Public life, it is widely considered, mirrors private realities. The events of the past few weeks around the Anna Hazare movement suggest that perhaps finally we- as a nation- are ready to begin to tackle the menace of corruption that so plagues our public life, including our private life, if truth be told.
Its best to be direct. If we are, as a nation, willing to tackle corruption at the highest levels, then as individuals, we need to be able to tackle corruption at the lowest level: the personal.
And since this blog primarily addresses things concerning UoH, introspection is best begun at home. There are many individuals within the University’s system that indulge in petty corruption… the kind that vitiates the workplace, the work ethic, and the sense of commitment that most of the others have. Some of this is financial corruption- construction, procurement, allotment. This is clearly the worst since the amount of money we are granted is finite, and anyone who steals directly or indirectly, steals from us. This can hurt only others among us, others within the system. Some of it is a corruption of values. An earlier post has asked serious questions regarding Academic Quality. Indeed, where does one begin? We know how to count the ways, but all too often, we desist from confronting such matters directly.
There is no need for us to be so bashful, or so fearful. If we do not wish to accept public corruption, we should not accept private corruption either.
We have the examples. Now we need to live the life and raise the bar of accountability at UoH as well…
Month: August 2011
Different Inabilities
The conference on Mathematics Education on the 19th of August was instructive in more ways than initially imagined. One of the invitees was the distinguished mathematician, V S Sunder from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Matscience) in Chennai. In recent years, Sunder has increasingly needed support in walking, and now requires wheelchair assistance essentially on a full time basis. The conference to which he was invited, and which he kindly agreed to come to, was scheduled to be held in the Raman Auditorium in our Science Complex.
We were very poorly prepared. In the event, we made a ramp that made it possible for Prof. Sunder to make it to the front of the auditorium, but not onto the stage… The building was made at a time when our sensibilities were less developed and we simply had not thought of such things.
Coincidentally, Sunder wrote a piece that appeared in his column on the 20th of August in the Chennai Times of India entitled DIFFERENT STROKES for DIFFERENT FOLKS which ran something like this:
How many times have you:
- Seen an elevator with no braille signs marked next to the door buttons?
- Even noticed that the elevator you use in your office or apartment complex every day has or does not have Braille markings?
- Noticed whether the edges of steps are made of a different texture than the rest of the step (so that a blind person will know the step is coming to an end there)?
- Wondered how hearing impaired students cope with our system of education?
- Heard people tell somebody with mobility problems that a distance of hundred metres “is very close by” or that “there are only a few steps” when there is no ramp for easy wheelchair access?
- Seen a lecturer in a classroom draw something on the board to explain something, and wondered how a blind student would follow?
- Been to a party on a roof-top which necessitates that anyone coming there should climb some twenty steps even after having taken an elevator to the ‘top floor’, and wondered if the plight of the mobility-impaired are even considered before either the party or the elevator was planned?
- Seen doors that are not wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…
It was not just that the conference venue was not fully prepared for Prof. Sunder, there was no way he could come into the Administration Block or drop in at the VC’s office if he wanted to. Which means that there are several others in the UoH family who are similarly denied access… And that also includes the elderly- pensioners, or parents of staff, students and faculty.
Many of our buildings are now equipped with ramps, but we are a very far way from being what is euphemistically called “friendly” to the disabled. And the lack of sensitivity to a range of disabilities is endemic. Not that the attitude of most of us is crude in any way, it has more to do with what we think about- or more to the point, what we do not think about…
Our neighbour in the Council for Social Development, Kalpana Kannabiran is someone who has long been concerned about such issues, and from a legal point of view. In an article entitled Looking at disability through the constitutional lens, she writes: The most important right guaranteed to all persons by the constitution is the right to life and personal liberty. The right to life may be enjoyed fully only when we also enjoy personal liberty. There can be no disagreement that a life in custody or confinement, a life without freedom is not a fulfilling life by any standards. What does the right to personal liberty mean for a physically challenged person? Very simply it means that all physical spaces – private and public — must be barrier free and must facilitate equally the mobility of a challenged person and a non disabled person.
The constitution of India in Article 15(2) says: No citizen shall be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to –
- Access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment or
- The use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or in part out of state funds or dedicated to the use of the general public.
