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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: sprezzatura

The World Below

05 Mon Sep 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Society

≈ Comments Off on The World Below

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aqualung, buoyancy, Cornelius Van Drebbel, Emilie Gagnan, gas laws, Henry Fleuss, Jacques Cousteau, NASA, National Association of Underwater Instructors, NAUI, nitrox, PADI, Professional Association of Diving Instructors, Rene Bussoz, Robert Davis, SCUBA, Scuba Schools International, sprezzatura, SSI, US Navy SEALs

Salve, amici! It has been said that despite the great mysteries the universe out there holds, some of the most profound ones are within. Something similar could be said for our planet as well, divided as it is between land and water. Although some 71 per cent of the earth is covered by water, most of us are intently and almost exclusively focused on the other 29 percent. Many of us do not know swimming and fewer still have done any diving. Even among those who can hold their head above water, most of the time spent is in indoor swimming pools and infrequently. This is unfortunate, for we are missing the amazing beauty and wonders the sea has to offer us.

Earliest records of diving go back to around 500 BCE when Greek soldiers supposedly used a bathysphere to approach an enemy ship from under water. Alexander is also supposed to have ordered the destruction of all the submarine defences of Tyre after the successful siege of the city in 332 BCE; legend has it that he himself joined the divers in a glass diving bell. The fantasy of underwater travel remained past the classical era. In his De Mirabili, circa 1250, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon talks about machines that would allow men to walk on the sea bed without harm to their bodies.

It was the Dutch inventor Cornelius Van Drebbel who built the first navigable submarine in 1620. There were several similar attempts to develop devices for individuals over the next couple of centuries – the most notable being of Henry Fleuss in 1878 and of Robert Davis in 1910 – but the first device that enjoyed commercial success was invented by Jacques Cousteau and Emilie Gagnan in 1943. The era of modern recreational diving can be said to have begun in 1948 when Cousteau persuaded a sporting goods store owner, Rene Bussoz, to import some of his self-contained underwater breathing apparatus kits. Bussoz imported ten, and believed the market saturated but as people realised that they could now dive without possessing a breath-hold diver’s stamina, more and more diving clubs and stores popped up.

In the 1950s, there was little training available for the diving enthusiast outside of the military and oceanographic institutes. As clubs and instruction schools popped up for aqua-lung divers – the term scuba caught on only in the mid-1960s – there arose a need to codify and certify the training. The National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI), was established in 1960, and the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) in 1966. These are the two most popular training associations in the world today, although others, such as Scuba Schools International (1970), do exist.

Over the years, diving has become progressively safer. With more experience and improving materials technology, scuba diving is one of the safest sports one can engage in today. Over the years, millions of ordinary people worldwide have become certified divers though many have not remained active. One reason might be that scuba diving is not an inexpensive hobby; another is that it is not easy to find equally enthusiastic diving buddies.

To learn diving, one must be at least 10 years old although there remain some restrictions until one is 15. Although there is the usual trash talk about which certification – NAUI, PADI, SSI, or other – is better, there is very little difference between the syllabi of these various associations. What is most important, at least for the beginner, is the quality of your dive instructor. For what its worth, I will also mention that while PADI is the most popular certification internationally, astronauts at NASA and the US Navy SEALs train with NAUI – you can guess which one I hold 🙂

A typical dive training course lasts about 32 hours and is spread over two weekends, eight hours each Saturday and Sunday. Four of these hours are spent in class while the other four are spent in a pool, familiarising you with the equipment, diving skills, safety, and maintenance. Most of the class time will be spent on revisiting secondary school science – buoyancy and the gas laws. This is because the water pressure underwater affects the air you breathe and consequently your body chemistry. Every 30 feet, the pressure on your body increases by one atmosphere, so at 60 feet below water, you have three atmospheres pushing down on you. The two golden rules of diving are closely related to the effect of nitrogen and oxygen on your body under pressure: do not ascend too quickly, and do not hold your breath while scuba diving.

