Rajan Parrikar Music Archive

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

When Sages Forget – from Shankara to Einstein

A PDF version is available here.

Even the most incandescent minds are not beyond forgetting the compass of their own making. History offers luminous moments when a sage or a scientist, having disclosed a truth for the ages, falters in living by it, only to be recalled by the very principle he had brought to light.

Shankara, the Hindu genius of the 8th century, counted among the supreme philosopher-saints of history, gave definitive expression to Advaita Vedanta, the ancient doctrine that the Self is One, indivisible, equally present in all beings. Distinctions of caste1 or station, he taught, are but passing appearances concealing the single underlying reality.

In Varanasi he faltered, momentarily waylaid by the reflexes of social conditioning. On his way to the river he was stopped by a Chandala, an outcaste, standing before him with his dogs. Shankara asked him to move aside and let him pass. The Chandala replied:

“Do you ask the body to move, or the Self? If it is the body, then yours and mine are alike, built of the same elements. If it is the Self, it is neither yours nor mine. It is Brahman, One Consciousness, indivisible, unmoving.”

The words pierced him2. At once Shankara recognised his error. Humbled, he bowed to the Chandala and declared him his teacher. From that encounter was born the Manisha Panchakam, in which he proclaimed that whoever knows this truth – whether Brahmin or Chandala – is his guru. Tradition even holds that the Chandala was Shiva Himself in disguise, come to humble the philosopher.

Centuries later another sage stumbled, this time in science. Einstein, who had remade our vision of space, time, and gravity with his General Theory of Relativity, was also one of the founding figures of quantum mechanics. His work on light quanta and the photoelectric effect had helped open the door to the quantum world. Yet he could not abide the probabilistic heart of the new theory. To him, a universe ruled by chance was not a finished account of reality. Again and again he devised ingenious Gedankenexperimente (thought experiments) to expose what he believed were fractures in the quantum edifice.

At the Solvay Conference of 1930 he presented one of his sharpest challenges. Imagine a box filled with radiation. A photon escapes, and by weighing the box one could measure the photon’s energy with limitless precision, apparently defeating Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty.

Niels Bohr, champion of the quantum view, wrestled with the riddle. If Einstein were right, it would mean the collapse of the quantum formulation. After long hours of thought through a sleepless night, clarity came: Einstein had neglected his own theory of relativity. A clock inside the box, meant to time the release, would itself be altered by gravity’s pull. Time would shift, and uncertainty would return.

Einstein’s great theory had risen against him. It was his last serious attempt to overthrow the uncertainty principle. Thereafter he turned his energies elsewhere, never again mounting a direct challenge of such force to quantum mechanics.

Both Advaita and quantum mechanics probe the foundations of Reality itself, and in each case the sage was momentarily undone.

Across centuries and cultures the pattern repeats. Shankara, preceptor of non-duality; Einstein, prophet of relativity. Each was corrected, not by another’s invention, but by the truth he had himself uncovered.

[1] The word “caste” does not exist in any Indian language. It is derived from the Portuguese casta. They misrepresented the social taxonomy they encountered in India and imposed their own term upon it. Regrettably the word struck, and even Indians adopted it; the distortion persists to this day. The Indian system is varna-jati, which is not the same as “caste.”

[2] Some traditions frame this encounter differently, yet all agree that it became the occasion for Shankara to affirm, with unflinching conviction, the non-dual truth.

RP, August 2025

What Is Karma?

A spiritual blockchain.

[A pdf version is available here.]

The word karma has entered everyday language across the Western world, but its meaning is almost always misunderstood. It is commonly taken to mean cosmic tit for tat, as if the universe were keeping score. Karma points to something more subtle and far reaching. Here we explore what it truly means and how this ancient idea can reshape how we see ourselves, others, and the events of our lives.

The Sanskrit word karma means simply “action.” More broadly, it refers not just to the act but also to its consequences, the moral residue it leaves behind.

Karma is a foundational idea in Hinduism and in all the other Dharmic religions of India, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. It is closely linked to other key concepts: dharma (righteous conduct), ahimsa (the principle of least harm), and above all, reincarnation. In this view, the soul does not perish with the body. It passes through countless births and deaths (samsara), shaped by its own accumulated karma, until it attains moksha, liberation from the cycle. At that point, it is freed from bondage and returns to Brahman, the eternal substratum of existence and consciousness.

Karma unfolds in layers. The portion already ripening in this lifetime is known as prarabdha karma. It determines the broad circumstances we are born into, such as our body, family, and life conditions. The rest of the accumulated store that has not yet begun to bear fruit is called sanchita karma. This is the backlog gathered over many past lives. Every new choice in thought, word, or deed adds to this reservoir. Nothing is ever lost. The record is exact and continuous.

