The 'chai' in Tchaikovsky

Beautiful things must be come across in a beautiful way to be truly appreciated, or so I thought until I was made to eat my words.

Quite literally too. My mother was making jantukulu and a seven year old me had snuck up into the kitchen when she wasn't looking and had managed to spell my name out with the dough in , what at that time, seemed to me like a display of amazing dexterity. Only, when my mother came back and saw the mess her precious kitchen was in, she was ummm, mad, to put it very lightly.

As, a punishment, I was made to eat the fried version of it as owing to the amount of dough in it, it was bound to come out of the oil, all soggy and messy (I agree, my mother never could think of suitable punishments. That was when she used to spank me).

Anyway, so there was me eating it all up and pretending to be feeling bad too when all of a sudden this beautiful sound filled the room. I watched, riveted, as Jerry, after finding himself on a table filled with food set out for a very formal dinner, gorges on it and then proceeds to dance with a little show-piece maiden.

And that was my introduction to Tchaikovsky.

Nobody in my family was the least bit musical types. True, there was the stack of cassettes of Boney M, Tina Turner, Asha Bhonsle and other assorted odd singers belonging to my Dad but that was that. Then me grew up, and also grew up with me, my tastes in music, ranging from ABBA's Dancing Queen to Metallica's Am I Evil? ( All, I have to admit, fallen in love with haphazardly, some heard in Hollywood movies and some at homes of my Dad's Russian and French colleagues).

But all that was more of rebellion than anything until that fateful day when ironically, Tom & Jerry was to give me my first peek into the bewitching sounds of a true maestro. It was years later when I was being tutored in Carnatic Music like most good South Indian Girls (SIGs), that I discovered who the maestro was. My music teacher had a showcase full of 'weird English music' and one slow day, when I randomly inserted a cassette in to the player and pressed the 'PLAY' button, there he was, finally proclaimed in his full Russian glory. Of course it took me another 10 years to get the name and the spelling right!

After that, I started my inroads into Western Classical music and discovered the beauty of Mozart, the structure of Beethoven and the melancholy tunes of Chopin ( the No.6 Prelude) but Tchaikovsky returned to haunt me again and again. So much that there finally came a time when the only way I could fall asleep in strange new hostel life during my post-graduate days, was while listening to Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, The Chinese Dance, The Waltz of the Flowers and the Arabian Dance (I have to profess my obsession for The Nutcracker here).

It became my comforter (I used to play it on my machine at Cognizant at an ultra low volume when the others around me used to complain about the noise and then immediately play jarring Bollywood numbers on their phones), my means of getting over emotional turmoils (the best way to getting over a fight with your boyfriend is to imagine glaring at him with the First movement of Symphony No.5 by Beethoven playing in the background), and generally getting lost in myself.

True, I did not know a thing about Classical Music. True I could not distinguish the Baroque from the Classical and again, the Romantic. I could not play the Piano and not even knew of anybody who could. But that did not deter me. I did occasionally come across "Oh Western Classical? Thank goodness, my mother had cultivated in me the art of appreciating it from a very early age", "Western Classical? What a snob", "Like fine wine, like a good scotch" and even " Bah! All that humbug. Too complicated" but I refused to let go.

As for me, I rallied on, perfectly happy with Tchaikovsky in the background, a good book in front and a cup of chai in hand content in soaking in the beauty first heard on Cartoon Network by a seven year old.