There can’t be any more beautiful coincidences than winning the highest international musical honour the same day as the one where your biography is released. Shankar Mahadevan’s feat highlights how talent and hard work pays off. Mahadevan is part of the Indo-jazz group Shakti, with guitarist John McLaughlin and tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, and the group won this year’s Grammy for the Best Global Music Album with This Moment.
The book is an ode to Mahadevan’s musical journey that built up to this international acclaim. Lyricist Javed Akhtar calls him a “musical genius” while filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra describe him as “God’s Own Voice” the first time he heard Mahadevan sing. Farhan Akhtar was still a young boy when he heard Mahadevan in one of Shakti’s shows and felt “overwhelmed” by the performance, It left an indelible mark on his mind. McLaughlin says, “The moment I heard him, I immediately felt that this was the voice I was looking for.” Gulzar fondly states, “He is a melody-filled matka.”
Ashis Ghatak’s book is a testament to many such anecdotes. It does a deep dive into the relationship that this musical maverick enjoys within the industry and outside. Ghatak has produced a comprehensive book where he has spent hours interviewing everyone important in Mahadevan’s life, meticulously researching on his musical influences and the way he delivers his renditions.
The Chembur boy was trained to become a veena artiste, but fate had other plans. While teaching Mahadevan to play a kriti, his veena guru asked him to sing along to execute it well, and thereby a singer was born. He has since mesmerised us with versatile tunes from Breathless to Suno Gaur se Duniya Walon, from Koi Kahe to Noor e Khuda and more. The coming together of the trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (SEL) was the turning point in the artiste’s life, where each one of them brings their unique musical note to the recording studio. On SEL’s ways of composing music, Mahadevan says, “It is like every morning we have a white canvas and the three of us have our sets of paints and brushes. What the other person paints becomes a trigger for the other two… If Ehsaan plans to paint a horse I cannot say I want to paint a tree on top of the horse. We have to respect each other’s triggers.” And that is how, Ghatak writes, the three friends continue to keep making music like a band.
One of the best things about Mahadevan is his boundless energy that easily translates into close associations. Whether it’s his collaboration with fusion music pioneer Hariharan or his collaborations with musician Louiz Banks, Ghatak offers his readers an in-depth exploration of these relationships and experiences.
Ghatak, who has earlier penned Louis Banks:
A Symphony of Love, is at ease writing the biography of the musician, carefully decoding notes and delivering a book that can be a valuable resource for music critics. But what the author fails to deliver is more personal non-music related stories, which could have shown a little more of Mahadevan’s life outside of the industry. Though there are long passages on his growing-up days, neighbourhood friends and so on, most anecdotes invariably are related to music. Often, the chapters on one song or songs in a film get tedious and it would have been a welcome break to know the man without his melody. Also, the editing could have been crisper.