But karma is not the only imprint we carry. Along with it travel the latent tendencies shaped by habit, desire, and experience. These are called vasanas. If karma is the ledger of actions and consequences, vasanas are the deep grooves that shape how we think, feel, and react. Both karma and vasanas are borne by the subtle body (sukshma sharira), which survives physical death and accompanies the soul from one life to the next.

Sometimes karma and vasana are aligned. Sometimes they are in tension. A person may be born into favourable circumstances yet feel drawn to destructive habits. Another may be born into hardship but carry an inner orientation toward clarity, self-restraint, or truth. The task before us is to refine these tendencies and turn them toward the good.

It is crucial to understand that karma does not imply fatalism, nor is it a system of mechanical retribution. It is cause and effect, shaped by intention and governed by free will.

Every thought, word, and deed plants a seed. The results may ripen now or in another life, but the imprint is never lost. This is not a doctrine of helplessness. On the contrary, it is a call to personal responsibility. You inherit the effects of past actions, but retain the power to shape what lies ahead.

The doctrine helps explain why good people may suffer while the wicked coast through life with seeming impunity. From the Dharmic point of view, the ledger of karma stretches across lifetimes. A child stricken by cancer, for instance, is not the victim of random cruelty or divine wrath. What unfolds is the consequence of accumulated actions carried forward. This may unsettle modern sensibilities, but it offers a more coherent moral accounting than the alternatives in the Abrahamic religions, which appeal to inscrutable divine will or inherited guilt. Karma affirms that justice is real, even if not immediate.

Once the principle is internalised, the transformation is deep. You begin to live with heightened awareness. You see that those who have wronged you are also bound by the consequences of their actions. This does not absolve them, though it softens the sting of resentment. Their fate will find them. You are no longer trapped by the need for vengeance. Your task is to act rightly, to maintain your compass and its alignment with truth.

More importantly, you come to see that nothing is trivial. Each gesture, each choice leaves a trace. Even the food you eat, how it is sourced, how you treat sentient beings, each of these enters your karmic account. They are not things. They are souls on the journey. To harm them needlessly is to incur a moral debt. To choose otherwise is to refine the self. The ancient sages saw the universe as an interconnected web, where no act is isolated and no sentient being insignificant.

The doctrine of karma touches everything. It becomes a steady, guiding force in your consciousness. In modern terms, your karmic record is a spiritual blockchain, updated with each act, invisible yet exacting.

This is no system of blame. It is a framework of consequence. Each of us is both heir and architect of our condition. And in that lies both the insight and the hope this ancient teaching offers.

– RP, Aug 2025

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Dr. V. N. Muthukumar for his input, which helped refine this essay.

Glossary

Karma
Action and its consequences. The moral residue of every thought, word, and deed.

Dharma
Right conduct. Living in accordance with truth and moral order.

Ahimsa
The principle of least harm. Choosing non-harming whenever possible.

Moksha
Liberation from the cycle of birth and death. The soul’s ultimate release from bondage.

Prarabdha karma
The portion of karma already ripening and shaping the current life.

Sanchita karma
The accumulated store of past karma not yet fructified.

Vasana
Latent tendencies formed by repeated actions and desires. Vasanas shape temperament and inclination.

Sukshma sharira
The subtle body. The non-physical vehicle that carries karma and vasanas from one life to the next.

PS: A version of this essay was published in Iceland’s leading daily Morgunblaðið on August 15, 2025.

Morgunblaðið, August 15, 2025

GOATs, Time, Trees, and Civilisations

The acronym GOAT – Greatest of All Time – is everywhere. What it usually signals is that the speaker has no grasp of time at all. When someone declares A to be the GOAT, the meaning is best rendered thus:

“I am a fan of A, who is currently trending. I know little of history, even less of time, and nothing of substance. But proclaiming A makes me feel clever and may fool other halfwits on social media into thinking I know something. In truth I am just another echo in the idiot chorus.”

That may sound droll, but it happens to be true.

Thinking in large time scales does not come naturally to humans. That is why many recoil from biological evolution, and why every passing cultural hiccup is mistaken for history in the making.

In the long arc of human civilisation, what survives is not personality or pageantry. It is ideas. 

MAGA faithful may chant that Trump is the greatest this or that. I voted for that degenerate 3 times, not out of conviction, but because politics is usually a choice between failures. Trump remains what he always was – ill-bred, illiterate, and deeply stupid – a pile of verbal litter soon to be swept aside. In a few decades, if not sooner, he will be a trivia question. History remembers signal and forgets noise.

What about Elon Musk? He is signal. Measured across time, he may merit a paragraph or two, perhaps more, if he helped shift humanity’s path. But even his finest technological feats are susceptible to obsolescence. Each generation overwrites the last and what was cutting-edge becomes quaint in the blink of a century.

What endures, what history truly sanctifies, are ideas that pierce the matrix of reality.

