by Roopinder Singh

UNOBTRUSIVELY the little black box added music to our life. When my wife came back from school one day, it was there; waiting for her, and the little startled smile that came on her face was reward enough.

Worldspace

Our mornings started with Asa Di Var, and kirtan. Later in the day, we would be humming to some old songs on Farishta, or the more contemporary film music on Jhankar.

Jansher enjoyed the latest English songs on Spin and Top 40, which we also liked, after a fashion, but then we had our own little refuge in Amore, that played mushy ol’e songs and spun its own magic.

The selection was great. Sound quality was crystal clear, except for the occasional day when clouds eclipsed a service that lit up our life at home.

It was the gadget aficionado A.J. Philip who had introduced me to Worldspace and its wonders. Typically, the receiver he had was not available in India, and thus we are relegated to using ones especially made by BPL for the service. Then Sunil got his Worldspace and started singing its praises… and then Shastri…

The thrifty logic in me, however, just could not warm up to the idea of paying for something that was free on the airwaves, and has been so ever since the inception of the radio. Let’s not get into details like licence fees, which have thankfully died a natural and least lamented death.

My father always listened to the radio, and normally by the time I woke up he had twisted the knobs of his trusty old Philips receiver and was au-fair with the latest events. Then it was time for music, which would continue all day, and sometimes into the night, providing a background to his reading and writing. So it was not that there was no music in the house, and to top it all, it was free and FM too was fairly good, becoming better by the day, or so it seemed.

All this was fine, till I realised that Jaspreet was pining for Worldspace, and that was reason enough to change my stance on free airwaves. I joined the gang, and realised what I had been missing all these years. Now it was an integral part of our lives. Yet there were clouds, and we are not talking of atmospheric disturbances.

Now that it has been announced that the New York-based Worldspace Corp has filed for bankruptcy protection, the last day of this year will be the end of service of this remarkable satellite radio that enriched our lives. We will still have music in our lives, Thank God for the free airwaves and the wonderful variety of music that comes through them.

This middle was published in The Tribune on December 29, 2009

I had written about how TV and FM radio in India are turning base in an earlier article.

“Personal histories are also social histories, since we human beings are social animals,” said Mrs Inderjit Kaur, as she released the book, “Darpan,” an autobiography of the late Risaldar Sunder Singh, which portrayed both the society and history of his times (1895-1990).

Pankaj Singh of the Browser, Mrs Baljit Gandhi, Brig Gobindar Singh and Mrs Inderjit Kaur at the book launch of Darpan

“Darpan”, means a mirror. The book is written in Punjabi, is a first person account of the life experience of the author. “The soldiers fought for the freedom of others in World War I. When they came back, they saw the need for freedom in their country, and as such many who had been loyal warriors of the British Raj and became prisoners in British jails,” said Mrs Inderjit Kaur, former Vice-Chancellor of Punjabi University Patiala and former Chairperson, Staff Selection Commission, New Delhi, who released the book at Lounge, Browser’s-8, Chandigarh, on Saturday, December 19,2008.

Brig Gobindar Singh and Mrs Inderjit Kaur and Mr Pankaj Singh of the Browser at the book launch of Darpan

As she punctuated her talk by quoting extensively from the book, she brought alive the book and its author for the audience. An unkindly reference to his uncle, the well-known freedom fighter, Baba Kharak Singh, by his senior prompted Risaldar Sahib to leave the British Army and in time, join the movement to free Gurdwaras from the control of the hereditary mahants, and also to free India from the British Rule. In over three hundred pages, the author narrates his experiences on the French and Mesopotamian fronts. He especially mentions Basra in Iraq and Kurdish areas.

Brig Gobindar Singh looks as Mrs Inderjit Kaur addresses the audience

The author’s narrative of active participation in the freedom struggle during the Akali movement of the early 1920s is noteworthy. Among the distinguished guest present today were Brig Gobindar Singh, nephew of and Mrs Baljit Gandhi, grand-daughter of the author. Mrs Devi Gobinder Singh read from the manuscript.

