly roads in India by bus, and an entire day's traveling ahead seemed like the perfect way to bring me to a whole new level of misery. my friend karthik who sat beside me, got me something to ease the nausea but it felt like impending doom. waiting to happen.
but something else did, which sort of changed my life a great deal. at least in the way i look at life now.
we were seated in one of the last rows - possibly just two rows ahead of the last row which runs from side to side. and i took the seat off the window because i felt that my tendency to look out the window into the scenery might aggravate the nausea. and all this now makes sense in the big scheme of things.
as the bus started, some of the guys in the last row called for some antakshari - basically a 'string-a-song' game, where one sings bollywood numbers with the (n+1)th song starting off from the ending letter of the nth song. some other rules apply regarding what consonant changes are permissible if need be, and what constitutes the ending/beginning of a song, but let us not get bogged down by technical details.
though antakshari is played as a competitive team event, junta in the bus decided that they'd all participate without resorting to team-forming, so basically they had decided upon singing songs in sequence but adhering to the aforementioned rules.
as the bus made a couple of `hair-pin bends', i swear to having heard someone from the last row go, " shuru karo ustaad "! and as if on cue, the ustaad did.
now i didn't know most of the people in the last two rows since they weren't BStat/MStat guys; some were Mtech QROR and some others were MSQEs. and the only other bit of info i have about ustaad is that his last name was Yekkela.....or something..let's say Yekkela.
He might have been a gult, I can't say now. i can't even recall his face properly but i still can distinctly hear his tone.
There are several wonderful tales about music and musicians saving people from dying, bringing rain to a dry town, and such like. What i am about to say is something similar, since the man definitely saved the day for me.
one of the most fascinating characters in the Asterix comic series is Cacophonix. not simply because his voice is supposed to be bad, it is supposed to be subliminally bad! it brought rain, terrified the normans, scared hungry lions and tigers, .... the list just goes on and on. it always remained one of my curious desires to know what his voice might have sounded like.
Now some of you are probably forming a bad opinion on Mr Y. i must reiterate: Y's singing saved the day for me, o.k? remember that.
at first i just didn't pay attention but slowly, felt that something sounded off ; in fact, i can't put a point upon it....from the chorus one voice stood out, as something very unique. i felt like i was one of those characters walking into a 'ghost well' or something....
soon most people in the bus, especially those of us who were in the last rows could feel some vibes...sorry, vibrations. at first it was difficult to understand what he was singing. i have heard people go off key but nothing like this! this man made it difficult to spot the song, even after him declaring what he was going to sing next!
let me explain: one of the songs he sang was " dil mera churaaya kyun, jab yeh dil todnaa hi tha" from AHAK. after about 2 words, i was completely bamboozled; i just couldn't spot which word he was on. it was like in Crouching tiger hidden dragon, where the kungfu masters practice Wudang, only in this case, the dragon would be the song that was trying desperately to get out!
if the analogy didn't make sense, don't worry, it at least should have conveyed my mental reaction to the song on show.
after a while, i spotted some of his metric patterns.

for instance take the song from a popular govinda film

"main tho rasthe se jaa raha thaa,
main tho bhel poori kha raha tha,
rasthe se ja raha tha, bhel poori kha raha tha,
ladki ghumaa raha tha,
thujko mirchi lagi tho main kya karoon!"

Now Mr Y would sing it (metric splitting) in this fashion.

" main thooooooooooooo rasthe
se ja raha, bhel poori kha raha(?!)
teri naani ko mirchi lagi tho main kya
karooooooooooooooooooooooon!"

In this fashion, he sort of preempted some of the forthcoming lines of the song! and if he forgot some words, never mind, he'd throw in a few of his own, entirely improv! for instance the dil mera churaaya kyun- after a point he had forgotten some words but promptly came back with mujhse yoon moo ladaaya kyun(?!!)!!

Now i obviously cannot describe his voice.....bloodcurdling would be a good word because it is possible that one's blood might curdle upon prolonged exposure to this kind of singing, but that doesn't quite make the match. because you wouldn't want to listen to something bloodcurdling at all, but with ustaad we wanted more of it! its like this: remember the screeching sounds you get from chalk on a blackboard? now how would it be if you liked that noise?!! his voice was sub bass-meaning, even the bass singers couldn't actually reach his....well, pitch?(is that an appropriate word for him?). in carnatic music parlance, his voice was somewhere in the realms of 0.5 - 1 kattai ! and his voice wasn't one of those feeble and difficult to spot ones-no siree, it was fortissimo! yet not totally unbearable!
i felt like one of the insects that get drawn to these electric lamps only to get the shock of their lives. and yet, i was enjoying his song singing so much that i completely forgot about my nausea; the man saved my day and made it one of the best experiences I've ever had in a bus trip!
in the days that followed, many tried to take over since what he did seemed easy (heck after all, they figured, its just cacophony!); and how mistaken were they!
that was however, his last year in ISI. he was unfortunately, a senior that year and was graduating-the last thing i knew about him was that he was joining TCS and this info is more than 8 yrs old, alas!
the harder the hacks and quacks tried, the more annoying they got. and to themselves too. they realized that they were not able to replicate that unique sound in any way. none of the wannabe yekkalas, those vying for his post, could match up to the man's prowess. he was in some sense, the antithesis of harmony and rhythm and yet (like the devil!), extremely ear-friendly!

i then realized that there was a method to his madness and it takes a genius to create such noise! no matter what i write now, it would still fall woefully short of the experience of listening to him from up close. and since i haven't heard of his exploits anywhere i must assume that his talent has been lost to obscurity.

will the real yekkelas please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?