Youtube Tabla wonders

Some amazing old footage of musical greats needs to be acknowledged.

Here is Ustab Ahmad Jaan Thirakwa on the Tabla with Ustad Habib Khan on the Vichitra Veena (no one plays it anymore)




Pandit Anokhe Lal of Benaras




Ustad Tafo Khan of Pakistan



One more of Tafo Khan



The late Ustad Amir Khan with the late Pandit Shyamal Bose, with whom I spent many days in Kolkata. He taught me some pieces in Bihag and taught my son Tabla. He was a wonderful short-tempered genius. Memories of a lifetime.....

Rupak Taal

A nice seven beat taal (3 + 4). A favourite for many, though I do not find it easy since I didn't apply myself when I should have.

Here is an example



Here is a piece by Zakir Hussain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvPMLQSz4y0

Basant

And this is Basant from a Pakistani movie.

Horrendously difficult on a violin, mathematically brilliant and lovely to hear.





A modern version from Rashid Khan

The beauty of impermanence

As time passes by and one gets older, it seems right that memories become a burden. Its great that nature dulls the sharpness of some poignant thoughts of events and people.

One looks back with surprise - was I that dumb? How could I have said such and such or done this or that? Was that really me?

I read a science fiction story once that talked about the conquest of death and the accompanying agony of those who wanted to be rid of too many memories, good or bad. The fear of passing on then perhaps went away. We shall move from one reality to another and never know the difference. The observance of cruelty, of a certain God who keeps desperate hopes alive but looks away at the suffering and pain of the innocent - a message garbled by philosophical rubbish, designed to keep us sane - yes, this is not a reality I am interested in. To that extent, I am happy when time accelerates and the pain of the innocent stops. But the cries of their agony will last beyond time.

I wrote a book many years ago on the survival of the animal kingdom and our own eradication as a punishment for centuries of depravity. The logic of suffering of the mute escapes me entirely. But we are superior, we are told, and have the right to erase and inflict.

Basant - Mallika Pukhraj and Tahira Syed

An extraordinary piece based on Raag Basant, a simple beat and two brilliant singers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq3bb33sElU

swimming in the cauvery

Water & Fire

A great trip to an idyllic and picturesque spot called Manchanbele near Bangalore. We had some terrific fun leaping off like fools from 40 feet cliffs into deep water, kayaking and swimming.

And we were face to face with a forest fire that stopped 20 feet away from where we were.

I was happy that I was as fit as guys half my age, which may not be saying much, given our sedentary lifestyles.

Pups & the House

A room with a view

These pups were born on the site.

Side view

Front View

Another view

Finally, a Great Concert

After months of waiting and watching, I finally attended a great concert.

We listened to Alka Deo Marulkar of Goa at the Gokhale Institute.

After a little warming up hesitation, she really stunned the audience. These were the Raags she sang

1. Marwa
2. Purvi (truly delightful)
3. Tilang (a variation)
4. Nat Bhairav (I think, but I could not precisely nail it down)
5. Bhairavi

I greatly appreciated the peace on her face when she sang. I think she is an evolved soul.

The tabla was a bit loud. The accompanists were very average.

Don't miss her if she visits your part of the Galaxy.

Points to ponder

There is only one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, that is an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
- Stephen W. Hawking

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
- Stephen W. Hawking


The visible world is the invisible organization of energy.
- Physicist Heinz Pagels


There is no reality in the absence of observation.
- The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics


No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.
- J.S. Bell


If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
- Niels Bohr


Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.
- Claude Bernard

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
- Lewis Carroll


Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
- Niels Bohr


To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
- Copernicus


Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
- Albert Einstein

The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!
- Lord Byron


The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science.
- Albert Einstein


Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
- Stephen W. Hawking

It gives me a deep comforting sense that ‘things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.’
- Helen Keller
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
- William James


We feel and know that we are eternal.
- Edmund Spenser


As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.
- Carl Jung


Time is not a line, but a series of now points.
- Taisen Deshimaru


The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.
- Chang-Tzu

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become-to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.
- The Upanishads

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the law of the universe will be simpler.
- H.D. Thoreau

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
- Carl Gustav Jung

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
- Winston Churchill

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity...and I'm not sure about the universe.
- Albert Einstein

Know thyself.
- Socrates

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
- James Joyce, Ulysses

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
- Albert Einstein

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
- John Maynard Keynes

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
- Democritus of Abdera

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
- George Bernard Shaw

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the violin sings

Yesterday my violin sang.

