How could you, Tiruvarur Bhaktavatsalam, be there at 7 pm?

It was well over half-an-hour past the scheduled time – 7 pm – when mridangist Tiruvarur Bhaktavatsalam turned up for the concert, huffing and puffing. All the while, the vocalist of the evening, T V Gopalakrishnan, sat apologetically in front of the mike, saying once in a while that the drummer was expected any moment and the concert would take off.

Well, you know, you have to take a sympathetic view of things, I said to myself. After all, in this goddamn Chennai traffic, to reach Besant Nagar Varasidhi Vinakayar Koil from anywhere in the city is one has to navigate his way through traffic snarls.

Bhaktavatsalam also started playing nice and soft, TVG was in his elements and the concert was really progressing well and, what with we Chennai’ites having Ukridge’s ‘big, broad, flexibile outlook’, Bhaktavatsalam’s late-coming was almost forgiven, forgotten.

But the way nature works is rummy.

If the mridangist had not picked the mike, had he not broken-off into a yappy commercial about TVG’s genius, he would not have blurted out the truth about why he was late.

Turns out that he had an earlier accompanying engagement—a concert of T V Sankaranarayanan at Narada Gana Sabha—which was to end at 7 pm.

Tiruvarur Bhaktavatsalam had undertaken to play at two concerts on the evening (of December 29), the first of which was to end at 7 pm and the second to begin at 7 pm and the venues were at least 45 minutes away in the thick evening traffic!

Eloquent and expansive, Bhaktavatsalam told the audience in his unsolicited and unnecessary ‘speech’ that TVS was so reverential of TVG, that when he (Bhaktavatsalam) told TVS about his (Bhaktavatsalam’s) next programme, TVS was kind enough to end his concert fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

In doing this, the colourful and cheerful mridangist revealed his disservice to lovers of carnatic music—he not made the audience at TVG’s concert wait for him for half an hour, but also deprived rasikas of TVS of 15 minutes of music.

I brought this up in my review of TVG’s concert in The Hindu (7th January 2010), but the Hindu editorial Desk deleted the all references to the incident, retaining only a mention of the fact that the drummer came late by half an hour. The Desk felt that my candour would earn me a bad reputation and overruled my submissions that I did not care much about reputation.

Off late, Bhaktavatsalam has also developed a bad habit of seizing the mike and breaking into speeches in praise of the main artistes in the middle of concerts, a trend that perhaps owes its birth to Umayalpuram Sivaraman.

I have nothing against Tiruvarur Bhaktavatsalam, whom I do not know personally and whom I consider one of the most gifted mridangists of our times. But it helps nobody to shut up when we ought to speak up. We rasikas are partly to blame, because we give so much of blind adulation to the artistes that some of them begin to believe they are above reproach.

We have to tell them that while we love them and respect them, they can’t take us for granted.