“Over a period of 300 years, between 900 and 1200 AD, the Khmer empire produced some of the world’s most magnificent architectural masterpieces on the northern shore of the Tonle Sap, near the present town of Siem Reap. Most are concentrated in an area approximately 15 miles east to west and 5 miles north to […]
Cassatt is perhaps best-known for her paintings of mothers and children, works which also reflect a surprisingly modern sensibility. Traditional assumptions concerning childhood, child-rearing, and the place of children in society were facing challenges during the last part of the 19th century and women too were reconsidering and redefining their place in modern culture. Cassatt […]
Mr. Khan was born on Nov 25, 1916 in Madras. He had migrated to Pakistan on Oct 17, 1947. On July 29, 1931 he had purchased a tape recorder to tape his mother’s voice. Since then he had taped the voices of Roshan Aara Begum, Ustad Amaanat Ali Khan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (all works), Akhtarul […]
“A shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky, occasionally sprinkling a fine film of rain.
“I stand under an apple tree in blossom and I breathe. Not only the apple tree but the grass round it glistens with moisture; words cannot describe the sweet fragrance that pervades the air. I […]
Article I-What Education Is
“I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual’s powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education […]
‘In order to understand the law of the equivalence of mass and energy, we must go back to two conservation or “balance” principles which, independent of each other, held a high place in pre-relativity physics. These were the principle of the conservation of energy and the principle of the conservation of mass. The first of […]
“According to legend, this city of abundant sunshine and cool sea breezes began its life as a small fishing village named Kolachi-jo-Kun and later, Kolachi-jo-Goth. An early reference to a place called “Krokola” (which is believed to be the site of present day Karachi) can also be got from one of Alexander the Great’s […]
Chaturpandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande is considered by many to be the father of modern Hindustani music. He was the most important Hindustani musicologist and composer of the 20th century, a true crusader and a renaissance man.
“Born into a cultured Maharastrian family in Balukeshwar, Bombay on December 31st, 1860, Bhatkhande acquired his sweet voice and initial […]
From Plato’s Symposium
Alcibiades’ Panegyric:
“And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth’s sake. I say, that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up […]
‘IV. He was very violent in expressing his haughty disdain of others. He said that the scholê (school) of Euclides was cholê (gall). And he used to call Plato’s diatribê (discussions) katatribê (disguise). It was also a saying of his that the Dionysian games were a great marvel to fools; and that the demagogues were […]
PHILOKTETES:
O hands, what you suffer for lack of a bowstring,
the prey of that man!
You whose thoughts are sick and slavelike,
how you have hunted me!
How you tricked me, how you stole up
with this boy as a shield, unknown to me.
He deserved a better master than you.
He is at a loss to do anything but what he’s […]
The Idea of the Continuum
20. Everything flows and nothing abides;. Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
21. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on. (91, 12)
22. Cool things become warm, the warm grows cool; the moist dries, the parched becomes moist. (126)
23. It is […]
Hector & Andromache:
Once the housekeeper spoke,
Hector left the house by the same route he’d come,
through the well-built city streets, across the great city,
and reached the Scaean Gates, beyond which he’d go
out onto the plain. There his wife ran up to meet him,
Andromache, daughter of great-hearted Eëtion,
who’d included a large dowry with her.
Eëtion had lived […]
“I have a special nomenclature of my own; I “pass away time,” when it is ill and uneasy, but when ’tis good I do not pass it away; “I taste it over again and stick to it;” one must run over the ill, and settle upon the good. This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing […]
‘Who can foresee the importance of a thorough knowledge of the structure and activities of the psychic apparatus when even our present state of knowledge produces a happy therapeutic influence in the curable forms of the psychoneuroses? What about the practical value of such study some one may ask, for psychic knowledge and for the […]
‘Today, as he has done for the past 6 decades, Ramrang spends his waking moments immersed in the contemplation and creation of music. True to his calling as one of the greatest vaggeyekaras of all time, Ramrang’s intellectual wanderlust shows no sign of abating; every day turns in a new insight or a new asthAi. […]
Ustad Allah Rakha was born in Muzaffar, a village in Sialkot District, in 1932. During early childhood, his family moved to Amritsar where he was raised. He acquired his initial education in classical music and sarangi playing from his father, Ustad Lal Din. Later, he became the student of three renowned sarangi players, Ustad Ahmadi […]
“The music of Khansaheb was pansophic in its conception, manna for the soul, an afflatus to purification of the self. In sum, the distillate of the most sublime in the Bharatiya tradition. To borrow a bit from a sentiment expressed in a similar context by Shri Bertrand Russell: it is artistry of men like Amir […]
“…Kishori Amonkar, L’Enfant Terrible de Hindustani Music. Born in 1932, this music genius from Goa has attained such mastery over her art that she can justifiably claim to be the sole heir to the exacting standards set by her predecessors- her illustrious mother, Mogubai Kurdikar, and the formidable Surashree Kesarbai Kerkar.” Rajan Parrikar
Kishori Amonkar’s Bilaskhani […]
Ustad Bismillah Khan, the greatest living exponent of an evocative instrument, the shehnai, received the Bharat Ratna in 2001. The 91-year-old maestro talks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk programme about his riyaaz, the oneness of divinity, his unflagging love for music, and above all, his faith in […]
