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Conversion and Continuity: How Hereditary Muslim Families Came to Lead North Indian Classical Music
Part III: The sociology of Muslim musicianship, the evidence for conversion, and why the music never changed In brief: One of the most striking facts about North Indian classical music is that its most prestigious performing lineages came to rest, over several centuries, in the hands of hereditary Muslim families even as those same families… →
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Sanctified Sound Music, Faith and Cultural Synthesis in Medieval North India, circa 1200 to 1550 How the history of Hindustani classical music was shaped by the Delhi Sultanate, the Chishti Sufis, and the temple stream
Part II Introduction Few chapters in the cultural history of the Indian subcontinent are as consequential, or as persistently misunderstood, as the musical encounter between the Indic world and the Persianate civilization that arrived with the Turkic and Afghan conquests at the close of the twelfth century. The popular imagination often frames this encounter as… →
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The Sound of the Sacred Land: A History of Hindustani Classical Music
Introduction to the Series This is a series of essays on Hindustani classical music, conceived to unfold across the ages and to illumine the nuances, the lineages, and the enduring legacy that adorn our musical heritage. Bharat, or Hindustan, is a land in which music is woven into the very fabric of our existence. It… →
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The Quiet Joy of Fortitude
On Stoicism, the East, and the Art of Not Growing Dull Speech delivered at the Maldives Professional Speakers Summit held on July 11, 2026 A very good morning to you all. Friends, when people hear the word “stoic,” they conjure someone glacial and impassive, clenching their way through existence. Perhaps, a statue in the rain,… →
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The Chalice of Malice
Homo sapiens have dominated the planet earth for millenniums as they kept evolving in to an incredibly rapacious species. But that dominion came with disastrous consequences. As we progressed, we left behind a trail of destruction, anarchy, disarray, that would keep us at the helm of the food chain but with little consideration for the… →
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A thousand years of peace!
The world that we have bequeathed from nature has now come to war with it! As humans attempt to overpower and rein in the primordial force of nature that created the universe, we are slowly but surely becoming more and more arrogant. With great power comes great responsibility, an adage much used by super heroes.… →
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A not so Accommodating World
An epoch is in the making as we move ahead with technological advancement and are faced with the choice of plenty to deal with. At the same time we have to face the increasing instance of monopolies that could rule our lives. We are consciously losing our right to choose and support small businesses. We… →
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A Brave New World!
Money has remained the primary medium of exchange allowing us to monetize goods and services in to a common denomination. So in other words, currency has been the great leveler. It has allowed us to ascribe a value for all our manufacturing output, human services, natural resources, industry and life itself. As we progress to… →
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An Irony of Authority
Our lives are full of blemishes and contradictions. They galore in every action of ours, yet we have developed a fine art of suffusing them with explanations that support them. One such area is the corporate world. In our personal lives and those of the nation’s we live in, we all support democracy and believe… →
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To be Equal or not to be Equal
We love to be unequal and to justify this boastful slander; we say that’s the only way to reward genetic differences, enterprise and risk. Of course as we stand today in our evolutionary stage, we are restrained by our dwarfed intellect to support this logic. We have established a human civilization that values individual enterprise… →
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To Think or Not To Think
To Think or Not to Think Imagination, the domain of every living species, yet dominated by one species, man. It is precisely this virtue of humans that has made them superior to other living species. What ignites our imagination is the very essence of what makes us dream. We wonder and are amazed by all… →
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To Eat or not to Eat
Exploring human food habits and reasoning with brevity. →
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