Article:
Reinventing the Library
By Alberto Mangueloct
NYT - October 23, 2015
Plato, in the “Timaeus,” says that when one of the wisest men of Greece, the statesman Solon, visited Egypt, he was told by an old priest that the Greeks were like mere children because they possessed no truly ancient ...
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Article:
Ancient civilization: Cracking the Indus script
By Andrew Robinson
Nature magazine - 20 October 2015
Andrew Robinson reflects on the most tantalizing of all the undeciphered scripts — that used in the civilization of the Indus valley in the third millennium bc.
Essay:
The Colonial History of Sculptures from the Amaravati Stūpa
By Jennifer Howes
Extract from the book: Buddhist Stupas in South Asia
Published by Oxford University Press, Delhi - 2009
The first Buddhist site to be examined and excavated in India by the British was the second- century stūpa ...
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Article:
Interview with D.N. Jha, historian of ancient India and the author of
‘The Myth of the Holy Cow'
By Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
Frontline - 2012
Q: Your book ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow' dispels the impression that Muslims introduced beef-eating in the Indian subcontinent. What were the m...
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Essay:
Relevance of Sanskrit in Contemporary Society
By B Mahadevan
Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore in 2003
..."The first and the most important and dominant theme, in the last two to three years is that if you talk anything about Sanskrit, then it is immediately brand...
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“I’m a rare book librarian. I get to touch books every single day. My colleague and I have a joke that we are Defenders of Wonder. A physical book assigns a sense of reverence to the content inside. It’s the same feeling you get when you look at a painting or hear a piece of m...
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Article:
Mosque in Kerala dates back to the Prophet's time
Times News Network | Jul 20, 2015
KODUNGALLUR (Kerala): One will find nothing unusual about this place of worship for Muslims as one drives past this town in central Kerala, just 30km north of Kochi. But it's when you go in and chat up w...
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Sultan-ul-Mashaikh, Mehboob-e-Ilahi, Hazrat Shaikh Khwaja Syed Muhammad NIZAMUDDIN AULIYA (1238 – 3 April 1325) (Urdu: حضرت شیخ خواجہ سیّد محمد نظام الدّین اولیاء), also known as Hazrat Nizamuddin, was a famous Sufi saint of the Chishti Order in the Indian Subcontinent, an order that believed in ...
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Article:
The vivid paintings that record a Briton's love of Delhi
By William Dalrymple
BBC News - 19 September 2015
A book of illustrations painted in the 1840s captures the Indian capital, Delhi, in all its glory shortly before the 19th Century's biggest anti-colonial revolt - and the British b...
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Biography:
William Simpson (1823-1899) -- "Prince of Pictorial Correspondents"
By Adrian Lipscomb (Simpson's Great Grandson)
William Simpson is widely-known known today as the war artist whose first-hand depiction of the Crimean War helped bring home the reality of that ill-managed campaign to t...
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Morya Gosavi or Moraya Gosavi (Morayā Gosāvi) alias Moroba Gosavi was a prominent saint of the Hindu Ganapatya sect, which considers the elephant-faced god Ganesha as the Supreme Being. Morya Gosavi is considered the chief spiritual progenitor of the Ganapatyas and has been ...
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Article:
Nawabs and their love to see self on canvas
By Shailvee Sharda
TNN | Nov 2, 2014
LUCKNOW: Narcissism omnipresent now in the form of 'selfies'—pictures people click of themselves—was manifest in the form of portraits the high and mighty got painted of themselves for posterity. Nawabs of ...
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Article:
What poetry has to do with math
By Rohan Murty
The Indian Express - 31 August 2015
Over the past year, I have heard my friend, mathematician Manjul Bhargava, give several public lectures on the deep connections between poetry, Sanskrit and mathematics. Like many other mathematicians bef...
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Charles William Bartlett (British, 1860-1940)
Artist
Charles William Bartlett was one of the first artists to work with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. Bartlett designed a total of 38 woodblock prints for Watanabe, beginning in 1916 and lasting through 1925. Twenty-two of these prints were pro...
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For some bibliophiles, the merits of the content are irrelevant: They judge books by their covers. An often-told tale has a collector, a Mr. Locker, taking a rare book with a small imperfection back to a binder. The binder examined the faulty cover and then, looking over his spec...
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Article:
20 Libraries In India Which Will Appeal To Every Bookaholic!
By Mohita Adhvaryu
We often exalt libraries across the world for their collection, their architecture etc. but we often fail to notice the beautiful libraries we have at home. These libraries in India are not only spreading k...
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