Here’s our second recording at Rohtas Fort, 13 December 2021.
Raag Darbari Kanada | راگ درباری کانہڑہ
Sarangi – Taimur Khan
Tabla – Sarfraz Khan
Cameras – Eliyab Sarfraz
Audiovisual editing, mixing and mastering – Khurram Waqar
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Taimur Khan
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Head of an Elephant – Kota, Rajasthan, 1700-1710.
Some more heartwarming music from Aftab Datta’s winter collection.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Abdul Rashid Khan – Bageshree Kanada (Veena)
Azmat Hussain Khan – Miyan Malhar (Bandish demo)
Bade Ghulam Ali Khan – Kedara (Radio)
Barkat Ali Khan – Khammaj (Dadra)
Basavaraj Rajguru – Shudh Sarang
Birendra Kishore Roy Chaudhury – Shivmat Bhairav
Faiyaz Khan – Lachhari Todi (Alap)
Ghulam Hassan Shaggan – Anand Bhairav
Gyanendra Prasad Goswami – Malgunji
Krishnarao Shankar Pandit – Multani
Latafat Hussain Khan & Vijay Kichlu – Todi (Farhat Said Khan Collection)
Mubarak Ali Khan – Shyam Kalyan
Mubarak Ali – Barwa (Bade Ghulam Ali’s brother)
Munnawar Ali Khan – Kamod (Farhat Said Khan Collection 1969)
Mushtaq Ali Khan – Nayaki Kanada
Nisar Hussain Khan – Nayaki Kanada
Nivruttibuwa Sarnaik – Ramkali
Padmavati Shaligram – Jaijaivanti
Prasun Bannerjee – Kafi Kanada
Radhika Mohan Maitra – Alakananda
Ravi Kichlu – Bagehsree – (Live Alap)
Portrait of the Elephant ‘Alam Guman by Bichitr (active ca. 1610–60) | metmuseum.org | Click image for larger view.
Saint Petersburg Mosque
In 1882, Selim-Girei Tevkelev who in 1865 was appointed the Mufti of Orenburg turned to and obtained agreement from minister Count Tolstoy with the requirement for a mosque in St. Petersburg. In 1906, the Minister formed a special committee headed by Ahun Ataulla Bayazitov to collect 750,000 rubles within 10 years for the construction of the mosque. They organised collections in towns and providences of Russia and received donations from many sponsors. In addition the committee input securities in total amount of 142,000 rubles and also stamps for mosque’s project. The biggest donor was Said Abdoul Ahad, Emir of Bochara who undertook all expenses for the building. —Wikipedia
Grasshopper (Acrididae), Barbilla National Park, Costa Rica. Photo by Piotr Naskrecki/Minden Pictures/Corbis
Die, selfish gene, die >>
For decades, the selfish gene metaphor let us view evolution with new clarity. Is it now blinding us?
Perhaps better then to speak not of genes but the genome — all your genes together. And not the genome as a unitary actor, but the genome in conversation with itself, with other genomes, and with the outside environment. If grasshoppers becoming locusts, sweet bees becoming killers, and genetic assimilation are to be believed it’s those conversations that define the organism and drive the evolution of new traits and species. It’s not a selfish gene or a solitary genome. It’s a social genome.
Locust and Chameleon | Photo by Nik Taylor/Getty
Dead or Alive? >>
Is it time to kill off the idea of the ‘Selfish Gene’? We asked four experts to respond to our most controversial essay
I can vividly remember reading The Selfish Gene in my local library as a teenager: it was both a page-turner and something of a conversion experience. Richard Dawkins’s explanation of the unsparing reality of evolution blew like a cold, refreshing wind through everything I thought I knew about human nature, and is one of the great pieces of scientific writing from the last century. I was hardly surprised then, that David Dobbs’s essay ‘Die Selfish Gene’ provoked a fierce and prolonged debate when we published it in Aeon last December. But now it’s time to take stock: is the ‘selfish gene’ idea still a useful way to explain evolution? We invited four experts, and the writer himself, to respond to this question. And we invite you to join the conversation by taking our quick survey at the bottom of the page. What do you think: is it time to get rid of the ‘selfish gene’ or is it here to stay?
