Art & Entertainment

We Sang With Him

On the journey to hear Panditji play ‘live’

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We Sang With Him
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I had the fortune of meeting Pandit Ravi Shankar on several occasions—in college, as a student of Indian classical music, as a concert organiser and, later, as a journalist who occasionally writes on music. Though I grew up listening to his soulful strings, my first encounter with him was in the mid-’80s at a concert in Delhi’s Modern School. The rasik in me was quite disappointed. For his famed sitar was absent, Panditji sang for most of the concert. His young audience spontaneously sang along. However, for me it seemed a lost opportunity, not being able to listen to his sitar ‘live’.

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A couple of years later, he performed at my college. This time, as an organiser, I saw him up close, talked to him, touched his feet. He played the sitar all through but I hardly remember the concert. Those few moments with him overshadowed everything, even my deepest wish of listening to him play live. Next year, I had another close encounter at a ballet, Ghanashyam, set to Panditji’s composition where he handled a large canvas of instrumentalists and vocalists. I met him again a few years later, when he was a Rajya Sabha MP. This time I was meeting the family man, having his evening cuppa, no crowd of disciples or admirers around. We talked briefly about politics and he laughed at the state of affairs, despairing that he couldn’t do as much for music in India as he wished.

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The last time was at one of his rare Delhi concerts. He had grown older, more distant. I remember that concert very well. Today, though, what comes to my mind more are the notes he sang several years ago when I first saw him. We had all sung with him then. We still do.

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