Nitin

In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end to his life, Gandhi had been on the political stage for more than fifty years. He head inspired two generations of India patriots, shaken an empire and sparked off a revolution which was to change the face of Africa and Asia. To millions of his own people, he was the Mahatma- the great soul- whose sacred glimpse was a reward in itself. By the end of 1947 he had lived down much of the suspicion, ridicule and opposition which he to face, when he first raised the banner of revolt against racial exclusiveness and imperial domination. His ideas, once dismissed as quaint and utopian ,had begun to strike answering chords in some of the finest minds in the world. "Generations to come, it may be", Einstein had said of Gandhi in July 1944, "will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon earth."

It was the passage of the Asiatic Registration Act in Transvaal in 1907 which convinced Gandhi that the method of protest, petition and prayer which he had sedulously pursued for nearly fourteen years had failed. It was at this juncture that he evolved a new technique, which came to be known as Passive Resistance; but as it ruled out both verbal and physical violence, it differed in important respects from the campaign waged on behalf of the suffragettes in England. The principles and techniques of Gandhi’s movement were to evolve gradually in the ensuing months ant years; its author was a man for whom theory was the handmaid of action.

Gandhji got his barrister in law from Soth AfricaThe programme of "non-violent non-cooperation" included the boycott of councils, courts and schools, set up by the British and of all foreign cloth. With some naivete Gandhi claimed that his movement was not unconstitutional: in his dictionary, constitutional and moral were synonymous terms. The British saw that the success of "non-cooperation" would paralyse their administration. Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, tried to kill with ridicule "the most foolish of all foolish schemes", which would "bring ruin to those who had any stake in the country". A number of eminent "moderate" politicians joined official critics in underlining the risks of mass non-cooperation as proposed by Gandhi

That a political programme had no chance of success without an adequate organization to implement it, Gandhi had realized at the age of twenty-five, when he had founded the Natal Indian Congress to fight for the rights of Indians in Natal. The Indian National Congress, had, therefore, to be refashioned, if it was to prove an efficient instrument of non-violent non-cooperation. Gandhi saw that what the country needed was not a forum for an annual pageant and feast of oratory, but a militant organization in touch with the masses. Under the new constitution, the Congress was given a broad-based pyramidal structure by formation of village, taluka, district and provincial committees, with the All India Congress Committee and the Working Committee at the apex. The Congress was thus reorganized not only on a more representative basis, but in such a way that it could function efficiently between its annual sessions. It ceased to be a preserve of the upper and middle classes; its doors were opened to the masses in the small towns and villages whose political consciousness Gandhi himself was quickening.

Gandhi was swept to the top of Indian politics in 1919-20 because he had caught the imagination of the people. He was loved and respected as the Mahatma, the great soul; with voluntary poverty, simplicity, humility and saintliness, he seemed a rishi (sage) of old who had stepped from the pages of an ancient epic to bring about the liberation of his country. Nay, to millions he was the incarnation of God. It was not only for his message that people came to him, but for the merit of seeing him. The sacred sight of the Mahatma—his darshan—was almost equivalent to a pilgrimage to holy Banaras. The unthinking adoration of the multitude sometimes made Gandhi feel sick. "The woes of the Mahatma", he wrote, "are known only to the Mahatma". But this adoration was the mainspring from which was drawn the immense influence he exercised over Indian public life.

Gandhi had struck some of the inner chords of Indian humanity; his appeal for courage and sacrifice evoked a ready response because he was himself the epitome of these qualities. It was because he was, to use Churchill’s epithet, a "naked faqir", because his life was one of austerity and self-sacrifice that a great emotional bond grew between him and the Indian people. The number of such "faqirs" was to multiply fast. Among those who gave up their lucrative careers and queued up for prison under Gandhi’s leadership were Motilal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, C.R. Das, Vallabhbhai Patel, and C. Rajagopalachari. Life acquired a new meaning for them. Abbas Tyabji, a former Chief Justice of Baroda, wrote from a village that he was feeling twenty years younger. "God?" he exclaimed, "what an experience ! I have so much love and affection for the common folk to whom it is now an honour to belong. It is the faqir’s dress that has broken down all barriers." It is of this period that Jawaharlal Nehru has written in his autobiography that the movement absorbed him so wholly that he "gave up all other associations and contacts, old friends, books, even newspapers except in so far as they dealt with the work in hand…. I almost forgot my family, my wife, my daughter."

From the autumn of 1920, the non-cooperation movement gathered momentum. The attitude of the Government at first was one of caution. It was reluctant to launch a drastic repression, as it did not want to alienate moderate Indian opinion. Soon after his arrival in India in April, 1921, Lord Reading, the new Viceroy, met Gandhi. In a private letter to his son, the Viceroy confessed to a feeling of excitement, almost a thrill, in meeting his unusual visitor and described his religious and moral views as admirable, though he found it difficult to understand his practice of them in politics.