Most dive instructors insist that you know swimming. For most, the usefulness of this is psychological – if something goes wrong when you are 50 feet below, the tendency to panic is higher if you do not know swimming. This almost always leads to a rapid ascent which could be dangerous. Were the diver able to remain calm, he would realise that the only thing he really needs – air – is right there on his back and there is no need to worry. In fact, it is difficult to swim with your entire scuba gear because of the high buoyancy built into the kit – from the neoprene wetsuit to the buouancy control device (BCD) and the tank of air, divers need to be weighed down to descend. Drowning while scuba diving is actually very difficult! Furthermore, a panicked diver inadvertently exerts himself more, consumes far more air, and cannot stay below for long even with a 80-cubic-foot tank.

Theoretically, you can dive anywhere but you want to optimise your experience by choosing the areas with the best water clarity and the most diversity of flora and fauna. Jumping or rolling off a boat is the image we have of scuba diving but some spots allow divers to even walk into the water and wade deeper until descent. For those in the Western hemisphere, there are several fantastic places such as Belize, Cozumel, Bonaire, and Cocos Island to name just a few. Those in the Old World should check out Lakshadweep, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, the Red Sea, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Beginners should check that the sites they choose do not have strong currents or they would have an additional thing to keep track of on their first trip out! However, currents are nothing to be afraid of – more experienced divers just allow themselves to be pushed along and exert themselves very little as they enjoy the corals and fish.

The fun really starts once you are familiar with basic diving and have received your Basic Open Water Diving Certificate, for there are several additional skills you can be certified for. For example, you can learn underwater photography and videography, night diving, cave diving, wreck diving, nitrox, and other niche skills depending upon your interest. The photos used in this article are some of the ones I tool on my first time out; imagine how much better they could be with more experience and training.

The typical scuba kit consists of a wetsuit, boots, flippers, mask, snorkel, BCD, dive belt, weights, dive computer, and regulator; oxygen tanks are provided by dive operators at the dive spot. Most serious divers begin by renting their kit initially and then slowly acquiring their own equipment as they learn more about their needs and gain more experience. For those with glasses, masks can be made to specification so that contacts and spectacles are not needed. Some sites may require flashlights, flags, dry suit, noisemakers, and other equipment but you will learn about those quickly as you start diving.

My first dive was at Cozumel. The first time I put my head below the water, a wave of tranquility washed over me. Suddenly, I was cut off from all the sounds around me and I was left in total silence save the Darth Vader-esque sound the regulator makes as you breathe. The water was cool and clear, and the tranquility I felt was not that of a solitary person but one who was for the first time fully integrated with the world around him. The experience was truly meditative and I stayed below for 55 minutes, not bad for a beginner according to my instructor. There are few things I have done in my life that I could recommend more. So look up your nearest dive school and get out and under…and if you do choose to get certified, look me up for I am always in need of a dive buddy!

Until next time, stammi bene.


This article first appeared in the September 2015 print edition of Swarajya as part of the column, Sprezzatura.

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An Orgasm for the Lungs

02 Thu Jun 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Society

≈ Comments Off on An Orgasm for the Lungs

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Abu'l Fath Gilani, Africa, Ahli Shirazi, Andes, arguileh, calabash, chillim, Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, dakka, dhoom netra, Ecuador, ghalyoon, gudugudda, hookah, hubbly bubbly, India, Iran, Ismet Ertep, Kenya, lulava, mu'assal, narguileh, Native American, okka, Ottoman Empire, Peru, shisha, smoking, sprezzatura, tobacco

Salve amici! Just what is it that people find so seductive about the ghalyoon? I am referring, or course, to the pneumatic water pipe, a device that is used for smoking in large parts of South Asia, the Asian –stans, and the Middle East and is known by several names – narguileh, shisha, arguileh, okka, lulava, chillim, dakka, gudugudda, hubbly bubbly, and perhaps most common, hookah. Connoisseurs swear by the succulence and richness of the flavoured tobacco smoked through a long, mesmerising, and oftentimes colourful hose; the ghalyoon has been the standard of smoking for centuries among the elites of the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires, a well-crafted instrument evoking an image of feminine beauty with its elegant and curvy profile. Whether it is the imposing lines that hint at an exotic mystery draped in puffs of smoke or an enchanting effect of the sound of gentle bubbling, the ghalyoon is a soothing symbol of relaxation and reminiscences of times long past.

