If you stumbled upon this post, reading this introduction might help
I don’t remember who the singer was but Umayalapuram Shivaraman was the Mridangist. When the concert was on for an hour or so, the singer started the next keertane, suddenly a member of the audience, who was Kannada activist, created a ruckus by loudly admonishing the singer that he was singing all keertanes in languages other than Kannada and that it was an insult to Kannada and the people of Mysore. Fortunately quite a few members of the audience shouted back at him and silenced him. The activist walked out and the concert continued.
Umayalapuram just sat there without playing. The singer gestured to him to start playing. Umayalapuram impishly said, “I have not brought my Kannada Mridangam. How can I play?” The whole hall erupted in laughter and applause at his cheeky response.
Then he continued in his inimitable brilliant way.
As a footnote, years later the same activist disrupted a meeting of the alumni of the Yuvaraja’s College of Mysore, held to formulate the plans for the diamond jubilee celebrations of the college. The meeting was being conducted, in English, by an esteemed professor of physics of the college who was also an alumnus. The activist’s demand was that the meeting be conducted in Kannada. The professor very calmly told the protestor that many of the alumni were from other states and did not know Kannada and hence, in order not to exclude them, it was pertinent to conduct the meeting in English and continued.
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