This provision provides protection on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex and place of birth. But today we find persons with disabilities are routinely denied access on all of these grounds by the state and private actors alike, through the absence of barrier free access. Looked at in the context of Article 15(2), therefore, it constitutes a very serious form of discrimination. What then are the meanings of personal liberty for persons with disabilities in perpetual unlawful custody resulting from the denial of routine everyday access to every part of the public domain and critical fields in the “private” domain as well?
Clearly we need to be sensitive to these issues, and without merely paying lip service to the cause. Our campus needs a “disability audit”, and while we are doing a fair amount already, there is much more that needs to be done. And we require to be informed as to what some of these needs are, formally and, especially, informally.
As the saying goes, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.
Ithaka, AP
When I was to speak at the Orientation for new students a few weeks ago, I was looking for something that would best describe what I wanted to convey… I feel that all of us here at the University, are on voyages of our own. UoH is as much a port of call as it is a destination for many of us, and Constantine Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaka’, struck me as the most appropriate.
The poem talks about a journey. It talks about striving for the destination, but also making the most of the journey – something all of us at the University should do.
And as it happens, I came across the poem only quite recently, so I decided to share it for those not familiar with it. There are many translations available, and this is one by Keeley and Sherrard that you can find on the Cavafy Archive website.
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard (C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)
Academic Quality?
A couple of weeks ago, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in Bangalore called a few of us from the UoH for a meeting. I decided to attend, mainly since we are rated 3.89 out of a maximum of 4 by the NAAC, and are therefore the leading ranked University in the country.
The reason I retain the adjective ranked in the sentence above is that it is perhaps meaningless to say we are the leading University in the country- since that can convey different things to different people. I know we are good in many ways, but I think- and I know that this feeling is shared by many of you- that we have a way to go before we can say we are “No. 1“.
The NAAC does a great job, given the rather variable landscape of higher education in the country. Of the 571 Universities in the country, there are many categories: Central, State, Deemed, Private… And these vary in size, from behemoths like Delhi University with 4,00,000 students, to the Central University of Tamil Nadu with something like 200… Not to mention that there are huge differences in quality, from the Homi Bhabha National University (TIFR in another guise) to Universities that exist in desk drawers if nowhere else….
Like many of us, I don’t take the No. 1 tag that seriously. Our strengths are obvious, as are our weaknesses. I therefore requested some colleagues who did attend the same meeting to put down on paper what we can learn from the NAAC exercise. And, more importantly, what we can do to make our University better.
I would greatly appreciate feedback and discussion on this topic. Please do write in, either in response to the post, or via email to rr @ uohyd. ernet. in. Thanks.
Here is their note:
Internal Quality Assurance: What the University of Hyderabad Can Do?
While national level organisations such as the NAAC carry out their role in upholding academic standards in the domain of higher education in the country, it is imperative that we at the University of Hyderabad come up with our own set of goals, standards and benchmarks. Quality Assurance is ideally tested by a set of internally verifiable mechanism as well as an evaluation expertly [and transparently] carried out by the peer group outside the University.
An effective quality assurance must fulfil, among others, the following requisites. It must be:
- Comprehensive
- Integrated
- Purposeful, and
- Ongoing.
Similarly, the assessment indicators would include, among others, the following:
- Curriculum aspects
- Teaching / Learning, Research Supervision
- Research, Consultancy and Extension
- Infrastructure and learning resources
- Student Support
- Innovative [administrative and management] practices.
The four components at our University comprise the Administration, Teachers, Students and the Non-Teaching Staff. While due attention is paid (or ought to be paid) to the quality of the Faculty in terms of their teaching and research capabilities, our University community regrettably does not articulate with sufficient firmness and clarity [perhaps due to a lack of political will] the role and responsibilities of the Student body, the Non-Teaching Staff and the University Administration. It should be our collective resolve therefore to see that along with rights, we should also have in place a protocol of duties and responsibilities fashioned by the Students, Administration and the Non-Teaching Staff themselves entirely by their own volition.
It may be added in this context that student centred education in our University and elsewhere has largely remained a concept rather than a practice, since we do not sufficiently insist that learning ought to be primarily done by the students themselves. What passes as seminars and class presentation, it must be admitted, have become largely a ritual rather than creative pedagogic tools. Further more, over the years; there has been a gradual decline in student performance. Indiscriminate monetary support regardless of performance or economic needs of the taught, relaxed standards and grade inflation due to face to face teaching and allied factors have been some of the features that might help explain the decline in the academic standard here. Periodical tests and term papers / class presentations have gone hand in hand increasingly with academic plagiarism and easy access to computers and audio-visual media. The latter have often become a substitute for true learning that believes in the acquisition of insights rather than a mere reproduction of information based on rote learning of a mechanical kind. Application of insights in an imaginative and creative manner in real life situations is what education ought to truly envisage. Is the education that we are imparting at the University of Hyderabad, at a premier institution of learning, serving this fundamental goal , we may ask.
