Learning knows no age, and at every juncture of our life, we seek to imbibe from the teachers we have around us. From moulding us to watching us sail into the deeper waters of life, sprinkling our lives with little titbits that stay with us, making us push ourselves and accept the importance of the journey, our teachers show us the way it’s done.
In the music culture of India, the legacy of guru-shishya parampara or teacher and disciple traditions date back centuries. On the occasion of Teachers’ Day, My Kolkata spoke to a few musicians from the city, from different musical backgrounds, about the gurus and teachers who inspired them to be a better version of themselves.
Here’s what they had to say…
Amyt Datta, guitarist
Amyt Datta and (right) Gyan Singh
I had a few teachers who typically sat across and gave me guitar lessons, I mostly observed better musicians and tried to pick up as much as I could with utmost honesty and with self critique. However, my real lessons are from life itself — ups and downs, light and dark, soft and loud, joy and melancholy… that is where music dwells.
Jayashree Singh with Amyt Datta, and (right) Monojit Datta
Music is the experience and expression of life on a sonic canvas. If asked, Gyan and Jayashree Singh and Monojit Datta were the figures who inspired me the most. In fact, September 5 is also Gyan’s birthday!
Bickram Ghosh, percussionist
Bickram Ghosh
My life has been a culmination of the contributions of my gurus and my teachers; I have to mention a few names. If not for my father, Pandit Shankar Ghosh, I would have never become a musician. There are so many cells in my brain that my father opened up — to appreciate, learn and perform music. I learnt the intricacies of Carnatic drumming from my guru, Pandit S Sekhar, from when I was 13 years old. The two learning processes ran parallel for me, where I learnt the intricacies of both north Indian and south Indian drumming, which is very rare in the musical scenario when it comes to percussionists.
Pandit Shankar Ghosh and (right) Pandit Ravi Shankar
Furthermore, I performed hundreds of concerts with Pandit Ravi Shankar for 12 long years. He became my guru, where he honed my skills of tabla accompaniment, gave me numerous lessons on performances and taught me a few life lessons that I’ll always treasure. He taught me to embrace and appreciate cultures and cuisines while we were touring extensively. I learnt something incredibly important — to embrace music from across the world, I need to taste food from across the world, which comes across as perhaps the biggest form of acceptance I can mete out to culture.
And to mention a mansik guru — it is R.D. Burman. I’ve imbibed a lot from him when it comes to film scoring, creating melodies and percussion sections. I never met Pancham da, but the work he left behind has taught me so much.
Kunal G, DJ
Kunal and (right) Jeetu Lakhwani
Anyone who is really driven can pick up the art of DJing. You stitch one track to the next and create a vibe for a couple of hours. But it’s the fine tunings that separate one DJ from the other. DJing is something I taught myself but it was Jeetu Lakhwani who fine-tuned and polished my skills. He taught me how to smoothly transition and helped me clean up my sets. He’s by far one of the sweetest and kindest people I have met. Friends call him G-tek and he used to DJ and run a school called Generation Technology.
Vicky Metharamani, DJ
DJ Vicky Metharamani and (right) DJ Chetan
There were no DJ institutions or schools when I started DJing in 1995. The only other way you could learn was from watching other DJs playing the console. You had to grab whatever knowledge or tricks you could pick up and learn independently. My inspiration and teacher back then was DJ Chetan who now lives in Jaipur. I picked up a lot of my initial basic skills by watching him play, which helped me grow in my early days.
Raghu Dwivedi aka RVD, hip-hop artiste
Raghu Dwivedi with his father Rajendra Dwivedi
My father, Rajendra Dwivedi, is my teacher. His knowledge in literature, epics from ancient India and vast knowledge about several cultures have been a great influence on me as a child. The art of self actualisation and the craft of communication is what I’ve learnt from him in all these years. He’s always been supportive of my decisions, even if it was outside his comfort zone.
He taught me the importance of communicating your thoughts and not letting them grow within us, which, in fact, helped me grow into an artiste because that is what we do — be comfortably vulnerable via our expression of the emotions we feel.
We try to seek positivity in every situation possible. My father and I jam to old songs from the ’90s in the car and it has been our go-to therapy session.
