A seismic risk assessment methodology based on socioeconomic clustering of urban habitat is presented in this paper. In this methodology, the city is divided into different housing clusters based on socioeconomic level of occupants, representing reasonably uniform seismic risk. It makes an efficient utilization of high resolution satellite data and stratified random sample survey to develop the building stock database. Ten different classes of socioeconomic clusters found in Indian cities are defined and 34 model building types (MBTs) prevalent on the Indian subcontinent have been identified and compared with the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik (MSK) scale, European macroseismic scale (EMS), parameterless scale of seismic intensity (PSI), and HAZUS classifications. Lower and upper bound damage probability matrices (DPMs) are estimated, based on the MSK and EMS intensity scales and experience from past earthquakes in India. A case study of Dehradun, a city in the foothills of Himalayas, is presented. The risk estimates using the estimated DPMs have been compared with those obtained using the PSI scale. It has been observed that poorer people are subjected to higher seismic risk, both in terms of casualties and in terms of percent economic losses.

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Very few earthquake risk studies exist for cities on the Indian subcontinent. The few studies that do exist typically focus on intensity as the parameter to describe the expected ground motion during an earthquake and on damage observations to represent building vulnerability. In contrast to these empirical studies, analytical loss computations, which are based on capacity spectrum methods (CSM), have recently become popular and are gaining wide acceptance. Analytical damage and loss computations have been conducted for the test bed Dehradun, a city of 500,000 inhabitants in the foothills of the Himalayas (northern India), and then compared with loss estimates from empirical studies recently performed for the city. The study illustrates the problems associated with trying to generate intensity-compatible ground motion estimates and comparing the damage and loss estimates of both approaches.

It is a general feeling of a keen listener of any music genre that music changes one emotionally. It is a feeling that music has a force that pushes off one’s emotions. How does an emotional shift occur if there is no abstract force? There are discussions within scholarly domains regarding the power of music. However, this aspect is not interpreted from a traditional Indian perspective. This paper addresses the power of music as discussed in Indian philosophical domains and makes psychological comments. This article is aimed to understand the power of music within the Indian traditional system and to find its impact on the psyche with the help of conventional Indian theories in Sanskrit literature. It is found that there are two powers of musical sound which are identified by Ācārya Abhinavagupta (940-1015 AD.): _Ānanda-śakti_ (power of bliss) and _Mādhurya-śakti_ (power of sweetness). In addition, the power of bliss is connected to the _rasa_ theory of Indian aesthetics, which directly correlates with humane psychology. It is discussed in the paper that the relish of _rasa_ itself demonstrates subduing of _rajas_ and _tamas_ and _sattva_ predominates the psyche. In other words, the mind achieves its homeostasis according to Ayurvedic principles. In addition, this paper also tried to synthesize the modern aspect of the power of music, which is discussed from therapeutic contexts with traditional Indian theories.

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