The origins of the ghalyoon remain shrouded in mystery. The earliest incontrovertible written evidence of the existence of such a device comes from the report of Edward Terry, chaplain of the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe, in 1616. He describes it as a clay pot half filled with water, from which emerges a tube; the bottom end remains submerged in water while on top of this tube is placed loose tobacco and hot coals. The user would inhale the resultant smoke that has passed through the cool water through a hollow cane that is also inserted into the spout in the clay pot. Some believe that the hookah was invented by Emperor Akbar’s court physician, Abu’l Fath Gilani, in the late 1580s as a means of purifying the tobacco smoke when his patron took up the habit. However, the ghalyoon finds an earlier mention in a ruba’i by a Persian poet Ahli Shirazi in the court of Shah Tahmasp I that dates its probable origins to the 1520s:

The hookah enjoys of your lips,
The pipe turns to a sugarcane in your mouth,
It’s not the smoke of tobacco around your face,
It is a cloud surrounding the moon.

However, the etymology of one of the names for the ghalyoon – narguileh – suggests an even older history and association with India. Derived from the Sanskrit word for coconut – narikela – the name describes accurately a device that served much the same function as the modern hookah. Although tobacco was introduced to the subcontinent only in the last decade of the 16th century, its natives were not new to smoking when the gifts of the New World arrived east. In fact, smoking has a history that goes back to at least 2000 BCE in the subcontinent and to 5000 BCE in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes. Native Americans smoked tobacco from calabashes and the excavations at Hyrax Hill in Kenya prove that smoking was an African pastime too, though dating the site has proven to be difficult. In India, smoking formed part of the Ayurvedic repertoire – dhoom netra involved the inhalation of medicated smoke passed through water to calm the vitiated doshas in the head and neck.

In this respect, the adherence to a modern origin of the arguileh narrative, such as in the tales of Ottoman and Iranian genius, seems implicitly biased towards the consumption of tobacco though the plant was actually a latecomer to the world of smoking. Nonetheless, it is the Safavids and Ottomans who get the most credit for creating the water pipe in its present form and popularising it; they perfected the apparatus from its initial configuration of using coconut shells as the water receptacle to clay, wood, brass, and finally glass. Even today, hookahs manufactured in Iran, Turkey, and the Levant are noted for their exquisite traditional designs in glass and metal.

By the mid-17th century, as the English physician and travel writer John Fryer attests, the hookah had become a crucial part of upper middle class coffeehouse culture in India. It was equally popular in Iran and the Sublime Porte as Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean-Baptiste Chardin, two French gem merchants, note in their diaries. Interestingly, there was fierce opposition to the habit then as there is now. In the second half of his reign, Sultan Murad IV (1623-1640) of the Ottoman Empire banned the narguileh in Istanbul upon pain of death. He also banned coffee and alcohol though historians report that he was a regular drinker himself. In more recent times, the emirate of Sharjah forbade hookah aficionados their pleasure in 1993, as did Abu Dhabi in 1996 and Oman in 2001, while Tunisia banished the shisha from café terraces. Egypt has spent millions in a vigorous public campaign against the shisha and various Indian cities impose and lift bans on ghalyoon parlours at whimsy. None of this has ever deterred the hookah loyal worshippers anywhere; these laws were usually more honoured in the breach than the observed, and at best, it pushed hookah parlours underground for a short while until the ban was lifted or a more permissive mood returned.