As a young student of electromagnetism, I came across a passage from Feynman that burned itself into memory. He was speaking of James Clerk Maxwell’s synthesis of electricity and magnetism, a feat of intellect so singular it redefined the world. Feynman said:

“From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”

Those lines underscored what it meant to think not in decades or lifetimes, but in epochs.

Ideas are the bedrock of civilisation. They endure while monuments rot and regimes collapse. That is why Newton’s Principia, Maxwell’s equations, and Ramanujan’s otherworldly mathematics still course through our intellectual culture, while the tycoons and emperors lie buried under layers of dust.

Musk’s name may survive, but only if it anchors an idea large enough. Multiplanetary life, perhaps, or a reinvention of energy itself. Otherwise, he risks being remembered like Ford, a revolutionary capitalist, but not a thinker who shaped human destiny.

30 years ago, I stood in the Bristlecone Pine forest in California’s White Mountains, among trees over 4,000 years old, the oldest living individual beings on the planet. They have withstood millennia of wind, drought, and stillness. It struck me then that these trees were alive when, on the other side of the world in India, the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi Tree and attained to awakening.

How fitting. In the Dharmic vision, trees are jivas: beings, not objects. They participate in the vast wheel of samsara, possessing a consciousness of another kind. To the Buddha or a rishi of the Upanishads, these trees would not be mute things but sage sentinels of stillness, beings who have perhaps understood time more deeply than any human ever will.

Let me end with a final testament to the power of ideas, one the average Westerner is unlikely ever to have considered.

China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. Each speaks a language from a wholly different linguistic family.* And yet, the ideas of Hindu and Buddhist India entered them, reconfigured their inner lives, and left fingerprints on everything from metaphysics to art, from architecture to ethics. No force of arms, no coercion, no bloodshed. Only monks, mystics, merchants, and the sublime seduction of ideas.

Imagine peoples who could not understand a word of Sanskrit or Prakrit, whose native languages were tonal and structurally alien, yet who absorbed and re-expressed the vision of Dharmic thought. They transmuted it, recasting it in their own imagery and cultural frameworks. But the substratum remained unambiguously Indic. This is a whole subject unto itself, for another day.

This civilisational permeation tells us something essential. Truly potent ideas transcend language, race, and nation. They outlast everything else. No armies overran them. Yet whole inner worlds were rearranged, from the Mekong to Mount Fuji.

Ideas alone outlive everything.

*Vietnamese and Khmer are both Austroasiatic languages, but mutually unintelligible.

– RP, July 2025

Measure of the True Guru

[Written on the occasion of Guru Pournima, observed today.]

In the West, “guru” has come to denote a tech wizard or business maven, a usage that is both mistaken and bereft of its original depth. In India, and in other regions shaped by Dharmic traditions, the word bears a far weightier significance. It invokes reverence. 

The word traces to Sanskrit, where gu (darkness) and ru (remover) define the Guru as one who dispels darkness and lights the way. More than a teacher, the Guru is a mentor and guide, his role transcending mere instruction.

What, then, makes for a great Guru?

Let us consider a luminous verse uttered by Krishna near the close of his discourse in the Bhagavad Gita:

इति ते ज्ञानमाख्यातं गुह्याद् गुह्यतरं मया।
विमृश्यैतदशेषेण यथेच्छसि तथा कुरु॥

Thus, I have explained to you this knowledge that is more secret than all secrets.
Reflect on it fully, and then act as you wish. – Bhagavad Gita 18.63

After leading Arjuna through realms of action, devotion, knowledge, and liberation, Krishna does something extraordinary. He does not demand obedience, nor does he proclaim, “I am God Incarnate. You must now submit.”

Instead, he steps back and grants Arjuna the dignity of choice: Reflect on it fully, and then act as you wish.

In these words lies the quintessence of the true Guru. He awakens but does not command, illumines the path but does not compel the journey. He trusts the disciple to walk forward or remain where he is, guided by his own light.

One might ask why Krishna did not offer this teaching earlier, during the long years Arjuna spent in the forest. Why now, on the cusp of battle? Because Arjuna had not asked then. Now, broken by doubt and lost in inner tumult, he turns to Krishna not for knowledge but for clarity he can no longer summon from within.

This, too, marks the true Guru. He offers his light in response to the seeker’s cry, not through imposition, and waits until the soul is ripe to receive.

Krishna reveals the terrain yet never strips Arjuna of the burden and privilege of freedom. For knowledge to ripen into wisdom, it must be tested in the furnace of personal discernment. The Guru can point, but it is the disciple who must walk the path.

That gesture at the end of Krishna’s teaching, when he withdraws and leaves the decision to Arjuna, is the final act of grace. The great Guru does not conquer the disciple’s will. He kindles it.

A Guru’s role is not to bind but to free. In Krishna’s restraint lies the signature of the Guru’s greatness.

RP, July 10, 2025

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