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Get Lucky: A Review

September doesn’t just herald the coming change of season. For me and several others around the world, every two years, it heralds the release of a new Mark Knopfler album. Get Lucky, his seventh solo album (including his duet with Emmylou Harris) was released a few weeks back, with just about as much fanfare as his previous releases; that is, almost none. An email about pre-concert ticket sales for a concert next April was how I came to know of this album.

Though the album was to be released only on September 14th (15th in the US), I got lucky and found out that my Rhapsody music subscription service allowed me to listen to the entire album a full week before the release. That alone justified the monthly subscription that I pay for Rhapsody. Coupled with Roku Soundbridge 1001, I listened to the entire album on my hi-fi system.

Compared to his previous album, Kill To Get Crimson, Get Lucky is a more modest effort, a notch or two below his best, especially in song writing, which has become his primary focus.

Across eleven tracks and 52 minutes, Knopfler uses flute, whistle, accordion and strings to produce a sound that is a throwback to the soundtracks of Local Hero and Cal. It is a september record: a few upbeat sunny songs but mostly quiet, midtempo tracks, tracks composed with a knowledge of the coming cold, austere times.

Three tracks stood out immediately. Hard Shoulder, the second song in the album, is a heartbreaking song about an unexpected loss. In a style that he employed on Hill Farmer Blues from The Ragpicker’s Dream, he starts with a workman listing out the things he has, the tools of his trade and then quietly slips in the real subject.

I’ve got latches for windows, handles for doors,
Grinders and scrapers and sanders for floors,
Rake for the gravel, chains for the snow,
Always got the shovel – you never know
I never thought you’d go

A workman, has stopped on the shoulder of a road, trying to recover from the loss. And with beautiful wordplay, he mixes the shoulder of the road with the need for a shoulder to cry on.

A few years back, we were having some repairs done on the house. The workman called to say the morning of the repairs that he had had a family emergency and that he couldn’t make it that day. I’ll call later and reschedule, he said. I was a little miffed (I had to shuffle my schedules so that I could be home when he showed up), but didn’t think much more. He called back a few days later and we rescheduled for him to come a week later.

He was an immigrant, like me, but eking out his existence in a much harder way than I ever had to. As he was doing his work, I remembered his family emergency and asked him if everything was alright. I remember how he looked at me, his clear blue eyes shattering as he said, “My daughter died last week. She was six years old. She had a fever that led to complications she never recovered from. That morning I was to come to your house, we had to rush her to the hospital”. I held him as he cried a little. I thought about my getting a little ruffled over his rescheduling. How little we know of the lives we call upon to care for our needs. Listening to Hard Shoulder reminded me of that man.

In true Knopfler fashion, the loss is never spelled out. A first reading made me think that it was about a lover leaving. But subsequent readings made me revise that opinion: this could be about any loss.

The second stand out track was the gentle waltz, Monteleone. The song is about John Monteleone, who Knopfler calls the world’s greatest living builder of the arch top guitar. The song is about his working of the wood to produce a beautiful musical instrument. I love the line “the chisels are calling”:

The chisels are calling
Its time to make sawdust
Steely reminders of things left to do
Monteleone, a mandolin’s waiting for you

The final standout track is also, in my opinion, the finest on the record, So Far From the Clyde. The song is about a ship taken to a breaker yard, some desolate beach in some impoverished part of India. I felt my insides rip as he sings about the ship as it is first shattered by riding it hard into the ground and then hacked and sawed off “’til there’s only a stain in the sand”. The ship comes alive, becomes a living thing. In one beautiful stanza, he sings:

As if to a wave
from her bows to her rudder
bravely she rises
to meet with the land
Under their feet
they all feel her keel shudder
A shallow sea washes their hands

I love the way he mixes in the metaphor of Pilate’s washing off his hands at the judgement of Jesus to the actions of the people involved in the tearing down of the ship.

Again, the song at one level, can be treated as merely the story of a ship, or it can be treated as an elegy to the end of a way of life. The song reminded me of an article that I had just read on NYT, about the lonely, wretched existence of many elderly immigrants in this country. The lead anecdote was about a Sikh father, living in the not far-off East Bay town of Fremont. Many of these immigrants had been cast aside by their children after being brought to this country. Now far from their social network, their ways of knowing and being, a stranger in a strange land, they seek solace in the company of fellow immigrants in similar positions and return to their rented places to die lonely deaths. Not unlike a ship that sailed proud and free for many years but taken at its end to a strange place. From the article:

Mr. Singh, the widower, grew up in a boisterous Indian household with 14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his son’s family and devoted himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided “they wanted their privacy,” said Mr. Singh, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly concluded he should move out.

So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its fake cobblestones, Mr. Singh drives to the rented room in a house he found on Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps packed neatly in plastic bins.