Interestingly, none of the bans were prompted by health concerns but social factors. With an increasing number of women participating in communal smoke sessions by the late 19th century, the usual stick-in-the-mud guardians of morality worried about the presence of women in what were until then male-only bastions and their marriage prospects. It comes as no surprise that the belly dancers some cafés introduced and waitresses in risqué uniforms missed their notice.

ghalyoon workingSo what exactly is a ghalyoon and how does it work? Any piece has the following basic components – a base jar, a hollow metal stem that fits into the jar and makes an airtight seal, an ash collector, a clay bowl, a hose, a set of tongs, and a windscreen. Grommets are used between the bowl and the top of the stem and the hose and the centre of the metal stem to better seal the joints. The tobacco – mu’assal, as it is known – is placed in the bowl on top and covered with a thin sheet of perforated aluminium. The jar is filled with water, and if large enough, plenty of ice, such that the bottom of the stem when it is inserted is about two inches below the surface of the water. The hose is attached and hot coal is placed op top of the aluminium-covered bowl. As the user inhales from the hose, the smoke is dragged down into the stem, through the water and into the air chamber in the base jar above the water from where it feeds the hose.

Hookahs come in many sizes but to optimise your smoking experience, it is vital to have a reasonably sized air pocket where the smoke can collect. If it is too big, you will be left light-headed due to inhaling too hard and if it is too small, a long drag on the hose will not be as satisfactory. Most regulars prefer their shishas at a height of between 26 and 32 inches. Ghalyoon regulars have historically known to be very picky about their apparatus and consumables: not all tobacco qualified for use in the hookah. First, the leaves had to be washed several times to make the tobacco milder; then, the leaves were immersed in honey along with molasses and various flavours – apple, grape, mint, orange, watermelon, guava, peach, jasmine, strawberry, melon – and left to ferment. This is very similar to the techniques used to this day and the due to the constant quality assessment required, the industry has resisted mechanisation so far. Non-tobacco mu’assal is also available and some users even make their supplies at home.

Similarly, self-lighting coals are a strict no-no in the hookah community – for one, they contain more chemicals that are harmful but more importantly, they ruin the flavour of the smoke. Only small chunks of natural charcoal are used, rotated, and refreshed in a smoking session. Depending on the flavour you are smoking, some users like to spike their water jar with rose oil or pomegranate juice. For some of the new flavours enjoyed only by hookah apostates – coffee, Cola, chocolate, cigar, licorice, mojito, bubblegum – the base jar is sometimes filled with milk, orange juice, vodka, or other liquids that enhance the flavour of the tobacco.

The health effects of smoking hookahs has recently come under increasing scientific scrutiny as its popularity, particularly among college students, has soared. Although the negative impact of tobacco and smoke on the respiratory system cannot be denied, some studies have absurdly suggested that one hookah session – which usually lasts up to an hour – is equivalent to smoking a hundred cigarettes. These same studies also warn smokers of the deleterious effects of other chemicals in the hookah tobacco. However, any survey of middle-of-the-road to high quality hookah tobacco brands will reveal that they contain substantially less chemicals than are found in cigarettes. Furthermore, the tobacco content of mu’assal is much less. Since the mu’assal is placed in a clay pot and heated rather than burned, it also produces less tar than cigarettes. Lower nicotine content reduces risk of addiction. Admittedly, the water in the base, commonly believed to filter impurities, does not do so completely – its primary function is to cool the smoke.

Ultimately, how safe a ghalyoon is for you is a risk each of us will have to evaluate for ourselves. Yet no one has put the distinction between modern smoking and the hookah more succinctly than Ismet Ertep, a 71-year old pensioner made famous by Stephen Kinzer’s Cresecent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds. “Smoking a nargile is nothing like smoking a cigarette, he said. “Cigarettes are for nervous people, competitive people, people on the run. When you smoke a nargile you have time to think. It teaches you patience and tolerance, and gives you an appreciation of good company. Nargile smokers have a much more balanced approach to life than cigarette smokers.” It is this centuries-old custom and an atmosphere of quiet camaraderie that we lovers of the ghalyoon seek to ensconce ourselves into each session.

Until next time, stammi bene.


This article first appeared in the June 2015 print edition of Swarajya as part of the column, Sprezzatura.

