On hearing of his passing, I went at once to my iPod to hear his recordings of Gorakh Kalyan and Jaijaiwanti. By now the maestro was visibly ageing, and knew it, beginning the concert by telling the audience at the Chowdiah Memorial Hall, “This is not the Buddhadev Dasgupta you once knew, but when the invitation came from Bangalore I could not refuse it”.īuddhadev Dasgupta died on January 15, 2018, a few weeks short of his 85th birthday. I retained enchanted memories of those concerts of my youth, so when Buddhadev babu came to play in Bangalore in or about the year 2010, I took my son to hear him.
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It was mostly in that city that he performed, for as a full-time engineering professional he could not work the all-India and trans-Western concert circuit in the manner of his contemporaries Ali Akbar Khan and Amjad Ali Khan. As a student in Calcutta in the 1980s, I had often heard Dasgupta play live. It was inspired by my hearing of the death of the great sarodiya, Buddhadev Dasgupta.
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Now, after my accident and the world it had opened for me, I began to supplement my private archive with periodic raids into this vast treasure trove of publicly available resources as well.Ī YouTube binge I recall with particular fondness occurred in the second half of January 2018. Rajam and Bismillah Khan if I was in the mood for instrumental music and to Bhimsen Joshi, Kumar Gandharva, Mallikarjun Mansur, Malini Rajurkar, Kishori Amonkar and Basavaraj Rajguru if I wanted to listen to vocal music instead. These came in especially handy on long, trans-continental flights, when the hours would pass most pleasurably listening to Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, N. By these means I passed the morning utterly enchanted, the pain in my limbs forgotten.īefore I discovered YouTube, I drew most of my musical sustenance from the large collection of CDs and cassettes of National Programme recordings that I had accumulated over the years. Remembering this tale, I now asked YouTube to let me hear Higgins sing “Krishna ni begane baro”, followed by a request (met with as quickly) for a rendition by that other fine vocalist born in a Christian home, K.J. Then, too, the devotee, stigmatized by the priests, sang his praises to Krishna in response, whereupon (so the story goes) an idol of Krishna itself turned around, broke the temple wall, and revealed itself to this true seeker. Higgins was deliberately - and very movingly - invoking an ancient story associated with the temple, which had denied the 16th-century Kannada poet, Kanakadasa, entry because of his low caste. So he stood on the street outside singing “ Krishna ni begane baro”, shaming the priests to let him in. On a visit to the town of Udupi, Higgins was denied admission to its Krishna temple because of the colour of his skin. So I heard her sing the song too.Īs I listened, I recalled reading about an incident involving this particular song and the Carnatic vocalist of American heritage, Jon Higgins. render it, I saw a link to a version by the well-known contemporary vocalist, Bombay Jayashree. This song is a particular favourite of mine, so after I had listened to M.L.V. That morning, he had linked a recording of “ Krishna ni begane baro”, as sung by the great Carnatic vocalist, M.L. Gopalakrishnan’s that set me off on my first YouTube binge. It was one particular recommendation of S. Now, as I sat in bed with my ankle numb and my shoulder aching, the algorithm of YouTube was inviting me to forget my pain by partaking of more of its pleasures. Previously, I had listened to Gopal’s recommendations one by one, without looking at the screen after I had opened the link. As I began doing this regularly, I discovered something that had eluded me before - that the screen was inviting me to listen to other compositions after the one presently playing had finished. Opening the computer, I would go first to the mail from Gopal, read his text, click on the link and listen to it. I learned to pick myself up in the mornings with music instead. The day stretched endlessly before me, with no prospect of cheering myself up with a walk through Cubbon Park. Now, with my ankle in plaster and my shoulder all strapped up, my mood when I woke up was invariably glum. I found my friend’s suggestions particularly handy when transcribing research notes into my computer, our shastriya sangeet playing soothingly in the background. Sometimes, a pile would accumulate, and then I would listen to them all at once. Before the accident, my mornings were hectic, so I rarely listened to Gopal’s postings as they came.