The album is unusual in that it comes with some liner notes by Knopfler, a man known for his understated, taciturn persona. Knopfler writes that this album was a personal one more than usual. His uncle, dead at the age of 20 in WWII, is the piper in “Piper to the End”, his father makes an cameo on “Before Gas and TV” and his own childhood and adolescent life is the fabric from which songs such as Border Reiver and Get Lucky are sown. But I found his songwriting on most of the songs not upto his usual exemplary standard.

Maya likes the three songs that I mentioned as well as the title track and Border Reiver. Especially, Monteleone which is one of her staple goodnight songs now.

There’s so little new music that soothes me. Don’t get me wrong. I continue to find new music that I enjoy, new styles and new artists. But novelty isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. Homecoming is not about novelty, but it is among the most emotionally complex and satisfying experiences. Listening to Knopfler is like a homecoming to me. Not all homecomings are as good and satisfying. But we go home anyways. And so, I’ll listen to this album.

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Just A Place Where We Used To Live


Ghost towns. Towns completely abandoned by its inhabitants because living there was no longer possible, usually due to economic circumstances. I’ve always thought that ghost towns were an American artifact. I didn’t think this concept existed in places like India where villages have existed for centuries, when new ways of eking out an existence didn’t work, you could go back to the old ways. Usually.

Last week, my parents went to Gokarna, a holy place in Southern India, to perform a ceremony honoring my father’s dead parents. On the way, they stopped at Davanagere and visited Yellamma Mills, the textile mills where my father worked for about six years, back in the ’80s. The pictures that he took, of what once was our house, reminded me of ghost towns.

When we moved to Davanagere in 1982, it was still a big textile industry hub, called the Manchester of Karnataka. A rather dry, arid place, it was on the Bangalore-Pune highway, an important arterial road. There were about seven textile mills, the most famous being Davanagere Cotton Mills (called DCM) and the industry was one of the largest local employers. My father was the General Manager of a mill that was owned by the Government, part of the National Textile Corporation. It was located about seven kilometers outside the town, in a little village called Tolahunase, surrounded by fields cultivating dry crops, and reached by a narrow, often potholed road, off the main highway.

The mill provided quarters for many of its administrative staff. My father, as the chief, had the biggest house. The colony of houses was shaped in the form of a rectangle. Surrounded by a large garden, our house stood in the center of the top of the rectangle. It was a rather large house, as most of our houses tended to be. I had a room to myself as did my sister. My mother was fond of gardens, relying on the gardener to carry out her instructions and perform the daily chores of gardening. Not far from our house ran an irrigation canal, the water flowing swiftly as I watched it from the steep banks, wishing I could swim.

I was in high school, in the 10th standard. I hated it that my father had to move every three or so years, uprooting our lives, carrying with us the things we could such as books, clothes and furniture and leaving behind things we could not, such as my friendships and schools. This move was even more painful for me because I was moving back to Karnataka after almost five years of being out of it. I had studied in a completely different schooling system and had lost touch with Kannada, my mother tongue, and I had to pass an exam in it now. 10th standard is a big deal in India. It was the first of the forks in the road, one of which led to a life of success (as engineering and medical professions were considered back then) or the other to a life that was considered the domain of losers (anything that wasn’t one of those two professions). I hadn’t expected the place to change my life as completely as it did.

Davanagere was a rough, dusty town, unaccustomed to the fineries of larger cities. English movies arrived infrequently and the movie halls were not as grand as the ones we had left behind in Kerala. When we arrived, it had no fine restaurants to speak of, no place my father could take his business associates for a drink and a meal. “The only culture in Davanagere is agriculture”, my father used to say. It was a rich town, thanks to the merchants and mill owners. For the first time in my life, I had friends who lived in larger houses than I did.


It was in this house that I came of age. Here that I first began to question everything including who I was and where I was headed (not career-wise but as a human being). Here that I lost my faith, going gradually from praying three times a day – reciting the holy scriptures from memory as I performed the ritual called “Sandhyavandane” – to to not praying at all, openly declaring my loss of faith and finally discarding the sacred thread that I wore as a mark of being a brahmin.

It was in this house that I was introduced to science in a way that I had not before. A friend of my father’s lent me George Gamow’s classic “One, Two, Three Infinity”, changing my reading and thinking forever. Here that I encountered Ayn Rand and fell in love with her narrative, carrying it with me till I became better acquainted with life and appreciate the Gita of Shanthala’s life, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

It was in this house that I first came face to face with my limitations, with the possibility that I may not be as bright as I thought I was, that my future was more cloudy than I was willing to admit. Here that I experienced the disappointment of failing the IIT entrance exam, of barely scraping into the local engineering school.

It was in this house that I first stared at the night sky in wonder. With the help of a binoculars that my father had obtained, I spent countless hours, lying in the garden, staring at the night sky, trying to decipher the constellations and view the planets, failing miserably at both. But for the first time, I saw that the spaces between the stars were sometimes filled with clouds of what seemed like faint stars. And some single stars resolved themselves into two through the binoculars.

