How the Season satiates both the soul and the stomach

A recent study revealed that food tasted best when served with quiet classical music and a hint of background chatter.
| Photo Credit: Illustration by SAAI

Shakespeare’s immortal quote, ‘If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it,’ is arguably one of the earliest examples of attempting to conflate food with music. Others have since taken the Bard’s quote literally and turned it on its head. To clear any ambiguity, in the quote, food is employed as a metaphor catering to Young Love’s heart and not to its stomach. We are familiar with the misogynistic aphorism suggesting to a homemaker that the best way to her man’s heart is through his stomach. In our enlightened, gender-neutral times, we would regard that as an unpardonable solecism.

While cogitating over food and music, the Chennai Music Season has crept up on us and thoughts turn to Thodi and Kalyani as they do to scrumptious bajjis, bondas, badam halwas and tumblers of steaming, hot coffee. However, I have no desire to take you on a gastronomic tour of Chennai’s sabha canteens and make value judgements on the cuisine on offer; a subject that has been done to death over the years by several writers, yours truly included. My mandate is somewhat different.

Do food and music enjoy a symbiotic relationship? That is the question I am grappling with. You are what you eat, some may aver. Interestingly, an international study on the subject, Music to Eat By concluded that there is empirical evidence to establish that listening to music while eating is associated with longer eating time than eating without music. Ergo, the correlation between eating and enjoying an artiste’s leisurely essay of Bhairavi is beneficial to the digestive process. The study goes on to imply that the slower the music, the longer you will take to eat the same amount of food, resulting in more efficient mastication and digestion. Q.E.D? Hmmm. I am ambivalent, but clearly this obsession with health foods and revolutionary eating habits goes out of the window. The much-touted, new-wave eating style of starving for 11 hours before eating two slices of bread is just so much baloney. Just listen to a 20-minute rendition of the late M.D. Ramanathan’s sonorous essay of the raga Kedaram and time your three-course meal with the maestro’s offering. Your digestive enzymes will sing hosannas (or thillanas) to your pancreas. You will be a healthier man than I am, Gunga Din.

To be contrarian, let me posit that the converse may be equally true. If it was the brilliant, iconoclastic maestro, the late G.N. Balasubramanian’s rapid-fire Kamboji swaraprastaras at the speed of light that you gorged on, your attempt to keep pace with your food intake could throw your digestive system clean out of whack. I am only speculating here. I am not a gastroenterologist, but I am a die-hard fan of GNB’s path-breaking music, and I would not risk speed-matching my luncheon with his thrilling pyrotechnics. I will allow that the Music Academy is provided with well-appointed, clean toilets. However, I have no desire to break Usain Bolt’s sprint record, holding my stomach, to dash off to its ablutionary sanctuary every time a present-day GNB wannabe’s brigas go through the roof.

Some of the leading sabhas in Chennai, which come with attached canteens during the Season, provide gastronomes with sound systems from which you can enjoy the music being performed inside the auditorium. While this is a thoughtful move on the part of the sabhas, it is axiomatic that the crowds milling around the canteen will be in inverse proportion to the quality of the music being performed. If the canteen is overcrowded, the artiste on stage must be a nervous newcomer or an over-the-hill has-been. If the canteen is virtually empty, a 5-star marquee vocalist is holding a full-house spellbound. That is a simple equation, arrived at by years of observing this unique, intuitive mutualism you will find only during the Music Season, when canteen cuisine and the performing arts fight for primacy.

I read somewhere recently about a study that revealed that food tasted best when served with quiet classical music and a hint of background chatter. This survey, assuming it is authentic, was presumably conducted in some western country. I arrived at that facile conclusion only because here in Chennai, background chatter can never be merely hinted at, however quiet the music. Conversation at our canteens, when every table is taken and people are literally sitting cheek by jowl, jostling for space while attempting to convey their portions of idli and chutney into their mouths in double quick time, will be louder than today’s thunderous tani avartanams. Much of the elevated decibel level has to do with impatient and hungry rasikas hollering to the servers to take their orders. At times, things can get out of hand. ‘I ordered ven pongal, not tomato upma.’

In recent years, the customer profile at sabha canteens has had precious little to do with Carnatic music aficionados. People from other communities such as the well-heeled Marwaris and Gujaratis who live in the vicinity, conspicuous by their absence at kutcheries, flock to these ‘music canteens’ in droves, much to the consternation of our irate mamas, mamis and mavens. “Why can’t they go to a proper hotel? The sabhas should only allow those who can tell the difference between Kalyani and Sankarabharanam.” Now there’s a thought.

The vox populi has spoken. Are the sabhas taking heed?