Brigid Hains, Editor
Jain Temple in Nagarparkar, Sindh, Pakistan | Photo by Salman-Rashid | Click image for larger view.
Greco Roman Sculpture | metmuseum.org
You are not who you think you are >>
You are not who you think you are. Philosophers, from the Buddha to David Hume to Derek Parfit, have been telling us that for centuries. There is no essential you, there is no unchanging nucleus at the centre of your being, and there is no homunculus looking through your eyes and pulling the levers that steer your actions. Whatever you think the hard core of you is, it’s an illusion.
Eid Mubarak.
Reclining Figure (1951), Henry Moore; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Why should we care about philosophy? >>
The consolations of philosophy >>
Happy Thoughts: Here Are the Things Proven To Make You Happier >>
The Five Paths To Being the Best at Anything >>
Are creative people more likely to be crazy? >>
What does the most comprehensive study of geniuses tell us about creativity? >>
41 ways to be more creative >>
Are you more creative when you’re drunk? >>
What are creative people like? >>
Are lastborns creative risk-takers? Are firstborns smarter? What’s the deal with birth order? >>
What five things can make sure you never stop growing and learning? >>
There is little point in discussing politics the way it is empirically discussed – and one should refrain from it as some Desi restaurants iterate – because there is no point in choosing from among a herd of narcissists and sociopaths.
And life is short.
Even Plato’s Republic is far from reason, even if in an unlikely way, it is a wealth of ideas.
“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” –Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
Terrestrial Mollusk, Poppy Anemone, and Crane Fly, Joris Hoefnagel, 1591-96; from George Bocskay, Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta in Annette Giesecke’s The Mythology of Plants
This brilliant scarlet anemone, Anemone coronaria, is often seen among olives and in stony places in Greece and the Mediterranean. The Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel shows it in this watercolor of 1591–1596 with a snail and a crane fly, or daddy longlegs. The ancient Greeks believed the flower’s blood-red color grew from the blood shed by demi-god Adonis, beloved by the goddess of love, Aphrodite, when he was killed by the virginal goddess Artemis while out hunting. Greek poets, storytellers, and mythographers often attached tales of unhappy love to the glorious flowers around them.
Source: Among the Plant Hunters by Robin Lane Fox
The DNA helix gave 20th-century biology its symbol. But the more we learn, the more life circles back to an older image
The DNA helix is important, of course. But the most important thing it does is make proteins that can operate in regulatory loops. These loops can also operate at the molecular level: genes make proteins, but these proteins determine which genes are ‘off’ and which are ‘on’ (as HIF1A does), making a control loop at even the molecular level. Unlike the helix, loops also operate at scales far above the molecular, covering a range of sizes from bacterial colonies to the vast ecosystems of the rainforest – perhaps to the ecosystem of the entire Earth. Beyond Earth, life without DNA is just about thinkable (one can imagine alternative strategies for storing information). Life without feedback loops, though? I have never met any biologist who can imagine that.
The helix is too well-established an icon to be deposed any time soon. And yet, a simple loop would be a much more universal symbol of how life works at all of its scales and levels. Perhaps the Ouroboros, beloved of gnostics and alchemists, has been an ideal symbol waiting in the wings for centuries: there can surely be no more evocative symbol of feedback than a snake growing by devouring its own tail.
Full article: A closed loop by Jamie Davies
WILD GEESE
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Poets revel in careful multivalence without fear of accountability.
Philosophers account for their multivalence, fearing just as carefully.
Or should I say, we deal with distinctions differently.
I once read that an elephant did not drop a wood log in a consignated hole because a dog was stranded there. I may not be capable of such moral rectitude but I love the thought that the elephant had.
Without having moved an inch, from what experience, my friends, and my mother told me, there is merit in going to Cholistan & Parachinar. If for nothing else, for the smell of diesel trucks. I love my mother.
My favorite platitude: “anything is possible in human relationships.”
Taimur Khan 