October 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 [...]October 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 [...]June 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 [...]May 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 [...]March 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 [...]January 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 [...]November 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 [...]November 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 [...]August 25, 2021
“Truth is one. Sages call it by different names.” – Rig Veda The six darshanas are philosophical systems, or schools of thought, that take their authority from the Vedas. As implied by the meaning of the word darshana, to see or to experience, the six disciplines offer unique points of view, six separate windows from [...]March 31, 2021
Many ancient traditions unequivocally describe the role of sound in the divine process of creation. The Bible declares, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. (1) Hindu and Buddhist traditions believe that OM is the sound of creation, of the unmanifest diversifying into all the [...]