The wait is over!

Ok everyone, the moment you have been waiting all June for is almost here!

I will be on TV, Vasantham Central at 9 p.m. on my very own episode of Mudhal Payanam (First Journey) on the 30th of June 2007.

All you people who will be in Australia, England, US or somewhere similarly far away will be made to watch a repeat telecast when you come back.

Thanks to all those who kept hounding me with the question, "When ah?" , I feel so celebritied!

So once again:

When: 30th June 2007 at 9 p.m.

Where: Vasantham Central (That's the same as Arts and Kids Central for you "I don't do local TV" la di da people)

Who: Lil' ol' moi!

What: Mudhal Payanam

Starring: Nalinee Barrett, Muthukrishnan Pillai and various other very puzzled people in Sirkazhi.

Why: Because you love me, of course!

Excited much!

Road Trip - India (part 4)

This is the final installation of my blog on my road trip.
For more photos of my journey, click here and here.

Day 3 - Vaideeswaram

Yet another temple town, Vaideeswaram is the “olai chuvadi” capital of the world. Using an ancient text to tell your history as well as your future, these guys belong to a special clan that has safeguarded these texts for 1000s of years. These texts, written on palm leaves, used a kind of archaic Tamil script that only people in that clan can still read. So they make quite a killing reading these texts to people who either want to know their history, or their future.

If you remember, the point of my trip was to trace my history, so we went to one of these guys to see if he could shed some light on my ancestors. Finding him was hard because there was literally a whole street of these guys in Vaideeswaram, all claming to be the original. (Sounds a bit like the whole Papa Roti thing, doesn’t it?) But in the end, a call to my dad’s friend Rajendran solved the problem. It helps to have friends in high places.

Outside Vaideeswaram temple, we were swamped by the most ubiquitious sight of India – beggars. They hang around the temple hoping people’s piety will move them to pity. I was warned sternly by Malar and John NOT to give them money. They said, if you really want, you can give them food – biscuits or buns – but chances are they will reject it. Apparently most of them belong to a syndicate that feeds them, but makes them beg for their keep.

I had to test it out. I had bought some packets of food (prasadam) from the temple, which I didn’t want to eat. I offered it to this beggar lady with 2 children, but she refused to take it and kept asking me for money instead. Now, if I was a mother with 2 hungry children, I would take any food that comes my way, especially when it’s still piping hot.

Lesson learned.

Vaideeswaram is a small town, well supported by the astrology business. But there really wasn’t much else to do there. So after we got all the footage we needed, we left and headed for Pondicherry for dinner and the long drive back to Chennai.

We reached the ultra comfortable Raj Palace Hotel at about 9:30 on Sunday night. With the most strenuous part of the shoot behind us, we could relax, enjoy a good dinner (Chicken fried rice washed down with several gimlets), and entertain each other with horror stories from the media industry. I found out that John was the CEO for a cable channel called SS music, before life on the road called him back to sound engineering.
And Malar has worked in almost every major city in India and South East Asia, including Singapore, where he holds an employment pass.

Day 4 – Chennai

Finally, the last day of shooting. All the shoots today are in Chennai, so we had a little bit of time for some shopping in the evening. But before that, I got to experience the colour and vibrancy of what is touted to be now the best Indian city to live in.

Beggars, cows and pollution. I didn’t really find any of these a problem. I don’t know if I just looked unapproachable or what, but there weren’t a lot of encounters with beggars in Chennai. I saw more beggars in the small towns, strangely enough, just outside temples. There were still street and slum dwellers, in rags, and with children in throngs around them, but they seem to be gainfully employed. I was glad to see that.

The ubiquitious cows were everywhere, but they were quite grazing in little grassy alcoves, rather than obstructing traffic or terrifying hapless tourists (aka me). It just wouldn’t be India without the cows.

As for pollution, I noticed something really interesting. Women would sweep their houses clean of dust and debris, then gather the said pile of dust and dump it just outside their houses, where the wind will blow it in again during the course of the day.

A lot of the rubbish is also organic. Indians use natural resources a lot more than we do here – banana leaves instead of paper plates, palm leaf baskets instead plastic bags and cow dung instead of pesticides. Yes, there are plastic bottles, cans and other man made rubbish as well, but for city as large as Chennai is, they must either have a lot less trash or much more efficient waste disposal teams. But there is no doubt that India is the original recycling society. People save and reuse everything, which is really admirable.

