Rajan Parrikar Music Archive

The Art of Not Becoming an Idiot

[This essay first appeared in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on February 17, 2026. Though it speaks of Iceland, its theme is universal: a meditation on thinking, and on the consequences of neglecting disciplined attention to evidence.]

As a young man, I read an essay by Bertrand Russell urging the habit of forming opinions on the basis of evidence and holding them lightly, ready to revise when new facts appear. This discipline, he wrote, guards against our baser impulses: prejudice, dogma, and confirmation bias.

We are often told that Iceland ranks among the world’s smartest nations. I have yet to see convincing evidence for that. Human stupidity is evenly distributed across the globe. I write about Iceland nonetheless because I live here, observe it closely, and care about its trajectory.

Five minutes of scrolling on the X app uncovers a farrago of nonsense from full-grown adults. Icelandic children, already lagging in basic reading skills, are surrounded by adults advertising their own mental shortcomings. It is fair to ask what chance the young have in such company.

Never as now have the means of acquiring knowledge lain in every hand, and never as now has that same hand so explosively paraded staggering imbecility before the world.

Half in jest, I have suggested a course titled The Art of Not Becoming an Idiot drawing on social-media trawls, which reliably turn up fresh examples of cognitive incompetence from people old enough to vote.

The dross encountered online falls into familiar classes: anecdotal fallacies, hasty generalisations, false equivalence, category errors, statistical illiteracy, confirmation bias, and lazy analogy. 

Consider a few fallacies not uncommon in Iceland, though hardly unique to it.

The moon-landing hoax keeps resurfacing. So does the reheated rubbish surrounding 9/11: inside job, an “Israeli plot,” controlled demolition. All belong to the same species of crank thinking: conspiratorial dot-connecting. Any fool can pose wild questions about an established account. The laziest move is to ask, “Could this have happened?” and mistake suspicion for insight. Another favourite line of the charlatans is “They lied to you.” Adults wallowing in such balderdash are not fit to be near children.

The mark of intelligence is knowing which questions matter and what the evidence can support. Idle speculation is cheap; clear thinking demands work.

This dot-chasing often slides into the darker territory of antisemitism, now evident in Iceland. Its practitioners hide behind words like “Mossad” or “Zionists.” To credit a single intelligence service with orchestrating revolutions, wars, financial crashes, assassinations, technological breakthroughs, and global politics is to ascribe to it a reach no organisation in history has possessed. It also requires believing that the rest of the non-Jewish world consists of perpetual chumps endlessly outwitted by one small country’s operatives.

Idiocy peaks in fields that actually require expertise. Nowhere are halfwits more animated than in matters of health. Such knowledge as they possess is assembled from social media and online poseurs. Their understanding of the subject and the force of their opinions move in opposite directions. The link between smoking and lung cancer is settled science. Yet someone always pipes up: “My aunt smoked five packs a day and lived to ninety,” a textbook anecdotal fallacy.

The same fog clouds debates about Covid vaccines. Reams of misinformation lead to blanket claims of mass deaths. When examined, the evidence reverses the story. Vaccination saved lives, especially among the vulnerable. Outlier deaths remained within the normal margins seen with all vaccines. One may criticise overbearing mandates and pandemic response, but the data on the vaccines themselves tell a different story.

An identical haze infects discussions of climate change. People who have never touched a scientific paper or seen (much less solved) a basic equation emit strident opinions aligned with politics, not a grasp of the subject.

All of this yields a trove of teaching material. True education centres on honing the mind. It’s not about supplying answers, but developing the habit of weighing evidence and deliberately testing one’s views against counterexamples and rival explanations before arriving at a conclusion.

Adult folly isn’t always benign. Beyond the classroom, unbridled stupidity exacts a steep price, sometimes with civilisational consequences. In 2000, Iceland’s population stood at roughly 280,000, with immigrants forming less than five percent. Today, around twenty-five percent of residents are foreign-origin, many from cultures and a religion hostile to Icelandic values. A demographic disaster is unfolding in plain sight. Did no one in 2000 grasp basic arithmetic to ask the obvious question: given the tiny baseline, how many immigrants can a small nation absorb before its historic identity is transformed beyond recognition?

If The Art of Not Becoming an Idiot had been taught before 2000, we might have averted this mess. Whether it can still be reversed depends on how quickly clear thinking replaces delusion.

