Column: The Good Life: for Mint Lounge
About Indian Wine for Mint Lounge
Wine clubs are proliferating all over India. The time is ripe for local producers to capture and grow this interest. An informal club I belong to served some nice white wines recently: an aromatic white from Château de Fontenille and a 2008 Aussières Blanc Chardonnay from Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite). The members of this club travel frequently and bring back wines. They do give Indian wines a try but prefer to pay two-three times more for wines of guaranteed quality. They are the market.
Maternal Mortality Rates
Maternal mortality interests me because it seems preventable and is a problem that is at a confluence of medicine, society and culture. I recommend (highly) the latest State of the World's mothers report. If giving birth is natural, why do so many mothers die? Shoba Narayan April 1, 2014 Updated: April 1, 2014 17:43:00 A small item in the news caught my eye. It is something I track, and something I worry about. The technical term for it is “maternal mortality”: dying while giving birth. Tribesmen in Pakistan and villagers in Darfur have expressed concern over rising maternal mortality rates [...]
Reinventing Carnatic Music
How do you make classical music relevant to a global audience? Should you even try? Today’s audience for Carnatic music ranges from Cleveland in the US to Chennai, and these are the hard-core ones. How can you expand its reach? Is it by removing the bhakti-rasa or devotional tone that some believe to be its core? Is it by changing the concert format, as some are doing? Or is it by developing a smartphone app?
VSCO
My latest app download. I love it Check out the photos here.
Lessons from Malaysia Airlines crash. For Quartz
LESSON FROM MALAYSIAN AIRLINES My rant about how large Planet Earth is; and about the hubris of our species. Sometimes, humans have no clue. Wrote it last night. Out today. The pleasure of web-zines is their immediacy. Reads better in QZ.com here Superstition about travel may be gone—but our respect of it shouldn’t By Shoba Narayan 11 hours ago Shoba Narayan is a writer in Bangalore. She is the author of "Return to India" and "Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes." We truly only know a small portion of our planet. AP Photo/Andy Wong Mortality is not something we associate [...]
Tackling Indian maternal deaths by smartphone: for Christian Science Monitor
This appeared in Christian Science Monitor. India's MMR statistics are shameful, something which I didn't know. But there is a nice report called "State of the World's Mothers" that outlines where India stands. The process is complicated because everyone has a view on how to get women into hospitals and take care of themselves. Given the number of interviews I did for this piece and the amount of information that I've collected, I imagine that I will write more on this important subject. Tackling Indian maternal deaths by smartphone India leads the world in annual maternal deaths. Technology firms are [...]
Evolution of Music 3
Western classical music traces its roots to Egyptian and Greek music. The medieval period lasted the longest, from about 500-1400. This was also the time when Indian music was being formalized. The Sangita Ratnakara, a musical text that influenced both Hindustani and Carnatic music, was written by Sarangadeva in the 13th century. The Islamic influence that caused Hindustani music to diverge from Carnatic music was just about to happen.
Forget brain workouts, chant mantras instead. For Quartz
The pleasure of filing one day and having it up the next! You should click on the link below and read it in Quartz. Looks nicer MEMORIES... Forget brain workouts—chanting mantras takes half the time and is more effective Shoba Narayan March 19, 2014 I read some disquieting news recently. Apparently, science isn’t sure that brain workouts work. This bothers me because it means that I will have to delete the 23 brain-improvement apps that I have downloaded on my various i-devices. On my iPhone, I have Lumosity, Fit Brains, N back 2, and Clockwork Brain, among others. I subscribe to newsletters from Sharp Brains, take [...]
About artisanal male perfumers and perfume: for Bloomberg Pursuits
I thought male perfume was a bit of musk, wood, leather, and all those usual suspect-ingredients. Who would have thought about oudh, orange blossom and the like? These new male perfumers are changing the paradigm. I pitched the story to my editor, Ted, based on Byredo. The perfumer is half-Indian which is how I heard about it. I also sniffed the perfume at a shop in Paris. Bloomberg Pursuits gave me the other names. My Parisienne friend, Elisabeth helped me a lot with this piece. Sourcing contacts and the like. Here it is finally. 14P1_Perfume_REVISE1_RFP 2 The magazine is here. [...]
Evolution of music 2
All music originated in the sacred, no matter what religion. Listen to Gregorian or Mozarabic chants with your eyes closed and they will remind you of the feeling you get in the early morning hours at a temple in Haridwar. Listen to Baroque Jewish music from a Portuguese synagogue, available on Youtube, and it will take you back to a church in Goa. Listen to Islamic Anasheeds or Sufi music and you will not just feel the pull of a mosque but also that of a Buddhist monastery.