Throughout 1921, the tension between the Congress and the Government was steadily mounting. There was no meeting of minds between Gandhi and Reading. The Ali Brothers, the principal leaders of the Khilafat, were arrested in September 1921 on a charge of inciting the army to disloyalty; their offence was repeated by a number of Indian leaders including Gandhi. This was a challenge which was difficult for the Government not to accept. The official optimism that the movement would melt away by internal differences or popular apathy proved to be misplaced. Nearly thirty thousand non-cooperators were arrested. The Government was reluctant to touch Gandhi until a favourable opportunity came. Indeed as late as December 1921, Lord Reading seemed willing to hold a round table conference with Gandhi and other Indian leaders to reach an understanding and to avoid unseemly scenes during the visit to India of the Prince of Wales. Lord Reading was, however, hardly in a position to make any substantial political concessions. Meanwhile, Gandhi was under increasing pressure from his adherents to launch a civil disobedience campaign. The Ahmedabad Congress in December 1921 invested him with authority to launch a mass movement. Mass civil disobedience was, in the words of Gandhi, "an earthquake, a sort of general upheaval on the political plane—the Government ceases to function… the police stations, the courts, offices, etc., all cease to be Government property and shall be taken charge of by the people." He proposed to proceed cautiously. His plan was to launch civil disobedience in one district; if it succeeded he proposed to extend it to the adjacent districts, and so on, until the whole of India was liberated. But he gave a clear warning that if violence broke out in any form in any part of the country, the movement would lose its character as a movement of peace, "even as a lute would begin to emit notes of discord the moment a single string snaps."

Bombay Chronicle report on the Ahmedabad Congress, December 1921

A riot which disfigured Bombay during the visit of Prince of Wales in November 1921 had led Gandhi to postpone civil disobedience. Nevertheless, two months later, under growing pressure from his colleagues, he decided to launch a no-tax campaign in Bardoli taluk in Gujarat. He communicated the step he contemplated, with his reasons for it, in a letter to the Viceroy. This was taken by the Government of India as an ultimatum. A head-on collision between the Government on the one hand and the nationalist forces on the other seemed imminent. Gandhi’s letter to the Viceroy was dated February 1,1922. Three days later, there was a clash between a procession and the police at Chauri Chaura, a small village in the United Province, in which the police station was set on fire and 22 policemen were killed.

Gandhi viewed the Chauri Chaura tragedy as a red signal, a warning that the atmosphere in the country was too explosive for a mass movement. He decided to retrace his steps, to cancel the plans for civil disobedience in Bardoli, to suspend the aggressive part of the non-cooperation campaign, and to shift the emphasis to the ‘constructive’ programme of hand-spinning, communal unity, abolition of untouchabilty, etc. His action shocked and bewildered his closest colleagues. Their reaction is best expressed in Romain Rolland’s words: "It was dangerous to assemble all the forces of a nation and to hold the nation panting before a prescribed movement, to lift one’s arm to give the final command, then at the last moment, let one’s arm drop and thrice call a halt just as the formidable machinery has been set in motion. One risks ruining the brakes and paralysing the impetus." The Viceroy, Lord Reading, cheerfully confided to his son that Gandhi "had pretty well run himself to the last ditch as a politician by extraordinary manifestation in the last month or six weeks before his arrest".

Gandhi's principles

Truth
Nonviolence
Vegetarianism
Brahmacharya
Simplicity
Faith

A man with such great simplicity, modesty and values, getting the Independence of India without any bloodshed is truly extraordinary.

Posted by Nitin at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet. He was one of the founders of the High Renaissance and, in his later years, one of the principal exponents of Mannerism. Born at Caprese, the son of the local magistrate, his family returned to Florence soon after his birth. Michelangelo's desire to become an artist was initially opposed by his father, as to be a practising artist was then considered beneath the station of a member of the gentry. He was, however, eventually apprenticed in 1488 for a three-year term to Domenico Ghirlandaio. Later in life Michelangelo tried to suppress this apprenticeship, implying that he was largely self-taught, undoubtedly because he did not want to present himself as a product of the workshop system which carried with it the stigma of painting and sculpture being taught as crafts rather than Liberal Arts. Nevertheless, it was in Ghirlandaio's workshop that Michelangelo would have learnt the rudiments of the technique of fresco painting. Before the end of his apprenticeship, however, he transferred to the school set up by Lorenzo the Magnificent in the gardens of the Palazzo Medici. Here he would have had access to the Medici collection of antiques, as well as a certain amount of tuition from the resident master, Bertoldo di Giovanni. His work here included two marble reliefs, a Madonna of the Steps (Casa Buonarroti, Florence), carved in rilievo schiacciato and showing the influence of Donatello (Bertoldo's master) and a Battle of the Centaurs (Casa Buonarroti, Florence), based on Bertoldo's bronze Battle of the Horsemen, which itself appears to be based on an antique prototype. Either at this time, or when he was in the Ghirlandaio workshop, Michelangelo also studied from and drew copies of the frescos of Giotto and Masaccio.

