Finding the Raga

Finding the Raga PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 168137479X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family’s native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

Finding the Raga

Finding the Raga PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 168137479X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family’s native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

Amit Chaudhuri Novelist and Musician

Amit Chaudhuri Novelist and Musician PDF Author: Dr. Laxmikant Govindrao Bahegavankar
Publisher: Lulu Publication
ISBN: 1008935131
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Indian English Literature today has its own place in the world literature. Begun as an imitation of British literature, it has now its own identity and a large number of readers all over the world. Indian English Novel, to be more specific, has reached to a height where it is seen on the same line of world novels. It has gone through many evolutions such as style, subject matter, point of view, color, language etc. Indian English novel today boasts its newness through the hands of Amit Chaudhary. He is one of the contemporary Indian English novelists whose work leaves an impression of being new in its presentation, in style and in subject matter. The present research is an attempt to explore Amit Chaudhary’s novels as new novels. This study undertakes five novels by him in order to see in what sense or the extent to which they are ‘new novels’.

Friend of My Youth

Friend of My Youth PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
ISBN: 9386495104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
A writer arrives in Bombay on a book-related visit, and finds himself in search of the city he grew up in and barely knows, a city shaken to its core not long ago by the 2008 terrorist strikes-even as he takes for granted his errant local friend, Ramu. A six-foot-tall Kannadiga and one-time junkie who cannot reconcile himself to modern-day adult life, Ramu is an unlikely hero, Bombay incarnate; the writer is his mirrored counterpart in an extraordinary narrative about this city by the sea. Friend of My Youth is at once an unexpected exploration and a concentrated reminiscence woven around a series of visits to a city that was never really home; a commentary on the power of memory and the stubborn interference of childhood with adult life; a paean to the transformative power of friendship by one of our greatest living writers.

A Strange and Sublime Address

A Strange and Sublime Address PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681378094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri’s elegant debut novel, in which an Indian ten-year-old experiences the entirely distinct experiences of life in Bombay, where his family lives, and Calcutta, where he visits relatives during his summer vacation. Ten-year-old Sandeep lives in a high-rise in Bombay, where his father has an important job that keeps him busy all the time. Come summer, Sandeep and his mother travel to Calcutta to spend time with his aunt, his self-absorbed and improvident uncle, and Abhi, his favorite cousin. His relatives’ house is shadowy and rambling; the vast city around it ramshackle and alluring. They fascinate curious, observant Sandeep. Days pass; the heat grows; the rains come; the visit ends. In the winter, Sandeep and his family return to Calcutta—and encounter an unexpected turn of events. But Sandeep has arrived at a new sense of things, an understanding of how the marvelous inheres in the mundane, that will be his, we feel, for good. At once delicate and incisive, A Strange and Sublime Address succeeds in both immersing us in a boy’s inner world and depicting that boy and his world from outside. It was Amit Chaudhuri’s first book, the work of a novelist whose striking originality of conception would subsequently become ever more clear. The three decades since the publication of A Strange and Sublime Address have only confirmed its appeal and poetry.

Calcutta

Calcutta PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307962172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity. Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.

The Immortals

The Immortals PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307273008
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In 1980s Bombay, a highly regarded voice teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student enter into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in their lives, and the lives of their families. With exquisitely sensuous detail, quiet humor, and unsentimental poignancy, Amit Chaudhuri paints a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force behind a revered Indian tradition; of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families; and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

Afternoon Raag

Afternoon Raag PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681378051
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Winner of the UK’s Encore Award for best second novel, a lyrical story of a Bengali student at Oxford University who is caught in the complications of a love triangle. Afternoon Raag is a book of branching and overlapping stories, a book that like memory moves unpredictably in time. In it, a nameless first-person narrator looks back at his student days in Oxford, a period of loneliness and discovery when his affections were torn between two women, and to the summer vacations that took him from England to Bombay, where his parents lived, and later to Calcutta, where he was born. Descriptions of Oxford’s green lawns and drab dorms, of friends and classes and the relentless drizzle, sit beside Bombay street scenes and recollections of the teacher, now dead, from whom the narrator and his mother learned music. Afternoon Raag is a book about the uncertainty of youth and the strange inevitability of growing up. Its images are wonderfully vivid; its rhythms elastic and entrancing. Throughout it is haunted by the spirit of the music teacher, the master singer who gives shape to the elusive and annihilating passage of time.

Odysseus Abroad

Odysseus Abroad PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351188450
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In this highly acclaimed novel, Amit Chaudhuri tells us the story of one unremarkable July day in 1980s’ London. Ananda, student of poetry, is lonely, and somewhat fraught, as he grapples with the big questions of literature. His uncle, Radhesh, a bachelor leading an early retired life in a Belsize Park bedsit, is self-involved, eccentric. On this day, they find uncertain companionship as they circle around their past and take stock of their place in the city. Ananda and Radhesh both provide a foil to each other and yet remain apart, as Chaudhuri shows why he is considered his generation’s best chronicler of acutely observed life.

The Origins of Dislike

The Origins of Dislike PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192512609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
'Strategic thinking for a writer articulates itself as dislike and as allegiance.' In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. Chaudhuri's criticism disproves and questions several assumptions—that a serious and original artist cannot think critically in a way that matters; that criticism can't be imaginative, and creative work contain radical argumentation; that a writer reflecting on their own position and practice cannot be more than a testimony of their work, but open up how we think of literary history and reading. Illuminating new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions, Chaudhuri shows us again that he takes nothing as a given: literary tradition, the prevalent definitions of writing and culture; and the way the market determines the way culture and language express themselves. He asks us to look again at what we mean by the modern, and how it might be possible to think of the literary today.

The Immortals

The Immortals PDF Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307454657
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In 1980s Bombay, a highly regarded voice teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student enter into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in their lives, and the lives of their families. With exquisitely sensuous detail, quiet humor, and unsentimental poignancy, Amit Chaudhuri paints a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force behind a revered Indian tradition; of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families; and of a society choosing between the old and the new.