Kolkata

Excerpts
A. North Indian Classical Music: I stayed in Kolkata (Calcutta) for almost two weeks, and got into the music scene there. Almost every night there were concerts, and I met and played with some musicians.

B. Cheerful Serenity meets Rhythmic Math: The Ghoshals are a family of musicians, with Pandit Arun Ghoshal a tabla master. I went to a few concerts with the son, Sourav, and visited their home. We sat together and played, exchanging not just compositions but also musical understandings.

C. The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2: Through a series of 'quantum mechanical' random events, I got connected with Kolkata's high school math Underground - where math is revealed in its elegance and depth to eager tutees. I ended up giving a sort of lecture, based on the presentation of a proof of the irrationality of root 2. In addition, with one student, Abhinav, we took math out of the classroom and to the chai stall, bookstore, music concert, etc.


Nagin, the chai man, who supplied the caffeine for my all-night music


That's all one tree - the second largest tree canopy in the world, at the Botanical Gardens.


the horizontal limbs are the branches, the vertical 'trees' are above-ground prop roots. You go inside the tree.


this living thing presented a beautiful metaphor for the interconnected web of Us that I think about a lot these days.




Elaborations

A. North Indian Classical Music:

Calcutta - lots of traffic noise, lots of classical music. Lots of foreigners studying music. I met serious sarod, sitar, and tabla students from all over the world, here for a few months for serious practice and lessons. I played with a few, which was exciting.

Lots of concerts. My favorite: the Dover Lane festival - four all-night concerts in a row, with the best of the best performing. I attended three years ago when I came to India, and was awed by the magic and majesty of this tradition. The audience of four thousand is full of connoiseurs, and the spirit of the traditional music is very present. The audience is also full of upper-class snobs, and the family of small bodies sleeping on the cold pavement on my early-morning walk home is still there, except for an infant's blanketed sillouette I remembered but didn't see this time.

One interesting story: during a sitar performance by Shalil Shankar, Shuben Chatterjee was playing tabla. I had snuck up to the second row of the VIP section, to the side so I could watch the tabla. As a tabla player, I know that while playing you sometimes need to solidify your grasp on physical reality, and do this by focusing your eyes somewhere. Well, Shubenbhai focused on me. At first I wasn't sure, but our eyes met and we smiled at each other more than once. During tough solos he would stare at my hand, with which I would keep the pulse for him. Sometimes he would play tricky embellishments and then look right at me, as if to say, "How'd you like that one?", or "Isn't this fun?". It was overall one of the most fun performances all week. We never met or spoke after that, but I feel like I had a conversation and made a friend.


Rashid Khan et al. after singing. The Dover Lane festival is dedicated to small lime-green aliens with bendy arms that play one-string guitars made out of golf tees, called xenorabs.

B. Cheerful Serenity Meets Rhythmic Math:

Pandit Arun Ghoshal is a professional tabla player, employed by All India Radio. His son Sourav is my age, and has been playing tabla since he was seven. Sourav and I met and went to a few concerts together. He gave me the address of one of the best tabla makers in Kolkata, and I got my tabla reheaded there. The visit to the tabla shop was sweet, because after studying tabla making in Jaipur in 2001 I have a deep respect and appreciation for these craftsmen.

One of my best musical exchanges was during a visit to Sourav's home. He lives with his father and sister Somashree, who teaches classical singing. His father is a very traditional player. They showed me fading black and white photos of today's masters, (including Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustad Alla Rakha) hanging out at festivals, playing together, or sitting with the masters of the generation before. Thus not only could Pt. Arun Ghoshal trace his musical lineage back for generations, but he was connected to the other Pandits and Ustads that carry the wisdom today.

We sat and played together - Sourav, Arunji, and I, with Somashree keeping the rhythm cycle on harmonium and singing occassionally. We knew the same composition, starting 'Ghe na tet te, Ghe na dha ge Di na gi na, tet te gi na...', but knew different variations of the theme. So we taught each other some variations.

The real exchange, however, was not in sharing this substance, but in sharing our different approaches to tabla.

I felt honored to be let into their family in such an intimate way - being a witness and participant as they sat together, making music with such simple joy and closeness. I could tell they did this every night, and it was as much about the music as about simply being with each other. In hindsight, it reminds me of my family's ritual of cleaning the dinner table. Several visitors to our Rhinebeck home, allowed to participate in the ceremony, have remarked that the unique character of the Wolcott family is revealed in this unifying (in the sense of consolidation into plastic) and cleansing act.

While I heard this story of musical warmth, I told my story of rhythm and math. They were impressed by my ability to pick up new material almost instantaneously - to figure out what structures were being manipulated in the variations, and to process that in real time while my knee unceasingly kept the pulse. I explained how I understand tabla compositions - as puzzles with patterns to be revealed. This is essentially what mathematics is, and by using the mind's mathematical machinery, so many things are possible.

It became clear that we experienced tabla very differently, and had managed to give each other musical glimpses across the barriers. For all four of us, it was a sincerely interesting and heart-warming exchange. The only thing that failed to cross the cultural barrier was Somashree's parting words - some Bengali phrase. Later Sourav tried to interpret, but apparently couldn't find the right english words and finally settled on, "I love you".


the tabla womb


Narendra, the tabla maker


after playing with the Ghoshal family - Sourav, Pt. Arun Ghoshal, and Somashree


C. The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2:

Abhinav is a math major at a university here in Calcutta. I met him, and got the inside scoop on math in India. It's a frustrating story of exams, boredom, and stiflingly uncreative beaurocracy. For example: he gave me a tour of his university. I wanted to see the library. The math library was closed for lunch, and the librarian extended his lunch break by an extra half hour. When the time came, we discovered that I had white skin, and somehow that caused a problem. Thankfully we had permission from the head of the department (who asks to be addressed as 'Master'). The books were locked behind glass, but at least I could see the titles, which wasn't the case at the main library.

Abhinav was lucky to have met Babu when he was younger. Babu has the magical ability to make math and physics an exciting and interesting act of creation, thought, and discovery. He tutors 11th and 12th graders in math and physics, fanatically trying to breath life into these subjects before they die and are thrown overboard. Babu, who chain-smokes and drinks chai like it's his job, feels he is slowly losing the battle against rote sterile formulae. The three of us, plus other thinkers, would meet and talk about math and physics at the chai stall for hours.

I visited one of Babu's group sessions and talked with the students. I wanted to tell them something I wish I had known then - about the dance of logic and intuition that is math, really, and how that is represented and integrated into math via proofs. As an example, I gave a proof of the irrationality of root 2.

Basically, it's a proof by contradiction. If you assume root 2 is rational, then it can be written as a fraction m/n, in simplest terms. Then 2 x n^2 = m^2, and m^2 is even. If m^2 is even, m is even (because m can't be odd, and every integer is either even or odd but not both). Write m = 2 x j, and you find n^2 = 2 x j^2. As before, n^2 and n are therefore even. So m and n are both divisible by two, and it is therefore impossible to write root 2 as m/n, where m/n is in simplest terms. Thus root 2 must be irrational.

Abhinav and I became good friends. He is an independent thinker, and is lucky to be from a family that has the means to send him to graduate school. He wants to go to the US, and I want him to as well. When we met, he would always buy the food and drinks, and I would share math/physics tidbits (non-euclidean geometry, vector calculus) and grad school advice.