George Harrison with Ravi Shankar in 1967.

Ravi Shankar was a giant in music world both in subcontinent India and in the West. I attended two of his concerts, one in Lincoln Center and other in New Jersey PAC, and it was exhilarating experience especially when Allah Rakha is playing tabla. Recently he was performing along with his daughter Anoushka Shankar, also a virtuoso pianist. At New Jersey PAC, we actually went to listen to his daughter Anoushka Shankar who was supposed to play sitar along with his father but unfortunately got sick and did not play.

Some excerpts are worth reading from obituary posted by NYT;

Ravi Shankar, the sitar virtuoso and composer who died on Tuesday at 92, created a passion among Western audiences for the rhythmically vital, melodically flowing ragas of classical Indian music — a fascination that had expanded by the mid-1970s into a flourishing market for world music of all kinds.

His final performance was a concert with his daughter, the virtuoso sitarist Anoushka Shankar, on Nov. 4 in Long Beach, Calif. He was also the father of the singer Norah Jones.

Ravi Shankar, whose formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians and dancers. His teacher was Allaudin Khan and he married his daughter, Annapurna Devi, also a sittarist.

Often his tabla player was Alla Rakha, who became a renowned soloist in his own right. At times, Mr. Shankar also shared the spotlight with Ali Akbar Khan, a master of the sarod, another Indian stringed instrument. These concerts, including an annual performance at Carnegie Hall, adhered to traditional forms, in which the musicians would improvise on a raga, often ecstatically, for about an hour per piece.

Through his recitals and his recordings on the Columbia, EMI and World Pacific labels, Mr. Shankar built a Western following for the sitar. In 1952 he began performing with Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI: “West Meets East” (1967), “West Meets East, Vol. 2” (1968) and “Improvisations: West Meets East” (1977). He also made recordings with Rampal.

Click below to read full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/arts/music/ravi-shankar-indian-sitarist-dies-at-92.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&smid=fb-share&adxnnlx=1355428932-ZGYEAS8Iv56gxhCAStVMAQ

Posted by F. Sheikh

Robert Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, played a vital role in defining the religion’s place in public sphere and separation of church and state. He was a great orator, his lectures were mixed with humor and many orthodox religious people would come just to listen to him. This article is a about the contributions of Robert Ingersoll, but it is also a great commentary on religion’s role in public space, secularism and separation of church and state. Susan Jacobi writes in The American Scholar;

“Known as Robert Injuresoul to his clerical enemies, he raised the issue of what role religion ought to play in the public life of the American nation for the first time since the writing of the Constitution, when the Founders deliberately left out any acknowledgment of a deity as the source of governmental power. In one of his most popular lectures, titled “Individuality,” Ingersoll said of Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin:”

“They knew that to put God in the Constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.”

“Although Ingersoll opposed organized religion in general, his specific targets were believers and clerics who wanted to impose their convictions on their fellow citizens and stifle inquiry that challenged faith. If he could not quite convince his audiences that all religion was superstitious myth, he did convince many to seek out a form of religion that admitted the insights of contemporary science or non-mythological history. Ingersoll himself was not much interested in debating abstract theological or philosophical questions, although he did so occasionally with reform-minded believers like his good friend Henry Ward Beecher, the best-known clerical orator of the late 19th century and a leader of liberalizing forces within American Protestantism. Ingersoll was, however, interested in creating a bridge between the world of secular freethought, for which he spoke so eloquently, and religions, including Reform Judaism and liberal Protestant denominations, that were willing to make room for secular knowledge. (Unitarians had done this in the 18th century in response to Enlightenment political thought and geological discoveries that posed the first solid scientific challenge to the biblical precept that the Earth was only 4,000 years old.) Ingersoll considered “moderate” religious believers if not allies, then a vanguard that, by rejecting biblical literalism, would unintentionally cast doubt on all religion”

Ingersoll and his sense of humor, the author writes;

“A man who combined reason with humor, who drew audiences looking for entertainment along with enlightenment, was much more dangerous than someone disposed to harangue audiences with the conviction that they were simply wrong about what they had been taught since birth. Everyone who paid to hear Ingersoll speak knew that he or she would go away with the memory of good laughs to accompany unsettling new thoughts”

“Newspaper quotations from Ingersoll’s speeches would be punctuated by “Great Laughter” and “Laughter,” which followed Ingersoll’s description of the haphazard founding of the Church of England after Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. “For a while the new religion was regulated by law,” Ingersoll remarked, “and afterward God was compelled to study acts of Parliament to find out whether a man might be saved or not. [Laughter.]”

To read full article please click on link below;

http://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-birth-of-reason/