Making of a musician
It was raining plaudits all through the rain-washed Sunday evening that saw sitar maestro Kushal Das, superbly supported by tabla wizard Subhankar Banerjee, as the sole artiste of a baithak to mark the occasion of Guru Purnima. His grandfather Bimal Chandra Das was a renowned esraj player; his father Shailen Das was a disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar and Lakshman Bhattacharya ; his sitar exponent uncle Shantanu Das was a disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. But soon he left Kolkata to join Khairagarh University as a professor; I was rudderless and sought refuge under the able wings of Pandit Ajoy Sinha Roy, a disciple of Baba Alauddin Khan and an extremely erudite musician belonging to Maihar School, the gharana that my father and uncle belonged to. Panditji’s melodic phrases display thrilling mathematical precision while Khan Saheb’s melodic permutations, very much like Ustad Amir Khan’s music, seem to search for poignant phrases. Since then I tried to imbibe whatever I could from all the three greats, formed my own melodic syntax; to which I also incorporated some aspects of my father’s guru Lakshman Bhattacharya; especially his Arati jhala — a unique concept using tarab and chikari strings sans mizrab, which sound like jingling temple bells; hence the name Arati.
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