Me and Music
Me and Music
SANDIPAN K GOSWAMI
The relationship between me and music is very simple. Since early days, my parents noticed that I always took an enthusiastic attention to any sound. For instance, when I was just 3 years old, my grandmother asked me a question- What do you want me to give you as a gift? The reply by me was very simple- a drum, not the one that adults play though! The next day, I had a very cute and classy drum on my hand. That was the first day when I and music met. Days went by and I started to play different beats on the drum. The most favourite beat that I still continue to play is the one that the musicians play during Durga Puja on their instrument called ‘Dhak’ or ‘Dhol’. At the age of 5, on 1st October 2011, I attended my first Tabla class. The name of my guru was Sir Shankar Das. He is the one who convinced my parents to send me to a music school. I am still under his guidance and will continue to do so. During the first few classes, a habitual practice of highest 15 minutes was required. But as days went by, the taals were becoming harder and harder and slowly, I was asked to practice 1 hour a day. At that time, I did not have much pressure from my studies. But soon after I crossed class 3, the pressure was slowing increasing. Many times I thought of discontinuing my prctise, but when god has fixed something, you can never break it. Somehow or the other, i managed to take out time and started practising. The next difficulty I faced was when I was in 6th standard. Class 6 is a totally different field. When a child is in class 6, he/she should give maximum 3-4 hours of quality time to studies which means sitting on the study table for 6 hours. And that became really tough for me. I went to school at 8 am. After returning from school at 2:30 pm, I had to sleep for at least 2 hours as I studied till late night. So after getting up from sleep at 5:00 pm, I went for cycling. Though I could have stopped going for cycling for a few days, but I returned home at around 6 pm.
After returning, I used to do some fun activities like disturbing my mom during her tuition classes, then disturbing my sister, who was in class 11 then, and many other things. So if I calculate, I used to sit at my table at around 8 pm, after getting a lot of scolding from my mom as well as my sister. During those days, I did not know how to manage time efficiently but now, with the grace of god, I am practising Tabla for 4-5 hours a day. And along with that, I have also started to score good marks in my exams. Till now, I have done more than 25 tabla programs from the year 2019 till 2021 starting. Now, things have completely changed for me. I got to learn many instruments and the most interesting part is that, nowadays whatever sound I hear, it turns out into a good music as soon as it passes through my ears. I got to make many new and talented friends who are just like me. We always want to create something new out of nothing. I have started to extend my family. I have two pairs of table and am planning to buy many more. I am very happy with wherever I am today at this point of my life. I just want to keep on increasing my knowledge on Music. Whenever I sit with my tabla, I keep only one single line said by my guru: Music is nothing but the combination of your imagination and your creativity. The output that comes from the combination becomes a very good music. My guru used to tell me in my mother tongue that Music is nothing but Shadhona. Shadhona means meditation. He feels that if you are playing music out of compulsion, then you should never continue it. Because the more we hear a single beat, the more we get to know about that beat. A striking quote by Ed Sheeran: “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and flight to the imagination and life to everything” also says that music is to be felt to be heard as it is closely connected to the heart. The final line that I want to add in this write-up is that Music is to be heard and felt, not to be played and learned.
SANDIPAN K GOSWAMI
Class: VIII, South Point School
