Ideas & Views

Event: Dance Performance "about Her" Artiste: Dancer Anita Ratnam Venue: Lincoln Theater, Washington, DC Date: Oct 27, 2007 7:30pm Hosted by: Dakshina Dance Company It has been a long desire to see the performance of dancer Smt . Anita Ratnam in person. Have been tracking her schedule quite sincerely from the time I first heard about the artiste. My first acquaintance with her was her rave reviews in The Hindu Friday Review when I was in Pilani . I was very keen on hosting a dance show in Pilani through Spicmacay and contacted Smt .Anita by email while she was in Delhi, conducting a dance movement workshop for The Hindu Youngworld . We were out of funds that semester and the opportunity slipped out. Then, I read her interview with The Times Sunday Magazine while I was in Mathura , UP, India. My reverence for Anita grew leaps and bounds. I got more interested in meeting her and have a chat with her about the various art forms she is trying. At that time, she had not come

Event: Soorasamharam Harikatha Artiste: Sri.T.N.Seshagopalan Venue: Sri Siva Vishnu Temple , Maryland Date: Nov 11, 2007, 3pm Someone had told me that the maestro's voice is fading these days and that's why he is performing harikathas instead of kutcheris . I thought this could be the last opportunity for me to listen to my most favorite artiste, for the venue is close and I have time to attend too. I was very angry at myself when I got stuck in the Walmart queue. I didn't know whether to go or not. Jay somehow convinced and took me to the temple. We reached there at 3:30pm while the concert was scheduled for 3pm. We went straight to the sannidhanam instead of the auditorium and I had decided that there is no point going so late, having to pay $15. Jay went downstairs and forced me to go down with him to auditorium. The concert hadn't begun yet!!!! There was the artiste standing in the stage in his harikatha costumes and someone expressing apologies for the dela

Maya Ravan - an english dance ballet by bharatanatyam exponent Padmashree Shobhana the second dance performance that i am attending in US in as many as 3 years. i was excited and enthued - it has been 6 long years since we had wanted Shobhana and party in Pilani . came to know of the concert just one day earlier and hurried to book my ticket. the tickets were sold out very soon. northern virginia community college at fairfax hosted the show to a packed hall. now to the ballet...... the ballet is a narration in english , conceptualized and choreographed by Shobana and music scored by the carnatic violin virtuoso brothers Ganesh - Kumaresh . the music is remarkably world class with a brilliant sound engineering behind the recording. most of the situational music and the alapanas are in violin. the first anjali piece was choreographed for the Nattai tune of "Dance Like A Man", a short movie starring Shobana for which Gan-Kum has set the music again. the solo piece &

I could not understand why historians have to compare Tagore and Gandhi. When I first read Gandhiji's works and literature on Gandhi, I instantly admired him and became a keen observer of some of his principles like ahimsa and simplicity. When I started reading Tagore's works, I instantly fell in love with him !!!! I was prompted to consume volumes of literature about Tagore. I had this compulsion to know every aspect of Tagore. I tried to read every piece of work and words that were ever told and written about him. He appeared to be the ideal person who was all that vedanta could convey. Indeed, I was stunned that he was the first person to be of that characteristics to have gained a place in both international arena and common man's hearts (apart from personalities who were branded as proper Saints like Swami Ramakrishna Paramahamsa , Swami Vivekananda, etc). Gandhi was a great political leader, helping the masses decide what is good for the country as a whole and how

a quite exhausting read on how geneticists and biotechnology companies function both in the past and present. exhausting because of too many characters and incidences (or it could be that i have lost the taste and patience to read fiction anymore). 'Next' is an eye opener to the non-biology herd. Crichton has painted a picture of the real life events...how biotech companies steal data, report results that are totally made up and what goes behind the screen in the case of banned research. till now, i was not even aware that genes could be patented!!! it came as a shock to me. how can this be true??? totally unreasonable and absurd. imagine Newton patenting Gravity or Einstein patenting Time and Space !!!!! gene, that forms the fundamental constituent of every life form has been patented and still being patented by companies that discover an attribute of a gene(something like this). hence, no research could be carried out by anyone else on that gene without paying heavy royalti

a frustrated man in anger: Oh God! God appeared: Yes Son! Man: (puzzled and looking around) God: Why did you call me? Man: (bewildered and not knowing whom he is talking to) I didn't call you. Who are you? God: You said " Oh God" and I had come for you. Man: Oh! So, you are GOD ??!! God: Yes Son. What did you call me for? Man: I am frustrated in my current position. Nothing is going smoothly as per plans. I am in too much of a bottleneck everywhere. I need solutions. God: Son, Gods don't appear to grant wishes. When I created you, I created you with infinite possibilities. All you need is to look inside you. Explore your deep depths, tune in and listen silently to the serene inner voice I gave you. When you understand the problem thoroughly, the solution will become visible to you by itself. You don't need me. I never created any problem for you. The next time you call, it must be to thank me for having created you with infinite possibilities. Hope to appear again

as i was browsing thru some management related stuff, i stumbled upon the blog of one Anand Sritharan . his profile was quite interesting. he is an IITian , finished his Masters in EE from UCLA, worked with Intel as a Design Engineer in Santa Clara for a while but went back to India to crack CAT and is now with McKinsey after his IIMA stint. for sometime, i was pondering on what could have made him go back and take CAT. IIM craze of course, i decided. over a period of time, i have started to feel that all our IIMs and other management institutes in India have become a churning machine of salesmen and marketing personnel . they are producing graduates who take delight in their trained taste for management and are convinced somehow that they have made the most rational decision by getting into management well early in their lives. this is a serious thought to me at this stage of my career and also purely from my not-so-well-informed point of view: do i want to sell my country