– Rajan Parrikar, Feb 2026

Morgunblaðið, February 17, 2026

In Defense of Reykjavík

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on November 08, 2025. See screenshot below.]

When the pantheon of Europe’s great cities is invoked, the same gods are named: Paris and Rome, London, Vienna and Prague, Berlin. Reykjavík rarely enters the prayer, waiting outside the temple doors, politely forgotten. So much the better, for Reykjavík may well be Europe’s best-kept secret, a city whose splendour lies not in marble façades or imperial boulevards but in a rarer currency: light, air, sea, and mountain. Cradled by Faxaflói and watched over by Esja, it is endowed with a setting nonpareil.

Here the golden hour can stretch across half a night, pouring hues of liquid gold and rose over roofs and water. The sub-Arctic light that drenches this city possesses an ethereal transparency, as though the air itself were a lens of ice and fire. In winter, when daylight seems a visitor, the brief flare of sun turns the world to theatre. Reykjavík lives by such mercurial gifts, which no museum, however vast, can hoard.

But this northernmost capital is not without blemish. The spread of drab concrete has dulled its charm, and the newer sprawl feels uninspired, lacking in aesthetic sensibility. Still, these are surface wounds, though not insignificant ones; this city deserves better than crude building and careless expansion. That Reykjavík remains as lovely as it is, despite the city administration’s vandalism, borders on the miraculous. Yet beneath it all, the city breathes freely, blessed with air of mythic purity. Its water is the finest anywhere, and what the country yields in milk and dairy is unmatched. Even its vegetable produce, grown in defiance of latitude, is world class.

The outdoors here is not a weekend luxury but a way of life: easy access to mountains, parks, and walking trails, all the offerings of a metropolis without its ailments. Reykjavík still keeps a small-town scale where people recognise one another, where a walk across town feels like a string of familiar nods.

Despite these blessings, the current generation of Reykvíkingar seem unimpressed. To be sure, Icelanders cherish their landscape and understand its worth; they hike, bike, and walk with reverence. Still, the unease manifests, the itch to be elsewhere, the flight to noise. Paris, Prague, and Rome seduce their imagination. As does a romp in Tenerife. On a whim they fly off for another selfie, blind to the benisons they left behind.

There was a time when travel enlarged the mind; now it fills a social media feed. The capacity to stay put has been relinquished. The modern mind, anxious and agitated, cannot abide stillness or the quiet communion that comes with familiar surroundings. It confuses movement with meaning and escape with renewal. Were I born in Reykjavík, I would anchor myself here and never stir unless truly compelled. What greater horizon could one need than Esja herself?

In his physics lectures, Professor Walter Lewin of MIT would point out that most people look at a rainbow but few see it. The difference, he said, is crucial. To look is to register an object; to see is to apprehend its being, to feel its mystery. Seeing asks for attention and discernment; indeed, in Sanskrit, the very word for philosophy is darshana, meaning “seeing.”

The same may be said of Esja. Icelanders look at her daily, but few see her. They drive past, note the weather clinging to her slopes, and the encounter ends there. To behold Esja is to feel the power that shaped her. She holds the city in her gaze.

Many live in Reykjavík, but Reykjavík does not live in them. Reykjavík without Esja would not be Reykjavík. Esja was raised not by human ambition but by the hand of God. Some mornings she stands in shadow; at other times she drapes herself in a scarf of cloud and mist. With a dusting of snow she turns ethereal, and in low evening light she blushes. She stands sentinel over the city with her magisterial presence, reminding those who care to see that here, creation is unfolding.

Set beside this living grandeur, the old European capitals represent another plane of achievement: the long labour of civilisation made visible in stone. Their cathedrals and palaces speak of mastery and memory. But they are fixed achievements. Once you have admired a monument or crossed another piazza, the revelation is complete. How many more cafés does one need to conquer? Reykjavík, by contrast, draws its life force directly from nature, renewing with every hour and season. It is the city that never repeats itself.

If the locals occasionally forget their good fortune, it may be because familiarity dulls wonder. Step outside, breathe, fill a glass from the tap, walk until the pavements yield to moss and stone. Look up, and Esja will do the rest.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a flight to catch – to my favourite city, Akureyri.

Morgunblaðið, November 08, 2025

The Thumb

What made civilisation possible.

Small and unassuming, the human thumb is the axis of our destiny, evolution’s subtle gift that set us apart from all that stirs upon the earth.

