Born in 1786, Baluswami Dikshitar was the lesser known brother of the musical giant Muttuswamy Dikshitar. Muttuswamy is widely considered to be a part of the trinity of musicians who in the 18th century changed the face of Carnatic classical music. While Baluswami was not as well known, his quintessential contribution to Carnatic classical music changed the way it sounded forever. He is thought to have introduced violin into Carnatic classical music, standardized its modes of fiddling to suit the Carnatic palette of sounds and began playing the violin sitting down. Much less known is the fact that Muttuswamy Dikshitar is said to have heard Irish music played by the British troops stationed at the erstwhile Fort St George(Madras) and is said to have composed Sanskrit devotional hymns on those tunes. These hymns are popularly known as nottuswara sahityam and are popular to this day as a means of introducing children to Carnatic classical music. Perhaps Muthuswamy today would have been criticized for "diluting the purity of our music in the name of fusion", but parochial cynicism aside sample some of the Nottuswara Hymns with their Irish cousins
1)Vande Meenakshi
http://youtu.be/B5r9Biejz9M
Rakes of Mallow
http://youtu.be/Z1AN9ccoF-Y
2)This has to be the heights
Santatham Pahimam
God save our queen
Please copy and paste the link, i couldn't embed it
http://youtu.be/tN9EC3Gy6Nk
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Sweet Palani
Muddupalani is not a name that has ever caused a revolution, nor did it set a 1000 ships sailing. But what it did achieve, is to me a cause to celebrate. Muddupalani was a courtesan in the court of Pratapasingha, the Maratha ruler of Thanjavur in the mid1700's. She wrote a remarkable epic poem in Telugu called Radhika Santvanamu (Consoling Radhika). An ordinary poem about sex - the voice of a self-aware and bold woman talking about a woman's sex life. No great thoughts, just an unabashed celebration of a woman's desire, an honest statement of her jealousy, a sympathetic portrayal of her dejection. She was in her own words:
Which other woman of my kind hasfelicitated scholars with gifts of money?
To which other woman of my kind have
epics been dedicated?
Which other woman of my kind has
Won such acclaim in each of the arts?
You are incomparable,
Muddupalani among your kind.
She adds:
A face that glows like the full moon.
Skills of conversation, matching the countenance.
Eyes filled with compassion,
matching the speech.
A great spirit of generosity,
matching the glance.
These are the ornaments
that adorn Palani,
When she is praised by kings.
The following is an extract of hers from her epic poem Radhika Santvanamu:
Radha Instructs Krsna's New Bride in the Arts of Love2
[Radha has dressed up the young bride, as Krsna waits in the
bedroom.]
` How will the lips of this young girl
suffer his bites? He is the killer of the demon Kaitabha.
How will her breasts bear his clawing? He's a lion of a cowherd.
Can her tender thighs take his vigour? He wrestled Cantlra
to the death.
Will her smooth body survive? He's an elephant-killer.'
All the women were joking like this, and lla bowed her head
in shyness, her face all red. Radhika drew close to her
and offered comfort:
`When your husband holds you,
push him gently with your breasts.
If he kisses your cheek, touch his lips with yours.
When he gets on top of you, move against him from below.
If he gets tired while making love, quickly take over
and get on top. He's the best lover, a real connoisseur,
extremely delicate. Love him skilfully,
and make him love you. That's my advice.
But you know best.
Loving has its own laws.' And she taught her.
Then she said, 'Go quickly. The good hour
is passing. Meet your lover. Don't delay.'
And she led her gently to Krsna, and said to him:
` Her breasts are tender as young buds. Unlike mine,
they won't hold up if you claw at them.
Her lips are like leaves. Mine are full-blown coral.
Don't bite too hard.
My thighs are used to wrestling with you,
but hers are soft as bananas.
Her whole body is a fragile vine. Mine is tough
as gold. In a word, she's not me.
Not equal to you in love.
Innocent. New to the art.
You have to know how to handle her.
Do you need me to tell you?
You're good with women.
Just touch her lips with the tip of your tongue.
Don't squeeze.
Kiss her cheeks lightly.
Don't scratch.
Caress her nipples with your fingertips.
Don't crush.
Make love very very gently.
Don't be wild.
I must be crazy to talk like this.
When you and she are deeply in it,
wrestling with each other,
these rules of mine won't hold.'
Then she handed 'la over to Krsna.
But really she wanted to come too,
and held on to Ila's sari. Ila loosed her fingers:
be back soon,' she said.
And Rddha went, her mind a jumble
of misery and joy.
Lying on her bed, alone, she thought to herself:
`You can give money.
You can give away your own family.