The chapter on Baba Kharak Singh, who had the distinction of having been the President of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee, Amritsar, as also the president of the Pradesh Congress, Punjab, is especially noteworthy for the human face it gives a legendary historical figure..

“The book is also an honest account of the out sensitivities in human relations and tragedies that he faced as in individual faced in his life, said Mrs Inderjit Kaur, who spoke in Punjabi, “it is an absorbing read.”

Mr Pankaj Singh, the owner of The Browser, said that the book had come alive after Mrs Inderjit Kaur’s talk, which aroused interest for reading the volume among all who were present at the book release function.

Punjabi Tribune. Please click on the image for a bigger picture

The event was well covered in the local media, including, the Lifestyle section of The Tribune, the HT Live section of Hindustan Times and the Punjabi Tribune.

Please click here to see the Doordarshan documentary on Mrs Inderjit Kaur.

Please click here to read about another book release by Mrs Inderjit Kaur.

Please click here to read my article about Baba Kharak Singh

profile by Roopinder Singh

SHE has worked hard to make history interesting-when she found that her lectures reached only a few who attended her classes at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. She reached out to a wider audience by writing a book, and another, and more, including one specifically to make history interesting to children, Mysteries of the Past: Archaeological Sites in India (National Book Trust, 2002). Upinder Singh, the co-winner of the Infosys Prize in Social Sciences: History, is indeed an outstanding historian of ancient and early medieval India. She was selected by a jury headed by the Nobel Laureate Prof. Amartya Sen.

The prize has been launched by the software giant to honour “outstanding researchers who will make a difference to India’s future”, and the annual award for each category is Rs 50 lakh, which in this case will be shared between her and her co-laureate, Prof. Abhijit Banerjee, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA, who won it for the category of Social Sciences: Economics.

Upinder Singh’s first book, Kings, Brahmanas, and Temples in Orissa: An Epigraphic Study (AD 300-1147) published by Munshiram Manoharlal, 1994, was based on her doctoral thesis which she had earned at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

A volume, Ancient Delhi (Oxford University Press) followed in 1999. Her recent books include The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology (Permanent Black, 2004); Delhi: Ancient History, edited by her, (Social Science Press, 2006), A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: from the Stone Age to the 12th century (Pearson Longman, 2008).

As the citation of the Infosys Prize says: “Professor Upinder Singh is being recognised for her rich contributions as an outstanding historian of ancient and early medieval India. Depth and breadth of her scholarly research are matched by a rare ability to communicate her findings to a broad audience of students and intellectually curious non-specialists.”

A student of History Honours at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Upinder Singh did two postgraduate degrees, an M.A. in History and an M.Phil. in History, both from the University of Delhi. She completed her Ph.D at McGill University and came back to teach at St Stephen’s College, before joining Delhi University.

She is a recipient of the prestigious Daniel Ingalls Fellowship at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University (2005). In 1999 she was awarded the Ancient India and Iran Trust/Wallace India Visiting Fellowship to pursue research in Cambridge and London. During this period, she was also a Visiting Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. In 1985 she was awarded the Netherlands Government Reciprocal Fellowship to pursue research at the Instituut Kern, Leiden. She is the National Co-ordinator for History at the Institute of Life Long Learning at the University of Delhi, which aims at creating a large corpus of high quality and exciting e-learning material for undergraduate students all over the country.

Her many students testify that she has “inspired and trained a younger generation of historians to adopt innovative methods in the study of early Indian history. A wonderfully creative historian, Singh is a key figure in rejuvenating the study of early history and archaeology in India.”

This article was published in The Tribune on December 8, 2009. Please click here to read an earlier account of the release of her book A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India, which Jaspreet and I attended, and here to read a 2004 interview with her following the release of her book, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology.

Reunions being forth memories of days gone by, inevitably tinged with a golden hue. The AYOSA, ably led by Jaspal Sekhon has been making valiant efforts to get the old boys and girls of the school together, and we meet on Saturday, in the evening, at North Park.

