Fallacy of equating Modernity with Westernisation

Just because the western world had a head start in science & technology is no reason to believe that their's is the only way to be modern. One can be true to one's national roots, but strive to be modern in that framework, abandoning only the outdated beliefs.

For example, an Indian woman can be modern, while wearing a sari. In fact many sari wearing women have achieved more in many fields in their lifetimes than their jeans & T shirt clad grand-daughters can achieve in many of their lifetimes. Modernity is a state of mind of being receptive to new ideas & being constantly creative. It is most unfortunate that jeans & T shirt or salwar & kameez have become the normal female attire, the sari being relegated to ethnic status.

The fact is one has adapted to a superficially western way of life, while holding onto the really anachronistic ancient beliefs. It was strange to see a film star, who had dated many men, like her western counterparts, suddenly turn a pious hindu wife, praying for her husband's longevity (itself a patriarchal idea) by peering at the moon through a sieve during Karva Chauth!

It was commendable to see Girish Karnad, the quintessential modern man, always donning Kurta Pyjama. Even at Oxford, he wore a close collar coat & never a jacket with tie.

The same goes for musical tastes. Nowadays, the young always wear earphones, listening to what? Probably western rock music, completely alien to Hindu culture with frequently abhorrent lyrics. A true modern young man, with refined tastes, can listen to western classical music, which is universal like all great art. Of course, it may be an acquired taste.

As George Eliot says in her "Daniel Deronda", "Popular music is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture, the passion & thought of people without any breadth or horizon. There is a sort of self satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody, no cries of deep mysterious passion, no conflict, no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it."

Nirad Chaudhuri describes his first encounter with Western Music. He had gone to his favourite bookshop in Kolkata & accidentally heard Massenet's Gavotte, sung by Amelia Galli-Curci, played on a record player. He fell in love with Western classical music then & there. He adds acidly "If I had heard pop music then, my chance encounter with Western music would not have any sequel. A man moored to the highest in one's own culture does not go over to barbarism, nor is he beaten by it."

"Meends" of Hindustani Music & Calculus

A "meend" is a gradual sliding from one musical note to another. For example middle C (Stuttgart pitch) is 264 hertz & D is  264 X 9/8 = 297 hertz. (in "Just" intonation.) In equally tempered scale, it will be 264 X 1.06 X 1.06 = 296.6 hertz, 1.06 being the twelfth root of 2. In a keyboard instrument one has to jump from one to the other directly, whereas in a string instrument like the Sitar, one can glide from one to the other by laterally pulling the string downwards along the fret, taking in all the microtones in between, not to speak of the semitone of C#.

Now this has an equivalent in Information technology, where "bits" of information are digitally stored either as 0 or 1. (like two keys of a keyboard). In analogue processing of information, a continuously varying signal can be handled (like the "meend" in a Sitar).

In Calculus, which can also be called "slope finding", the slope can be easily found in a straight line graph by calculating the ratio of opposite side over the adjacent side (of the triangle of the graph), or the tangent of the angle. In the case of calculating the slope of a curve like a parabola (y=x squared), the slope is obviously different at different points of the curve, but can be found by dividing the curve into miniscule portions, finding its slope & proceeding to the next portion. So, the general slope of a curve like the above parabola is dy/dx = 2X. (Full details of the calculations can be found in "How to enjoy Calculus" by Eli S Pine.)

So to conclude, the "meend" is the processing of microtones between C & D, like processing the miniscule bits of the parabolic curve in Calculus or the continuous analogue processing of data, instead of digital bits as in information technology.

Anthropomorphic Animal Tales

Probably the earliest of these is Vishnu Sharma's "Panchatantra" narrated to bring the wayward princes of a king to heel.

It is interesting to note that both Aesop & Uncle Remus were slaves, so some amount of harshness of their lives influenced their tales. Whereas Aesop's tales had a moral attached to each tale, Uncle Remus's Brer Rabbit used his wiliness to escape the clutches of the predatory Brer Fox & Brer Wolf.

Beatrix Potter was reputedly not very fond of children for whom she wrote, but was certainly very fond of animals in their habitat, who appeared in her tales. She was a very skilled & observant painter of small animals.

A. A. Milne, creator of the two immortal "Winnie the Pooh" prose works, not only made his animals human, but invested them with human psychological traits as well, like the depressive Eeyore, the hyperactive Tigger, the dyslexic owl, the bossy Rabbit, the anxiety ridden Piglet & Winnie himself suffering from ADHD. (Attention deficit hyperactive disorder). His prose was admirably complemented by Shepard's marvellous colour renditions.

Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows", gave the animals all the mannerisms of Edwardian gentlemen. Toad, notably is a stinging caricature of the British Upper Class, with inherited wealth & a snooty attitude towards his social inferiors, spending his ample time & money on momentary enthusiasms. All noted illustrators have tried their hand at illustrating it, notably Shepard, Rackham, Ingpen & the "impressionist" Inga Moore.