The IDEA - The Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts - Seven somewhat dated collections of essays, music, videos, and thought curated and designed by Shankar Barua, backed by totally awesome early Internet-era graphics, and hosted at
Laurie Spiegel's also-rad
retiary.org.
Please note that many individual pages of The IDEA gazettes are very-very heavily loaded, by [2001's] WWWeb standards, with images/audio/video. In other words, if you can get past ugly old broken HTML and auto-playing music, you may find a lot to like in here.
posted by carsonb
on May 4, 2010 -
3 comments
Chai Why? The Triumph of Tea in India : "But whereas I initially supposed tea-drinking to be as Indian, and perhaps as old, as the Vedas, I have come to know that it is, in the
longue durée of Indian history, a very recent development; one that (in many parts of the country) did not much precede my first visit, or that even followed it."
posted by dhruva
on Apr 19, 2010 -
18 comments
The Art & Life of Annie Truxell [via
mefi projects]: Annie Truxell is a well known painter who has lived a long and fascinating life. Her adventures have been legendary, encompassing Greenwich Village in the 50s, London in the 60s and India in the 70s. She was friends with Franz Klein, Bill de Kooning, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, Mati Klarwein & many other wild & woolly people.
posted by The Whelk
on Jul 12, 2009 -
11 comments
Dr. Frances W. Pritchett, Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University, New York, has created
a superb online collection of resources, all about
India and South Asia, its art, history, literature, architecture and culture. Her
Indian Routes section (the
Index page) is a particularly rich resource. Her vast, colorful and informative site also has many great images. Check out her "scrapbook pages" on the
Princes l the
Ghaznavids l
British Rule l
Women's Spaces l
Perspectives on Hinduism.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Jun 9, 2009 -
14 comments
Staining the nails, skin and hair with
henna is the favorite way of enhancing beauty amongst women in the Middle East. It is used as a hair treatment as well as a dye to make
decorative designs on the skin. The art is known as
mehndi. Henna
markings remain on the skin for about twenty or thirty days.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Aug 13, 2008 -
36 comments
The Idol Thief "Vaman Ghiya operated one of the most extensive and sophisticated clandestine antiquities rings in history, and he had grown rich in the past three decades by smuggling thousands of Indian antiques to auction houses and private collectors in the West."
posted by dhruva
on May 14, 2007 -
15 comments
Proceedings against
MF Husain have been
stayed in India's Supreme Court.
A painting by the celebrated Muslim artist, apparently depicting Mother India as a nude, led Hindus to bring an obscenity case and proceedings to seize his Mumbai property were initiated. However his lawyers moved swiftly to
frustrate the action, transferring the property into his son's name and then seeking the High Court ruling. Hindus have
taken offense at previous
paintings by Husain, depicting Hindu deities in allegedly obscene ways.
Others disagree.
posted by Phanx
on May 8, 2007 -
41 comments
Introduced to Western culture by the Beatles in their single
Norwegian Wood, the
sitar has featured prominently in North Indian classical music for centuries. Princeton-based computer scientist Ajay Kapur updates the instrument with his
ESitar, an audio and video controller that uses
gesture input (PDF) and
machine learning algorithms to facilitate joining the computer with Ajay in his sitar performance. Undergraduate engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania work from the other direction, building
RAVI-bot, an
award-winning, self-playing
robotic sitar (YouTube) programmed to generate music from classical
Raga scales and melodies all on its own. For those in the Philadelphia area, be sure to check out a live performance of RAVI-bot at the local
Klein Art Gallery.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Apr 19, 2007 -
32 comments
The Omkara Project "..the word Omkara meaning - ' the
vehicle to cross the ocean of life ' Crossing this ocean is the
journey that the mortal being must undertake in a lifetime and henceforth encounter the three basic elements of mortality - creation, preservation and destruction."
posted by dhruva
on Jul 17, 2005 -
8 comments
What Was True. From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s,
William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the
United States, in
India, and in
Europe, and filling
notebook after notebook with his observations. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the
daily chores of unemployed
coal miners, from the lifestyle of hippies in
Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney
was able to record the lives of others with clarity and poignancy.
Gedney's America is a nation of averted eyes, and broken automobiles, and restlessness, a place Edward Hopper would recognize, but so, also, Walt Whitman.
posted by matteo
on Apr 27, 2005 -
11 comments
