The background drone of the tambura connects the dots

In an email to a few colleagues, I quoted the following:

Since the early 1970s, higher education has suffered from increasing specialization and, correspondingly, excessive professionalization. That has created a culture of expertise in which scholars, who know more and more about less and less, spend their professional lives talking to other scholars with similar interests who have little interest in the world around them. This development has led to the increasing fragmentation of disciplines, departments, and curricula. The problem is not only that far too many teachers and students don’t connect the dots, they don’t even know what dots need to be connected.

Of course, I have used that in my blog. Years ago.  How do you think I easily tracked down the quote?  What I write here is no different from what I write to my colleagues, which is no different from what I tell my students.  The only difference is that in the blog, I allow myself to freely express my emotions, dammit ;)

In my intellectual approach, I am always drawn to connecting the dots.  To me, there is simply no other way.  How else can we understand this world?

Which is why I end up reading essays that sometimes are difficult reads for me.  But then I freely admit to my ignorance and try my best to learn the lessons for me there.

Today's complicated essay is this, authored by a president of a prestigious liberal arts college--Middlebury.  She is also an accomplished poet.  The essay involves a lot of poetry.  I am ignorant there.  But, I kept reading.  Because, I know well enough that if I struggle through, there will be gems that will help me connect the dot.

And the gems started appearing; she invokes "the Tanpura Principle."

I practice what I tell students all the time--be an engaged reader.  So, of course, red flag alert right away.  Tanpura, as in the tambura that we refer to in Carnatic music?  Have I been incorrect all my life in referring to the tanpura as the tambura?  So, where did the tambura come from?  And, yes, what the hell is " the Tanpura Principle"?

Connecting the dots.  To help me understand the world.

I paused reading the essay, in order to find out about this tambura/tanpura.  Wiki says that the origin of this instrument is Persian!

The name of the instrument derives from Persian تنبور (pr. tanbūr) where it designates a group of long necked lutes (see tanbur). Hindustani musicians favour the term 'tanpura' whereas Carnatic musicians say 'tambura'; 'tanpuri' is a smaller variant sometimes used for accompanying instrumental soloists.

WTF!  How come I didn't know this Persian connection all these years!  Do the Hindu fundamentalists know that they are using an, ahem, Islamic musical instrument for their bhakti?  I am sure they know that the violin is not Indian, but the tambura?

So, what is the tanpura principle?

The tanpura is a long-necked, lute-like instrument in Indian music that sustains the other instruments by providing a drone. Tanpura players do not provide their own melody, but pluck the instrument’s four strings in a continuous loop of rich tones, to provide a base from which the soloist can draw in singing or playing the raga melody.
The Tanpura Principle in writing is the idea that much of writing occurs while doing something else, because the base of poetic inspiration, the supporting drone, is always there.

Aha; go on:

There are times when we don’t hear the drone, because we are too tired or too overwhelmed with other emotional, spiritual or even logistical challenges to know it. But the point is not then to “cultivate inspiration,” rather, it is to remember that the drone is always there, perhaps even especially there, in the fatigue and frustration of our “other” work.

Think about the dots that this blog has connected.  By themselves, the dots seem unrelated.  But, when connected this way, the world makes sense.  We try our best to make sense of the world which is really incomprehensible.