Latest news with #Mangalam
The Hindu
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Watch: Umayalpuram explains how to play for the stalwarts of Carnatic music
Mridangam maestro Umayalpuram Sivaraman shared his experiences of accompanying great musicians — each possessing exceptional mastery in their respective fields — and said that it became easier for him after undergoing rigorous training. He likened the experience to visiting a sweet stall. 'You will be bewildered about what to buy,' he said during a conversation with CPI(M) general secretary M.A. Baby at The Hindu office. 'You should have the reflexes to play immediately. Whatever is in your brain should come out through the mridangam. Through hard work, you reach the top and maintain your place by constantly improving. Otherwise, others will overtake you,' he said. Recalling his experience with Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, he said the veteran often sang in madhyama kalam, and sometimes the mridangam player had to establish the tempo before he began the kriti. 'I wanted to accompany him in one desadi thalam, but for a long time, we didn't get the opportunity. Then one day, he sang it, and I said, 'Today I am very happy, mama.' He replied, 'Only today do I have the confidence that you will play well,'' Mr. Sivaraman recalled with a smile. Mr. Sivaraman said one could never deviate from kaala pramanam (sense of timing) while playing for Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar. 'He would say, 'Ennathu? Odapidathe. No running. Nothing.' And you had to play with abandon because his voice was so powerful,' he said. In one programme, to showcase Mr. Sivaraman's scholarship, Chembai gave him five thani avarthanams in a single concert. 'After that, he asked me to drink Horlicks from a flask. He said, 'I will not stop singing, and you should not stop playing.' At the end of the programme, he said, 'I have earned name and fame. I also got money. You should earn all that too.' Then he sang the Mangalam,' Mr. Sivaraman reminisced. Playing for Madurai Mani Iyer was a different experience. The mridangam player could never deviate from shruti. 'The great T.R. Mahalingam said of Madurai Mani Iyer: 'If you want to worship Swara Devatha, here is Mani Iyer's music.' When Madurai Mani aligns with the tambura, there is no dichotomy. You have to tune the mridangam accordingly. If it's not in tune, he will look at you,' Mr. Sivaraman said. Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer was known for sarva laghu singing. 'It is like the running of a horse. You won't have time to tune,' he said. G.N. Balasubramanian was famous for brigha-laden music, and Sivaraman had to adapt his playing accordingly. 'The Alathur Brothers were pallavi experts. When you ask them, they would say, 'There's nothing you don't know.' But then they would sing something I wasn't familiar with. While singing Thiruppugazh, if you didn't play aruti, they would ask why hadn't I played it,' he said. He added that while accompanying Musiri Subramania Iyer, he had to play the niraval properly and also provide the aruti. 'If you accompanied flautist T.R. Mahalingam, you would never know what he was going to play. He might play a misra gathi adi tala varnam. You had to be ready,' he said, and even demonstrated by singing Viribhoni Varnam. With Viswanatha Iyer, Sivaraman said he had to embellish his playing because Viswanatha Iyer himself knew mridangam well. 'These are all the ways I learned so many things. Everyone is great,' he said. Mr. Sivaraman also shared his experience of playing Simhanandana Thalam with 128 beats for Mudikondan Venkatarama Iyer at the Music Academy. 'He had a tuft. He would keep the thalam correctly. Sometimes, his tuft would come undone — he would stop to tie it back, but he never missed the thalam. You also had to play thani avarthanam in that thalam. So when you go through all these drills, it becomes easy. You really have to pass through all this,' he said. Asked whether playing for T.N. Seshagopalan was tough, Mr. Sivaraman said he was a very great musician in all aspects — composition, niraval, swaram, pallavi, and Thiruppugazh. 'When you play for Seshagopalan, he will also put you to the test. The thing is, you have to really prove your worth and create something great in the concert so that he will appreciate it,' he said. Reporting: B. Kolappan Video: Johan Sathyadas, Thamodharan B, Shiva Raj Editing: Shiva Raj
Forbes
07-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How An AI Tutor Could Level The Playing Field For Students Worldwide
