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95th 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
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
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)
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 :
Happy reading!
-neelanjana
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