MUSIC. Prodigy reclaimed: a path that led back to Indian classical music

Condensing a two-hour-long conversation with an articulate, chatty, highly educated, super-talented, and engagingly modest young man who also talks a lot of sense, into 500-odd words, is most challenging. More so if he has just been pole-vaulted to fame for having bagged the national award for the best male singer on his debut in playback singing.

The truth is, long before such national recognition landed on Mahesh Kale’s lap for his renditions in the celluloid version of the classic Marathi musical play Katyar Kaljat Ghusli (A dagger through the heart), Puneites have known, and loved, this musical prodigy.

Such was the magic of his music that there are tales galore of how the talented youngster, who opted to join engineering college, was locked in a room by friends to pre-empt ‘enemy camps’ kidnapping him just before intercollegiate music contests. The rationale for such pranks: almost no one else stood any chance of winning if he was in the contention.

Path taken Kale, who not only has an engineering degree from Pune, but also two masters degrees from American universities, wears his academic achievements rather lightly, believing, that it makes him an ‘alien’ of sorts and people might then be tempted to not have the highest expectations from his music. On why he then opted for engineering, he smiles, “Partly because I got good marks, partly because my friends were going in for engineering,” adding pensively, “I knew what I wanted to do, but did not question what I had to do.”

Not surprisingly, the project for his first MS was an extension of his music — an (eventually unsuccessful) attempt to put two Indian musical instruments, sarangi and esraj , which are being pushed into oblivion — into the synthesiser.

Though he stayed on in the US, well ignoring popular advice to leverage his engineering career, he has for the last few years, devoted himself to spreading, well, the sound of Indian music in America. “It may be an oxymoron, but as I lose myself in music, I find myself,” he grins.

Mahesh, who got his early training in music from his mother, has travelled across his adopted country performing, also holding workshops and boot camps on music while teaching students in the Gurukul style at home. The routine might have carried on, till fate intervened, and India reclaimed him.

Though he has sung on that hallowed stage of Indian classical music — the annual Bhimsen Joshi Sawai Gandharva festival in Pune — Mahesh’s latest success seems distinctly providential. It came for songs which were woven into music by his late guru, the renowned vocalist Pandit Jeetendra Abhisheki. And now, more than 50 years on, he is playing a role in not only reviving interest in the classic, but also helping the music transcend linguistic, geographic and generational boundaries.

Amongst his many quests is to help the youth experience Indian classical music. “On the surface, it is entertainment, but if someone leads them inside, it is like entering a rain forest. And they see the magic.”

There are only a few steps of conversion, he feels. “Inspire them, educate them, and try to connect by going a few steps along with them,” he says earnestly, quite convinced that the award is a vehicle that can help him be the Santa Claus of music.

So is Kale a musical ascetic who shuns all things material? Not quite. While he believes he is relatively simple, he loves fast cars, and confesses that his convertible Z4 Beemer is his “only poison”.

May be that’s another reason why Gen Next can connect well with him.