Invaders

When you see the title, if you think of  people like as Alexander, who created vast kingdoms by invading kingdoms far and wide, then you are out of luck. I’m talking here about invaders of a different kind. Bio-invaders.

I still remember the time in the late 1970’s when there was no Parthenium (Linn: Parthenium hysterophorus) in India. Apparently introduced to India through wheat imports from the United States, the weed has taken over large tracks of India that it is hard to find a place this does not grow. Parthenium is linked to many respiratory allergies and illnesses that have become more common after it was introduced into India.

When I visited the Nagara Hole national park in Karnataka a few years ago, I was surprised and shocked to see Parthenium becoming the major component of ground cover in the forest. It must have displaced manly local species of plants, and other organisms that depended on them.  There is no better illustration of what an alien species can do to a new ecosystem than this.

An elephant in Nagarahole national park, India

(Click on the above picture to get a larger view. All the greenery, and the small white florets you see on the ground are Parthenium plants)

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This year, when I came back to town after a few weeks of vacation, I was greeted with some icky, sticky, waxy stuff on some of  the hibiscus plants in my front yard.

 

 

There were some small white moth like flies flying around these sticky spider-web like thread on leaves. I went to the local garden store, and described the symptoms. The person in the listened to my description, and said it might be an infestation of  spider mites. I came home, washed the plants and sprayed them with the pesticide prescribed at the garden center, hoping that it would all be gone the next day.

It did not take too long for me to realize I was wrong. The insects, and the sticky threads came back each time I washed and sprayed the pesticide. Then I was sure that the diagnosis was wrong in the first place.

Some more on-line search, and help from Facebook friends pointed me in the right direction. This was an infestation of  an insect called Giant Whitefly, which came in from Mexico to California sometime in the early 1990s, and came in to the Bay area much later – around 2005.  And apparently it loves hibiscus plants, and is very hard to get rid of this pest.

One of the website said -”If you don’t care for your hibiscus plants in your garden, it is best to get rid of those plants rather than trying to get rid of the pest”. However, I do care about my hibiscus plants and the color they add to my front yard. So I’m doing other things such as using a systemic insecticide (which is slow to act, but hopefully keeps the insect population under control) and trimming branches (anyway, with winter around the corner, there won’t be many more blooms).

I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I can’t totally get rid of this pest from my yard. Oh fate!

-neelanjana

Karnataka/Andhra Flood Relief Benefit Concert

Sewa International Presents

A Violin Concert by Anuradha Sridhar

accompanied by Shriram Brahmanandam on the Mrdanga.

Date: Friday, 20th November @7:30 pm   Venue: Quainlan Community Center, Cupertino, CA

For tickets, you can leave a comment here, or purchase online at: www.indolink.com/sewa

Take this opportunity to reach out the flood victims, and enjoy the wonderful music.

All proceeds will be used for the benefit of affected people.

Karnataka Flood Relief Concert

-neelanjana

Flute Concert

95^{th Monthly Concert Invitation}

^{Under the series of “Udyana Nada Sindhura” the academy has organized a grand concert and invites all the music lovers to attend the event.}

^{Vid. Tejasvi Raghunath - Flute}

^{Vid. Redappa - Violin}

^{Vid. Anoor Anantha Krishna Sharma - Mrudangam}

^{Vid. B J Kiran Kumar - Khanjeera}

Date & Time: 01.11.2009 (Sunday) from 5. 30 PM to 8.00 PM

Place:
YOGASHREE YOGA KENDRA,

1 Phase, 2nd Main Road, Girinagar,Bangalore – 560 085

(Nearest landmark Sita Circle Indian Oil Petrol Bunk)

ALL ARE WELCOME

Shrikaantha Kriti Sourabha

Audio CD Release Function

Two CDs containing compositions of current generation  vaggeyakara Dr Shrikaanth Murthy are being released at a function at Bengalooru this weekend.

When: Sunday, 25th October 2009 @10:00 am

Where:

Ananya Sabhangana,

91/2, 4th Main,

Malleshwara, Bengalooru -560003

CD1:

Vocal: Vi.Dr T S Satyavati

Violin: Vi.T S Krishnamurthy

Mrdanga: Vi. Amrit Nagasundar

CD2:

Vocal: Vi. Dr Sukanya Prabhakar & Party

A vocal concert by Bengalooru Brothers ( Vi.M.B.Hariharan & Vi.S.Ashok and Party) featuring compositions of Dr.Shrikaanth K Murthy will follow the release function.

CDs will be available for sale at the venue. Part of the proceeds will be donated to Ananya Arogyadhara fund.

