"Music connects us with something deeper. We know there's stuff around us that science cannot explain. Consciousness, for example, is hard to explain through science alone. Music seems to connect you somehow with what this other thing is. The emotional impact that music has and how it connects people together is also very profound. Music was absolutely central to Einstein too and if he got stuck in something when he was theorising, he would go away and play his violin and that would transport him into a different world and give him ideas. He likened music to science and scientific discovery. Musicians, he believed, didn't create music; they received it. I believe that as well. The music is out there and you act as an aerial/valve/funnel. Einstein believed that about scientific discovery too -- it's not like you create these theories; you receive them. So, by playing music by composers he loved -- like Bach -- who he believed received music, it put him in that frame of mind for discovery. Other great scientists like Max Planck, who were also good musicians, have said that as well. Science, music and mathematics have been woven throughout history. It's natural because, what is music? It is sound. Sound is a physical phenomenon and it's got mathematical rules. There is something unique about music, something different from anything else, and that's' what makes it so fascinating!" -- David Darling, author, A Perfect Harmony; Music, Mathematics and Science talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from Mesopotamian music from 1400 BCE, the Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur, and the compositions of the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen to dementia choirs and the tannerin used by the Beach Boys Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Books and Authors

The Hymn to Nikkal, Einstein's violin, musical space odysseys and beyond

Pastoral and indigenous communities in Nagarhole, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal, and the Van Gujjars in Uttarakhand are the ones who are protecting forests. They have a relationship with it. It's a sense of ecology that has to be looked at for solutions to the many big questions that we are grappling with at the moment. Since colonialism, the agenda has been to keep these people from being the righful owners of the land or to have a voice. Much of urban India is not in touch with the reality of the country. But people like the Van Gujjars and Taungyas are clearer and sharper about what's going on. Indian comics are very good at voicing what mainstream art and culture may not have space for. I love it when I can create comics that give me a sense of the story but also makes readers join the dots."- Ita Mehrotra, author, Uprooted; A Graphic Account of the Struggle for Forest Rights, talks to Manjula Narayan about the struggles of communities displaced from the forests that have always been their home, life in resettlement colonies, the increasingly precarious existence of semi nomadic pastoralists, their relationship with their buffaloes and about being influenced by Joe Sacco, Orijit Sen and comics like Rachita Taneja's Sanitary Panels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of promises broken over centuries

"Being able to experience the love of a grandparent is one of the most special things I've had in my life. It's the only selfless love you'll ever experience. Food was my Ammi's love language and my family formed a special relationship with food because of her. My grandmother passed away in her 90s in 2019 and one of my biggest regrets is not releasing this book in her lifetime - because she deserved that. The recipes in this book are our family recipes that we still cook to this day. We've put in the most popular dishes and the ones that are most symbolic of Rampur. Rampur has influences from UP and Awadhi cuisine but at the same time, because Rampur was a princely state, there were a lot of people passing through, and there are Afghani and Persian influences in the food as well. The cuisine has taken a few things from a few places and it's become its own kind of unique offering. There's a big difference between Mughalai and Awadhi food and Rampuri food. Unlike with those cuisines, here the flavours, textures and richness is not really dependent on cream and fat. With this book I almost feel like I'm becoming the brand ambassador of Rampur! I think Ammi would be proud"- Pernia Qureshi, author, Ammi's Kitchen; Heirloom Recipes from Rampur talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from anda halwa, taar gosht and kathal kababs to outdoor cooking, what her family typically serves at formal dinners, the difference between khichdi and khichda, and her grandmother's busy dalan in Rampur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of anda halwa, taar gosht and more

"I wanted to make the case that here is a system that we all created together that allows for our exploitation through the prism of services that we actually do get some benefit from. Everybody involved in the system gets some benefit from it - the CEOs of these companies and also us as users. I wanted to investigate that complicity" - Vauhini Vara, author, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age talks to Manjula Narayan about her book that uses her Google searches dating back to the early aughts, Amazon reviews, long conversations with AI, memories of her sister who died of cancer in her teens and insights gleaned during her years as a technology journalist to understand how tech has become so enmeshed in our lives, and grasp the sinister aspects of that while also understanding that no single trajectory is inevitable.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Only connect

