there are these ants here, really tiny ones, redish brown and black (and they bite/sting which is pretty painful given how small they are), which can find food pretty much anywhere in my room within 1/2-couple hours, a little stream of ants hurrying back and forth along a scented path, crawling out of some crevice across the room.
i take back everything i used to believe about hotter, more humid climates fostering cultures that are more relaxed and laid back. might have worked for hawaii, but india is completely the opposite. the schedule here is nuts: people generally seem to eat dinner at 9-10pm yet wake up at 5-6am, plus it's a 6-day work week. though my tamil skillz are still coming along very slowly, people seem, at least especially in the streets, to use the language pretty aggressively, and this seems to be reflected in tamil television (which the elderly lady i'm living with watches a lot of). the streets of chennai are definitely not the place for politeness and courtesy. it's take whatever you can get whenever you can get it.
went to an interesting concert last week, called a jugalbandi (a duet for two instruments). in this case, the concert was a contrast of carnatic (south indian) with hindustani (north indian), so the instrumentation was carnatic violin+mridangam (south indian drum) (+tanbur) and sitar+tabla. the first hour was a carnatic recital, the second a hindustani recital, and the third hour (3 hours is not unusual..) was all of them playing together, playing in the ragam charukesi (major scale+flat7+flat6... sounds like major on the bottom and minor on the top). having not listened to hindustani music at all since i got here, hearing the differences between them was eye-opening. while the two often use similar pitch material, the treatment is very different, hindustani seems to sit on the dissonant pitches of a scale (say, scale degree 2, 7, sharp 4, etc), while carnatic music seems to tend more to realize these notes as aberrations away from the more consonant intervals (tonic, dominant). of course, the rhythmic content is totally different between the two... both are mathematical but in really different ways. but actually what was probably more striking for me than the differences in musical content were the differences in presentation, reminding me of conversations with my teacher about the use of gimmicky styles of playing. while i enjoyed both soloists' performances, it was hard to really compare them because the sitar player played in so much more of a virtuosic style than the violinist. when the two played together, the violinist seemed to try to match the virtuosity, but didn't quite get there. but i think that was partly due to instrumentation and acoustics (sitar has an incredibly bright, vibrant timbre compared to violin, which (especially with the mic-ing) is much darker and as a result ended up covered sometimes).
by the way, the ants theme is only further expanding the uncanny parallels i've been feeling between india and 100 years of solitude (marquez)... magical-realism (currently reading midnight's children). there's a building in chennai called vivekanander illam but commonly referred to as 'ice house,' built to store brought in from america before ice-making processes existed in india.
