Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

Recent posts

about

Category: People, Places & Friends

  • A Question of Lineage (Sujatha)

    A simple, almost off-hand comment in this article (via 3QD), describing an interview with the estimable William Dalrymple: "It was during the writing of White Mughals that Dalrymple discovered something about his own family: His maternal great-great-grandmother Sophia Pattle was the daughter of "a Hindu Bengali woman . . . who converted to Catholicism and…

  • Punjabi in Pakistani Punjab

    We have a discussion going about Punjabi language and its survival or lack of survival in Pakistan, up at brown pundits. comments very welcome..

  • Some of my best friends …

    Animals entered my life very early. Since I was about four or five years old until I was a teenager, a parade of dogs and birds came through our home. I would become attached to every one of them and their death or disappearance invariably caused me grief. Even though all the family members were involved…

  • K.S. Radhakrishnan: A journey in search of shapes, space and Shantiniketan

    From time to time I write about artists, writers and other interesting personalities I come across in real life either by chance or by design. In late 2008 I presented Mimi Radhakrishnan and her work on our blog. After all the depressing news from Tucson and Pakistan that we have been discussing here for a while, this may be a good…

  • A Caged Bird is Free (Sujatha)

    I had mentioned in my previous post that had I access to Rabindrasangeet recordings earlier on, I might have been able to appreciate them better.The example of lovely singing that I linked to was a rendition of a song by two of the Rabindrasangeet Trinity, so to speak – Kanika Banerji and Suchitra Mitra. Of…

  • Madhavi Mudgal: Dancer, Teacher, Friend

    During my recent trip to India, I was able to visit two art / history museums of interest. One was Tagore's ancestral home in the Jorasanko (Twin Bridges) area of Kolkata, the place of the poet's birth as well as his death. The other was the wonderful National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi which I had last seen many, many decades ago. A third equally…

  • The Waiting Pox (Cyrus)

    I have been meaning to write something substantial for my first post to Accidental Blogger, but my brain has been roasting at a pleasant 39°C (that’s 102°F for the Imperialists) for a large portion of the past week. It has simmered down to near normal now, and the pox are on the retreat. I was…

  • No God Needed (Sujatha)

    That's the conclusion that Stephen Hawking has come to, in his latest book The Grand Design, written in conjunction with Leonard Mlodinow. In his introduction to the book on the amazon.com website: "How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? Over twenty years ago I wrote A Brief History of Time, to…

  • “The World Cup, My White Afrikaner Skin, My Fascist Parents, Mandela, Obama, And Forgiveness”

    A very interesting piece of writing - part memoir, part commentary by Evert Cilliers over at 3 QD. Do take the time to check this one out. Evert wears his heart on his sleeves and it is quite astonishing to be a spectator.