Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama . To celebrate this I am republishing, without further editing, the 2014 photo essay about my close encounter with His Holiness at the Kalachakra Initiation in Ladakh, northern India. The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the re...
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"It is a sign of cultural defeat when you have to keep on assuring your audience that what they are listening to is wonderful."
Amen. In recent years, CBC Radio 2 (in Canada) increasingly exhibits the same tendency. They've pretty well lost my wife and I (and our daughter is probably more negative than we are).
Yet the Spectator's Charles Moore describes himself as "a musical ignoramus" and thinks "Radio 3 is becoming stupid".
The classical stations have lost knowledgable listeners like you and me. But they are not attracting new listeners, as is confirmed by RAJAR data here in the UK.
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2011/10/bbc-shows-world-how-not-to-do-classical.html
Yet still the dumbing out continues....