First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"Bring forward a chant, a melody of the heart!"
"My Nanna, your chant is sweet; it is the chant of my heart."
"Gregorian chant, but with it all the rhythm of medieval music, reflects a cyclical (and therefore liturgical) conception of time, which undulates and oscillates without rigid formal parameters of duration because it always returns to itself. Implicit in its thematic structure is the certainty of the answer to any question. Every ritual, in fact, like every prayer, never asks real questions, never reaches doubt, because the interlocutor to whom it is addressed is God. Gregorian chant, therefore, can afford to “range” over indefinite durations because it is supported by the “certainty” of the divine response. Time is given."
"Bach's genius lies in having found a logical system necessary to support the unnecessarily repetitive structure of cyclical time, which is no longer “given” as obvious and correct. Repetition becomes a continuous succession of questions and answers, a tremendous effort of human intelligence to fill the form of absolute time with self-sufficient content, that is, content implied in its own system, without subordinating reason to the certainty of a time already “given”. Bach's counterpoint does not need God to exist."
"With the Enlightenment, man now asks questions that have no certain answer: research becomes the very condition of being human. This is the modern form of scientific logic: the time of science, therefore, coincides with what we might call the “interrogative structure” of music; with a musical time that, from Debussy to Schönberg to Berg to Bussotti, moves further and further away from the concept of [[w:duration|duration, of beginning and end, and seeks “continuity” in “space”, moving from the fading of sound to the fading of tonality. In fact, in the same year that Einstein published his “Memoir on Relativity” – 1905 – Schönberg's symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande was performed for the first time and greeted with boos, marking a milestone in the search for “spatial” music."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.