Kairana’s Different Music
Reading up for an edit I am writing today, I came to know that the small town of Kairana near the banks of the Yamuna, which is now being targeted by the Sanghi goons to instigate communal violence, is the birthplace of the one and only Ustad Abdul Karim Khan saheb! The Kirana gharana which he co-founded is nothing but a different way of saying ‘Kairana’….
[Just for the record, it is clear that the BJP/RSS are fabricating news of a Hindu exodus from Kairana due to “Muslim criminals”, only to polarise voters along Hindu-Muslim lines ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections early next year.]
Here is Ustad Abdul Karim Khan singing a Thyagaraja Kriti ‘Rama Nee Samanamevaru’
Little Bit of Lunacy
I went out with friends to celebrate a little bit of lunacy I have sprinkled over the space-time patch that’s life. Here’s some photographs of a witness to it all.
An attempt to raise the Hindoo population against the Muhomedans, 1857
I had come across this letter in the files of the National Archives of India, New Delhi, while researching for my own work on the history of the Western Himalayas. This was in the summer of 1995 or 1996.
Though unrelated to my own work, this letter seemed so remarkable that I had copied it down as exactly as I could (gaps, formatting and shorthands included).
Over the years it got misplaced among all my notes and copies of archival papers; often I looked for it but despaired that I had lost it forever. Today while looking for some data on commodity prices in the Sutlej river valley in the 19th century for an article I am writing on markets and borders in colonial Western Himalayas, it surprised me with its presence, smiling happily between sheets enumerating the population of different occupation groups in the Simla Hill States from the Census taken on 10th of January 1858.
Here it is, exactly as I had copied it.
How to Make Friends and Influence People…
Got this list some years ago on email and found it again while searching for something else today. While its a bit American in its cultural setting, many of the suggestions are universally valid. Go try them out! Read the rest of this entry »
Rewa
The ancient name of the river which is called Narmada today. Read the rest of this entry »
Be Positive
its been a long time i have not posted anything here. Read the rest of this entry »
The perfect brew
In this guest post, Kaushik says, “The world’s oldest food purity law dates back to 1516”. But the reason why Nothing2Report is honoured to host this guest post is because it is about Beer – that indescribable elixir of divine grace – and the need for its purity. Read the rest of this entry »
Ode to a Rebel
One of the first communists I knew when I was growing up in Shimla in the early 1970s was the trade unionist D N Kapoor, Kapoor chacha to me. Read the rest of this entry »
Holy Cow!
There is an old cliche “A picture is equal to a thousand words”. You don’t know what it means unless you’ve seen this! Read the rest of this entry »
Notes to a Barren City
Last night, as I finished marking the last of the answer scripts for the course I was teaching at the university here, I chanced upon a wonderfully evocative poem Read the rest of this entry »
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