Anglo-Indians In Cinema: Of Love And Longing outlookindia.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from outlookindia.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The composer’s transcultural experiments were always intense and persuasive
“The Brahma-rakshasa needs more lines!” “The chorus can’t drown out the High Priest!” “The duet works, now shorten the moonlight aria!” For six years, between 2003 and 2009, enigmatic communications like these would fly across Mumbai by phone, by fax, and by courier between Vanraj Bhatia’s studio and mine. During those years, I worked closely with the legendary composer and music director on an opera, Agni Varsha (‘The Fire and the Rain’), based on Girish Karnad’s play, which the playwright had translated into English from his original Kannada. While I developed the libretto, Vanraj composed the music. In the process, I spent many delightful and sometimes exasperating hours with the maestro, listening as he played passages from our evolving work on the piano, imbibing a series of masterclasses on tempo, orchestration, polyphony, and the seemingly impossible project of creating