You can give your very life, that isn't easy to give up.
But to give your own husband
to another woman—what woman can do that?
By now I'm sure she's sucking at his delicious lips.
Or already pounding his naked chest with her breasts.
Probably moaning like doves.
He's on top of her, and she's pressing against him.
She's quite skilled to begin with. Maybe a bit shy,
but by now he's won her over, freed her
from any reticence. He's brought her close,
touched her everywhere. Taught her everything.'
She kept thinking. Tortured by love,
she couldn't close her eyes.
Inside her, she was burning.
As for Krsna, he was busy
with the girl.
(Shamelessly "borrowed" from a resource available on wesleyan.edu, dunno if this infringes on any copyrights, if it does I'm sorry but this deserves a wider reading, at least from some of my friends)
Monday, March 28, 2011
The Story Of Zero
And so it was, that on an extremely uncomfortable summer evening, an indian yogi in the streets of takshila was chasing away the flies that came in droves, in part due to the fantastic aroma that his body emanated after years of not having made his acquaintance with the bathing ghat and in part to eat away the caked up dirt from his body and to earn enough punyam to be born as something better than a fly in the next life.
And so it was,That a dog had after a long and lazy afternoon decided to do what the yogi hadn't done in years-personal grooming- which as any observant pet owner would know, involves the meeting of both the appertures of the body through which food is processed; and in doing so caught the yogi's eye and his attention,since he didn't understand the reason for this utterly strange behaviour, being to him a glorification, by the dog, of its own mortal body,which the yogi thought reflected so aptly on the society of his day, which had given itself to bacchanalian excesses since these strangely attractive greeks had shown up-an utterly telling demonstration of conspicuous consumption,going in one way and coming out the other and reentering the cycle again until it became poiintless like the unending cycles of life and death.
And so it was, that the yogi traced the symbol of his spiritual catharsis in the sand in front of him, repeating it again and again until it became second nature to him to trace this symbol of all pointless pursuits in life, telling him how nothing was indeed everything and indeed everything was nothing, which he kept chanting and tracing so that one day the world would know how he had derived the essence of spirit- nothingness- from the dog's pursuit of evrythingness, due to which he failed to notice the fact that he had gathered a staunch secretive cabal of devotees, who had gathered around him to follow him in this most recondite of spiritual pursuits, who in turn had failed to notice that he had died in the meanwhile and so had a few hundred generations of spiritually inclined young men and women who through their lifelong dedication had kept alive the flame of this secret knowledge.
And so it happened that the dirty emaciated Hindus were defeated and exterminated from the hindu kush which left the holders of the great secret knowledge in great peril, so they decided to bathe and grow a beard ,which would allow them to become muslims and live in peace while they practiced the secret knowledge of the nothingness circle, all the while fooling the blood thirsty ululating muslim hordes into believing that they were converted, which they were not, but that did not escape the notice of the arab religious police who noticed strange circles appearing in the sand all the time where kafirs would have been sitting a while ago, which interested them because they liked to mess with the secret hindus for lack of other entertainment,and so it became a great sport in arab circles to draw a circle and secretively discuss it to draw out the secret hindus and then to beat the living daylights out of them but the need to keep all of this a secret from the secret hindus lead them to name it the cypher.
And so it happened, that the arabs stumbled upon the cypher, mistaking it for what it just was not though at the end of the day the game caught on and travelled to the maghreb where the mystical spicy muslim orient met the bone headed mediaeval christianity of the erstwhile day, peopled by christians who thought every practice but their own a sin and attributed sinful motives to everything that was not their own, so when they saw arabs playing with these luscious circle, they could not but help bunching up the sacred circle with the barbaric profanity of other heathen people, thinking the circle to be the symbol of the feminine apperture, they attacked the use of the circle and the game that surrounded it, though they could not anticipate the sexual frustration that had built into the christians who wanted to use the circle as freely as the muslims did but were held back by papal decrees asking for restraint, and so this sexual frustration gave rise to the secret meetings of the circle where the availability of the number of circles was indicated to the interested men, who greatly outnumbered the women, thereby giving rise to the need for a symbol which would also indicate the number of men and hence a straight line to symbolise the erect members of a man was devised which was later called one just to clarify the number of erect members each of the lines signified, which lead to the convention of indicating one's and zeroes on the parchment which announced the secret meeting of the circles.