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The Daughter of Elysium

01 Sun May 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Society

≈ Comments Off on The Daughter of Elysium

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An die Freude, Berlin Freedom Concert, brotherhood, Die Weihe des Hauses, El Himno de la Alegria, Friedrich Schiller, Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee, Leonard Bernstein, Ludwig van Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy, Opus 125, Rhodesia, sprezzatura, Symphony in D Minor, Theater am Kärntnertor, Tiananmen Square, Vienna, Wilhelm Furtwängler

Salve, amici! The fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony must be one of the most recognisable pieces in the repertoire of Western classical music. Set to the words of Friedrich Schiller’s An die Freude, the piece has become a secular benediction at public occasions and has been appropriated by all points on the political spectrum. Most famously, it was used by composer Leonard Bernstein to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall in his historic Christmas day Berlin Freedom Concert in 1989. In 1972, the Ode to Joy was adopted as the European anthem, and the music was set to different words as the national anthem of Rhodesia from 1974 to 1979. During the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean dissidents sang the anthem of protest and Chinese students played the movement over loudspeakers in Tiananmen Square in 1989; earlier in the 20th century, Protestants borrowed it for their hymn, Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, Marxists saw class struggle in it while the Nazis saw it as an expression of superior Germanic artistic genius. The Ninth has even penetrated popular culture, popular at the Olympics, football tournaments, on television, in video games, inspiring flash mobs, and seeing success even as a Spanish pop song, El Himno de la Alegria, in 1970.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Manuscript is sold for ?1.9 Million GBPThere have been dozens of interpretations of Beethoven’s last symphony, from its first performance on May 07, 1824, in Vienna, down to the present day. Hector Berlioz, the famous French composer, was intoxicated by Beethoven’s music and Claude Debussy, another French composer, called the masterpiece a “magnificent gesture of musical pride.” Richard Wagner wrote that “beyond this symphony there can be no progress, for there can follow from it immediately only the completed artwork of the future, the universal drama” – we are meant to understand that Wagner alone could produce such work. Richard Taruskin, American musicologist, called the fourth movement a “mounting wave – or better, a spreading infection – of Elysian delirium.” Maynard Solomon, a Beethoven biographer, heard a secular deity who transcended particlarisations of religious creed, “a fusion of Christian and Pagan beliefs, a marriage of Faust and Helen.” Not all interpretations were so flattering: Susan McClary, a musicologist at Case Western Reserve University, denounced the first movement as an example of horrifyingly violent masculine rage” and Dutch conductor Gustav Leonhardt called the Ode to Joy a puerile vulgarity.

There can be no definitive interpretation, of course. Wilhelm Furtwängler, widely considered to be one of the best conductors of the symphony, once said that trying to nail down Beethoven’s ideas any more precisely than that is like pinning a butterfly to an entomologist’s wall. “How one viewed the Ninth,” Jan Swafford, a biographer of the German genius, wrote perceptively, “depended on what kind of Elysium one had in mind” – hence the appropriation by humanists, Marxists, Nazis, and liberals alike.

Like many of Beethoven’s works, the Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Opus 125, as it is technically called, pushed the boundaries of music. It was the longest symphony ever composed until then and the first to use voices, hence the occasional reference to it as the Choral Symphony. Despite its composition in a minor scale, generally associated with melancholy, the Ode to Joy is filled with gaiety, striving, and power. Beethoven also became the first major composer in history to use the metronome – a mechanical device used by musicians to keep time as they play.

BeethovenWhat we hear when we listen to the Ninth today is not what the audience heard in the early 19th century or even how Beethoven wrote the symphony. Conductors take their artistic license with any piece, it is true, but there has been some controversy over the maestro’s time markings. Were one to strictly follow Beethoven’s instructions, the symphony would have a much greater tempo and lose some of its clarity and mystical profundity. Some historians have suggested that the composer’s metronome was broken, others have argued that given the smaller, less resonant halls of the time, the nature of orchestras and musical instruments, and playing style, the greater speed could have been accommodated. However, orchestras were not a professional affair in Beethovenian times and the faster beat would have made the piece much harder for the musicians as well as the vocalists. According to a contemporary source, the symphony took 65 minutes to perform in its entirety. Today, a complete performance of the Ninth ranges from a brisk 64 minutes (Arturo Toscanini, 1952) to a leisurely 79 minutes (Karl Böhm, 1981).

