Musical pillars in South Indian temples

Early rock music – Music from Stones Strange, the uninitiated would think, reading the title, for it is neither about rock music as we know it today, nor about the rolling stones, but about music from stones, a field called Lithophony, and its early applications in South India, characterized by the...

Read More

A Sojourn in Morocco

Off the beaten track It did not take much effort to plan this trip once we had set our minds to it, and we were lucky to find a travel company that then worked with their Moroccan counterpart to provide a decent package. Pretty soon, we were on an Air Canada flight across the Atlantic and headed to...

Read More

The Swaraj Spy – A Novel by Vijay Balan

After more than a decade of concerted effort, Vijay Balan’s studies have culminated in a novel depicting his grand uncle’s life and times, published by Harper Collins as ‘The Swaraj Spy’ under the historic fiction genre. Without a doubt, Vijay’s painstaking research is evident from the meticulous unraveling of...

Read More

Orlando Mazzotta

The phantom in Quaroni’s opera In March 1941, Subhas Chandra Bose slipped out of Kabul, holding the passport of an Italian named Orlando Mazzotta, headed for Moscow, leaving behind the real Italian, in Afghanistan. I had previously covered the tale of Bose’s flight out of British India, and his...

Read More

Menon and the Coorg War

And the tragedy which befell the Chikka Deva RajendraThe house imprisonment of Karunakara Menon was a major cause that precipitated the invasion and acquisition of Coorg by the British, a sad tale in itself. An event which is said to have weighed upon the conscience of Menon, until the end of his life,...

Read More