Music in the World of Noise

March 16, 2023
On Passion & Profession

On Passion & Profession

I find a number of lyricists, singers, musicians who come up to me and say that we want to take this up as a career. While I try not be cynical while giving them any advice, I try to paint as much as a realistic picture of what lies ahead […]
February 12, 2022

The Song of Life

The song has the longest life. – Russian Proverb It is said that there is not a single moment in the 24 hours of the day, when a song by Lata Mangeshkar is not being played in some corner of the world. For more than 75 years now, the Mangeshkar […]
September 6, 2020
Ampex Multitrack Recorder

The Parable of the Magnetic Tape Hiss

Let me tell you the story of the Rishi who found a mouse and turned her into a girl. When the girl came of age he tried to get her married to the sun, but she felt that the sun was too angry. He tried to get her married to […]
August 4, 2020
sonu nigam ar rahman talk about the music mafia

Music of the Mob

Opening the Pandora’s Box After the unfortunate suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput, there is a lot of talk about politics, nepotism, groupism, factionalism, etc. in the Indian film industry. While this discussion revolved around the film industry, it was just a matter of time before someone started talking about the […]
July 20, 2020

Mann Chimb Pavasali – Soaking in a Monsoon Song

The tune came to me almost spontaneously. I have often observed that the moments leading up to the creation of a song are very lonely. When the clouds of creativity gather in your mind, even in a crowd, you become alone.
March 31, 2020
Clouds - Bill Hunyh

The Devil’s Workshop – 1

As I announced on my social media profiles, I shall be uploading in a serial form a novella that I wrote when I was 19 and still in college. If you find the writing raw or amateurish in certain places, bear in mind my age and almost zero experience in […]
January 5, 2018

Pt. Ulhas Bapat – The Maestro

A pall of gloom set in when I heard that Pt. Ulhas Bapat was no more. The man who played the santoor in each and every of R. D. Burman’s recordings from the movie, ‘Ghar’ in 1978 to ‘1942 – A Love Story’ in 1994, it surely was a quirk […]
April 5, 2017
Kishori Amonkar

Gaanasaraswati

  A late night phone call Late last night, or more accurately early this morning at 1 AM, as I was working on the background score of a new feature film, my mobile phone rang. Although the phone ring did not startle me, it did cause a bit of a […]
March 27, 2017

A New Beginning Revamping My Website

For a long time I have been contemplating the revamp of my website, which was lying in a time warp. I have always been fascinated by computers and the internet. The first computer that I owned was a Spectrum 128K, way back in 1987. It was hardly a computer! It […]
January 13, 2015
Chalice & the Drinker

Rear Window: The Chalice & The Drinker

A beautiful Urdu she’r (couplet) says: इश्क़ की चोट तो पडती है दिलों पे यक्सांज़र्फ़ के फ़र्क़ से आवाज़ बदल जाती है It means that in love, the blow is similar to all hearts. But the sound changes depending on the vessel. Figuratively, it means that different people react differently depending on […]