Amrithavaahini - let us ride the music wave

“Saamaja vara gamana …” these were the exact words which started off a musical revolution in 10-c Si Apartments Edapally. Though it was not the only song in the movie “Sankarabharanam” there was some spark in that song which lighted our dead or about to die artistic instinct. I know a few eyebrows will be raised questioning that instinct of ours, but no one can deny the effort being put in to create, if not heart melting music but atleast some sound which encourages one to practice more.

The flute we bought at Athirapilli falls started the next level in our search for musical nirvana. Rajan, Vinay and me are so far the only members of this club. This club is in reality no club, it is not one which has been formed to impress supervisors, or is hyped up so much with not an ounce of substance. It is an informal group (at present only three people) trying to learn something. We may not become great artist, but we would have learnt something, we would have learnt to appreciate great musicians and artists more. We would have felt the difficulty in playing the instruments; the effort needed even to produce the basic sounds properly. We found it the hard way yesterday that playing a flute was not a joke. Even to get a simple train whistle like sound took me the better part of half an hour. Imagine me playing a full keerthana on a flute. Once we got through the initial difficulty of getting a simple sound from the flute, we started discussing the basics---

Where is the S R G M P D N in this flute … before that what is this sruthi ? what is a thaalam ??sruthi, thaalam, ragam,

Being engineers J we took a scientific approach. A band of frequencies is the sruthi (what people call elu kattai or elra kattai) or scale. Within each sruthi there are low frequencies sounds and high pitched ones. So any song can be played in any sruthi depending on the ability of the person. So that part decided we moved to thaalam, this is the speed at which the swaram or words are played. That too can vary. We were now decently well versed at these. Now came the next question where is the ‘Sa’ ‘Ri’ ‘Ga’ .. in this flute. A small book from the nearby music store helped solve this a little bit.

But we ended up with a new problem. The book told about S R G M P D N S for a 1 + 6 hole flute, and all the flutes depicted on the book had the same number of holes, while the three flutes we had either had 7 holes or even worse eight holes. It took sometime before we decided to ignore that last two holes and use the remaining six for our endeavour’s. Thus, started our music club- the club meant only for music. We are not trying to impress anyone, not trying to hide any image of not having work, there is no one drive this, no one takes the ownership. As said “Kotilo oka manushi unte chaalu ee amrita vaahini anantharanga pravahishthundhi”. Music is divine whether Indian or western.