I felt that politics and cinema drive the city more than then many temples, spiritual gurus and ancient texts and books. Everywhere you look, they are posters of political luminaries. Actors endorse everything from Aircel mobile networks to pumps for agricultural use. And the people are such big fans of some of the actors, that apparently in the cinema the film reel operator has to stop the reel in order to accommodate the whistling and celebrating that goes on once the hero appears. I wish I had time to have experienced this, but sadly, it didn’t happen. But the next time I surely will.

Chennai has been an eye opener. The memory I had of the city I visited 17 years ago remains an old and distance memory, the way you remember your grandma when you were 5. As I have grown, Chennai has grown along with me, infinite in beauty, wisdom and grace. This is not to say that it’s perfect, no place is, but its faults have been exaggerated more than its virtues. The people are gentle and hospitable, I wasn’t eve-teased, rubbed up against or even gawked at even once. The food is amazing, with enough variety to keep foodies like me happy for a long time.

My heart is full. I am so glad I came. Chennai, you have a part of my heart, and you will see me again.

Road Trip - India (part 3)

Day 2 – Sirkazhi.

After a quick and excellent breakfast of thosai and the best tea I have ever had, we set out for Sirkazhi, the town my great grandfather came from. I was supposed to meet my dad’s friend, Rajendran who lives there. He in turn helped me to find all the possible connections to my dad’s family. If not for him, I would probably still be there, looking for my roots.

We went to the house of this old priest of the local temple, who was said to remember my great grandfather. This man was 95 years old, and still had a memory that was sharp as a knife. He is retired from his priestly duties, but lives with his daughter’s family in the same house he had lived in since he was born.

I was excited to visit the house, because 1) it would be my first visit into a village house, and 2) my first visit to a orthodox Brahmin house. I tried to remember all the “rules” of orthodoxy regarding visiting a Brahmin household. I am glad to say none of them were true. They welcomed us with kindness, offered us a place to sit on a bench, and some ice cold water to drink.

(A short note on drinking water in India. I was told NEVER to drink the tap water. The crew bought many bottles of mineral water and an ice cooler, so we were well watered throughout the journey. But, when you go to someone’s house, and all they have is water, from the tap, how to say no without being rude? The last thing I want is to be remembered as the uppity Singapore girl who won’t even wet her lips in our house. So I drank their water when it was offered. I said a blessing over it, and drank whole heartedly. And didn’t suffer so much as a stomach ache from it. )

The house looked exactly like the kind you see in Tamil movies. A U shaped covered house with a small open air courtyard in the middle, where they had the Tulasi tree and the water pump. In the back, there is a well and a general washing area. These people were considered affluent because they had electricity, running water, and a fridge. The floors were cement and the walls brick. The roof was wood and attap, and kept the house cool and comfortable. 6 people lived in that house, which is the size of my living room. Amazing. With no separate rooms for married couples, how on earth did they make 2 children. The mind boggles.

The next house I visited was the one my great grandfather built. It has been around for about 100 years and is based on the same U shaped with courtyard plan. My uncle and aunty who still live there have electricity, but no fridge, and no running water. And my uncle works in a bank!

Meeting my relatives was an experience in itself and I will leave it to the show to tell the story. But walking into the house that I could have been born in was overwhelming. I can describe it adequately, and won’t even try.


2nd Night – Chidambaram

Since Sirkazhi is such a small town, they don’t have any hotels that will fulfil the creature comforts stipulated by the crew. So we spent the night in Chidambaram, a slightly larger temple town that was a 2 hour drive away. I was so exhausted – drained physically by the 8 hour shoot in the broiling sun and emotionally by meeting my relatives – that I took a shower and went straight to bed. It’s only the next morning that I realized that the hotel we stayed at was called the Raffles Hotel! The irony was not lost on me. I’m not complaining because it had a clean bed and aircon, which is all I needed, but they were little short on the marble flooring and jazz quarter, what.

The hotel also did not have room service, so the guys had to go out to get some take away food. One of the things I really enjoyed about this trip was that I was with a bunch of people who were serious meat eaters like me. Which is really good because India has very good non-vegetarian cusine offer. The meat is usually fresh, not frozen, so it tastes different and absorbs the flavours of the spices better.

Now, I know a lot of you are frowning because you think I did something stupid and dangerous, but for the record, I did not get any digestive disorders while I was in India. No Delhi belly, nothing. 2 out of 3 meals were non-vegetarian. For breakfast, we went to a veg restaurant, but only because breakfast foods like thosai and idly are much better there.

If I have any complains about India, it’s this. The sun rises really early in the morning. By about 5:45 a.m., it is peeking into my room. Being used to waking at dawn in Singapore (6:30a.m.), I was like WTH when I found myself rising at 5:30 or so. So from then till my actual wake up call (8:00), it was my time with the wonders of Indian television. I was pleasantly surprised to find a TV channel dedicated to Christian programming – songs, sermons and services – in both Tamil and English. Belonging to a secular state like Singapore, it came as quite a treat, really.