The human thumb is opposable, meaning it can turn across the palm to meet the fingers, a capacity refined to perfection in our species among all living beings. In that movement lies the birth of purpose, the first act of will translated into skill. Other creatures can grasp, but only humans command. The thumb alone marries strength to dexterity, power to delicacy. So much of the brain is devoted to controlling its movement that it seems the mind took shape around the hand.

From that adaptation flows everything that defines us: tools, writing, art, surgery, music. No thumb, no civilisation. The hand and the mind evolved together; imagination found its instrument. The thumb is not merely anatomical; it is the seed corn of all human activity.

This thought, that the thumb sits at the root of human possibility, calls to mind the Mahabharata, where the thumb becomes the pivot of one of its most haunting moments, the story of Ekalavya and Dronacharya.

Ekalavya was a boy of extraordinary talent and devotion who longed to master the bow. He came to Dronacharya, the renowned guru of the royal princes, and begged to be accepted as a pupil. Drona refused, bound by his duty to the crown. The secrets of archery were to serve the kingdom, not its outsiders. Undeterred, the boy shaped a clay image of his guru and practised before it in solitude until his mastery eclipsed even that of Arjuna, Drona’s chosen disciple.

One day, Drona and his pupils came upon a dog whose mouth had been sealed with arrows, silenced yet unharmed. The feat, fusing mastery with restraint, left Drona astonished. He sought the marksman and found Ekalavya, who bowed low and hailed Drona as his guru.

Drona’s wonder turned to alarm. Two dharmas now stood before him: raja dharma, the duty to protect the kingdom, and guru dharma, the higher duty to honour genius wherever it appears.

To uphold one was to betray the other. Drona chose the kingdom. As guru dakshina, the offering owed to one’s teacher, he asked for Ekalavya’s right thumb, the source of his art and the seal of his mastery.

The boy, stainless in devotion, cut it off without pause and laid it at his teacher’s feet. In that supreme gesture of discipleship, marked by reverence and surrender, Ekalavya gave up not only his skill but the life that might have followed from it. Drona upheld his duty to the crown but in doing so violated the deeper law that binds the guru to the seeker.

Yet in another sense, by losing all, it was Ekalavya who triumphed. Deprived of a living teacher, he fixed his mind on the very essence of the guru, the principle of guidance and surrender, and through unswerving focus attained mastery. His clay image was no ordinary form but proof that true initiation can take place within.

The Mahabharata is rich in such collisions, a moral minefield where the righteous are driven to error and the villainous reveal flashes of light. No one in its vast canvas is wholly pure or wholly corrupt. The epic denies the comfort of moral certainty.

At its core, it is not a story about war but a study in moral entropy. It presents life in its fullness and declares: here is dharma – fraught, tragic, real. Dharma is not a rulebook but a living tension, situational and fluid, often agonisingly difficult to discern. Its crises arise not from simple wickedness but from collisions between equally binding obligations.

Vyasa, the sage who composed it, announces this scope:

What is here may be found elsewhere; what is not here is to be found nowhere.

This is not boast but design. The Mahabharata seeks to encompass the entire field of human experience, from the cosmic to the commonplace, from the saintly to the savage. It is the supreme mirror of civilisation, examining without flinching the entanglement of duty, desire, and consequence.

Every exalted figure bears moral compromise. Their dilemmas are not failures of judgment but conflicts between valid claims upon them. Each action leaves residue, carrying forward as karmic debt that unfolds across generations.

Where other civilisations draw firm lines between sinner and saint, obedience and transgression, the Mahabharata moves through a fog of uncertainty. Even Krishna, the Supreme Reality in human form, bends the rules in service of a higher cosmic necessity. The epic neither sanctifies nor excuses its protagonists; it exposes the human predicament in all its complexity.

From the thumb that made civilisation possible to the one that tested its conscience, the circle closes.

Nasadiya Sukta – The Hymn of Creation

Composed over three millennia ago, around 1500 BC, Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation in the Rigveda, stands apart from every other cosmogony and ranks among the most world-shaking works of literature. 

Most traditions begin with affirmation:

“In the beginning was …”

The Vedic seer, on the other hand, begins with erasure. He – or perhaps she – intuited that truth could not be grasped by affirmation, only by stripping away.

“Then was neither the non-existent, nor the existent…”

What is astounding is that it opens with a double negation, dismantling our most basic categories before anything else can be said. It is an apophatic vision, seeking truth not by affirmation but by unsaying. Long before the Upanishads gave voice to neti neti  – “not this, not this” – the Rigveda had already broken open language itself.

