yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

Jashn E Deccan: beautifully unconventional Sruti  published this piece in its April 2017 issue. Thanks are due to the team at Sruti.  Link to the unedited version  here . My mother asked me if the music festival organized in December 2015 on the outskirts of the town would be organized this winter too. Some days later came the flier for the second edition of the Jashn E Deccan festival in Hyderabad. Jashn E Deccan is an annual festival celebrating the rich traditions of various Indian music and dance forms under the aegis of the KMR Foundation – a trust started by the children of K. Mahipathi Rao, in June 2008, to honour his memory and the ideals he valued. It is their endeavour to create a vibrant and inclusive space in the realm of music and dance. The festival is meant to ignite interest, create curiosity and enthuse people to make the experiential journey of listening to and watching some great exponents of Indian music and dance. The events are...

How serious are we about the earth? This piece is published at The Citizen on 5 th April here . Thanks are due to the team at The Citizen. ‘W e are a nation that talks of salads and eats samosas ’, Sanjeev Kapoor, the well-know chef, had stated in an interview. He may well have been referring to our attitude towards our planet , albeit in metaphorical terms. Two events bring this out starkly. Images from Cold Play concert at Mumbai, November 2016, depicted trash lying scattered after the event. More than seventy thousand people had attended the mega-event; many of whom had contributed to the litter. During the event they had pledged to the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs; their pledges and actions turned out to be anti-thetical to each other. This is how the media covered it: ‘ Nobody could be bothered with civic sense or niceties such as recycling for a sustainable living ’ ~ huffingtonpost.in ‘ It was an event designed to raise awareness but lik...

This finds place in Teacher Plus’ February 2017 edition. The piece on their website here and the unedited post on the blog here . Thanks are due to the teams at Teacher Plus and Centre for Experiential Education and co-participants. Co-creating Experiences Experiential Education Conclave is an annual gathering that provides opportunity to learn of the topic and interact with others exploring it. During the recent weeks as I saw fliers and then images of the 3rd edition at Gurugram I recalled with fondness the event I had attended a year ago. Going down memory lane During his session, ‘Pains in Practice of Experiential Education’, it was interesting to observe how Vishwas Parchure noticed a frame on the wall depicting multiple knots and used that observation effectively. We were asked to select a knot from the frame we identified most with. I was confused as all knots appeared the same to me. We then discussed the proverbial knots in our li...

Jashn E Deccan, festive indeed Mumi asked if this December too the music festival we had been to, during the previous year, at the outskirts of town was being organized. Some days later we came across the flier for the 2 nd edition of the Jashn E Deccan and, as they say, blocked the dates.   During the previous edition Pandit Biswajit Roy Choudhury, one of the artists, had beautifully described event as, ‘ Everything here is so beautifully unconventional ’. Ustad Abdul Rashid Khan’s performance at the event unfortunately turned out to be his final performance; that evening at the age of 108 he had stunned all present and for me redefined few terms.   This year’s edition, held at the same venue, Sreenidhi International School , had performances by 6 artists spread across 2 evenings. Pandit Uday Bhawalkar began the proceedings with Raag Yaman and moved on to Raag Shivranjani. Seeing him perform I recalled Piyush Mishra state that an artist had to enjoy his perfo...

After my first experience at the Jaipur Literature Festival ( 2017 edition ) a friend called and asked if it was about fun ( read food ), glamour ( read wardrobe ) or books ( read buying, reading, knowing, listening to and interacting with authors ). It is about all of this and more, you need to savour the experience once, get a feel of the scale and fervour, and develop your own understanding of the festival. A friend says we are a nation of melas, and this is a wonderful one! Not very easy to choose favourites in such scenario but if I had to pick two threads it would be the books on history and one liners. It was story-telling at its finest and changed the way I understood history could be discussed. Suzannah Lipscomb talked of ‘The lovers who changed history’ and Giles Milton of ‘The spice trader who changed history’. The later, to quote William Dalrymple, “a master class in history”. What I share (and discuss) below are one-liners that I came across and that stayed...