India Post News Service

Los Angeles, CA: The Ackerman Plaza at the UCLA campus was packed to capacity on March 25. Sankara Eye Foundation hosted a concert by the maestro Padmashri Hariharan. The show was to raise funds and awareness of the foundation and the good work they do in India by bringing light into the dark lives of people.

The amazing bandwidth that Hariharan has is almost unparalleled. In an exclusive one on one with India Post, he responded thus: IP: How have you achieved this tremendous bandwidth of songs that you record? HH: I think I had the luxury of time with me. A struggle period of fifteen years in which I got myself exposed to a lot of different cultures of singing. When you achieve mastery in one 'gayaki', you can use your vocal chords because it becomes powerful. You have to meditate on that one style and alongwith exposure, a little intelligence one attempts to get into different styles.

I was experimenting with music since I was a child. I trained in Carnatic Music, was in Bosco, so I sang western and all this combined with practice and the need to imbibe a culture. IP: What do you attribute your edge over a lot of contemporaries to? HH: To technique, to practice and to the desire to sing a variety within different cultures. It is also how you present a song, what is the tonal quality of the voice, what is the energy you have to give to a song, how you say the words.

The way I sing a ghazal is different from a thumri and although there is technique to singing, the emotional involvement with the sur is so intense that it overshadows the technique. Mehdi Hassan Sahib once said to me that 'when you sing a sur, it should be such that the sur awaits in front of you helplessly' meaning that you become the master of that sur at the point of time. IP: What is your input on the evolution of music in Indian music and film industry? HH: What we did in Colonial Cousins, the fusion, we see a lot in the films today. A lot of bands started playing. MTV and Channel V were playing Indipop which grew and the Hindi film industry absorbed that. Then we had Lucky Ali, Alisha, Adnan Sami all of whom sang beautiful pop songs.

AR Rehman came in around 1993 and changed the sound and it became more global and he still keeps evolving. IP: What kind of social responsibility do you think singers and musicians should have? HH: Basically any public figure in showbiz should have a sense of social responsibility. Film music in particular is dictated by the story of the film and the sequence on hand. If the scene demands a level of frivolous, then the lyrics of the song too will go hand in hand with that need of the hour. But, as long as there is honesty in that frivolousness, you have done your job. The audience was thus left spellbound with the melodious 'Tu Hi Re' from Bombay, to 'Dum tara dum tara' from Guru to 'Roja jaane man'.

Accompanying Hariharan was Chandreyeyi, his student and an extremely melodious singer from Kolkata. She is currently in Mumbai to pursue her career in Bollywood. In the midst of the program, we had a very moving slide show of the Sankara Eye Foundation presented by the current president of the Indian Medical Association of California, Dr Gurbani. He gave a comprehensive update on the what, how, why and where about Sankara Eye Foundation. His update on the financials reflected a very transparent system in place.

The President of Sankara Eye Foundation - Murali Krishnamurthy too appealed to the audience to donate generously to help them achieve vision 20/20 by the year 2020. Sameer Nigam along with the entire team of volunteers did a great job of the event.