It was in this house that I watched a crow and a cobra fight each other. The crow seemed to be taunting the snake more than actually hunting it, letting it eventually slither away. It was here that one night, a night watchman caught thirteen scorpions and tied them all up for me to see in the morning. It was here that I encountered vipers, two of them sleeping behind rectangular pots of plant, clearly visible from inside the house, excitedly discovered by my sister and I. And here that two people died of snake bite, one a young child.

It was in this house that I first watched a movie on video. My father had purchased a used video recorder and brought home two movies with it. We watched the same two movies repeatedly till video rental stores started sprouting.

It was in this house that I first rode a motorbike, a used Ind-Suzuki that I rode to college everyday. It was here that I first owned a pet, a pair of rabbits. My father built my little sister a tree house at the back where she whiled her hours away, playing housie and holding a school where she was the strict teacher, willing to use the cane at the slightest infraction.

It was in this house that I had my sexual awakening, though as was the case with most kids of my generation in India, there was little I could do with the knowledge.

And it was in this house that that one golden fall evening, Shanthala came home, looking stunning, in that silver gray dress, and I made us a cup of tea and we sat on the parapet of the roof, and watched the sun set. It was the first time I had cooked something for her. Here that I first recognized and yearned for, that childlike delight and innocence that she possessed. It was here that we forged our relationship, talking on the phone for hours, driving our parents mad. “Why do you speak so softly to her”, my father would demand to know, “With everybody else, your voice can be heard for miles”.


To see the house in ruins now saddened me, the sadness catching me by surprise. I have never been able to see the inside of a house that I lived in as a child, not a single one. I had plans of visiting them all some time and taking Shanthala with me, but it never came to pass. The one in Gulbarga is gone, demolished completely. The one in Bangalore is still standing, but just a shell. And I don’t know the fate of the houses in Coimbatore and Kerala. This house also was the dearest to my heart, outside of my grandparents home in Bangalore, which is also gone.

With globalization, the textile industry left Davangere, leaving many thousands unemployed. When I was there the last time, a friend of my in-laws, an attorney, told me about the surge in crime thanks to the soaring unemployment. Of the seven mills, only one still remained, barely. The biggest of them all, DCM, had been completely demolished, converted into a residential development, all traces of it ever being a textile mill gone. A couple had closed doors even while we were there.

Tolahunase didn’t turn into a ghost town, even sporting a new post-graduate center for the newly formed Kuvempu University. But the colony of Yellamma mills did, save for the shrine to goddess Yellamma that my father built, god and nature reclaiming back what was once theirs.


This empty kitchen’s where
I’d while away the hours
Just next to my old chair
You’d usually have some flowers
The shelves of books
Even the picture hooks
Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on

Once there was a little boy
Used to wonder what he would be
Went out into the big wide world
Now he’s just a memory
There used to be a little school here
Where I learned to write my name
But time has been a little cruel here
Time has no shame

It’s just a place where
We used to live – Mark Knopfler

Maya: Half Past Three


What can you say about a three and a half month old girl ? That she’s cute, happy, beautiful and incredibly sweet-natured ? That at birth, she carried on her fragile shoulders the weight of the expectations of so many people who eagerly awaited her arrival ? That her parents are grateful everyday, nay every minute, for having been blessed with such a healthy and strong child ? That my heart overflows while I lie next to her every night and watch her little chest go up and down ? That she is calmed by Mark Knopfler’s Shangri-La, Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence and my voice as I sing Billy Joel’s Goodnight, My Angel ?

The third month is when they start to unclench their fists, when their fingers find their way to the mouth much more smoothly and precisely, when they start to look around and be more curious about their surroundings. Maya is doing all that and more. She had a strong neck and back at birth and that continues. When placed on her tummy, she holds her head and upper torso up completely, supporting most of her upper body on just her abdomen.


She’s starting to roll over, but it’s not very smooth yet and she doesn’t have the hang of how to do it precisely. She can also stand up for almost a minute with support. This is also the time infants are open and friendly to everyone, not just their primary caregivers and Maya is blowing away friends and strangers with her happy, 1000 watt smile.

We started toilet training her a little over a month back and it’s been a month at least that we haven’t had a soiled diaper. She took to peeing and pooping in the toilet quite easily. Even Shanthala’s mom, representing a generation that raised their children that way, was surprised by how early Maya began and how far she’s already come.

We started taking her out more often now, visiting the farmer’s market twice, visiting friends and even having lunch at a restaurant. Do it all now, we’re told, because they haven’t started to crawl yet. Once they start to crawl, they’ll hate being stuck in a chair and forget dining out then, our experienced friends tell us.


If Kitty’s last breath is the very symbol of death, of the end of life, for me, Maya’s turning her head to look at me from the OR table when I called out to her “Sunshine”, is the very symbol of birth, the beginning of life.

This is all the heaven we’ve got
Right here, where we are,
In our Shangri-La – Mark Knopfler