Our search for excellence must also take into account the diversity of the student body, their composition in terms of class, caste, ethnicity and regional affiliations. While identities politics could be empowering, powerful interest groups on campus could also act at times against excellence by demanding separate turfs and exclusive terrains that militate against a truly integrated and inclusive approach that seeks to harmonize group interests. In other words, the question we must answer is : how do we reconcile the search for excellence with the equally important need for social equity? What kind of politics would motivate and empower the entire community here rather than serve sectional interests?
There are a few other aspects that merit our urgent attention. These may contribute to our thinking with regard to quality assurance in this university
- The pursuit of quality and excellence, as has been stated earlier, must be internally driven, especially in a relatively well-endowed central university like ours. [This need not prejudice assessment by an external agency like NAAC whose methodologies are yet tentative and evolving.] The internal goal-setting for the purpose, however, must be faculty-specific. This is because the needs, aspirations and constraints differ systematically across humanities, social sciences and sciences. While the idea of common guidelines across disciplines may have considerable appeal, we need not be bound by a straitjacket of uniform yardsticks or a set of procedures against which all the faculties would be judged.
- Each faculty/department may evolve and place in the public domain its own vision statement that informs its teaching/training programmes, research interests of faculty and demands for infrastructure. Globalisation of the kind we are going through seems to challenge our curricular designs in many disciplines and offers the potential for Indian universities to be leaders, rather than meek followers, of the Anglo-American centres.
- Courseware must be in the public domain. Very often, one colleague does not know or care about what others are teaching. While the individual teacher may be doing justice to his/her own course, his/her commitment to the philosophy and objectives of the teaching programme as a whole seems to be missing. Vision statements of this kind would vastly improve the way the University’s Annual Report would read.
- There is an urgent need to integrate all the stakeholder groups of the university. Such a vision of synergy and integration would help make students, teachers, staff and the alumni active partners in ushering in the kind of campus life we want. The new approach would privilege healthy conventions over paper laws in campus life and day-to-day running of the university.
Finally we should be able to come up with a check list for the four wings here:
- For the teachers: Are they regularly taking classes? Are the lectures prepared well? Do the lectures have publicly verifiable contents? [Traditionally teachers used to have a lesson plan! Seems to be given up increasingly]
- Do the teachers give adequate time for student consultation? Is there regular monitoring of the students’ progress, or lack of it?
- How many teachers supervise the research work of weak students?
- Are the teachers available for administrative work? Or do they disappear after their class?
- Are they present in the department for a specified number of hours or do they come to the department on the days of the class?
We need to ask similar questions regarding the, Administration, the Students and the Non Teaching Staff without fear or favour. There are other important aspects that we need to consider. These include the importance of impact study, selection and training of staff and complaint handling mechanism.
Clearly, the questions that we need to ask regarding internal quality assurance are many. It is time we made a small beginning.
_______
It adds up
Prof. Kumaresan, our colleague in the School of Mathematics will be 60 this year. A man of many parts, one of his activities is to direct MTTS, the MATHEMATICS TRAINING AND TALENT SEARCH PROGRAMME that has been funded by the National Board for Higher Mathematics for the past 18 years… The aims of this programme are
- To teach mathematics in an interactive way rather than the usual passive presentation. To promote active learning, the teachers usually ask questions and try to develop the theory based on the answers and typical examples. At every level the participants are encouraged to explore, guess and formulate definitions and results.
- To promote independent thinking in mathematics.
- To provide a platform for the talented students so that they can interact with their peers and experts in the field. This serves two purposes: i) the participants come to know where they stand academically and what they have to do to bring out their full potential and ii) they establish a rapport with other participants and teachers which help them shape their career in mathematics.
These schools have been held at a number of places- many of the IITs, Pune, Allahabad, Pondicherry, Indore, … – and have been a great success. Each level (I and II) has lectures in the four basic streams of Mathematics: Algebra, Analysis, Geometry and Topology. Students of Level O are offered courses in Basic Real Analysis, Linear Algebra, Geometry (curve tracing, sketching of surfaces, classification of quadric surfaces) and one of Discrete Probability, Combinatorics and Elementary Number theory.
