Music and its workings

From the Boston Conservatory page:

One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

Hat tip to Jayan for the email pointer.

Art and science of metal forming

An interesting read (Registration required):

I crossed through the low bay, where the workers were unloading long steel bars off the trucks and cutting them into billets to feed the presses. Farther on, I came to the high bay. It was a dark, smoky, loud place, busy with men and machines. It seemed as if the only light came from the burning orange glow of the hot parts.

The line of forging presses towered above the factory floor, their flywheels spinning and their rams pounding, each machine operated by a crew of men covered head to toe in the black graphite used to lubricate the dies. When you get home after working in a forging factory, you sneeze out dark gray snot for the rest of the night.

I stood and watched the fifteen-hundred-ton mechanical press with its long, powerful stroke, a machine I’d spent many hours on as a young engineer learning the art and science of metal forming.

The press operator gripped the iron tongs with two hands and pulled a glowing billet out of the induction heater and placed it in the press. The lubricant on the dies boiled and snapped like oil in an overheating frying pan. When he stepped back and pushed the palm buttons, the clutch engaged with a loud screech and the iron mountain above his head came slamming down. Standing thirty feet away, you felt the blow in your chest. The concrete floor shuddered as the crankshaft turned and the ram returned to top dead center.

He reached into the machine and grasped the now flaming, perfectly formed steel part with his tongs. As the parts came out of the press they were so incandescent you could barely look at them. He placed them carefully side by side in a large metal bin. He worked with such deliberateness that it was impossible not to feel that despite the difficult work, and the harsh physical conditions, he gained a certain satisfaction in the creation of these perfect objects. The glowing parts lay in even rows, their colors fading as they cooled.

By the way, thanks to one of my colleagues, I recently attended a lab class where steel was melted and cast in a centrifugal die; to say, it was fascinating is an understatement; and, I believe, but for that, I might not have appreciated the above paragraphs as much as I do now.

Role of ACK in defining an Indian in post-colonial times

In his latest Endpaper column Pradeep Sebastian writes about a scholarly book on Amar Chitra Katha, which looks like a great read:

What McLain repeatedly heard from ACK readers is that the comic books seemed to almost radiate a spiritual force. In many households, other comics were seen as a waste of time and discarded, but ACK was preserved carefully. Grandmothers covered them with those brown wrappers used to cover school textbooks to keep them clean. Nieces and nephews inherited bound volumes from uncles and aunts. Some even confessed to seeing the images of the gods and goddesses as pictured in the comics when they closed their eyes to worship.

She celebrates the comic for its force and power and for how it can charm and entertain but is careful to interpret its influence also as defining and constructing an upper caste Hindu identity. One young reader she interviewed was furious at the suggestion that the comics could have had a religious agenda, while another made it crystal clear that he felt it was “damm Hindutva propaganda to brainwash children”. The villains in many of the comics, when they were not British officers, were Mughal generals.

McLain’s interest in the project is to look at these comics as “a unique opportunity for the study of the definition and negotiation of a modern middle class Indian identity… They also draw upon Indian visual and literary culture. In mixing mythology and history they create a national canon of heroes — where Bose and Rama are side by side.”

She observes that they go some way in defining an Indian in post-colonial times, and so have a power and significance that other comic books from other cultures don’t possess.