"Our food has completely changed in the last 30 years. This has totally changed our gut physiology, our gut microbiome, and has caused silent inflammation in the gut. Issues like reflux and bloating are caused by a gut that isn't functioning well. Also, if you don't eat the right type of food, your body is incapable of making the neurological chemicals called neurotransmitters that are required for stable mental health. That correlation is not discussed in modern medicine though it is the cause, many times, of these mental health issues. Adding a drug is just symptomatically managing it. Instead of just depending on drugs and therapy, people can go back and connect it to what is wrong with what they are eating. When you trade nourishing food for, say, burgers and junk food and even things that aren't considered junk like white rice and wheat, you are nutritionally depleted. That's why people are unable to have robust systems physically and psychologically. The reason  we are now seeing so many autoimmune diseases is because 70 percent of the immune system sits in the gut. If you're eating the wrong food, you're telling the immune system to keep its guns always at the ready. And so, the poor guy is always hyperactive and always creating a reaction instead of only being activated when there's a fungal or a bacterial infection. Food has a real connection to conditions like ADHD, Alzhiemers and bipolar disorders. All forms of mental health conditions are dependent on what you're eating. There is absolutely no denying that correlation." - Manjari Chandra, author, Brainwashed by your Gut talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from mindful eating and toxic foods to the uptick in PCOS among Indian women and the urgent need for the nation to fight conditions like diabetes and cancer.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much food for thought

"One thing that's become abundantly clear from the ancient DNA revolution of the last 10 years is how important migration has been in the history of our species. So, of course, there has been hybridisation, cultural, genetic, linguistic. There is no such thing as a pure people, pure culture, pure language. Genes, culture and language do not map neatly onto each other. This book was a huge amount of work because the only way you can tell the story of Proto Indo European [the ancestor of Latin and Sanskrit and their daughter languages including English, German, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and many, many others] is by combing the fields of linguistics, archeology and genetics. It's very fast moving and the point of writing the story now is that it's had this huge impetus from genetics" - Laura Spinney, author, Proto; How One Ancient Language Went Global talks to Manjula Narayan about the ancestor of the Indo European family of languages, the Yamnayas, the birth and death of languages, the great migrations out of the Steppes, the Harappan script, multiethnolects and why AI might be great for predicting language change Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The original mother of many tongues

"Food is not just for nutrition but also for the soul" - @neelakaushik and Shibani Sethi, editors, 'Flavours of India talk to @utterflea abt the 40k strong Gurgaon Moms community that's contributed the family memories and recipes in this book Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of raab, kadhi and more

"In Raj Khosla's films, songs were storytelling devices. They didn't just push the narrative forward; they were also narratives by themselves. They had a beginning, a middle and an end, and the way they were shot, the way relationships were portrayed, and the way situations were brought in... It is an art that Guru Dutt taught Raj Khosla and which he then brought out in a way that really connected with the crowd." - Amborish Roychoudhury, author, 'Raj Khosla; The Authorized Biography' talks to Manjula Narayan about the life and art of the maker of such commercially successful and vastly different popular Hindi films as CID (1956), Do Raaste (1969), Main Tulsi Teri Aangan Ki (1978) and Dostana (1980).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of unforgettable soundtracks and an emotional core

"All materials come with an environmental impact but plastics are worth singling out as they have turbocharged our desire to consume and our reliance on disposability. Consumer goods companies are the ones we should be looking at. They make decisions about what we see on supermarket shelves, what we see in our homes. I hope this book makes people feel that we do have the power to change things because these companies want us to like them. They are very sensitive to how their reputations play out among consumers. Scientists have been sharing concerns that endocrine disrupting chemicals found in plastics could be impacting everything from our ability to procreate to mental health. Ultimately, it also comes down to policy, to pressing companies to pay to manage the waste created by their packaging. If a big consumer goods company is choosing to use a sachet, they should be paying a commensurate amount to find a way for those sachets to all be picked up even if it costs billions of rupees, and if they are selling a product that is difficult to recycle, they should be paying an environmental tax that reflects the cost of what they are putting out there." Saabira Chaudhuri, author, 'Consumed; How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from overconsumption, the harmful chemicals that leach out of packaging, and microplastics that are hazardous to all life to being a more mindful consumer and why there is still hope Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greed, greenwashing, and the perils of convenience

"I'd never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that's when I realised, I don't want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it. My husband and my mother in law became statistics of the COVID wave but they were so much more. Like love, grief is universal and everyone experiences it in some form or the other. I wanted to make the book a medium for me to put down my grief for myself and my children but also for those who want to be able to look at their own grief too. I felt that I could articulate my grief so I should. Those who cannot articulate their grief feel like they have found a voice through this book" - Andaleeb Wajid, author, 'Learning to Make Tea for One' talks to Manjula Narayan about survivor's guilt, family ties, the exhaustion that comes with writing a memoir about loss, and how different it is from writing fiction for young adults Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remembering not to forget