Apophatic currents later surfaced in Christian mysticism (Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, and so on) – but they remained on the margins of a tradition more comfortable affirming divine attributes. In the Nasadiya, by contrast, the path of negation lies at the very threshold of creation.

Nasadiya Sukta (Rigveda 10.129)

नासदासीन्नो सदासीत्तदानीं
नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत् ।
किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्
अम्भः किमासीद् गहनं गभीरम् ॥
Then was neither the non-existent, nor the existent.
There was no realm of air, no sky beyond.
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?
Was there water, unfathomable, deep?
न मृत्युरासीद् अमृतं न तर्हि
न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत् प्रकेतः ।
आनीदवातं स्वधया तदेकं
तस्माद् धान्यन् न परः किञ्चनास ॥
Then was neither death, nor deathless,
nor the dividing line of night and day.
That One breathed without breath, by Its own puissance.
Other than That, nothing was.
तम आसीत् तमसा गूढमग्रे
अप्रकेतं सलिलं सर्वाऽइदम् ।
तुच्छ्येनाभ्व् अपिहितं यदासीत्
तपसस् तन्महिनाजायतैकम् ॥
Darkness there was, enshrouded in darkness.
All this was an undifferentiated flood.
That which was hidden by the void
emerged through the power of heat.
कामस् तदग्रे समवर्तताधि
मनसो रेतः प्रथमं यदासीत् ।
सतो बन्धुम् असति निरविन्दन्
हृदि प्रतीष्या कवयो मनीषा ॥
In the beginning arose Desire – the first seed of mind.
Sages, searching in their hearts with wisdom,
found the bond of being in non-being.
तिरश्चीनो विततो रश्मिरेषाम्
अधः स्विदासीद् उपरि स्विदासीद् ।
रेतोधासान् महिमान आसन्
स्वधा अवस्तात् प्रयतिः परस्तात् ॥
Their line was stretched across:
What was above, what was below?
There were seed-bearers, there were mighty forces;
Energy beneath, impulse above.
को अद्धा वेद क इह प्रवोचत्
कुत आजाता कुत इयं विसृष्टिः ।
अर्वाग् देवा अस्य विसर्जनेन
अथ को वेद यत आबभूव ॥
Who verily knows? Who here shall declare it?
Whence was it born, whence this creation?
The gods are later than this world’s arising –
So who knows from where it came?
इयं विसृष्टिर् यद् आबभूव
यदि वा दधे यदि वा न ।
यो अस्याध्यक्षः परमे व्योमन्
सोऽङ्ग वेद यदि वा न वेद ॥
He, the first origin of this creation –
whether He formed it, or did not,
He who surveys it from the highest heaven,
He alone knows – or perhaps He knows not?

The translation above has been synthesised from well-known sources and laced with my own touches.

Even after millennia, the Nasadiya leaves us suspended in mystery. It refuses the closure of certainty, daring to suggest that not even the highest heaven may hold the answer.

In his memorable series Cosmos, Carl Sagan recited these lines with awe. For here we meet the earliest voice of humankind asking the most unsettling of questions – and leaving them open. Video below –

Illusions in Sight and Sound

Reflections on Melody, Perception, and Raga.

A PDF for download is available here.

Prologue

Why does the same element appear or sound altered by its environs? The eye reveals it: an optical deception sets before us two grey squares, identical in fact, yet one seems dark and the other light because one lies in shadow while the other stands in radiance. The ear works likewise, most strikingly in the ragas of Indian classical music: our perception of sound depends on its antecedents, aftermath, and surrounding tones. This essay briefly explores the visual–aural analogy and what it reveals about the delicate interplay of our senses.

Raga and Swara in Indian Music

Raga is the fundamental melodic form in Indian classical music. The Sanskrit word raga literally means colour, and in music it refers to the living matrix of melody that colours the mind. A raga is neither a scale nor a tune. It is better thought of as a blueprint for melodic conduct, animated only in spontaneous performance, through improvisation.

Beneath it lies the elemental unit: the swara. The temptation to equate swara with ‘note’ is natural, yet it is the cardinal error. A swara is not a single fixed pitch-point. It has a centred core and, equally important, a shaded field around it, a penumbra. Integral to it are microtonal graces, subtle inflections and intonation, the direction of approach, and the presence of neighbouring swaras. Together they form a microcosm, the source of a swara’s life.