It is easy today to think of post-Napoleonic Vienna as the hotbed of cultural innovation, a paradise for aesthetes and elitists with sophisticated tastes. In truth, the Austrian capital was far from it. Frustrated by the conservative and popular – Italian – tastes of his fellow burgher, Beethoven wanted to release his grand creation in Berlin, one of Europe’s two great cultural capitals. It was only with the intervention of Vienna’s most prominent citizens that the German genius was persuaded to give his masterpiece to the Austrian capital, his second home since his mother had died in 1787. Dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, Beethoven presented his Ninth Symphony at the Theater am Kärntnertor barely six weeks after it had been written.

Kärntnertor TheatreIncredibly, it had been rehearsed completely only twice, that too by a group of largely amateur musicians.Given the challenging technical demands even for modern professional orchestras, one wonders what monstrosity amateurs might have played that May evening. Beethoven was his charming self, snapping at a soprano soloist who complained that a note was not possible, to “just learn it, the note will come.” Worse, there had been no time to have the score neatly printed – it had to be hurriedly copied by hand for the entire orchestra and Beethoven was not known for having neat and crisp original sheets for the copiers to duplicate. In the short time between the completion of the symphony in late March and its performance in early May, Beethoven also had to wrestle with the local authorities to allow him to perform at the Kärntnertor. The programme for the opening night involved not just the his new symphony but also the overture of his Die Weihe des Hauses and, more notably, sections of the religious Missa Solemnis. In those days, Austria had a law that forbade the performance of religious music at secular venues. It was only after one of Beethoven’s benefactors leaned on the chief of police that permission was granted.

Despite the lack of preparation and the chaos before the opening, Beethoven received a standing ovation from the crowds. One reviewer wrote that Beethoven had outdone everything that had been thought possible until then; another recognised the impossible demands the maestro had made on his vocalists and commented that the “singers did what they could.” A more effulgent critic declared that Beethoven, “a son of the gods,” had “brought brought the holy life-giving flame directly from heaven.” Yet not all were pleased – some commented that the symphony was too long and difficult to follow, calling the beginning of the famous fourth movement a horrible noise. Wagner would later describe it as Schreckenfanfare. Music lovers today would be astounded to learn that ultimately, Beethoven’s great Opus 125 was not an economic success in its day.

OrchestraWhat went into the Ninth? The year was 1824: Europe had just defeated Napoleon Bonaparte after nearly two decades of warfare that left five million dead. The brief whiff of liberalism was brutally stomped out at the Congress of Vienna as the people of Spain, Poland, Italy, and Greece found out by the time the Ninth opened. Nonetheless, the winds of liberalism and nationalism had started to blow in the continent and the world – more and more people were beginning to demand greater political and intellectual freedom. It was also the Romantic era, and poets like Giacomo Leopardi, ETA Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, George Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley had begun to do with words what Beethoven would transcend with music. There is no reason to suppose that Beethoven was apolitical: in fact, his scratching out the dedication of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, indicates that the composer was indeed politically aware and very much a liberal. Beethoven was by no means a modern democrat – in the liberalism of the early 19th century, he probably subscribed to the Platonic idea of philosopher kings. Yet the German composer had to pay lip service to the European nobility upon whose patronage he depended and for whom the French Revolution was too recent to tolerate overt proclamations of universal brotherhood.

Although Beethoven used no words, he had always held that music was a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. The call to universal brotherhood, certainly not new, was phrased as a secular hymn with all the pagan imagery one might expect in a classical bacchanalia or of the Romantics. Beethoven’s music sought to bring people together, as music lovers, as liberals, as thinkers, and as humans; ironically, the maestro’s music achieved what he himself rarely could in life.

Until next time, stammi bene.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony in D Minor, Opus 125:

 

This article first appeared in the May 2016 print edition of Swarajya as part of the column, Sprezzatura.

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