"Every part of India has shamans; you could say its part of folk culture. They call Himachal Dev Bhoomi because every village is home to several deities. Every village also has its main deity and a shaman, who is the medium of that deity. He can communicate with that deity when he goes into a divine possession trance that is ritually invoked. The villagers communicate with their devis and devtas for everything and in pooch sessions, the shaman or goor will answer questions as the deity. To a westernised mindset, this sounds like superstition. But you cannot ignore the lived experience of millions of people across centuries and say 'Yeh bakwas hai; this is nonsense!' Scholars like Sudhir Kakkar and Oliver Sacks accepted that the sacred healing rituals of shamans are far more effective than modern psychotherapy because they take the whole field of the person - family community mythology - into consideration" - Documentary film maker and author of 'Shamans of the Himalayas', Anu Malhotra talks to Manjula Narayan about the strong connection that villagers in Himachal have with their local deities, divination, altered states of consciousness of shamans, and how the belief system persists despite the onslaught of modernity and migration.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of trances, theta states, and shamans

"Any place where a guru goes and spends time becomes a dera; it gets a sacred connotation. Deras are reflective of our larger tradition of argumentation, philosophy and contestation. In India, there is nothing singular about our world; everything is very plural. So, any sort of broad brushing or monolithic thinking about deras is unhelpful. All deras are not Dalit. But I was surprised to see Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura at one. Some are doing very much for Ambedkarite thought. They have a lot of Ambedkar in their libraries and their sanctum sanctorums too have big portraits of Ambedkar alongside their religious iconography.  Ravidassias constantly tell me that Sant Ravidas is their spiritual guru but Ambedkar is their political one. All this made me take deras very seriously. " - Santosh K Singh, author, The Deras; Culture, Diversity and Politics talks to Manjula Narayan about the varied character and caste and class affiliations of the deras of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, the Ad-Dharmis, the Ravidassia deras of Punjab and the grand Ravidas temple in Banaras, the connections between the local and the global, and also the great need for sociologists to get their ideas out into the wider world beyond the Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of spiritual churning and identity umbrellas

"To earlier academics, it seemed like Company Painting was not really to be taken seriously. The Modernists didn't look at it because it's too early and the Court Painting specialists didn't look at it because it was too late. It just sort of fell in the gap. Perhaps people were less inclined to rescue it from that gap because they had difficulty in coming to terms with its hybrid colonial status. You cannot get away from it being a product of Empire. But rather than telling the story of the patrons' perspective, you have to look at how Indian artists respond. This is a historical moment where artists trained in the Indian court ateliers realised that there is this alternative source of patronage with a completely different set of demands. And when they made the transition from Court to Company, they transformed themselves and they transformed Indian art. With artists like Sewak Ram, we've got a wholly new approach. It is exciting to see the artist as much an agent as the patron in creating the hybrid form. The book and the show at DAG attempts to cover the whole spectrum of Company Painting and its trajectory in the very brief period from the 1770s to its fizzling out by 1850" - Giles Tillotson, editor, 'A Treasury of Life; Indian Company Paintings c 1790-1835' talks to Manjula Narayan about  the works of outstanding artists like Mihr Chand, Sita Ram and Ram Das, the depiction of different communities in work by Tanjore artists, Louisa Appleby's album commissioned in the vanished settlement of Maidapur, and his hope that more albums with named artists will soon come to light  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Company Painting: A transformative moment in Indian art

"South Korea is strategizing its soft power through K-Drama, K-Beauty, K-Pop and now K-Cuisine. There was a conscious strategy from the government of the country and the private sector. So the craze for Korea that we see today is no accident." Vasudev Tumbe and Sudha Huzurbazar Tumbe, authors, 'Seoulmates; Korea Through Indian Eyes', talk to Manjula Narayan about their six-year stay in South Korea, its punishing work culture, beautiful public places, numerous fantastic public toilets, contradictions in terms of being safe for women but having very few women in senior positions in the work place, and how Koreans save very little money and as a result, often can't afford to retire.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sojourn in South Korea: In the land of the morning calm

"How to keep kids engaged through the book is the most important job of the illustrator. Every page was approached through that angle. That's why I've included as many dynamic poses of dogs as possible — running, jumping out of the page almost!" says Chandrima Chatterjee, illustrator, 'The Little Book of Indian Dogs'.  "I've always been aware of Indian dog breeds but I wanted to introduce my daughter to them and there was absolutely nothing out there that one could read out to a toddler. So I thought let's do it. I wrote it and then I found Chandrima," says Anusha Ramanathan, writer of the book that weaves wonderful factoids — did you know Indian dogs don't drool? - about a range of breeds like the Chippiparai, Rajapalayam, the Kombai and the ever popular Indian pariah around a simple story that both children and adults who read out this book to them will enjoy.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of Bakharwals, Jonangis and more

In this podcast, National Books Editor Manjula Narayan tells you about books, authors and their journeys. This is a Hindustan Times production, brought to you by HT Smartcast

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Books and Authors

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