And so it happened, that zero arrived in all the major civilizations of the world, except the Chinese, who aren't very major because they have small dicks, which besides being totally irrelevant is very insulting to a lot of my friends, so continuing with the ones and the zeroes, people in europe kept at it in their own combinations of ones and zeroes, until one remarkable englishman called george boole observed that the combination of ones and zeroes corresponded rather exactly with the number of people present at the gang bang, thereby laying the foundation of the binary system, which lead to the modern software industry, after which, finally the zero, collared by the ones and packed into computers arrived back in india, requiring millions of hormone zapped young people to move to strange towns for a job in the software industry and to find their own binary sex life waiting to happen to them, thereby completing the circle from right where it had begun-in India and in a wasteful circle -just the way the naked yogi had predicted, just like his own spiritual revelation of the circle, which ended up like the dog grooming itself- In a circle of nothingness.
And so it was,That a dog had after a long and lazy afternoon decided to do what the yogi hadn't done in years-personal grooming- which as any observant pet owner would know, involves the meeting of both the appertures of the body through which food is processed; and in doing so caught the yogi's eye and his attention,since he didn't understand the reason for this utterly strange behaviour, being to him a glorification, by the dog, of its own mortal body,which the yogi thought reflected so aptly on the society of his day, which had given itself to bacchanalian excesses since these strangely attractive greeks had shown up-an utterly telling demonstration of conspicuous consumption,going in one way and coming out the other and reentering the cycle again until it became poiintless like the unending cycles of life and death.
And so it was, that the yogi traced the symbol of his spiritual catharsis in the sand in front of him, repeating it again and again until it became second nature to him to trace this symbol of all pointless pursuits in life, telling him how nothing was indeed everything and indeed everything was nothing, which he kept chanting and tracing so that one day the world would know how he had derived the essence of spirit- nothingness- from the dog's pursuit of evrythingness, due to which he failed to notice the fact that he had gathered a staunch secretive cabal of devotees, who had gathered around him to follow him in this most recondite of spiritual pursuits, who in turn had failed to notice that he had died in the meanwhile and so had a few hundred generations of spiritually inclined young men and women who through their lifelong dedication had kept alive the flame of this secret knowledge.
And so it happened that the dirty emaciated Hindus were defeated and exterminated from the hindu kush which left the holders of the great secret knowledge in great peril, so they decided to bathe and grow a beard ,which would allow them to become muslims and live in peace while they practiced the secret knowledge of the nothingness circle, all the while fooling the blood thirsty ululating muslim hordes into believing that they were converted, which they were not, but that did not escape the notice of the arab religious police who noticed strange circles appearing in the sand all the time where kafirs would have been sitting a while ago, which interested them because they liked to mess with the secret hindus for lack of other entertainment,and so it became a great sport in arab circles to draw a circle and secretively discuss it to draw out the secret hindus and then to beat the living daylights out of them but the need to keep all of this a secret from the secret hindus lead them to name it the cypher.
And so it happened, that the arabs stumbled upon the cypher, mistaking it for what it just was not though at the end of the day the game caught on and travelled to the maghreb where the mystical spicy muslim orient met the bone headed mediaeval christianity of the erstwhile day, peopled by christians who thought every practice but their own a sin and attributed sinful motives to everything that was not their own, so when they saw arabs playing with these luscious circle, they could not but help bunching up the sacred circle with the barbaric profanity of other heathen people, thinking the circle to be the symbol of the feminine apperture, they attacked the use of the circle and the game that surrounded it, though they could not anticipate the sexual frustration that had built into the christians who wanted to use the circle as freely as the muslims did but were held back by papal decrees asking for restraint, and so this sexual frustration gave rise to the secret meetings of the circle where the availability of the number of circles was indicated to the interested men, who greatly outnumbered the women, thereby giving rise to the need for a symbol which would also indicate the number of men and hence a straight line to symbolise the erect members of a man was devised which was later called one just to clarify the number of erect members each of the lines signified, which lead to the convention of indicating one's and zeroes on the parchment which announced the secret meeting of the circles.
And so it happened, that zero arrived in all the major civilizations of the world, except the Chinese, who aren't very major because they have small dicks, which besides being totally irrelevant is very insulting to a lot of my friends, so continuing with the ones and the zeroes, people in europe kept at it in their own combinations of ones and zeroes, until one remarkable englishman called george boole observed that the combination of ones and zeroes corresponded rather exactly with the number of people present at the gang bang, thereby laying the foundation of the binary system, which lead to the modern software industry, after which, finally the zero, collared by the ones and packed into computers arrived back in india, requiring millions of hormone zapped young people to move to strange towns for a job in the software industry and to find their own binary sex life waiting to happen to them, thereby completing the circle from right where it had begun-in India and in a wasteful circle -just the way the naked yogi had predicted, just like his own spiritual revelation of the circle, which ended up like the dog grooming itself- In a circle of nothingness.
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