Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.
‘For a sixteen-year-old youth who had yet to begin to shave’, writes Kumar Mukherji in his memoir of life as a music lover, ‘the winter of 1942 would best be remembered as the year when he heard Kesarbai [Kerkar], Roshanara Begum and Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan perform’. Were I to recall the year I turned [...]
When Mohammed Yousuf is at the wicket I often stop by the TV and watch, for he is one of the more graceful batsmen now playing. I thus caught snatches of the three long hundreds he scored against England earlier this summer, in the course of which at least two commentators referred to him as ‘Yousuf [...]
As a rule, this column does not mention or review books recently published. If I make a exception this fortnight it is because the work in question is exceptionally good, and because its author died before seeing it in print. The book is Kumar Mukherji’s The Lost World of Hindustani Music, a wonderful anecdotal history of [...]
Some months ago, a reader wrote in to dispute my characterization of cricket as ‘the most subtle and sophisticated sport known to humans’. He gave twelve reasons as to why it was football, rather than cricket, that should be accorded this honour. He began by quoting Albert Einstein, who once posited a connection between beauty and [...]
Speaking to the singer Dilip Kumar Roy in February 1924, Mahatma Gandhi said that he was very fond of music although he ‘could not boast of the power of any expert or analytic appreciation’. He added that he could not ‘conceive of the evolution of the religious life of India without music’. Towards the end of [...]
My interests, personal as well as professional, are in politics and society; in cultural terms I am more-or-less a philistine. I know a little about literature, a little less about music, and nothing at all about the greatest of modern art forms, the cinema. This column about a film director is being written by a man [...]
2005 has been the year when, by becoming the first man to reach 600 Test wickets, Shane Warne further consolidated his claims to being regarded as the greatest bowler in the history of the game. And October has been the month in which two other leg-spinners briefly shifted him from the headlines. First, an unknown sixteen-year-old [...]
The state of Karnataka is made up of three sections, each previously part of another political regime. There is ‘Old Mysore’, the districts in the south which once belonged to the princely state of that name. There is the ‘Hyderabad-Karnatak’, the collective name for the arid northern districts (Bijapur, Raichur, Gulbarga, etc.) that once formed part [...]
A British band had come to town, and my eleven-year-old daughter wanted to go hear them sing. I was resistant to the idea. That should have been the end of the matter—it would have when I was growing up—but nowadays the rhetoric of rights has permeated even the process of child-rearing. So we argued, back and [...]
When Dom Moraes died earlier this year, most obituaries justly focused on the quality of his verse. With his fellow Mumbaikar Nissim Ezekiel, he made Indo-Anglian poetry respectable. He was a Goan Christian, Ezekiel a Bene Israel; both could only have been products of what—despite the endeavours of Bal Thackeray and his followers—remains a stubbornly cosmopolitan [...]