In 1967, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, made the mistake of giving me admission to the 2-year full-time MBA programme. There was no possibility of correcting that error. So, 45 years after I graduated, the institute decided to acknowledge similar mistakes by running a special feature on performing arts in the The IIMA Alumnus magazine. In the pages of this feature, I find myself in the distinguished company of people like Mallika Sarabhai. They asked me to recount my life in music. I am sharing here what I wrote.
By the time I joined IIM-A (age: 19), I had received about
12 years of training as a sitarist,
become a respectable performer, and also advanced substantially towards
a respectable diploma in Hindustani music. I was at IIM because a performing
career in music was an unacceptable risk, and an academic career in musicology
looked unattractive. But, music wasn’t
going away anywhere.
After graduation, I continued to learn and practice the
sitar, as I pursued careers in media research, business journalism, periodical
publishing, and financial consultancy. Between 1986 and 1992, I enjoyed a short stint
as a performing musician, winning respect for my command over the instrument,
and the soundness of my approach to music.
The performing life was heady, but not sustainable at my
level of musicianship. The economics of it were absurd, and each concert demanded
preparatory practice of at least six to eight hours a day for a whole month. Besides,
I wasn’t anybody’s idea of a future Ravi Shankar or Vilayat Khan. So, it made
sense to seek a less insecure place for myself in the music world.
The opening came in the early 1990’s in the form of an
invitation from the late Mr. N Pattabhiraman, Editor of SRUTI magazine, to
contribute critical essays on Hindustani music. Thus was launched my career as
a musicologist. Around the same time,
India Archive Music Ltd. (IAM), a New York based specialist producer of
Hindustani music, commissioned me to write musicological commentaries on CDs
produced by them. Between 1995 and 2004, I wrote commentaries of 8000-10,000
words each for over a 100 of their CDs. The commentaries helped IAM emerge as
the most successful and influential producer of Hindustani music outside India.
By 2004, SRUTI had published perhaps fifteen of my critical
essays, and IAM had received over a million words of commentary written by me.
The SRUTI Editors, and the owners of India Archive Music encouraged me to recast
the knowledge-base I had created in the form of books. The manuscript of my
first book “Hindustani Music – a tradition in transition” was accepted by DK
Printworld, New Delhi and published in January 2005. Then came “Khayal Vocalism
– Continuity within change” in 2009, and “Hindustani Music Today” in 2012. My fourth book “The Raga-ness of Raga-s” is
scheduled for release by June-July 2014. The fifth book, written partially
under a Senior Research Fellowship of the Ministry of culture, Government of
India, is likely to be published by end-2015.
Not having
trained as a musicologist, I could never address the academic community in a
language that it respected. My stance, as a writer on music, could only be that
of a serious student of music – at best a connoisseur -- sharing his
understanding of the tradition with other seekers of knowledge and insight. Despite this, it appears that the content and
style of my writings have come to appeal -- in varying degrees -- to both these
segments. Access to connoisseurs is the more gratifying of the two because they
engage actively with the performing tradition, and are a part of the quality
control mechanism that regulates the art.
By any
financial yardstick, music has been a loss-making department of life. This
seems a small price to pay for the credit side, which is unquantifiable… and
priceless.
