by-RAMACHANDRA GUHA (an article from The Hindu, dated Dec 05,2004)
A BRITISH band had come to town, and my 11-year-old daughter wanted to go hear them sing. I was resistant to the idea. So we argued, back and forth. "What is this band?" I demanded, adding: "In any case, I cannot allow you to go out at night." "I am going with my friend and her parents," came the reply. "Then what about your homework," I persisted. "Please, Appa," pleaded the child, "I really love their music — they are to me what that Panditji is to you." "Which Panditji," I asked suspiciously. "You know who I am talking of," she came back: "That Panditji whom you forced Amma to go and listen to — the one who is Norah Jones's father."
I guess I might myself have never heard of Pandit Ravi Shankar had it not been for a programme on Vividh Bharati called Svar Sudha. While at university in Delhi I moved on from Svar Sudha to attending live concerts. At just about this time, a young man in Delhi was setting about spreading musical literacy among his fellow Punjabis — while not necessarily excluding the rest of creation. His name was Kiran Seth, and he had lately returned from the United States to teach at the Indian Institute of Technology. In 1977 he started an organisation with a wordy name embodying a weighty ambition. It was called the Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture among Youth — SPICMACAY, for short. The organisation's subsequent growth had been remarkable indeed. It now has some 200 chapters, and holds in excess of 1,000 events annually, mostly in places of learning, but occasionally also in more "public" venues such as a Town Hall. What Svar-Sudha was to my generation, SPICMACAY has been to the generation after mine: that is, a vehicle for transmitting, in palatable form, the traditions of Indian classical music. To have the great artistes sing in your college for you and your friends, is to bring their music far nearer than were it to come over the radio. The concerts are open to all, and free; so sometimes adult interlopers can benefit from them as well.
The last SPICMACAY concert I myself attended was held at my daughter's school. It featured that very fine vocalist Padma Talwalkar. As Padmaji put it, "When SPICMACAY asked me I could not say no." I heard all of Padma Talwalkar's concert; my daughter heard about half of it. She came and sat in the corridor outside the room where the artiste was singing, thus to hear her last two compositions, one of which was a quite magnificent tarana in Hameer. Afterwards I asked her what she thought of it. She did not answer, but her look suggested that she did not now reject her father's music altogether. With luck, and some help from SPICMACAY, my Panditji might one day become hers, too.