Road Trip – India (Part 2)

First Night – Pondicherry

Being on a road trip like this one, it’s impossible to tell where we are going to be when night falls. Therefore making hotel reservations was out of the question. Therefore 2 hours of our night in Pondicherry was spent driving around, looking for a hotel to stay. Most hotels were full for two reasons – 1) Pondicherry is a kind of a party town where young Chennai natives go for a wild weekend of drinking and partying and 2) Because of the political meeting, even more people decided to leave the city and Pondi is the nearest destination.

By 9:30, we still hadn’t got a room and I was beginning to panic. I know how Mary and Joseph felt, not that I was about to have a baby, but the part of being tired and stopping at every inn and not finding room to rest. Finally Malar called one of his friends, who told us to try a place called Shanti Inn. It was on a street that we had already driven by twice, but we didn’t see it because at the street level, you only see the door. The rest of the hotel is on the 2nd – 5th floors. The rooms were clean and air conditioned, the bathroom looked recently washed and the bed was comfortable. We decided to stay.

Dinner was room service, although no one had much of an appetite from all that traveling. Ok, honestly, that was not the reason. Pondicherry is apparently some kind of tax haven for alcohol. A bottle of Smirnoff vodka only cost SGD$16. So everyone decided to camp out in my room and have a few bottles of the stuff, “to help to relax”. They were so relaxed, I had a hard time kicking them out, because I wanted to sleep. Tomorrow we go to Sirkazhi, a big day for me. I needed to sleep.

Before I end this post, a word about Indian TV. Firstly, I love the fact that every channel has people who look just like me – beautiful Indian girls endorsing products in ads and good looking men reading the news. And the ads are really a lot more creative and sometimes risqué then what we get in Singapore. There is this one ad where the opening sequence is a medium shot of a woman, waist up, squatting on something and bouncing up and down with her eyes closed. The next shot is a long shot of her rinsing out the pair of pants she had just washed by hand, and turning to show it to the camera. It was an ad for washing soap.

And these people had a problem with Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty? What the…?

Sex and nudity is not really an issue in India. People are bathing in public places all the time, the men wearing a little less than a thong and the women a sheer sari or cloth that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. The problem was probably that Richard was an old geezer, kissing a young nubile woman. Yeah, I think that was probably it.

For pictures, click here.

Road Trip – India (Part 1)

Itinerary
Day 1 – Chennai to Pondicherry
Day 2 – Pondicherry to Sirkazhi
Day 3 – Sirkazhi to Vaideeswaram
Day 4 – Vaideeswaram to Chennai
Day 5 - Singapore


Day One
I landed in Chennai airport at 10 a.m. and already the heat was searing through my skin. It was Agni Natchathiram, the hottest day in the year, although I didn’t know that at the time.

Good thing Kannan, the Assistant Director from Verite Productions was there with an air conditioned Chevrolet, so I didn’t suffer too long in the heat. It did make me think about how the people who cannot afford air conditioning survive this season.


We went to Raj Palace Hotel where I met the rest of the crew – Hameed, who of course I know from poly days, Malarvannan, the cameraman , and John Fernandez, the sound guy. Both Malar and John are Chennai natives (Chennaivites? Chennaaiwals?) , although they have both travelled the world extensively as professionals in their field. My episode of Mudhal Payanam was in good hands.

Before heading out of the city, we stopped for lunch – at Liu’s Chinese Cuisine. The two Singaporean guys, Kannan and Hameed were tired of eating Indian food and were dying for a change in palate, and this was their last chance to get some Chinese food before we headed for the rural countryside. So my first meal in India was steamed Thai rice, sweet and sour pork, chili beef and chap chai! Go figure eh.

At about 4:30, we headed out of Chennai further south toward Pondicherry. On our way out, we saw busloads of people with strange black and red flags on the windows coming into the city. Apparently some minister was getting honoured for 50 years of active political career, so the prime minister and president of India were coming down to some meeting to felicitate him. His followers also took it at a personal invitation and descended on Chennai in their thousands. Malar said it’s good thing we were leaving for a few days, because just the traffic snarls would tie up any travel plans for a while.

Even on the other side of the road, we were moving at a snail’s pace, because the more important followers of that minister were allowed to drive on the opposite side, towards oncoming traffic. Our driver Kumar played chicken so many times, I stopped counting. I just know that by the time my journey ended, I had almost broken the hand grip in the car.
Traffic rules are more of a suggestion than the law here.