The power of exposure

The power of exposure
Baithak Foundation’s experience both underlines the value of making classical music part of the school curriculum and reveals some hurdles.

How long do you do riyaaz? What can you do to make your voice stronger? What kind of a diet should a student of music follow?

These were among the many questions that girls studying at the Pune School and Home for the Blind posed the fine young classical singer Mukul Kulkarni, 36, after his concert at their institution on Saturday. Kulkarni, a student of Mumbaibased Pandit Arun Kashalkar’s, also learns from the Gwalior gharana stalwart, Pandit Sharad Sathe, 85, who attended the concert. Sathe moved to Pune two years ago after living for most of his adult life in Shivaji Park.

The 50-odd pre-teen girls in the audience, none of whom had heard a classical music concert before, listened quietly and intently to the one-and-a-half hour recital, during which Kulkarni rendered Gaud Sarang, Sughrai, an ashtapadi in Bahar and an abhang. The concert was part of a programme that Mandar Karanjkar, 26, an engineer by training, and his wife, Dakshayani Athalye, also 26, a law graduate with an advanced degree in education, run in three Pune schools attracting students from socio-economically weak sections. They run the programmes through the Baithak Foundation, a non-profit group that they founded.

“In college, I saw that friends who were photographers, cyclists and trekkers were able to easily spread their passion to others,” said Karanjkar, explaining what spurred him to start this activity. “I was also able to turn some friends in my engineering college into classical music fans by making them listen to it when we worked late into the night on submissions. It is a process. But it can be done.”

The couple decided to begin by targeting underprivileged children. In June 2015, they started trying out various teaching strategies in two community centres to which students came after school. There, they chopped and changed their lessons as they discovered what worked and did not. The following year they put in place classical music instruction in three schools.

For this programme, they chose and trained three young students of music, offering them a stipend to spend a few hours in the morning three days a week teaching music. The instructor in the school for the blind, Kedar Kelkar, for instance, learns from Pandit Suhas Vyas.

The couple meet the instructors once a month to review and refine lesson plans, and discuss other issues. Their experience both underlines the huge value of such programmes and throws light on some of the hurdles.

One of the instructors, for example, had a hard time accepting that his students would not touch his feet, a widespread practice signalling respect for the guru in the world of the Indian classical performing arts. “In my home district, even the collector, who was learning from me, used to touch my feet,” the teacher complained to the couple.

When students asked another instructor what the sthayee (first verse) and antara (second verse that usually goes up to the ‘sa’ of the upper octave) of a bandish (khayal composition) were, he drew a circle on the blackboard and divided it into two. He then labelled the circle the bandish, one half the sthayee and the other the antara. It did not occur to him to just sing a bandish to show them what its components were.

“Even after we had made detailed lesson plans, the instructors sometimes did not execute them,” said Athalye.

In a third instance, after an instructor had finished singing the octave’s seven notes, he proceeded to link each with a Hindu deity. He then wrote the information on the blackboard and told the students to copy it all down. When Athalye asked him why he had inserted this into his lesson plan, he said that the students needed to learn about our tradition.

The instructors also had to learn to control the classes, which had 20 to 30 students each and proved to be a challenge. So six months into the academic year, the couple began voluntary music clubs at these schools that would meet on weekends, limiting the size to 10 students. Hearteningly, these did attract the numbers. But because they chose to come out of interest, they did not have to be disciplined or motivated, and could be given more attention.

From the coming academic year, the couple is thinking of eliminating compulsory teaching and offering instruction only through such clubs. They hope to set up fully equipped music rooms in the schools.

They also plan to open the year with two concerts at each of the schools and then take students to performances outside, including the big Sawai Gandharva festival — setting them off on a journey to becoming hard-core rasikas, if not musicians.

(This column appears every other Tuesday.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own. The opinions and facts expressed here do not reflect the views of Mirror and Mirror does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.


Sumana RamananSumana Ramanan
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