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 [...]
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 [...]
Lessons from Malaysia Airlines crash. For Quartz
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Tackling Indian maternal deaths by smartphone: for Christian Science Monitor
This appeared in Christian Science Monitor. India's MMR statistics 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.
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About artisanal male perfumers and perfume: for Bloomberg Pursuits
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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.