Icons leave a gap in hearts of millions

DEMISE \\ The world mourned the demise of sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar who breathed his last on December 12, 2012. Shankar was 92. Ravi Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956. In 1956, he began to tour Europe and the Americas playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and rock artist George Harrison. Shankar was awarded India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999. Astronomer, television personality, British eccentric and a great populariser of science, Sir Patrick Moore also passed away in December. In his capacity as an astronomer, Moore had helped map the moon and was for more than half a century until his death the presenter of BBC TV’s The Sky at Night, missing only a single episode through illness, in July 2004.