"With the death of Lorenzo in 1492, the school broke up and Michelangelo was given permission to study anatomy at the hospital attached to Sto Spirito. In gratitude to the prior for allowing him this privilege he carved a wooden Crucifix (the one now in the Casa Buonarroti is considered by some scholars to be the work in question). In October 1494, Michelangelo transferred to Bologna and was awarded the cornmission for three marble figures to complete the tomb of St. Dominic in S. Domenico Maggiore, begun by the recently deceased Niccoló dell' Arca. By June 1496 he was in Rome and here established his reputation with two marble statues, the drunken Bacchus (c 1496-7; Florence, Bargello) for a private patron and the Pietá for St. Peter's (1498-9). The latter is generally considered to be the masterpiece of his early years, deeply poignant, exquisitely beautiful and more highly finished than his later works were to be. In creating a harmonious pyramidal group from the problematic combination of the figure of a full-grown man lying dead across the lap of his mother, Michelangelo solved a formal problem that had hitherto baffled artists. He returned to Florence a famous sculptor and was awarded the commission for the colossal figure of David to stand in the Piazza della Signoria, flanking the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio (1501-4, original now in the Accademia). Soon after this he was cornmissioned to paint a battle scene for the new Council Chamber of the Palazzo. On one wall he commenced the painting of the Battle of Cascina, while on the opposite wall his principal rival, Leonardo, was commissioned to paint the Battle of Anghiari. Although neither painting was ever finished, copies of a fragment of Michelangelo's full-size cartoon, showing a group of nude soldiers reacting variously to the battle alarm that has interrupted their bathing, soon began to circulate (e.g. Earl of Leicester Collection, Holkharn Hall, Norfolk). These nudes, posed in a variety of turning and animated poses, established the Mannerist conception of the male nude as the principal vehicle for the expression of human emotions.

"Michelangelo abandoned this Florentine commission when Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome to design his tomb. What should have been the most prestigious commission of his career, a free-standing tomb with some 40 figures, to be located in St. Peter's, became, in Michelangelo's own words, the 'tragedy of the tomb'. Julius died in 1513, the contract was redrawn several times over the following years with ever-diminishing funding, other demands were made on Michelangelo by successive popes, and the project was finally cobbled together in 1545.

"In 1534 Michelangelo departed for Rome, never to return to Florence. From now on he worked mainly for the papacy. Soon after his arrival Pope Clement VIII commissioned him to paint the fresco of the Last judgement for the Sistine Chapel (work commenced under Pope Paul III in 1536, completed in 1541). The spirit of the work is totally different from that of the ceiling unveiled 29 years earlier. In the interim, the Church had been torn apart by the Reformation, Rome had been sacked (1527), and Michelangelo's fresco breathes the new militancy of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The optimism and confidence of the ceiling is replaced by the pessimism and emotional turmoil of the altar wall: saints swarm around the Apollo-like figure of Christ, wielding their instruments of martyrdom, seemingly demanding righteous judgement on the sinners stirring to life from the bare earth at the bottom of the picture. The Last judgement was intended as the climax of the chapel's account, represented in coherent stages, on the ceiling and walls, of the Christian history of the world. This was Michelangelo's most controversial work to date and was as much condemned (for its nudity) as it was praised (for its artistry). After the death of Michelangelo, the fresco was nearly destroyed, but the Church authorities settled for Daniele da Volterra painting draperies over the offending nudity.

Posted by Nitin at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though the individuals of this time remained Christian to the core, they began to take a dimmer view of the way that their faith had been mediated by the Church during a 1000-year "dark ages." They instead sought to validate their Christian faith on the basis of personal loyalties and personal virtue. These people were doers--who used their minds in service to the needs of the family and local community--the "patria" as they understood it. They were not contemplatives; monastic life was not for them a Christian ideal. They were not knights living to honor the code of chivalry; that was much to abstract a notion for them. They were practical, "earthy" in their interests, and sought to use their considerable worldly talents for the common good. This was their understanding of their Christian responsibilities, their accountability before God.

The spirit of "earthiness" was well reflected in the development of the arts. Art reached beyond traditional religious themes to reflect this interest in the individual and the passions of the living person. Architecture was called up not only to build churches, but also trade halls and private homes. Poetry began to reflect not only on religious themes but on subjects of human love and passion.

