Word: vedic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Shankar also proved something else: that Indian music means a lot more than just the sitar and its familiar partners, the two-drum tabla and the string-drone tamboura. Indian music has its origins in Vedic hymns that date back 2,000 years. Indians have always believed that music has the power to change human destiny. Their sacred chants had to be intoned just so; a mistake could ruin everything. Thus, if Vocalist Jitendra Abhisheki seemed ner vous as he came out for a selection of Vedic chants, it was understandable. But his nasal, three-note invocation to Saraswati, goddess...
Just outside New Delhi, in low bamboo enclosures paved with dried cow dung, 400 Hindu pundits and priests have gathered this month to recite the Vedic prayer Gayatri Japan 10 million times. Night and day, squatting under TV lights beside shrines and ceremonial fires that they feed with the liquid butter called ghee, they raise their voices, powerfully amplified by loudspeakers, to the circling planets above. For according to India's astrologers, under the conjunction of the planets due early next month, the earth will be shattered by quakes, floods, air crashes, revolutions and wars, in what could...