ALL ARE WELCOME

A Warning Bell

Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 2007, for supporting the cause of the environment. His film “An Inconvenient Truth” has won an Academy award as well. I got to watch this movie a few months ago. This is a real eye-opener. If you get an opportunity to watch this, do not miss!

What is this ‘Inconvenient Truth’? It is something that most of us know, but not willing to acknowledge. Our tendency is to push the mess under the carpet, unseen until it gets so big, and can not be concealed anymore. Well, the unpleasant, inconvenient truth is that the global warming caused by human activity has harmed the earth’s environment in the last 4 decades, probably more than what had happened in the previous forty centuries. And worse, we are turning a blind eye to that even after knowing the consequences of global warming.

The harm done to the environment is nowhere more visible than in the melting ice sheets and the receding glaciers. Over the years, glaciers are receding, and ice sheets in the Arctic and the Antarctic are melting away. In the last 25 years almost 20-30% of the arctic ice sheet has melted. Between 1850 and 1980 the glaciers in Europe have lost about a third of their landmass. Parts of the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic Ocean are actually warming up at a rate twice or thrice that of the other regions in the world. The ice cover in Greenland has about 10% of the world’s supply of fresh water, and if all that melts, the sea level will increase by about 20 feet. In The frozen continent of Antarctica has about 99% of the land covered in thick ice sheets. If this would melt, the sea level would increase by about 200 feet. Overall, the sea level has increased by about 6 inches in the 20th century. This may further increase by about a foot in the 21st century. Considering a large population of the mankind lives on or near the coastal regions, any impairment would be of great consequence.

Glaciers on all the 6 continents have been receding and melting away. The glaciers on the Kilimanjaro in equatorial Africa have receded to less than 60% of what was there in 1975. In Glacier National part in Montana, more than 40 of the 137 glaciers have disappeared in the 20th century. In Greenland, new islands are breaking away from the mainland due to melting ice. Several pacific and Indian ocean islanders are always living is fear of being overtaken by the sea.

I know many people who visited the town of Gangothri in Uttaranchal, expecting the headwaters of the river Ganga to be there and being surprised to find a free-flowing river instead. The headwaters are actually at Gomukh, several kilometers up the river at the terminus of the Gangothri glacier. The Gangothri glacier, source of river Ganga, is receding averaging to an alarming 83 feet every year. Gomukh is getting farther off from Gangothri every year, and it is 3 kilometers farther away from Gangothri than it was a century ago.

In general, the glaciers in the Himalayas are found to be drying up faster than those in the rest of the world. In case of Gangothri glacier, the rate of receding has been shown to be much higher in the last 3 decades. NASA pictures have shown that Gangothri glacier has receded about 850 meters in the last 25 years. If the same rate of depletion continues, it is feared that the glacier may totally disappear by the end of the 21st century.

If Gangothri glacier melts away, it will affect more than 1.5 billion people in India and Bangladesh directly. How does that affect others? The financial meltdown of 2008 has shown that in the current world economic scenario, no country is shielded from the events happening elsewhere. Billions of more people around the world will be affected by a slow catastrophic event of this nature. When the glaciers recede, the oceans will swell and cities and mangroves near the coast will face the threat of getting submerged.

So, should we care about climate change? Yes, we should! Every one of us can, and has to do something to slow the negative impact on the environment. In Kannada there is a saying “ಹನಿ ಹನಿಗೂಡಿದರೆ ಹಳ್ಳ” – “Water drops gather together to form a stream”. Even if individually small, collectively we can achieve large goals. Here are some things that we can do as individuals to reduce our impact on the environment.

Mother Earth has been so kind to us. Isn’t time for us to be kind to her?

-neelanjana

(Posting a modified version of an earlier post I made in 2008 – For the Blog Action Day -2009)

Sangraha Chudamani of Govinda

If you are into south Indian music, then you might be aware of  the  common name confusions. I mean the raga names – Tyagaraja’s Manohari versus Muttuswamy Dikshita’s Manohari, for example. Melodically very different, but share the same name. On the other hand, Tyagaraja’s dArini telusukonTi (Shuddha Saveri) and Muttuswami Dikshita’s Sriguruguha tArayASu mAm (dEvakriya) have the same melodic structure.  And as if to make matters worse, Tyagaraja has another dEvakriya, and Muttuswami dikShita a different Shuddha sAvEri (EkAmrEsha nAyike)!

