Column: The Good Life: for Mint Lounge
The great bubbly paradox: how to choose Champagne: for Mint Lounge
A piece about my favorite beverage. I have been trying to write columns without using the letter "I" in it, as a kind of New Year resolution. This was very hard with this piece because my instinct was to begin the piece by saying, "I love champagne. I can drink it with lunch and at night." But I changed it to "What's not to love?" in the third person. The great bubbly paradox How to choose your champagne and savour it Shoba Narayan First Published: Fri, Jan 18 2013. 06 07 PM IST The Dom Pérignon Power of Creation event [...]
How the French do it: for Mint Lounge
To French wine, cheese, bread, but sadly, for a vegetarian-- not French food. Thank you, dear Elisabeth-- our lunches together give me a taste of France right here in Bangalore. How the French do it Provenance, Indian style, is soon becoming a thing of the past Shoba Narayan First Published: Thu, Dec 06 2012. 08 20 PM IST Dessert wines and candy shops, all within walking distance in Paris. Photo: Jorge Royan/Wikimedia Commons RELATED Why don’t we speak in the local tongue? French wine, Indian palate In the words of the daughter-in-law The Itinerant Investor Updated: Thu, Dec 06 2012. 08 [...]
Words
Thank you, Sriram, for the phrases. I wonder who the people in the photo are. My heart beats ‘pada-pada’ Around India, you find duplication of words, from mada-mada in Tamil to balle-balle in Punjabi, as a national trait Shoba Narayan Recently, at a family wedding in Madurai, I listened to a rather mind-bending conversation. It occurred to me that it was a fairly typical conversation in all Tamilian weddings. Let me just recount it for you and then explain context. Here is a typical scene at a Tamil wedding. Everyone is extremely busy, acting extremely busy. This intensifies as it [...]
The pink-skinned banana flower is a luxury for Mint Lounge
The pink-skinned banana flower is a luxury You have to be family to be served banana flower Shoba Narayan Updated: Fri, Nov 23 2012. 05 21 PM IST I am cooking banana flower today. It is a good-looking if shy vegetable, hiding its offerings under pink, smooth skin. Peeling a banana flower requires patience and if you are lucky, community. Joint families are best for this vegetable because it invites sitting around and gossiping. Women in the proverbial ancestral home will sit on the ground in a circle and painstakingly remove the kallan or stigma along with the pink outer skin. The next [...]
Conversation between Carnatic and Classical Part 2
Dear Bijoy: Thanks for your missive on Bach, the fugue and the music of the Renaissance period. I found them to be very interesting. What is mordent? What are grace notes and trills? Is the below one piece or a compilation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tro_gaczCxw&feature=related Why do you think western music was able to diverge into the harmonic path, while Indian music continued on the gayaki path that you talk about? Is it because Indians didn't think "instrumentally?" Ok, my turn. I am not an expert in Carnatic music so I will tell you what I know. Also, my tutorial will meander unlike [...]
Carnatic and Western Classical Part 2
Dear Bijoy: Thanks for your missive on Bach, the fugue and the music of the Renaissance period. I found them to be very interesting. What is mordent? What are grace notes and trills? Is the below one piece or a compilation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tro_gaczCxw&feature=related Why do you think western music was able to diverge into the harmonic path, while Indian music continued on the gayaki path that you talk about? Is it because Indians didn't think "instrumentally?" Ok, my turn. I am not an expert in Carnatic music so I will tell you what I know. Also, my tutorial will meander [...]
Navrasa in an ikebana arrangement for Mint Lounge
Thank you, Malathi-aunty. Navras’ in an ikebana arrangement The ladies behind this ancient art Shoba Narayan First Published: Thu, Nov 15 2012. 08 07 PM IST Veena Dass, one of the foremost exponents of the art in India, will be a speaker at the ikebana conference in Delhi. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint RELATED Muhammad said that if you have bread in one hand, you should have a flower in the other because one feeds the body and the other feeds the soul,” says Veena Dass, one of the early Indian exponents of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. We [...]
Carnatic and Western classical Part 1
One of the pleasures of writing is to hear back from readers who have views that are opposite your own; and who are able to educate you about their area of expertise. A while ago, I wrote a piece in Mint about western classical music conductors here. I heard back from a reader who told me about a conductor I had never heard about. Thus began an email exchange about Carnatic music and Classical music. I have-- with his permission-- pasted it below. He lives in New Delhi and his name (fake but authentic to his region) is Bijoy Banerjee. [...]
Speaking English
I don't like my column in this week's Mint. To do it right, I should have delved deeper into the "personality" of languages; and delved deeper into the notion of mother tongue. But being neck deep in badam halwa and other Deepavali sweets, this is the best I could do. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this Reuter's response to the piece, which, by the way, I like better than the piece itself. One comment has already come and calls my attitude "intensely offensive." It says that I was-- to use psychology parlance-- projecting. Maybe I was, although I [...]
Waiting for the next Zubin Mehta for Mint Lounge
Waiting for the next Zubin Mehta Why haven’t any of India’s great institutions produced world-class Western classical musical talent? Shoba Narayan First Published: Fri, Oct 19 2012. 06 00 PM IST A concert in progress at Mumbai’s NCPA, home to the The Symphony Orchestra of India. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint RELATED The dramatic and soulful orchestra men The Bangalore School of Music is celebrating its silver jubilee. The Delhi School of Music is close to its golden jubilee. The Calcutta School of Music, founded in 1915, is even older. Chennai has two recent institutions dedicated to non-Indian music: A.R. Rahman’s KM [...]