New strings that have had time to settle and some great musical inspiration helped. I am a very average violinist but sometimes the sounds of a contented violin are captivating. Especially when one of playing for oneself.

a great piece in Raag Paraj was the inspiration - check this out http://sarangi.info/sarangi/vocal/ratnakar_paraj.wma

Paraj is related to Basant, Puriyadhanashri etc and all flow from Purvi Thaat.

Who are my visitors?

I see that I get a few repeated anonymous visitors who do not leave comments.

You don't have to, but do write and tell me who you are. It would be nice.

Englewood CO
NJ
Delhi

Oddly, a very common search that leads people to my blog is 'forensic'. :-)

Throw them into Jail for Negligence and Dereliction of Duty

While in power, they have security, power, foreign trips - all at our expense.

When there's a problem, they defer to the Italian 'High Command' and 'offer to resign'. If the High Command decides after deliberations to accept their resignations, they just ...LEAVE!!!!! Nothing happens to them! They probably get accommodated as Governors or even Presidents. Nothing happens to them. NOTHING!!! They are NOT ACCOUNTABLE TO US!

This MUST CHANGE! They cannot just resign and get away with this!

These guys should be thrown into jail for negligence and dereliction of duty! They must be held accountable and punished severely!

The great country of Israel

How I admire Israel....

A country where the people have learnt lessons from history and treat every single citizen and his or her grief with great tenderness, while making sure avenging deaths is never a lower priority.



For this poor child, the entire country stood up

"Moshe, you don't have a father and a mother to hold you in their arms... no parents to hug and kiss you," Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky said as mourners dressed in black chanted hymns with tears rolling down their eyes. "You are the child of entire Israel," Kotlarsky said adding the community would take care of the boy, whose parents Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his wife Rivka, 28, were among those killed when terrorists stormed the Nariman House in Mumbai.

How utterly moving, how utterly beautiful. I have no doubt that in parallel, those who killed or ordered the killing of the boy's parents will be hunted down and hopefully tortured continuously (not to death please, that's an escape) for years on end.

And now cut to India, where &^%&^%& politicians like the Chief Minister of Kerala, Achuthanandan said this about the family of Major Unnikrishnan who was killed in Mumbai



Achuthanandan, who went to offer his condolences at the Bangalore house of National Security Guard commando Sandeep Unnikrishnan on Sunday night, was turned away by his father. The chief minister reacted sharply, saying that "even a dog would not have gone to their house if he had not been a martyr".

This #$@)(*%$# dares to say this!

And where was the Defence Minister? Why did he not attend the funeral?

I forgot - he is busy figuring out who the next Chief Minister of Maharashtra is to be.

Patil, Patil & Patil

More weird stuff.
29 Nov 2008, 2134 hrs IST, IANS: When asked at a press conference whether the terror strike was an intelligence failure, Patil said in Hindi: "Aisa nahi hai. Itne bade shahar mein chhota hadsa ho jata hai. To total failure nahi hai. (It is not like that. In big cities like this, small incidents do happen. It's is not a total failure.)"

Others do notice Incompetence:

Walter Andersen, currently associate director of the South Asia Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, told rediff.com, "I am surprised that after several terrorist incidents, the government hasn't moved faster to get something much more effectively in place."

"You have a totally incompetent home minister (Shivraj Patil), and why he isn't removed is beyond me," he said, "He really doesn't know how to get the bureaucracy organised to have some sort of coordinated planning."

Our 'President' is still holidaying in Indonesia. Others notice.


Fri Nov 28, 7:20 am ET DENPASAR, Indonesia (AFP) – Indian President Pratibha Patil arrived in Indonesia for a six-day visit Friday, going ahead with a Southeast Asian trip despite deadly militant attacks in Mumbai.

More pictures of house construction

Some fine Gentlemen

This is my little boy Nemo. He thinks I'm his Dad.