There will be a significant presence from by class—Gurpreet Bhattal, Rajbirinder Chahal, Tina and Sunil Jain, Birinder Gill, all live in Chandigarh and are keen golfers. No wonder, there will be an inter-house golf competition on Saturday morning at the Chandigarh Golf Club, where Birinder is the President. I can’t swing a club to save my life, and will happily join the gang in the evening.

Nostalgically, we remember those no longer with us—Satbir Virk, Narendra Singh and Winendra Kaleka, all of whom left us years ago. They were good people, but we were not destined to spend more time with their memories rather than them.

The other day, when our class-fellow, Ramjit Kaur visited us from the US, Gupi Bhattal dug up this old photograph that he had carefully preserved and showed it around. I have posted it online so that we can share it even more widely. Please click on it for a bigger picture.

I have also uploaded a Hi-Res picture which is a 5MB file. You can see each face if you enlarge it, you can also download it on to your computers!

by Roopinder Singh

THEY were a bunch of restive boys, whose visit to Chandigarh had begun with a pilgrimage to the Govt Museum and Art Gallery in Sector 10. They were tired after travelling back from the Queen of the Hills. A few had been sick, since they were not used to hill roads, but they perked up when their Principal told them the three-foot sculpture they were looking at was Buddha’s foot—“the other foot is in Lahore”.

Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, OBE, is uniquely qualified to talk about the two museums, and the treasures that they hold. He is chairman, Executive Committee of the Lahore Museum, and has been visiting Chandigarh since the mid-1950 when the museum was set up under the leadership of Dr M S Randhawa. Aijazuddin and his wife Shahnaz have fond memories of Dr Randhawa’s hospitality.

Aijazuddin wears many a cap — chartered accountant, with experience in automotive, fertiliser, oil and gas, insurance and investment banking sectors. He is also an author with many books to his credit, and now head of his alma mater, Aitchison College, Lahore, where many of the scions of the most-noted families of the region studied. He had come to India, leading a party of young students who had to join in the celebrations of another fine old institution, Bishop Cotton School, Shimla, as it celebrated its sesquicentennial this year.

My alma mater, Yadavindra Public School, Patiala, however, traces its lineage back to Aitcheson College because after Partition, the Maharaja of Patiala founded YPS around a nucleus of Aitchisonians — teachers and students — who had been displaced from Lahore. As a Yadavindrian, my friend Gurpreet Bhattal had asked me to join a delegation that met these Aitchisonians in Chandigarh, something I had gladly done.

“One-third of the Lahore museum came to Chandigarh,” Aijazuddin told his students, as he was escorted by the director, NPS Randhawa, who took them around, showing miniatures and sculptures of a heritage that preceded the international border. As Aijazuddin took diverse strands and wove them into a tapestry of artistic history of the region, he reminded one of Chandigarh’s own Prof B N Goswamy, interacting with whom is an education. No wonder the two families have strong ties.

“If we expect them to respect our culture, we must do the same,” he gently chided his boys, as they broke into giggles over some of the pictures, even as he explained the relationship between various gods and goddesses to them. Aijazuddin has studied pahari paintings as an art historian and I was reminded of the first time that I met Aijazuddin, at a seminar on “The Arts of Punjab” held at Punjabi University, Patiala, in 2006, where he gently supplied a detail that enhanced my caption during my presentation on the Murals of GuruHarsahai.  Aijazuddin  had earlier taken the audience on an impassioned trip of Lahore down the ages through painting and sketches.

Aijazuddin laments that young Indians and Pakistanis are not aware of each other’s cultural heritage these days. As the visiting children were told to go to Sector 17 for shopping and recreation for a few hours, their Principal said he wanted more exchanges between people who have not visited each other’s countries, not just those who have the nostalgia for the land that was once there.

Gurpreet Bhattal and Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, OBE

One reads of a Lahore in the grip of violence practically every day. The students of the elite institution and their principal represent the other side of our old cultural capital. Many of us like my friend Gurpreet and I, who live in Corbusier’s modern city, have never visited Pakistan, but we have a foot in Lahore and quite like the Buddha statue, our ties transcend the physical divide.

A shorter version of this article was published in The Tribune on December 3, 2009