Rajan Parrikar Music Archive

Tiger in the Sitar

There is the sitar, and then there is the instrument in Ravi Shankar’s hands.

This isn’t just a matter of virtuosity. India has long turned out masters every bit as accomplished, some greater, most barely known beyond its borders.

The change is structural. Shankar modified the instrument by adding kharaj (bass) strings tuned to the deep tonic, and by fitting a second resonator gourd along the neck so those low tones could open out and linger. The idea drew from older lineages of the Indian lute, the Rudra Veena especially, where the lower register has always borne the music’s gravity.

With that single change the sitar learned to speak from deeper ground.

When fully realised, the sound transforms. The pluck thickens and rolls with resonance. It recalls a tiger’s low growl, deep, primal. And then, unbidden, an image forms: Shiva, absorbed in meditation high in the Himalayas.

In the opening alap of Raga Gaud Sarang, a mid-afternoon raga, he remains in the lower register, unhurried.

As he draws those long meends (see note below) across the bass strings, something ancient stirs. The greater length and low tuning establish a firm fundamental, while the added resonance gathers around it in a dense halo of overtones. The curved bridge (called jawari) keeps the vibration alive, so the tone does not settle, but breathes, tilts, and ripples.

The melody that emerges possesses precision and intent. The swara is not merely a struck note, a fixed pitch. It is a tonal molecule, shaped by its graces and intonation, by its approach and placement within the phrase. The melodic line unfolds within the grammar of the raga and the boundary conditions it imposes, and resolves to its natural conclusion.

Most sitars dance light and agile. Ravi Shankar’s custom design carries weight, both in the hand and in the ear. But that weight would remain inert without the mastery to awaken it.

The lower octave can be unforgiving. Higher on the instrument, brilliance and velocity can sometimes paper over small sins. Here, every decision lies bare.

To make the bass strings truly sing demands flawless execution across those extended meends. The swara is drawn out, coaxed, burnished, and allowed full flower. A single hesitation or clumsy glide and the whole line can unravel.

Fitting the bass strings is one thing. Realising the swara fully in that register is quite another. With Ravi Shankar, the two meet seamlessly: intonation held true, pressure and release finessed to the breath, the swara born rather than forced. This is why it does not register as a thud or a trick, but as something integral to the music.

It also requires a disciplined hand on the andolan (a controlled oscillation around the swara). Even the smallest inflection on those thick strings carries consequence and must be sculpted with care. The resonance invites lingering, but the raga calls for restraint.

This is one of those moments where the swara stands in full dignity, or the performer stands exposed.

Note: There is no Western equivalent of meend. Glissando and portamento come close, but do not capture its essence. A meend traces a specific contour, often touching implied tones along the way without explicitly resting on them. In Indian classical music, it is foundational; it is how the raga speaks. If one must use a Western term, glissando or portamento will do, but with a mental asterisk.

Iceland – Irreplaceable

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on March 30, 2026. See screenshot below.]

Years ago I met an elderly farmer in the countryside beneath Hekla. As I stood taking in the land, he said: “My father was too poor to admire this beauty. Now my sons have too much to admire this beauty.”

It is a common human failing. We disregard the gifts at our doorstep and chase delight in distant realms. In Iceland’s case, the irony cuts deep.

Those born on this tiny patch of rock in this age won the luck of the draw. Karma placed you here in this cycle of existence. Your ancestors waged a ceaseless battle merely to sustain life. You, by contrast, dwell in an age of abundance and technological ease unimaginable to them. Yours is the blessed generation.

Let us turn to Iceland’s landscape.

Nothing else resembles it. Its visual essence is not merely distinct but utterly irreplaceable. The moment treeless expanses, volcanic strata, braided glacial streams, moss-draped lava fields, sulphur-stained soils and a pervasive austerity come into view, the recognition is immediate. The terrain proclaims itself, its signature unmistakable.

It stands in a class of one.

Comparisons to New Zealand arise often, but the analogy fails. New Zealand is undeniably lovely, but its allure fits a known genre. Forested peaks, fjords, alpine lakes and undulating hills place it within a broader landscape family that includes Alaska, Patagonia, and swaths of the European Alps.

A vista from New Zealand might pass for elsewhere. An image of Iceland could not.

Our world harbours expanses of staggering beauty. My native India boasts landscapes of extraordinary scale and variety: jungles, deserts, fertile plains, endless shores, and the colossal rampart of the Himalayas. Its wildlife ranges from elephants and tigers to birds and reptiles in astonishing richness. India dazzles through sheer magnitude and plenitude, a vast spectacle.

Iceland operates differently. Its beauty is subtle, spare, almost vulnerable. 

Elsewhere on Earth, geology hides beneath canopies of forest, layers of soil or human cultivation. Iceland stays wild, its bones visible. 

The scarcity of trees proves pivotal. Trees homogenise landscapes, obscure geology, and soften the land’s contours. In Iceland the landscape unfolds in primal splendour, uncamouflaged. Herðubreið would lose its essence if it were clothed in woodland. Here the orography of a mountain manifests in elemental purity.

While the Highlands evoke an alien enigma, the Vestfirðir withdraw from human scale. The ground feels ancient beyond settlement. Many cultures would instinctively recognise such places as hallowed ground.

Through its settled history Iceland’s terrain endured largely untouched by human hands. Until around fifteen years ago, when the scourge of mass tourism descended, initiating what I can only call the prostitution of this sacred earth.

In my photographic exploration, I have surveyed Iceland extensively by helicopter. In recent years the wounds upon the land have deepened alarmingly. Those advocating this harm cloak it in the hollow phrase “sustainable tourism.” It is a deceitful label wielded by profiteers who ferry crowds through Iceland, reducing the country to a commodity. Proposals to curb tourism ignite opposition from its beneficiaries, including politicians. We are told change is inevitable, that Iceland cannot be frozen in time. But decay too is change. Healthy societies evolve organically; they are not rushed.

My homeland offers a caution. Goa was once paradise; mass tourism has remade it beyond recognition. The damage extends beyond nature: the spirit of the place shifts, and so do its people. 

A similar tale unfolds in Iceland.

Not long ago, a wanderer in the countryside might spark curiosity and conversation. No more. Many farmers, wearied by tourism’s intrusions, greet strangers with reserve, if not aversion.

Today one can circle the island, tour the famed sites, and meet scarcely any Icelanders. Former family farms, acquired by Reykjavík capital, have been turned into tourist ventures staffed by transient overseas workers. Outsiders unbound to this soil purchase prime land near storied peaks, eyeing tourism development. The pattern mirrors Switzerland: vistas laced with facilities, tailored for endless crowds.

In essence, Iceland’s Disneyfication.

Alongside the debasement of the land itself, Iceland has suffered a more profound wound in the last decade: its demographic destiny. Projections warn that, without swift remedy, Icelanders may soon be outnumbered in their ancestral home.

And now EU accession is being fast-tracked, with sovereignty and control over borders the price.

The folly of Iceland’s leaders defies measure.

This was the planet’s final haven where a peerless, pristine landscape was wedded to a tiny but vital civilisation. That inheritance now hangs by a thread.

A truth from the Buddha, arising in my motherland India, comes to mind:

“To every man is granted the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates to hell.”

Morgunblaðið, March 30, 2026

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 –

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