Selections from the intro to “the Cowboy and the Yogi: Ideals shared by India and America”

Complete book available at this Link

When I first came to the Bay Area, I knew only one thing about India: Its music was amazing. Critics would often refer to these astonishing structures of melody and rhythm as “ethnic music”, and of course I knew I was more likely to get hired playing at Indian restaurants than anywhere else. Nevertheless, even though I knew where this music came from geographically, I didn’t really experience it as coming from anywhere
in particular. For me, it existed in a kind of abstract possibility space, like gravity, numbers, and justice: profoundly beautiful, and beyond any one location in space and time. To some degree I still believe that, but India Currents taught me to love the culture as much as the music it produced

. . . . . Can I sum up in a few fundamental principles what I learned after fifteen years of monthly columns? I can try. Despite widely held stereotypes, India, like America, is a country that feeds and nourishes creative individuality. Just as Americans have been inspired by the archetype of the Cowboy, who wanders the open spaces in search of a dream, so Indians are inspired by the Yogi, who wanders inner spaces in search of realization. The essential difference between the two cultures is that…