A raga draws on a specific set of swaras, distinguished by characteristic phrases, tonal molecules, and sanctioned patterns. These stipulations give the raga its signature and govern how it moves in melodic space. Within these conditions there is ample room for imagination and improvisation.

Comparison with Western Classical

The commonplace distinction says that Indian music is melody-centric while Western classical is harmony-centred. There is truth in that, but a deeper divide matters here. In Western practice the basic unit is the note, conceived as a fixed pitch within the tempered system. Ornamentation exists, such as trills or portamento, but these are typically embellishments rather than the essence of the tone. To be sure, modern Western composers have explored microtonality and fluid pitch, but these remain exceptions, not the ground of the tradition.

In Indian practice the swara is a tonal field, a shaded presence. Devices such as meend, the continuous glide, blur the edges between pitches. A raga line flows as if poured; one swara dissolves into the next, and identity resides as much in movement and relation as in the point of arrival. To the attuned Indian ear, even the majestic Western symphonies may seem discrete, hewn from blocks of pitch rather than woven from unbroken tonal threads.

Visual and Aural Analogues

With these preliminaries in place, we can address the central theme: perception of swara, without which raga could not be raga. Vision offers a precise analogue. Perception is shaped not only by a patch of colour but by its surround.

Edward Adelson’s Checker-Shadow illusion1 shows two squares, labelled A and B, that appear to be different – one dark, the other light. In fact, they are exactly the same shade of grey. The surrounding pattern employs genuinely lighter and darker squares to create the look of a checkerboard, and a cast shadow falls across part of it. Our visual system “corrects” for the shadow and misreads B as a light square. The implication is clear: perception hinges less on the intrinsic patch than on the field that contains it.

This principle is exploited in photography, as good photographers instinctively harness such interactions to achieve a desired visual and emotional effect.

Remarkably, the sages of ancient India discerned the same law in sound, where it is far less obvious. They saw that a swara does not live in isolation, that its true identity emerges only through its neighbours, its approach, and its resolution. It was a singular vision to divine in sound what in sight demands contrived demonstration.

The aural analogue can be illustrated. A swara is heard through its intonation, ornament, volume, and direction of approach, and through the tonal landscape around it. 

Consider the komal gandhar (nominally the flattened third in Western terminology) of Raga Darbari. The upward gandhar is perceived very differently from the downward. The nucleus is unchanged, yet its course and company transform the experience.

In the clip below, my guru Pandit Ramashreya Jha “Ramrang” (1928–2009) renders this with rare precision: the same tone unfolding as two distinct lives. For those not conversant with Hindi, he reveals how the flattened third in Raga Darbari is heard differently in its upward and downward movements.

This relational life of swara is the reason Indian music cannot be captured by scale or bare notation. A swara cannot be abstracted from its living context, any more than a patch of colour can be perceived apart from its frame. To grasp this is to see that a raga is not a mechanical construction but a living organism.

Musical Reality?

It is often said that integers in mathematics have an independent reality, discovered rather than invented. Might the great ragas belong to the same order: fundamental patterns of tone and perception sensed by the ancients? Who first discerned their contours in sound? Tradition gestures toward the Sama Veda, the great corpus of chant written down around 1200 BCE, as the earliest source, and to Bharata’s Natya Shastra, committed to writing around 200 BCE. The genesis may be lost in antiquity, yet the discernment endures and the revelation abides.

Raga stands with the great discoveries of civilisation, alongside number and language. It is not merely a cultural artefact but a fundamental reality of the human sensorium. That the swara lives only in relation, and that the raga arises from this living tissue, only adds to the depth and mystery of human perception.

Epilogue

I have touched on only one facet of a vast subject. A fuller treatment would take us into neuroscience, into how the brain binds and integrates sensory information across modalities. My aim has been modest: to illuminate how the perception of swara shapes raga, to hint at its optical parallel, and to suggest why this insight merits a place among the great discoveries of civilisation.

[1] The Checker-Shadow is one of many such demonstrations in vision science. Others, like the Chubb illusion, likewise show that identical stimuli can appear radically different depending on their context. The principle is universal: perception is shaped not by the isolated signal, but by the field in which it lives.

The Eurocentric Delusion

Setting the record straight.

[This essay was published in Iceland’s leading newspaper, Morgunblaðið, on September 2, 2025. See screenshot below.]

A PDF version may be downloaded here.