These guys like to hang out with me because I can be easily manipulated. Thats Jumbtle, Scotty and Nemo.

Humble Jumble, with the big heart.

Weird Stuff At a time of crisis

The most astounding, weird stuff is happening now in India.

The Prime Minister has warned Pakistan for the 3462474th time. He's asked the ISI chief to visit, all expenses paid.

The Home Minister said: "Before I could reach there, the terrorists who had attacked one of the hospitals, the Cama Hospital, had left and those who attacked the railway station had also left," Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil said. NOTHING bothers this man.

Our 'President' is vacationing in Vietnam and has not thought it necessary to return to India. On second thoughts, let her stay there.

Sonia Gandhi has condemned the attack. Imagine that!

Rahul Baba, heir-apparent, with no known source of income, has said "Its a terrorist attack." Now that's profound!

Allahabad and Pune

A nice trip outside Bangalore on a campus recruitment mission.

It had been quite some time since I visited UP. I went to Allahabad and enjoyed Sangam, the confluence of Yamuna and Ganga. An expensive boat ride takes you from the banks of the Yamuna to the point of confluence, where one takes a nice dip and then returns. Religious ardour is everywhere and the setting is quite nice. I also brought home a Guava sapling – Allahabad is famous for its Guavas – and I also visited the temple of the reclining Hanuman, which comes with its own interesting myth, about how he lay down to control Ganga and how she washes him once a year. Such stories are actually quite beautiful.

Then on to Pune, which I had not visited since 2002. Not too much to say except that it seemed a cleaner city (than Bangalore) and the roads were better. Now I’m back and quite exhausted.

On the subject of Literature, the only note of disappointment is that I discovered that the habit of reading anything sensible has been discarded a long time ago. No one cares.

Someone I know had this written about him...it was quite amusing that he became the subject of some literary examination...

http://openspaceindia.org/essays_52.html

Almost a year ago, on another network called Shakespeare and Company, a strange person made his debut: Akira Yamashita. Akira-san claimed to be a Japanese Koto player, with an interest in writing poetry. He was received warmly by the network. A few weeks later, however, he put up this startling post:

Some of you may recall that several weeks ago, I fell a victim to Fugo fish poisoning. I was hospitalized in a Sapporo hospital and fed activated charcoal as part of the treatment. Time stood still.

It was a period of intense soul searching. I had visions. I spoke to God and several doctors and nurses. As a side effect of the poisoning, I lost the ability to converse in Japanese and now speak English with a pronounced Angolan accent. Not being able to speak Japanese in Japan despite being Japanese has certain disadvantages and I am now looking to emigrate. In any case, I discarded Koto playing and now play the Sitar, which affords a deep sense of meditative pleasure. I find I cannot tolerate Japanese food either and prefer the more charming Idli and Dosa from South India, despite having never visited India. And I never want to write a haiku again. Never. Ever.

The strange case of Akira Yamashita – a persona that continues to grow, change and became an independent narrative – is one way of dealing with the problem of personality in an impersonal space. With self-deprecation and humour, Akira-san constantly subverts and at the same time, draws attention to some aspects of our behaviour online. In this post, he has raised the issue of identity: What kind of a Japanese man wakes up to find he speaks English with an Angolan accent and wants to emigrate to south India? Which part of this narrative is real and what does that word mean anyway?

Another member of the same network, David Israel, had this to say when it became apparent that Akira-san was a fiction:

Is this, rather, a question of fictional persona-construction as lying close to the imagination-generating heart of his poetical creativity? Or if one is to essay the writing of haiku per se, does this fairly necessitate constructing a Japanese persona who may then do the writing? -- if one is to write from the vantage of a Black American, does this call for the formulation of a personality who can justify such a literary exertion?

Is [this person] radically different from any significant poet who, perforce, constructs a "self who can speak" in the very process of speaking?

Akira Yamashita is a story that magically transforms our ideas of ourselves in an online space. We are forced to question the stories we tell about ourselves, our identities as writers and our identities as speakers in the stories we tell. He is a mirror held up to us; if we are conscious of absurdity in his posturing, it is a timely reminder to us to examine our motivations and our stances online.