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mysore, city of culture

8th November 2003 permanent link

I wrote in my Indian diary about how impressed I was with Mysore as a city of culture - everywhere you go you meet artists, sculptors, choreographers, sanskrit scholars in practically every street. Apparently it was even more impressive when Vish Murthy, who emailed me recently, was growing up:

Pattabhi Jois lived very close to our home, he in Lakshmipuram ( where you probably were too) and me at my grandfathers house very near what used to be called the 5 lights circle (now Ramaswamy circle). Between people like him (who were held in awe as the original yoga masters and whose gleam in the eye I can still vividly remember), between the Maharaja of Mysore (Jayachamrajendra Wodeyar, whose last tragic days are perhaps only known to a few folks like me), between writer RK Narayan and between the musical doyens like T. Chowdiah (who used to practice his violin in our house and in whose honor my family dedicated a performing center in Bangalore in the shape of a violin and which happens to be a now famous landmark of Bangalore ), Mysore remains in my memory a quintessence city (something like  Padova to an Italian). Of course the city then did not have the population and the burdgeons of a declining system that it has now.

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