As befits a person who has devoted so much time to manpower development in mathematics and mathematics training, the School of Mathematics in collaboration with the National Institute for Science Education and Research in Bhubaneswar have organized a three day meeting on Mathematics Education- Trends and Challenges from 19 to 21 August, 2011. This conference/meeting is intended to invite the attention of the mathematics community concerning the perilous trend that is prevailing in “Mathematics education” and to make a sincere attempt to suggest some remedies. It is planned to bring out a white paper on the present scenario of mathematics education.
Perilous trend is just about right. There are paradoxes aplenty in the scenario of mathematics and mathematics education in the country. The work of Prof. Kumaresan in this arena, in encouraging the growth of competence in our mathematics community, will go a long way in ensuring that although the road ahead may be a bit rocky and steep, there will be mathematicians to help us along the way…
Breakfast Symmetry
Mr Venkatesh from the Lake View Guest House has been deputed to do the housekeeping in the flat that I am currently occupying (off campus, but that is hopefully for a short while, till the VC’s Lodge on campus gets renovated). In the past few days, he has been turning out breakfasts that are a visual treat, and I thought, given the way in which all of one’s life is out there, I would share some images.
These arrangements, made of apple, kiwi, fig, and grapes- have interesting symmetries- and are entirely spontaneous creations. With some encouragement and motivation, of course, but the ideas are all there… Group theoretic analysis (of the idealized arrangement, of course), anyone?
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to what he comes up with tomorrow…
How cool is that!
Launching Bol Hyderabad 90.4 FM today was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done since joining the University. While we are not the first University campus to have its own Radio Station, it hardly matters- we finally have one! Although confined to Gachibowli- our radius is just about 15 km- we also have live streaming, so you can hear us anywhere in the world. Check the website for programme details.
Bol Hyderabad aims to be non-discriminatory, democratic and independent. It will produce a wide variety of programmes on information and entertainment, in at least four languages: English, Telugu, Hindi and Urdu. The station will also remain sensitive to the impact of its programming within the university community as a whole, as well as the communities residing around it.
Ideas for what we can do are very welcome. They will be vetted by the station’s Radio Advisory Council, of course, but we really need people to come up with suggestions of what we can do. Write in, in response to this post, or contact the station directly.
Meanwhile, do tune in. There’s going to be a lot of very cool things on air!
Independence Day
My first Independence day at HCU was the University’s 37th, and India’s 65th. Not having attended such a function for a very long time, I was a bit nervous and hesitant, but there was something to do, and something to say…
Members of the HCU family, students, faculty, officers, staff, and fellow countrymen. Greeting on the occasion of our 65th Independence Day.
As we do every year this day, we look to a new year of our Independence with renewed hope. Hope for a better tomorrow for our children and ourselves. Our freedom has brought us huge possibilities, but it has also come with a huge responsibilities, the main one being that we strive to build a more inclusive, more equitable society.
As a University, we have a huge role to play in realizing these dreams. Progress and development, prosperity, health and well being will not come easy. Each of us has to acknowledge the sacrifices that had to be made for the country to come so far over. And today we are called upon to make new sacrifices as our country faces challenges mainly from within. Our public life is open to scrutiny as never before, and the picture that has emerged is not pretty. There are dark clouds of corruption that appear to pervade many issues, and today this is the main concern in our minds as we wrestle with the two questions of how we got into such a mess in the first place, and how do we get out of this vortex of corruption.
This concerns our University community in direct and indirect ways… We are a public institution, with public accountability, and public norms. And as an institution of higher education, we should be willing to set the norms. Each one of us has to answer for her or himself, if the standards we set for probity in public life are personally valid as well. If we ourselves uphold the principles and values we wish to see in our leaders, we will then eventually get the leaders we deserve.
Our responsibilities extend to all other spheres of action. Our nation cannot have a concern for the environment and for sustainable growth if each of us does not subscribe to the same ideals. What we see as a by product of development, the unwarranted and uncontrolled exploitation of the land is in reality a public expression of private principles. And it is here that education has a major role to play. All levels of education are important, from the primary school level, all the way up to higher education, which is where we have our expertise, in learning, intervening, and educating ourselves. It is our responsibility to do the best we can in this regard.
