My heart is filled with gratitude to those who have given me so much joy through Carnatic music, far beyond what I could imagine existed, or daresay, deserved to enjoy. I can see that I am not alone in these sentiments and someone more expressive and savvy must have already written about their feelings in the same way.
I am talking of all those great ones, who brought Carnatic music within my reach, unbeknownst to themselves of the yeoman cause they served. And I am going to name only a few, and if I have forgotten any names, no offense intended. Like –
Pandit Fourier Makhi, from France, who showed how any complex periodic wave can be split up into its frequency components-
Ustad Maxwell Khan, who explained the relationship between magnetism and electricity-
Vidwan Steinmetz, who showed how to make better electromagnets-
Miya Edison, who invented sound recording-
Alexander Bell Dikshitar, who showed how sound could travel as electrical signals over waves-
Marconi Shastrigal, who started sending music over the air-
Great institutions like Philips Isai Sangam and Sony Academy, who propagated the technology to the masses-
Saint Gulshan Kumar, who was so prolific in his piracy trade and brought it everyday coinage in India, serving a cause along with CONtemporary King Composer Dawood Ibrahim, Harshad Mehta Dikshitar, and SivaSankaran Shastri, who are veritably the quartet of gems in laundering, pirating, institutionalizing, and celebrating a wealth of technologies that go to make us rich in music by making it freely available to one and all-
Asthana Vidwan Bill Gates, and Shikhamani Steve Jobs, and the nameless great of the Internet, who have all helped to mass market the technology for easy copying, distributing, recording, editing, and sharing music beyond borders and beyond the arm of the law-
And more than anyone else, to that divine power who resides in all of us that makes us selfish and make us care not for the musicians nor their toil. How we would love to grab music on the fly, and enjoy it like the Mylapore mosquito, unseen, and uncaught, by anyone.
Oh for the greats of Carnatic music, who have made all this possible, in a veritable Vizha of musical celebration of all and sundry, and done everything to make music a career without recompense, a truly selfless spiritual endeavour, so that millions can enjoy and Carnatic musicians can reach for the millions in their dreams.
