Moonlight and crystal salt radiate whiteness on the desert

-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gharapuri with Dikshitar playlist

-
Image
  There are many brilliant depictions of Ardhanarishwara across the country. But, standing before Him/Her at Gharapuri/Elephanta always feels special. As one moves from the Sadashiva who occupies the center space, with his magnifying spell, towering over us is the Ardhanarishwara. The Her part which we first encounter, the lips that twist to represent the masculine and the feminine is sure to cast a spell. The stylish way in which His hand rests on the Nandi, and the light coming from the left adds to our appreciation of the full form.  On my first visit after five years, in December, when I was standing there, I asked my friend who is a student of Carnatic Music, “why don’t you sing Ardhanarishwaram” … that song reverberated in my ears for long after I left the island that day, to only revisit it with another friend, the next week. I thought as someone who loves temple visits as much as Carnatic music, and listening to lot more of the mahan vaggeyakara Muthuswami Dikshitar in...
Read more

Sambar: taste is enough. Does history matter?

-
Image
Last two decades have seen “eating out” grow manifold in India and restaurants catering to every taste bud, and all possible “global cuisine” opening up. Along with the burgers and pizzas, the idli, vada, sambar have also kept pace. By-product of the booming “eating out” culture has been the number of food writers, researchers and bloggers. They wouldn’t leave the humble idli to the Tamilians, but say, hey trace its origins, it came from, sometimes Arabia, sometimes Indonesia. But, idli’s famous restaurant created accompaniment sambar has a story of its own. The Udupi boys had brought it to Mumbai, and Matunga Gujaratis queue up to slurp them, and many have tried to credit the Marathas for our “saambhar”. I have always been doubtful of the sambar lineage being traced back to the Shahaji Bhonsale’s kitchen in the Thanjavur palace. Though the story by now is very popular, let me recount it here, straight from the social media post that is attributed to historian and writer...
Read more

Chozha Bhoopathi Saraboji

-
Image
This has become a norm now, or has been for a few decades now, to complain about Carnatic musicians singing songs in unknown languages and how that is a reason for losing rasikas. When a friend took up this topic recently, I was trying to tell him how at some point many of us who were born in Tamil Nadu, and grew up there used to be multi-lingual. I come from a home that spoke  manipravala, Tamil so interspersed with Telugu, Kannada and Sanskrit words. Many musicians of that era were quite comfortable traversing this multi-lingual landscape and the issue of Telugu kritis or Kannada kritis may not have been an issue till we drew boundaries based on language. Thanjavur was an epicenter of arts, had the history of Nayaka kings and later Marathas embellishing art, architecture, music carrying on the great legacy of the Chola kings.  What I thought of as multi-lingual culture was not a mere conjecture became, got an evidence when I heard Indira Peterson last week...
Read more