“I should say that a raga is not a tune. It’s not a note, not a scale, not a composition — although the raga is sung in the framework of a composition. But you can identify the raga from a particular arrangement of notes that have to do with the way they’re ascending and descending; a particular pattern in the ascent and a particular pattern in the descent identifies the raga.” Amit Chaudhuri — an award-winning novelist and nonfiction author and a trained Indian classical singer — has a go at explaining the difficult-to-capture meaning of raga and writes about how he found his way to carrying Western popular songs into the Indian classical system. – The New York Times
