Dr. Charles E Langs (Pic: http://www.med.nyu.edu/biosketch/langsc01)
My mind routinely flies off on a million tangents. It is a good thing nature does not require me to file my flight plan.
As in life, one of the things I like to do on this blog is connect seemingly unconnected dots or create reasons to connect them. Today’s post is one example of that reflex.
Let me start with Dr. Charles E Langs, a New York nephrologist with whom I had a chance meeting on a flight from Chicago in September. I had a debilitating migraine attack on a full Southwest flight and was assigned the middle seat (5B). One may be able to manage either a migraine attack or a middle airline seat but doing both must qualify as a nightmare of epic proportions peculiar to modern life.
As I kept clutching my head in my hands and at one point even detached it from my torso and held it like a helmet, Dr. Langs’s doctorly instincts sharpened. At that point he did not really need his medical degree to tell that I had a severe migraine attack. So he began chatting me up with the easy empathy of an accomplished family doctor. That conversation continued throughout the nearly two-hour flight during which we discussed literature and classical music and everything in between. It struck me instantly that Dr. Langs was an enormously well-read man. As it turned out his friend Christopher Hitchens thought so as well.
In fact, Hitchens asked Charles if there was anything that he had not read. Apparently there was not much. Not much of consequence anyway. Charles gently mentioned his passion for Western classical music and how he was learning to play the piano. It was obvious to me that he was not learning to strike a few notes at a party where everyone was drunk. He was learning it seriously.
To cut the short story shorter, by the time the captain announced that we were landing my migraine had subsided significantly. I mean significantly enough for me to face New York. It turned out that Dr. Langs had deliberately engaged me to distract me from my intense pain. The other consequence of the conversation was that we became friends.
That story ends tangent one. Tangent two is about the great Indian saxophonist Manohari Singh who died recently. No single piece of instrumental music has endured in my mind for close to four decades and revitalized itself every time I have heard it as much as one played by Singh for the 1964 Hindi movie ‘Kashmir ki Kali’ composed by the ever melodious O P Nayyar.
I found this remarkable clip of Singh playing to a handful of his admirers the song ‘Yeh duniya usiki zamana usika”. There is a lot I can say on the enchanting little performance but instead I chose to send it to Dr. Langs, someone totally unconnected with Hindi cinema music. I sought his comments to see what he thought of it as someone learning Western classical music.
“Although I am woefully ignorant when it comes to the music of the sax, I truly was moved by his playing,” Charles says. He then adds something that I could have said but did not. “Mournful, melancholic, achingly beautiful. Goes right to the soul. He had that exceptional gift of eliminating the barrier between instrument and player. He, in effect, became the instrument.” Singh does indeed become the saxophone.
This brings me to my third and final tangent. Mohammed Rafi, by most reckoning India’s greatest playback singer, would have turned 87 yesterday. Although he died in 1980, the passage of three decades has done nothing to diminish his dulcet genius. While he sang a few thousand songs and most with uncompromising brilliance, I am choosing this one merely because it fits my post. Pay attention to the opening of the song and how effortless he is. This has to be one of Nayyar’s best compositions.
P.S.: Just before the onset of another migraine headache, I played Singh’s impromptu riff. The migraine disappeared.
P.P.S.: I am very likely wrong on this one but the saxophonist in the movie clip may have been Singh himself. If so, that would be neat.
