“From Ilyich to Ilyich, no stroke, no heart attack,” the Ukrainian gentleman muttered. We were chatting at a wedding reception a few decades ago. He had emigrated from the Soviet Union, and somewhere along our conversation I had happened to mention Anastas Mikoyan. He was agreeably surprised.
Everyone knew of Gromyko, the poker face of Soviet diplomacy from late Stalin to early Gorbachev; few outside the USSR had heard of the old-time communist from Armenia. But Mikoyan’s was the more eye-popping high wire act. The October Revolution, Stalin’s purges, Khrushchev’s housecleaning and Brezhnev’s putsch – he had survived and flourished through them all. Whatever else changed in the Kremlin, whether it was V.I. Lenin or L.I. Brezhnev in the corner office, the two ‘Ilyich’s my Ukrainian acquaintance was alluding to, Old Anastas had remained a Soviet fixture.
Mikoyan, who somewhat resembled Walt Disney owing perhaps to the moustache, is long gone and little noted. I remembered him suddenly last week when reading about Amir Khusrau, a multifaceted genius from 13th-century India.
Khusrau (1253-1325) was a Renaissance Man long in advance of the Renaissance. Credited by some historians with inventing the sitar and the tabla, he was also a fine poet, with compositions both in the high Persian of the court and in the rough Hindi of the North Indian countryside. Khusrau is also said to have invented qawwali, a unique style of singing popularised in the West by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And he introduced the ghazal poetry form to India. Khusrau was probably a pioneer too in the art of the
— source counterpunch.org | Niranjan Ramakrishnan | Jun 1, 2012