This was the "Age of Exploration"--a term we use in reference to the beginning of the exploration of the Seas and continents around Europe by a wide variety of Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish explorers--professional adventurers really. In the early-mid 1400s, Prince Henry of Portugual was sending out numbers of sailors to explore the African coast in search of a southern route around Africa to the East. By the end of the 1400s and the early 1500s the seas were full of the exploits of such explorers as Diaz, Columbus, da Gama, Cabral, Magellan, etc--and their royal patrons who financed these ventures.

Interestingly, the Church chose to join the action. Certainly there were those who objected to the church taking up such a worldly manner. But by and large the view of the church--notably of its popes, who during the 1400s could be very worldly fellows--was that intellectual revolution and political intrigue were things to be pursued. Thus the church was as active a player in the Renaissance game as were the newly emerging princes and kings.

Posted by Nitin at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though there was no specific event to mark the end of the middle ages and the on-set of the modern era, the 1400s seem to be the all-important transition time.
This period of transition into modernity, known as the "renaissance," was centered on Italy, especially the cities of Florence, Milan, Rome and Venice--but was carried into Northern Europe through commerce and by scholars who studied in Italy and took its learning northward to Paris, London, Bruges and Antwerp.

The 1400s mark both a definite continuity with the long development of Western Christian culture and yet at the same time a strong departure from many of the ways the Christian community had understood the cosmos around it. The Christian mind had long (a thousand years) seen the sweep of history in a profoundly dualistic fashion. There were the times before Christ and the times since then. Every thing before that even had meaning for them only as preparation for this grand event. Everything since that event was measured in terms of how it gave fulfillment to God's plan of salvation for human life.

In terms of literature, In their "earthiness" they were an incredibly curious .They studied all the classic works they could get their hands on. They already knew Latin; they now took on Greek and even Hebrew. They wanted to go back to the "sources" themselves of the intellectual foundations of their world. They took in the works of the early church fathers--more authoritative for them because they were closer to the original events of Christ. But they also became quite as familiar with the wide range of "pagan" works of Greece and Rome. The idea was that if it came out of that older age, it was truer, purer. Indeed, some of them became literary scholars of the first order such as Lorenzo Valla, who studied the linguistic structure of the ancients and was able to demonstrate that the "Donation of Constantine," by which the popes claimed vast temporal powers received from the Emperor Constantine (early 300s), was actually a much later document employing a much later Latin more characteristic of the Middle Ages when it was probably written.

Having discovered the wealth of ancient human testimony and being deeply touched by the profunidty of its spirit, they began to detach themselves all the more from the "darker" Christian mood of the centuries that stood between themselves and that "golden age" 1000 years earlier. They saw history now not as some form of single Christian continuum, but as time in which the once greatness of Roman civilization was lost and was now, a thousand years later, being rediscovered.

Posted by Nitin at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Srinivas Krishnan, Srini as he is called has a big organizations with musicians called GLOBAL RHYTHMS which was started long back. Srini is a visiting professor in Miami University, Ohio and also at other universities around the U.S.He is a musician by himselfHe hs been playing Tabla since he was young.

After completing his studies at Miami University, Ohio,he decided to use his musical background to start the organization globak rhythms.The organization comprises of mostly Americans who play the Indian instruments, sing the Indian traditional classical songs and film songs and dance for the Indian music too.

Srini has two to three programes every year in U.s, I got a invitation along with my otherfriends for his show at Miami University, Ohio on the 18th of this month. The show was phenonmenol. I was taken by surprise by seeing the way the Americans sang some of the toughest Indian classical songs. They sounded awesome. One could never say that it was the Americans who were singing these songs.
All were so greatly dressed. The girls were cladded in their sarees and some the guys in Pyjama and Kurta which is a very common wear for the guys n India.Patrick, one of the artist looked adroit withGADAM which is nothing but a clay pot. It is one of the instruments which is played in a classical Carnatic orchaestra.Patrick has been learning Indian classical music from Srini ever since the global rhythms was born.The show also featured a bharathnatyam, classical dance art from the southern part of India.It had dances for some Bollywood songs, which is the movie industry in india. It had an orchaestra with more than 200 American artists. It also had some of the most experoenced drummers from the country. Looking at these artists perform, I felt like being at India.The Global Rhythms had spread through out the U.s and he has a number of Americans who are intersted in joining his Global Rhythms

Prof Srini has done an excellent job in making this show a great success. He had put in tremondous effort by traing all the artists for more than two months. I really felt previkeged for having attented that program and would like to thank him for his invitation.

Posted by Nitin at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)