Hi from Knight
My parents named me Drew Knight Weller just before my birth on April 8th 1986. That makes me 19 years old putting me in my second year of college at New York University. This also means I'll be turning 20 during our homestays in Ladakh. Originally I am from Bordentown, the crimp squeezing the middle of New Jersey into the silhouette profile of an upside down rabbit (or that is what my elementary school teachers told us, if you look at a map the peninsula of Cape May is a big bunny ear). So now I am studying interdisciplinary overlapping and cross-curricular collaboration at the Gallatin School of Individualized study in NYU.
This means how to integrate music with painting with stage performance with video production with biology and physics and philosophy and blahcetera. Aside from taking exams and writing endless papers, this includes throwing events for the student run record label Gallatone and a bunch of other fun stuff.
Like everyone else in the West, I got into Indian music because of the Beatles. There is so much there and I have had the privilege to meet some great classical Indian musicians. I have even accompanied a few classical hand drummers playing basic ragas on guitar for festivals and such, but I have hardly begun to scratch the surface of the infinite complexity that is the continuum of Indian audio art, so of course I am looking forward to learning a bit more about that.
But long before ever playing the music I have been captivated by the philosophy. Most striking to me is that it is based on insight, and not (at least in theory) on memorized doctrine, though the ancient texts reveal a lot. Right now a few of my friends and I are taking a course that we designed called Meditation: History and Practice, and as part of the final project we are making a documentary about the contemporary practice of meditation. As I write this we are finishing up pre-production and are about to start shooting. But I won�t be bringing a video camera on our trip to the sub-continent, so we all have to take lots of great still pictures!
As for how this expedition officially fits into my academic plan of study, I will be looking at the similarities of cosmic perspective between the ancient Vedic sciences and new revelations of modern quantum physics and beyond. I am particularly interested in how vibration frequencies of chanted mantras and of classical music might correspond to the brainwave patterns associated with meditative states, and perhaps the waveforms of subatomic particles in string theory. But that is enough yammering about scholastic mumbo jumbo. I can't wait to meet you all and I hope the travel preparation finds you well.
~knight~