Students, for some of you this is the first 15th of August on the campus, and it will represent your own independence as you learn to make your own decisions, and become your own men and women. A small step by each one of from here on can make a difference and this is a difference we must make.
Today we ill be launching the Campus Radio station and I sure that along with information and knowledge dissemination and entertainment there would also be programmes to address these concerns. As a University we are also concerned with the environment and as a small step toward this we will launch a tree planting campaign shortly after this programme at the S.N. School of Arts and Communication and the School of Chemistry. We will also request the students of National Service Scheme to adopt this and take this movement for a clean and green campus further with a definite plan of action. This is a difficult task that can only be achieved by each of us subscribing to this sincerely and actively participating in this movement. Even if you do not plant trees, do not destroy the existing environment by indiscriminate throwing of waste around the campus. Let us at least preserve what we have. Each employee in the school, department, centre or section must feel and act on this.
As a centre for learning and knowledge dissemination, a University like ours has this added responsibility of bringing about growth with inclusion in the true sense and transparency. Our commitment to this goal is real, and I request all of you to join us in this endeavour whole-heartedly so that we as a society provide a truly egalitarian society to our children with equal opportunities for all.
One freedom that I would like the University to get in the coming years is the freedom to excel. Too often, we perform to the levels set by others and achieve goals set by governments. As academics, we know that the best standards are internal, set by the disciplines themselves. We need the freedom to pursue such ideals, without fear or favour, without interference from other agencies, and I hope to get this freedom for us soon.
Let us then promise ourselves and to our society to subscribe to the values of honesty, integrity, fair play, inclusiveness and concern for the environment. As a University we will look to consolidate our gains over the last few decades and seek to build upon these achievements keeping these principles in mind.
Once again my greetings on the occasion of Independence Day to each of you.
Jai Hind.
S : R : Ranganathan
The invitation from the Academy of Library Science and Documentation to speak at the Librarian’s Day programme at the City Central Library, Ashok Nagar on Sunday, 14 August has proved to be a great opportunity to reflect on the contributions of the S R Ranganathan, the Father of Library Science in India. As is well known, Ranganathan was the originator of the Colon Classification system, and I first learned of this as a student in Madras University where I spent many hours in the University Library next to Presidency College. This was where Ranganathan started his career in 1924… Another library that began using the colon classification system- but sadly, did not stay with it- was the JNU library, so while I have heard generations of librarians extol the virtues of the colon classification, this is now rarely used. Nevertheless, the reputation of Ranganathan goes well beyond this contribution.
In the area of education, and specifically, in the area of higher education, the importance of a library cannot be underplayed. And it is here that Ranganathan made his most lasting contributions, by clearly enunciating how information is to be stored, curated and classified, and shared. His five laws of Library Science are as relevant today as they were when he enunciated them in 1931… in some ways, as the amount of information has grown tremendously in volume, these laws should be even more relevant to us.
I have been a user of the college and University library system since about 1970, and in the past forty odd years, we have all seen how libraries have changed. In my own experience, I recall how the closed stacks at Loyola College contrasted sharply with the open shelves at the British Council and USIS libraries that I was exposed to as an undergraduate. The more modern libraries with books and current journals at the IIT Kanpur, the vast collections of libraries in the US and Europe that I have been able to explore, and the few great libraries that we have here in India even now- I am not just thinking of niche libraries such as the Khuda Baksh in Patna and the Rampur Raza library in Rampur, but the Connemara, the Asiatic Society and others… – these are some sort of heaven, as Borges famously said.
The digital revolution has changed some of this in a fundamental way, and much of it is for the better. As the volume of information has increased, digitization has meant that the effective size of holdings have increased, their preservation has improved, and their accessibility- and searchability- have vastly increased. So much so, that much of what a library offers is now available on a computer screen. Much, but not all, of course- there is something to holding a book and flipping a page that swiping the screen of an iPad cannot reproduce. But that is a sensation that coming generations will not miss, or at least will not miss in the same way as we might.
How we search for information and how we share it has, in general, been fundamentally altered in the past decade though the invention of powerful tools on the internet. Wikipedia and Google are two that come to mind, but there are also many other huge efforts in information management.
