Where the soul resides

 

Perhaps the most distinguishing factor, between Indian and western music is the meend.

The lilting glide, the imperceptible transition from one note to another. The sometimes swift, the sometimes lingering journey between adjacent notes; that space, as the renowned Dagar saab put it, where music is made.

The meend is a quivering pause between ripples of water, the thing that eyes speak when words are not enough, the reflections of the notes upon each other, that gap in the mind that is silent because it is so full of being in the moment that nothing needs to be said.

The meend is the curving flow of the river down a mountain that hugs the rocks as it cascades down, the space between light and shadow that defines them, a sudden snatch of warm breeze on a winter afternoon that threads two cold moments in a snug embrace.

Aakash Gandhi then does the impossible so beautifully. He manages to blend the dna of Indian and western music so seamlessly by getting the meend into the piano.
As his fingers glide across the keys, he suffuses the spaces with tender longing, love, a heartbreaking beauty. He immerses this bridge with memories of rainy days and winter morning ;of sunlight filtering through the eyes of a lover and walks in autumn evenings on tree lined avenues carpeted with rust leaves.

He slips in the meend of afsos and noor-bathing each note with an incandescence that illuminates as it glides, and somewhere during this recital,this journey, you feel closest to that deepest part of you….