Saturday, September 24, 2005

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents

A handbook that offers advice to bloggers, particularly for those who want to protect themselves from the authorities, has been released by Reporters Without Borders. The handbook discusses many technical ways to escape from censorship, how to blog anonymously, how to ensure the e-mail is truly private, etc. It is available (in pdf format) for download.

Friday, September 16, 2005

M. S. Subbulakshmi - 016


From The Hindu article,

Today, September 16, is the birth anniversary of M. S. Subbulakshmi. Hers was a life of many towering achievements...
..Music critic Harold Schornberg of The New York Times praised MS's UN performance sky high and declared that "it would live in his memory forever."
It was a remarkable achievement and invokes awe even among present day jet setting musicians. But MS remained untouched by it all. She knew only her music and perhaps that is what gave her art that pristine quality which made it immortal.

From the book Kunjamma - Ode to a Nightingale,
..An interesting fact is that all the eminent vidwans from whom Subbulakshmi is known to have learnt songs to strength her repertoire were eventually honoured with the Sangita Kalanidhi title by the Music Academy. They are Mazhavarayanendal Subbarama Bhagavatar, Musiri Subrahmanya Iyer, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, G. N. Balasubramanyam, T. L. Venkatarama Iyer, Papanasam Sivan, K. V. Narayanaswamy, K. S. Narayanaswamy, and T. Brinda..

..The legendary Siddheshwari Devi came down from Benares and stayed with Subbulakshmi for a few months..She and Subbulakshmi had to be ready by 7:30 in the morning to go through a systematic riaz which involved singing the basic notes one hundred and eight times while Siddheshwari Devi kept count. The sessions went on until lunchtime..
Previous posts of MS series in this blog
Links
I came to know yesterday about this new blog on MS.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Google Blog Search

Google has now launched Blog Search.
More details are available here.
Google has a blog too.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

M.S. Subbulakshmi - 015

Excerpts from the talk on MS at The Nehru Centre, London:

"Subbulakshmi... represented a continuity in artistic traditions, and because of her national status and charisma she was able to communicate to a wide variety of people through her music. She was truly a people's artiste."

The best tribute that India can pay to M.S. Subbulakshmi, the Carnatic music legend, is to institute chairs in universities for the study of and research on her work, according to her biographer Lakshmi Viswanathan. Speaking on the life and work of M.S. at the Nehru Centre, the author of Kunjamma — Ode to a Nightingale, described her as a "national treasure".

Read here a report by Hasan Suroor.