It is tempting to think of what Dr Ranganathan would have made of all this were he alive today. The laws he enunciated, and which have guided so many libraries and librarians are in many ways the forerunners of the Open Access movement that is so important now. The five “laws” that SRR stated (with slight rephrasing by me)
1. Books are there to be used
2. Every reader needs his or her particular books
3. Every book has its specific reader(s)
4. It is important to save the time of the reader
5. A library is a growing organism
still need to be remembered, perhaps with some modification as we redefine our notions of book, of reader, and even of library. The printed book has evolved to its electronic counterpart, the eBook, but in addition, we need to include, as essential components to our scholarship documents of various forms and formats: journal articles, newspaper articles, blogs, audio and video files, and so on. Readers need not be just human readers- we already have robots that search the web, for instance the Googlebots for information and indexing. And of course the library need not be a physical space, since any library today uses resources that are physically located anywhere, and it needs resources that have to be elsewhere since what a good library can offer its readers today vastly exceeds what it can hold in its physical space. The development of resources such as JSTOR are also significant in this regard as many journals go from being purely print entities to purely electronic entities. Devices such as iPads and Kindle or their clones make the portabilities of the library today a reality. And yet, Ranganathan remains a relevant, and in many ways, a guiding spirit.
Ranganathan’s laws capture the essential spirit of service that is needed in librarianship- to enable others to access information, and use it for their own benefits. And in the process, to remember that the voulme of information must increase, and therefore to plan for it. To remember that in order to locate the information, it should be stored logically, and preserved carefully.
Many of the new technologies- and I believe that Ranganathan would have welcomed them- make the stewardship of information easier than ever before, to ensure that libraries can be better and that libraries remain as relevant to the generation and preservation of human knowledge. We need to reaffirm the importance of the library to the academic community, and today is a good day to remember that the intellectual hub of an institution of higher education is its library.
Yamini 2011
This is just culled from any number of sources and is both a tribute to the SPIC-MACAY organization as well as a means of sharing. 14th August night, from 8:30 onwards at the DST Auditorium on the HCU campus, there will be an amazing array of talent performing Indian classical music and dance. Shri T. N. Seshagopalan (Carnatic Vocal), Shri Kalakrishna (Andhra Natyam & Perini Tandavam), Pt. Ronu Majumdar (Bansuri), Hyderabad Brothers -Shri Seshachari & Shri Raghavachari (Carnatic Vocal), Pt. Sanjeev Abhayankar (Hindustani Vocal Concert), Lalgudi G J R Krishnan & Smt. Vijayalakshmi (Duet Violin Concert). What more can one want?!
From the SPIC-MACAY Facebook page, more info:
SPIC MACAY is celebrating Virasat 2011 across the country, with performances of several art forms organized in educational institutions.
The special and unique feature of Hyderabad Virasat 2011 is the second edition of the overnight concert ‘Yamini’, which will commence at 8:30 pm on 14 Aug and will continue until the break of dawn on 15 Aug at DST Auditorium, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad. It is a significant coincidence that we would be going onto a tryst with soulful music through the stroke of the midnight hour which broke the shackles of long British Raj over our motherland. We would be celebrating our Independence in the real way.
Yamini promises to be an enthralling night with performances by maestros of Indian Classical Music and Dance. Yamini meaning ‘Night’, is the night that descends on gently, slowly, to the mellifluous notes of music and the gentle rhythm of the artistes’ feet. It is the night when the clouds above, part to reveal the star spangled banner of the dark skies. It is the night when the lush green campus of the University of Hyderabad, will sport their best hospitality for the patrons of art. When Yamini is on, you wake up to your inner self and dissolve in the shower of music and dance. From Malkauns to Bhairavi, from dusk to dawn, the night of revelation prevails.
The overnight is an eclectic mix of Indian Classical Music performances on a single dais. Organised by SPIC MACAY- University of Hyderabad Sub-Chapter, it is open to all.
The five artists performing are:
Shri T. N. Seshagopalan (Carnatic Vocal)
Pt. Ronu Majumdar (Bansuri)
Pt. Sanjeev Abhayankar (Hindustani Vocal)
Shri Kalakrishna (Andhra Natyam & Perini Tandavam)
Shri Lalgudi G J R Krishnan & Smt. Vijayalakshmi (Duet Violin Concert)
Yamini traces her journey from night to dawn, let us welcome the overnight with our presence. Let us see the truest movements of our life in nutshell. Let us get enveloped by the colour of music over our daily existence. Let us sit on the boat of moon, and while we undertake the great journey from night to dawn, let music be our guide.
We assure you, that these five stars will elevate your senses to different realm. SPIC MACAY invites you to an evening of spiritual ecstasy.
Come and watch the stars with us…