PROFESSION MUSIC
HOBBY MOUNTAINEERING
“IF T.M. KRISHNA sees a boat, he has to rock it,” quipped comedian Alexander Babu. It might have been a joke, but the best jokes always carry an undercurrent of truth. If Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna sees a wrong, he will right it; that’s just the way he’s wired. In his music, he is both an innovator and a disruptor. Although hailing from a Brahmin family in Chennai, Krishna has been a long-time critic of the Brahmin dominance of the Carnatic music industry. In 2016, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for “breaking barriers of caste and class to unleash what music has to offer, not just for some but for all”. The same year, he launched a Carnatic classical music festival with volunteers from the fishermen community. In 2020, during the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, he sang Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Hum dekhenge’ at Shaheen Bagh in four different languages. In 2021, he moved the Madras High Court challenging the new IT rules. He has, on several occasions, criticised the government for propagating lies and jeopardising Hinduism.
When the Madras Music Academy conferred the Sangita Kalanidhi on Krishna last year, it deeply divided the Carnatic music fraternity, with musicians lathering him with love or loathing. There were, however, some silent spectators looking on from the sidelines―majestic, aloof and non-judgmental: the mountains. That’s why their call has been irresistible to the musician for over a decade.
“In many ways the mountains have the same rhythm as music,” he says. “I’m generally a person who is doing 50 things at once, but when I’m on a mountain, time comes to a standstill and everything slows down―my mind, my distractions, my obsessions…. It gives me the same clarity that my music gives me. When I sing, I get a clarity that I can’t get in the muddle of everyday life. I’m able to see things objectively and with sensitivity. Mountains also give me that.”
Top of the world: Krishna (middle) summits Cayambe mountain in Ecuador.
Krishna went on his first climb in 2013, to Stok Kangri in Ladakh. It was a non-technical climb, with no need of ropes or harnesses. He kept a steady pace for a first-timer, but the cold was biting and the climb was hard. What he remembers about that climb is a dog which bounded ahead of them. “It sprinted up the mountain, summited, came down and then sprinted up again, as though it was no big deal,” says Krishna with a laugh. “That dog was literally rubbing it in, asking what was taking us so long.” They summited before sunrise, and watching the world spread out below, all aglow, was “exquisite”. His friend asked him to sing something, so he sang ‘Jagadodharana’. Since then, he has been singing something at the summit of every mountain he has climbed, “whatever I feel like, depending on my mood”.
He tries to go on a climb once every year. So far, he has climbed eight mountains in five countries (Nepal, Russia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina) and summited six of them. There have been mishaps. Once, for example, he fell and hurt his knee while climbing Argentina’s Aconcagua mountains in 2019. It was a long summit day. They left camp at 1am and summited at 4pm the next day. On the way back, Krishna was exhausted. The terrain was rocky and he tripped on his crampons (the attachments on your mountaineering boots to give better grip) and fell flat on his left knee. “The guy in front of me shouted, ‘Roll to your right’. Because on the left was a sheer drop. So I rolled to the right and thankfully, escaped with nothing worse than a hurt knee, which, however, took months to heal,” he says.
Another time, he was climbing Huayna Potosi in Bolivia. His guide, Rachel, was from Portland. Everything was going well till about 4am, when they encountered an ice wall. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to bring a harness for his ice axe, so it slipped from his hand and fell into a crevasse. There was the option of Rachel rappelling down to get it, but Krishna was not ok with that as he would not be able to help her if something went wrong. And so, to his deep disappointment, he could not summit that mountain. “The funny thing is, the next day, somebody called Rachel and asked for the location of the crevasse. Then another guy rappelled down and got the ice axe for himself. So at least somebody got to use it,” smiles Krishna.
The greatest allure of the mountains for Krishna is the brief glimpse it affords him of profundity, a kind of splintering of the senses. The first time he felt like this was when he listened to D.K. Pattammal as a boy in the 1980s. He had gone alone to the morning concert. The hall was so full that he had to sit on the stairs. Pattammal was singing ‘Shanti Nilava Vendum’. He did not understand the words, but for some reason, he was deeply touched. Afterwards, he walked to his grandmother’s house crying all the way. That was true magic for him. It is the same wand that the mountains wave. When he describes watching a vivid sunrise from Lobuche East in Nepal, it is almost like he’s drunk on beauty. The mountains, for him, hold a deep mystery that he will never solve, and yet will never stop trying to.