In the past week or so, as part of my effort to turn my life around and reduce regrets when on a ventilator, I have allocated some time daily to study something interesting. This has been raags, despite my tin ear. I’ve been working my way through a few websites, including the one below, a rather spectacular one of carefully handwritten pages, with titles written using a ruler or perhaps a stencil, numbered stickers for page numbers, and all on pink paper printed with flowers. I was feeling rather glum about it yesterday as I had listened to an instructional video which tried to show how two raags based on the same thaat (scale) could sound quite different, and I couldn’t really say they sounded different to me. But today I did yesterday’s work again, and did indeed hear something. Maybe it’s starting to click, maybe.
I briefly got all hopeful and had the excellent idea of buying a dizi, a Chinese flute, to play the notes myself, and then a brief fantastical vision of becoming The World’s! First! Exponent! of raags on a dizi. Then I remembered the tin ear and my childhood inability to tune a triangle, not to mention that even if I bought a dizi I was due to leave Taiwan in a week and no one could teach me how to play it. So, the dream dissipated into the air.