Showing 50 articles
Celebrating Dhrupad – In concert with Pelva Naik
Author: Nupur SampatJanuary 22, 2024
Pelva Naik has been trained in the Dhrupad style of vocal music under the Dagar School of Indian Classical Music. She is a disciple of legendary Dhrupad maestro Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar and is a teacher of Art, Music and Humanities. She has performed in festivals and concerts in India and abroad. New Acropolis Culture Circle hosted a musical evening with [...]
Tales from the Ramayana – The Abduction of Sita
Author: Miha KosirSeptember 8, 2023
In the world of literature there are a few well known epic stories in which the plot is built around the abduction of a woman. In the East one of them is the ancient Indian story of the Ramayana, and in the West, there is the ancient Greek story of the Iliad. These are not [...]
A Lifetime Of Architecture: In Conversation With B V Doshi
Author: Zarina Screwvala and Nupur SampatOctober 9, 2022
“Projects must go beyond the functional to connect with the human spirit through poetic and philosophical underpinnings.” – The 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury Citation for Mr. Doshi On 30th October 2021, New Acropolis Culture Circle hosted renowned architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, sharing his life experiences in a talk titled ‘A Lifetime of Architecture’. Charting [...]
Qawwali: Call of the Spirit
Author: Harianto MehtaOctober 9, 2022
This article serves only as an introduction to the legendary origins, metaphysical purpose, and the traditional form used in the practice of Qawwali. It would be impossible to capture the cultural nuances, complex history, and social impact of the genre in this brief work, but I hope to share some principal themes that have emerged [...]
Gitanjali by Tagore: An Investigation
Author: Prof. Ananda LalJune 27, 2022
On 29th March 2021, The New Acropolis Culture Circle conducted an online session on Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize-winning work Gitanjali, with Prof. Ananda Lal. An authority on Tagore, he retired as Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and directs Writers Workshop, the oldest continuing publisher of Indian poetry in English. The professor’s doctoral thesis had [...]
The Gurukul Tradition of Ancient India
Author: Manjula NanavatiMay 25, 2022
Indian philosophy holds that the universe is not confined to what is apparent to our sense perceptions, and that the Ultimate Reality is veiled from us, by a curtain that maroons us in ignorance and illusion. Accordingly, the main purpose of education in ancient India was to pierce this curtain in order to experience the [...]
ART AS A JOURNEY WITHIN – An Interview with Olivia Fraser
Author: The Acropolitan Magazine Editorial teamMarch 28, 2022
For centuries art has been a natural means to express one’s inner journey – be it as a community or as an individual search. So has it been for Olivia Fraser, who has used her art to uplift, to produce wonder and beauty, and to find the ‘inner essence’ of things. Olivia Fraser moved to [...]
The Science of Space – Vaastushastra
Author: Sashikala AnanthJanuary 3, 2022
As a student of Sri V Ganapati Sthapati, and then from her association to the School of Architecture of Madras University, for over 30 years Sashikala Ananth has been investigating the classical Indian science of architecture, known as Vaastu, combining both textual knowledge and practical field application. She has distilled her experience in her books [...]
A Sufi Transformation: Baba Bulleh Shah
Author: Sukesh MotwaniNovember 7, 2021
Hazrat Baba Bulleh Shah is believed to have been born in 1680, in the small village of Uch (Bahawalpur, Punjab) in present-day Pakistan, where his father, Shah Muhammad Darwaish, was a Paish Imam and teacher. Most historians confirm that Bulleh Shah worked as an adolescent herder in the village. Despite his poverty, however, he was [...]
Akbar, The Great Enigma
Author: Manjula NanavatiNovember 7, 2021
During the Renaissance, while Europe was experiencing a gigantic shift of ideas in almost every aspect of knowledge, in India, was born a man who, as Emperor of Hindustan, would use his indomitable courage and a restless search for wisdom to weave a similarly audacious social, political, and spiritual vision in the Indian subcontinent. His [...]
Mastering the Bow
Author: Harianto MehtaNovember 7, 2021
Yogastha Kuru Karmani First establish being in yourself, and only then perform action. Introduction Amidst a series of mystical verses compiled in the Bhagavad Gita, this is one of the fundamental instructions that Krishna transmits to a distraught Arjuna, when faced with the prospect of killing his own cousins in the battlefield of Kurukshetra, in [...]
An Enduring Gift: Q&A with Sudha Murty
Author: Bhushan DabirAugust 25, 2021
Extracts from an evening hosted by New Acropolis Culture Circle Philanthropy can be a bridge between the ideal of fraternity and its material manifestation. Imagining a better world, with a greater sense of fraternity is intuitively appealing to many. Yet, to make a personal sacrifice in order to create that better world, is the choice [...]