Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Initiation

Actually speaking, I never thought about this way of expression. But it was a random conversation with my son that got me thinking. I was travelling with Pt Arun Kashalkar to Mumbai and my son was also with us in the car. After listening to us talk about music for about 3-4 hours, he suddenly asked me, "Baba, why don't you start a blog? Whatever you two have been discussing is the perfect content for a blog...!" I never thought of blogs as a medium of expression - I've always written for newspapers with the common reader in mind. But this reaction from my son set me thinking seriously. Although I have written extensively on Indian Classical Music, my reader was always a known quantity - at least to me. With the blogs going out to the entire cyber-community, I always thought that I lost touch with the identity of my reader and never really gave it a serious consideration. But this is it - I have taken the plunge and will take it up in the right earnest and put down my thoughts out to the cyberspace.

But who would take efforts to read it...? I am not a practising musician, nor one who's trained in the revered 'Guru-Shishya' tradition - I really got my moorings in ICM from all those artists who treated me as a friend and tried to give me some insight into the domain. Really, I'm a total nobody - except that I love Indian Classical Music (ICM) to such an extent that it's THE PASSION in my life. With this passion, life also gave me loads of opportunities to listen to quality music, meet with colorful personalities in this field and enrich my experiences. Whatever I have written so far, has come out of the wealth of experiences so gathered. This blog is just an attempt to create a space for my random thoughts - some may call them ramblings - but I do think that there's a soul-mate somewhere in this cyberspace who finds consonance with my thoughts and, maybe; likes to read them. The blog may feature excerpts from my previous writings or reactions to events / happenings around us or, just as I mentioned above, stray / random thoughts. So let's get blogging...