The coming decades will witness a far-reaching rebalancing. India and China, the world’s most enduring civilisations, are reclaiming their place as global powers. As the centre of gravity shifts eastward, the West will, one hopes, remain a pole, but no longer the sole arbiter of modernity. This is not merely geopolitical; it is a civilisational reset that demands a reckoning with history, ideas, and culture.

In Iceland, as across much of the West, history is taught through a narrow Eurocentric frame. Civilisations beyond Europe are cast as peripheral, their contributions acknowledged only in passing. The result is a worldview that inflates Western “firsts” and “onlys” while overlooking parallel or prior achievements elsewhere. Such a view cannot survive the coming century. To face the new world honestly, the West must see itself not as the sun around which others revolve, but as one bright star in a larger constellation.

This is not to belittle the West. I have straddled two worlds and benefited from Western civilisation. Its record of achievement is immense, and many of its thinkers remain my guides. What is needed is a corrective: much taken as uniquely Western has roots in Asia. The human story is manifold, and recognition of that plurality enriches us all.

Take philosophy. The standard claim that it was born in ancient Greece, with other traditions offering only “proto-philosophy,” is a conceit. India had developed systematic inquiries into reality, ethics, and knowledge centuries earlier. The Upanishads wrestled with being and consciousness long before Socrates. China, too, cultivated rich traditions – Confucian, Daoist, Legalist – each in its own idiom. The Greek term philosophia named one branch of a universal tree; it conferred no monopoly. To admit this takes nothing away from Greece; it affirms philosophy as a human quest.

In political ideas, the imbalance is clear. The West has long exalted Machiavelli, yet he is an amateur beside Kautilya, the 4th-century BC author of the Arthashastra. That treatise is a systematic science of power covering statecraft, economics, espionage, and war while The Prince is a thin tract for minor rulers. To enthrone Machiavelli and ignore Kautilya is Eurocentric distortion at its purest.

Or take freedom of thought. The idea that it is a uniquely Western gift is untenable. In India, debate between rival schools was institutionalised. The famous encounter in the 7th century AD between Shankara and Mandana Mishra, judged by Mishra’s wife, exemplifies fearless disputation. The Buddha himself arose in open defiance of Vedic authority, denying a creator god and proposing a new path. In China, the “Hundred Schools of Thought” period (6th-3rd century BC) set Confucians, Daoists, Mohists, and Legalists arguing with a vigour that shaped centuries. What the West achieved later was remarkable: it codified free expression in law, enshrined it in constitutions, and tied it to individual rights. That was distinctive, not exclusive.

In science and technology the record is as clear. India gave the world zero and the decimal system, the foundations of mathematics, long misnamed as “Arabic numerals.” Hindu mathematicians such as Bhaskara II anticipated ideas of calculus, such as derivatives and instantaneous change, centuries before Leibniz and Newton systematised them with rigorous notation and wide application.

The sage Sushruta pioneered surgery in the 6th century BC, and his rhinoplasty techniques remain recognisable to this day. Three millennia before Christ, the Indus Valley civilisation built cities with planned streets, wells, and drainage systems of striking sophistication. Europe, by contrast, after Rome’s decline, endured foul, disease-ridden towns until the modern era. History delights in reversing roles.

The cultural sphere is another realm where Western dominance has owed more to geopolitical muscle than to intrinsic merit. That imbalance must now be faced and redressed.

Consider music. The Indian conception of raga opens a universe of melodic thought, beyond the narrow tonal palette of the West. A raga is not a tune or a scale but a living organism that colours the mind and stirs the soul. It is a fundamental musical reality, standing to music as the integer stands to mathematics: a discovery of civilisation rather than the invention of an individual. Chinese calligraphy and Taoist philosophy are likewise testaments to refined sensibilities long ignored by the Eurocentric gaze.

In addition to Mozart and Bach, the canon of human achievement must also speak the names of Tyagaraja and Kalidasa, of Confucius and Laozi. These figures embody traditions as luminous as anything the West has produced, yet they remain almost unknown outside their homelands. 

But civilisations do not mirror one another. Western modernity staked its identity on conquest of nature, technical mastery, and law. India and China never neglected those pursuits, but their genius flowered in realms of consciousness, ethics, aesthetics, and inner transformation – the shaping of self as much as world.

These achievements form humanity’s shared inheritance. Rabindranath Tagore, drawing on the ancient Rig Veda, put it thus:

“Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.”

– RP, September 2025

Morgunblaðið, September 2, 2025

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