SigIQ founders Kurt Keutzer and Karttikeya Mangalam Students who receive one-to-one tuition perform better than those who learn in large classes. That seems an obvious statement, but the size of the advantage that one-to-one learners enjoy may surprise you; the landmark study by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found '90% of tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20% of the control class'. The real-life impact of this gap is to exacerbate inequality. Well-off students able to access one-on-one tutoring will perform better than classmates who learn in large groups. It's a problem in Western societies, with wealth inequality inhibiting social mobility. It also hits hundreds of millions of students in developing economies, who miss out on the educational advantages many of their counterparts in richer nations take for granted. Enter Karttikeya Mangalam, CEO and co-founder of who believes artificial intelligence can begin to redress this balance. He and co-founder Kurt Keutzer have developed an AI tutor they claim can deliver one-to-one teaching of the same quality as a human educator, but at a fraction of the price. SigIQ, which is today announcing that it has raised $9.5 million of new funding, aims to offer this tutor to as many students who need it. 'It has always felt deeply unfair to me that this massive divide exists in terms of access to education in different parts of the world,' says Mangalam. 'Google has solved the inequalities in access to information that used to exist; we want to do the same thing for education.' The venture is a deeply personal one for Mangalam, who grew up in Bihar, a particularly poor part of India. Defying the odds, he won a series of scholarships that gave him access to high-quality education in India – and later to Stanford and Berkeley in the US – before working in research roles at organisations including Google, Meta and OpenAI. 'I am where I am because I spent a lot of time in the best places being tutored by the best people,' he says. 'Most people don't get that opportunity.' Building on his experience in the AI sector, Mangalam set out to address this problem directly. SigIQ has developed an AI-powered tutor that works with students in the same way as a human teacher would provide support. The tutor starts by building a picture of the student's current level of understanding of the subject, identifying strengths, weaknesses and knowledge gaps. It plans a strategy for addressing these issues, focusing on what to teach and when. It delivers the material at a time of the student's choosing. And then it assesses the student's approach. 'All of these steps need to happen in a cycle for tutoring to be effective,' Mangalam adds. 'Our AI agents are replicating the decision making of teachers at each stage of the learning process.' Mangalam says the key is to develop a genuinely interactive agent that is highly responsive to the student's needs and able to deliver instruction and feedback in ways that are personalised to each student. SigIQ's early results appear to suggest that this approach is working. Launched in 2023, the company has so far built two AI agents, working with students in India who are studying for the country's notoriously difficult civil service exams, and a smaller number working towards taking the GRE tests for graduate schools in North America. More than 200,000 students have used the Indian tutor, with a further 10,000 students using the GRE agent. These students report a 30% to 40% increase in effective study hours, and a performance improvement of 18% in the first month. Some of the individual students behind those statistics credit SigIQ with having a dramatic impact on their learning. 'The AI-powered essay review feature was a game-changer for me,' says Priya Sharma, who is currently studying for the GRE. 'It provided detailed feedback that helped me refine my writing and improve my AWA score significantly.' SigIQ has also demonstrated the AI tutor's effectiveness by getting it to sit the Indian exams last year. In a live demonstration, the agent took seven minutes to complete the paper, achieving a better score than any student in India last year. The next stage in the company's development is for SigIQ to build further agents to offer tutoring in other subjects. Raising new finance will help with the research and development required for this scale-up. Today's $9.5 million seed round is co-led by The House Fund and GSV Ventures, with participation from Duolingo, Peak XV, Venture Highway, and a number of angel investors. "SigIQ isn't just a regular edtech startup,' says Jeremy Fiance, managing director of The House Fund. 'They've built an AI system that publicly demonstrated its ability to outperform both humans and leading commercial AI models on one of the world's most challenging exams.' In time, SigIQ will also need to commercialise its business. Currently, its AI tutors are available completely free of charge – in line with Mangalam's vision of opening up access to education – but the business sees potential in developing premium versions of the product with monthly subscriptions. The company is competing in a fast-moving market, with education apps such as Khanmingo also making more use of AI and a growing number of start-ups targeting other edtech applications, including marketplaces such as Wyzant and SuperProfs thaty match students to tutors anywhere. The test for competitors in the market, says Mangalam, is whether they can resolve the access issue. 'Our mission is to democratise personalised learning,' he argues. 'Whether you're in rural India with dreams of attending an overseas university or short on time and money as you juggle a job and student debt, you deserve access to personalised learning.'
