Blogs

A rising spate of regulations in the education sector is slowly choking the supply. And Education departments around the country are catching up to Revenue and Transport departments in their levels of corruption. The irony is that the Education department officials turn a blind eye to the government schools, which often don't meet even the most basic regulatory standards. Unfortunately, parents whose kids are in private schools are not sufficiently worried about this. They believe that schools should be forced to keep fees as low as possible, while delivering quality education. They also believe that their children's schools will pay…

  This is my feedback to you on the matter of disconnection of the power supply to my home.   Ms. Surekha called me up from the J P Nagar office of BESCOM and informed me that my bank had dishonoured the ECS payment for August and September, and hence my electricity was cut. She told me that this was also the reason for the lineman demanding the deposit of Rs 1600, and that I should immediately pay  the amount due for electricity charges for  October by cash.    Fearing another disconnection, I went on Monday, 17th Nov and paid…

One evening I heard a buzzing sound near my glass door overlooking the garden. I did not pay much attention as I did not expect anything unusual. After a while I noticed two bees in my living room. One of them was lying on its back and was desperately trying to come back to its normal position. It took some time and started flying all around the house. I was scared of its sting—it took me a lot of courage to not swat it with a newspaper. After a long bee hunt, it was finally set free outside. These bees had started to build its…

Community update on the Ibblur Lake restoration effort, shared by Mr Mukund Kumar   In the month of October, the last section of the fencing of the inner lake area around the bend from ORR service road (near Cafe Coffee Day) was finally fenced by officials of the BDA. A separate pedestrian gate was installed on the section facing the back side of Sobha Hibiscus near ORR Service. This was stalled in the context of a court case filed by a certain party who was arguing for road expansion in the lake area in the context of commercial construction interest…

Last week we looked at how music from Europe such as Gregorian chants and Hungarian music had traces of classical Carnatic ragas. This week let's look at music from African countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Mali. The music of Algeria today is the confluence of many threads including those of Bedouin origin, Andalusian music with its confluence of the Ottoman Empire and Europe, and the mysticism of poets such as Rumi. Bedouin music revolves around the theme of spirituality with strong influences of Rumi, the well known Muslim poet. Andalusian music, a form of Arabic music owes much of…

Kripa is a married mom of two in her mid-30s. She is on Facebook, Twitter and many, many WhatsApp groups. And yep, she has many “friends” across these various social media, across groups, too--school groups, college groups, work groups. Too many 'friends' to count, in fact. Through the day, Kripa finds it hard to ignore her cellphone because it pings incessantly with messages from the various groups she is part of--there is a constant exchange of messages, videos, images, jokes--some “non-veg” jokes and videos, some innocent, some childish. All kinds of messages, really. One day, Kripa sent a smiley in…

PNLIT is committed to promoting awareness of the environment among the residents around the Puttenahalli Lake. We are happy to tie up with Artyplantz to achieve this end. Like PNLIT, ArtyPlantz loves nature and takes real pleasure especially in plant life.  ArtyPlantz and PNLIT are organizing two specially designed programmes on Sunday, 16th November at Puttenahalli Lake, JP Nagar 7th Phase, Bangalore.   Session 1 - for adults and children above 15 years - to sensitize and help them connect with nature. This event will be held 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fee Rs. 350/participant. Seats limited to 20.   Session 2 - for children between…

Bhairavi, Amirkalyani, Rasali - One common, one not so common, one rare. These were the ragas that veteran vocalist T.V.Shankaranarayanan presented at his concert last night at the Nadasurabhi annual festival in Koramangala. Rasali is a janya raga of the 4th melakartha raga Vanaspathi and the one composition that comes to mind for raga Rasali is Tyagaraja's Aparadhamulanorva. The concert was marked with an energetic flow of swaras, evocative rendition of songs which were mostly composed by Periasami Thooran, Tulasivanam, Tyagaraja and Purandaradasa. The Bhairavi raga alapana was followed by the highly emotive Tamil song on Lord Muruga "Pazham Nee".…

It was good to get back to Ranga Shankara and theatre after a long hiatus, and it so happened that it was a play from the land I had left behind! Poorna Jagannathan Productions was staging, as part of the Martin Moran India tour, his play, "The Tricky Part". The play, written and performed by Martin Moran, is the story of his life.  Between the ages of 12 and 15, he had a sexual relationship with a much older man, who was actually a counselor he met at a Catholic boys' camp. How he resolves the ancient conflicts, and his…

I emailed Mr Pandey, the MD of BESCOM, as follows: Dear Mr Pandey,  I am a very ordinary consumer, and here are the details about me.  Name: Mrs Deepa Mohan,  Address: xxxxx  Consumer no: xxxx For the past several years,  I  have been using the ECS facility to pay our power bills, and have never once been in arrears. Also, we took the ECS option to prevent our power supply being disconnected, since we travel a lot.  On the 25th of October,  when I was  abroad,  our power supply was disconnected, and five days later, a lineman appeared at our…