It so happened when I heard about the capabilities of TRS, his knowledge and his generosity as a teacher (a friend of mine learnt from him as well and would tell me how enthusiastic and dedicated he was even at that age), and was trying to find recordings of his music that I found out about this infamous thesis incident, courtesy google, the all knowing guru of modern mankind.
I even read quite a few excerpts of it, if you can call that a "Ph.D thesis" - which started somewhere from the trinity to composers and vidwans and musicologists and instrumentalists and all that was contemporary at the time) -- in my honest opinion, it was a mish mash of below average forum posts, youtube comments and a collage of random condescending gossip, hearsay, the occasional hyperbole or the pat on the back, with maybe a fact here or there that was already open knowledge anyway, at times open trolling, and some misgivings and some genuine observations that have been expressed by others in better tones. There was even a separate section taking cheap shots at the music of the great ladies...
And if you're thinking of "music criticism", the truth is that nothing and nobody is beyond it, but even criticism has standards. This was not a counter to hagiography. Some excerpts were so cringe-worthy it made me think of what would happen if faking news or the onion wrote about Carnatic Music
. Some of the most condescending posts on this forum have been outdone by that draft in that regard...
Yeah, I was reminded of this :-
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/sni ... hone-23181 -- that's the level of satire I'm talking about, in a manuscript intended for a doctoral dissertation....
But this is the part I didn't like -- you take something like this, that wasn't even published and which should have been dispatched to the "vambu" bin right away and turned to smoke -- you bring it out in the open, pass equally sarcastic criticisms on it, use this to ruin the reputation and careers of two musicians by creating a scandal -- this is very poor journalism. There was definitely an agenda there for sure. Otherwise all this would have just come and gone off the radar. Why raid the garbage bin?
If anything, the moral of the story is never to wash dirty linen in public, and never allow flammable material to be put in writing, and never willingly fan an ember into a forest fire. Don't do trolling in the name of research. And always dispose off the trash thoroughly.
I hope I never have to discuss this incident again -- it makes me sad to think about it - a brilliant musician like TRS ending up being known for this. IMHO, All these opinions and satires that belong indoors firmly between one's two ears should have never come out in the first place. I mean, many books have been written about CM musicians where their pluses and minuses have been made known, but this thesis was trolling it. Those things ought to be left to the tigers and the porcines and sheep and trolls and all other species of anonymous rasikas, and that stinks enough already.
There is so much about TRS mama's music I have admired -- his knowledge, diction, laya and pallavi expertise. It is now a dream of mine that will never be realized of learning pallavi singing from him. I only regret that I did not meet him (and so many others) when he was alive. Anyway, a nice RTP to take my mind of this is very much the need of the hour....