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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
About Satya Nadella: Suddenly, all Indians seem to know Microsoft’s new CEO
Wrote this right after Nadella became CEO. It was published yesterday Suddenly, all Indians seem to know Microsoft’s new CEO Shoba Narayan March 11, 2014 Updated: March 11, 2014 19:33:00 Now that India-born Satya Nadella is the new CEO of [...]
The real reason Wendy Doniger’s book on Hindus was banned in India. For Quartz
My friend, Mitra moved from the WSJ to Quartz, a digital initiative of The Atlantic Monthly. Their daily briefs are followed by the top brass in Twitter, and policy institutes. The production and layout quality is excellent (like Medium). Best [...]