Word: gita
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Philip Glass's Satyagraha is not your standard opera. For one thing, it is sung in Sanskrit. For another, it dramatizes Mohandas Gandhi's struggle against racial discrimination in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. The libretto is drawn entirely from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text that served as the moral authority for Gandhi's nonviolent resistance movement-called Satyagraha, after the Sanskrit words for truth and firmness. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the opera, given its American premiere at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y., last week, is the music itself. Melodically sensuous, harmonically...
Satyagraha is certainly appealing, indeed beautiful. The score glows with a spiritual luminosity rarely encountered in this secular, anxious age, and its inner peace harmonizes with the tenets of the Bhagavad-Gita being sung and the goals of Gandhi's revolution acted out onstage. The opera's three acts (seven scenes) trace the beginnings of the Satyagraha movement during Gandhi's 21 years in South Africa: the founding of the Tolstoy Farm commune, the increasing resistance to discrimination against Indians, the climactic Newcastle march of 1913 in which Gandhi led striking miners in protest against restrictive racial...
KARMA COLA by Gita Mehta...
...Gita Mehta's witty documentary satire illustrates that the cost can be considerably higher. This is especially true for the thousands of Europeans and Americans who have flocked to the Indian subcontinent in search of enlightenment, cheap dope and, like the Californian who turned her sadhana into a course on "inner environments," opportunity. As reckoned by the Hindus and Gore Vidal, this dark, chaotic age of Kali seethes with confusions, corruption and misapprehension. Karma, for example, a rather severe concept of determinism, has been turned into a metaphysical jelly bean by hippies, shopping-center swamis and jet-lagged gurus...
...scene was madness. The Cincinnati Reds. The LAST pitch. Zimmer stood fixed, staring stonily from the dugout, a Grand Teutonic field marshal in double-knits. Bill Lee was doing some yoga stretches in the bullpen, singing Hindu chants from the Bhagavad Gita. The lights from downtown Boston flickered off past right field in the glare of ballpark floodlights, the green monster stood impassive...