When I first met Aravindan in 2014, he was working for The Hindu Tamil. I was meeting journalists from various publications in Chennai and he was one of the people who wanted to speak to me. When he was informed that the interview would be a short one, he politely refused to engage and asked if we could meet later for a long-form interview. This was quintessential Aravindan.
He was never interested in superficial conversations that did not go below the surface. A person of depth and nuance, his every question was layered and allowed for passages in various directions. He made you pause, think and, at times, forced you to add subtlety to your opinions and positions. Aravindan was a thinker who could not tolerate flatness in intellectual activity and would convey this to you with a probing question that would be accompanied by a smile or a chuckle.
Within a few months of our first meeting, Aravindan reviewed a music film titled One in which I had sung. The film was about listening to Karnatik music in its barest form when the musician was in the wilderness. Today, with the advent of mobile cameras and other technological advancements, such videos are often seen on Instagram. But, at that time it was a pathbreaking effort.
What Aravindan saw in the film was something more than visual beauty, technical proficiency or musical excellence. He was not an aficionado of Karnatik music, something he often told me. But he had a sense of music’s existential effect on people. He felt music at a deep level and had a realisation of its human value. This was not limited by its social-political impact. Aravindan always spoke about art being personal and individually transformative.
Aravindan said the film took art beyond being a performative act. The film was not about the musician but about receiving unguarded music and allowing it to be imbued by the environment. This was the philosopher, the spiritualist, in Aravindan. But his quest was not cluttered by religious dogmas, philosophical ideologies, or mystical apparitions. His seeking was within the reality that he experienced and saw around him.
I believe some of the books that he chose to translate were also because of his deep interest in the human condition. He loved to discuss the philosopher J Krishnamurti, and we would go back and forth debating his thoughts and words. Words really mattered to Aravindan.
Our relationship shifted once he agreed to translate my book A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story for the Tamil publisher Kalachuvadu. This was the first of my three books that he translated. Working on a book with Aravindan was a beautiful experience. He would work on a few chapters and then we would read them together. His printouts would have questions and mark-ups. Each one of those would sometimes consume the entire duration of our meeting. Our conversations around a line or chapter would more often than not float seamlessly into other terrains: politics, society, caste, faith, gender, and poverty.
One could reduce the appropriateness of a word just to semantics but that was never enough for Aravindan. What he sought in his translation was not merely accuracy. He would ask me to describe the word I had used. I had to give him a sensory experience of a word. He wanted to feel the word. Then while deciding upon the Tamil equivalent, he would repeatedly read the line. The chosen word had to sound and read fluently along with the rest of the sentence. This was what I would call ‘musico-semantic’ sensibility.
Aravindan might not have known music, but he definitely knew the music in the sound of words. He was the first translator to find appropriate Tamil words for innumerable technical expressions in music. Until him, generic emotive expressions were used for musical terms. If he had to compromise on a word, Aravindan would be very disappointed.
He was also a person who gave me feedback on what other people said about something I had said or written. With his non-confrontational demeanour, he would engage with those who disagreed with me. He would listen to their thoughts and place them before me along with his own interpretations. This was extremely useful because I was able to see how someone from a very different social construct viewed my positions. Aravindan did this for no other reason than the fact that he cared for me and wanted me to grow.
Beyond everything I have said here, Aravindan was a kind and generous human being. Someone who rarely said no to a request. He was inspired by ideas, imaginations, and language, and worked tirelessly at lightning speed without ever making anyone feel obligated. He was quiet and insightful, never flaunting his intellectual breadth and depth. He was so subtle in his presence that we might have even taken him for granted.
His loss reminds us that people like him who do not occupy the front pages but enrich society everyday with their mind and heart must be celebrated while they are with us. Once they are gone, there is a vacuum that cannot be filled.
This piece was first published in Tamil in Kalachuvadu magazine.
TM Krishna is a musician, author, and activist.