Most of this happened because many manuscripts that contained Tyagaraja’s composition did not have raga names in them, or had them in some encoded form. When these were copied, and re-copied in the years after Tyagaraja, the scribes who copied these manuscripts  assigned raga names very likely based a book they had access to. This resulted in many names unheard till then being assigned to some of these compositions, some compositions were even assigned to two different ragas (rasALi/vanAvaLi, dundhubhi/divyamaNi, Srutiranjani/Kantamani, dEvAmrtavarShini/nAda chintAmaNi  etc). Tyagaraja’s school dominated the music scene of the later 19th and 20th centuries, these variations in names stay put.

This reference book these scribes referred to was most probably the ‘Sangraha Chudamani’ – written by one Govindacharaya. Although he got some of the facts wrong, and went against traditional music terminology, the usage of such terms has stayed on even till now as part of the musical vocabulary of Karnataka sangeetha.

So when I found out from the Guruguha blog that the text of Sangraha Chudamani is online on DLI’s website, I went ahead and read some parts of the text. Reading from the DLI site was not a very user friendly experience. Since the book is in public domain anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to post a .pdf version of the book for those who might be interested. Thanks Sunil for creating the PDF files!

Here are links to the first four parts of the book on Scribd (There are 16 PDF files). While the introduction is in English,the main body of the book is in Samskrta. Links for the remaining parts are available on the right hand side under the “From the same publisher’  menu, when you are browsing any of the following pages :

Sangraha Chudamani: Part 1

Sangraha Chudamani: Part 2

Sangraha Chudamani: Part 3

Sangraha Chudamani: Part 4

Happy reading!

-neelanjana

44444

Few days ago, when the hit counter was at this magic number, I was around to take a screen capture.

Picture Says All!

-neelanjana

A South Karnataka Slideshow

I did not know making a slide show with Picasa was that easy, until I created this one using pictures from our visit to Karnataka.

The pictures are from several places in southern Karnataka – Bengaluru, Srirangapattana, Ramanagara, Halebidu, Beluru, Kowshika, Sravana Belagola and Mavinakere – not listed in any specific order -
and show creations all the way from the 11th century, to the 21st century .

Here is a map of this part of Karnataka.

A Map of Southern Karnataka

-neelanjana

A Jatiswara for Navaratri

Last two years, I wrote a series of articles on my Kannada blog in Sampada: ನವರಾತ್ರಿಯ ದಿನಗಳು and ಸಂಗೀತ ನವರಾತ್ರಿ. This time, I thought it would be a good idea to do something different, since time is a commodity in short supply these days

Instead of writing about a well known musical compositions, I have chosen to write about a brand new one, still very fresh! Did you say how do I know that it is really brand new?

Because this is a composition I came up with last week, when I was humming to myself as I was waiting outside my kid’s swim class! After some final dressing up,  and after getting the nod of approval of some people whom I hold in very high regard musically, it is now before you as a finished product – A Jatiswara in rAga nAsAmaNi.

To listen to this jatiswara click here. (Played by violinist K R Sathyapraksh)

Raga nAsAmaNi is not a very well known rAga. According to the asampoorna mELa scheme, it occupies the place of 70th mELakartha. In the sampUrNa mELa scheme, the 70th mELa is called as nasikabhushaNi, and nAsAmaNi considered to be born out of this mELa. There is one composition of Muttuswamy Dikshita in nAsAmaNi (Sri ramA sarasvatI sEvitAm) and one composition (mAra vairi ramaNi)  of Tyagaraja (although somewhat disputed, because of the missing signature) in nAsikabhushaMi. There are compositions of Dr M Balamuralikrishna, and Koteeswara Iyer in Nasikabhushani as well. There might be others, but not that well known.

But why did I compose a jatiswara in nAsAmaNi, of all the rAgas? I don’t really know, except that it just happened so! And this is my first attempt at doing something like this – so I’m keen to hear from you. If you have any sort of comment,  or any type of  feedback,  feel free to write a comment.

I’m very glad to share the notation of the jatiswara with the musically inclined visitors to ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ.

If you attempt singing/playing it and send a recording, I can post it here too

I wish a very happy Navaratri season to all visitors.

-neelanjana

Two years of ’ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ’

Time moves very fast.

Really? Not true, since we know that the earth is revolving around the Sun at a steady rate (for all practical purposes, that is!). So it is all in our perception of time.

Whatever the facts are, one more year has passed really fast for ‘ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ’. Today, ’ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ’ is stepping into the third year after finishing two years. I can still recall me writing the very first post on this weblog, and the post when the blog turned one year, as if it happened yesterday!

It’s been a good year for ’ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ’ so far. The very first image at the top of this blog was from the navaranga, inside the temple in Halebeedu, I thought it would be apt to change the image to another view of the Hoysaleshwara temple on it’s second birthday too.

Thanks for coming by ’ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ’!

-neelanjana