The Mad Mad Madras Season

Mini Naidoo spent her formative years in the verdant tea estates of Assam from where she imbibed a deep and abiding affinity towards nature. She did not receive any formal training in art but attended a charcoal portraits course at Manila for six weeks in 1990. She paints and writes for creative satisfaction, more by instinct than technique. She started selling her art works as a means of augmenting her efforts to raise funds for social welfare activities in which she has been involved since 1984. At present she does voluntary work as Chairperson of Projects at RAKSHA, an NGO in Kochi which helps children with multiple handicaps.

Her art-works are in the private collections of Tata Tea, Malayala Manorama, Amalgam Seafoods, Kancor Spices, Forbes, Beeyu Overseas and those of her many friends and well-wishers.

Hindustani musicians take great pride in the meditative/contemplative/spiritual quality of their music, and are busily encashing this image in the international market. They do so on the strength of the improvisatory skill which they have learnt, and which they have absorbed well enough to distinguish their music from the kriti-based Carnatic music and pre-composed Western classical music.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that, over the last few decades, the improvisatory process in Hindustani music has witnessed a steady impoverishment. This could be because the merukhand, a sophisticated system of cultivating the improvisational skill, has fallen into disuse. A fresh look at merukhand is warranted in a larger perspective today because information technology provides excellent prospects for its revival and use as a training device.