The Magic Of Music And Friendship

Here's how music can be the perfect glue and create lifelong bonds of friendship.

The oldest in the group is in her seventies, the youngest is a college student not yet 20. One of the group members is a busy paediatrician, another is an administrator at India’s space research organisation. The fifth is a homemaker looking after her aged mother and mother-in-law while the sixth is a former film actress (now retired and living alone after her mother passed away). Each of them lives in a different part of Bengaluru.

They would have never met, much less become close friends if their shared interest in learning music had not brought them together. Not to become professional performers, but to enjoy the process of learning, and divert themselves from their respective preoccupations (as a doctor, working woman or housewife) for a few minutes. They met once a week at their teacher’s place, for an hour of learning new compositions. The homemaker who had grown up in Gujarat wrote down her song notations in Gujarati script, the doctor wrote down in Hindi while the film actress preferred Kannada. It was a truly diverse group, age-wise and in terms of lifestyle routines. One came in salwar-kameez outfits, another was always in a sari while the college student was clad mostly in jeans and tops. But their interest in learning music, even if only for diversion, was a common denominator.

The group had a great time, learning together, and ‘switching off’ their other professional/household obligations and concerns even if only for an hour, once a week, as they walked in for lessons. It was, they said, therapy as they learned and prepared theme-based modules, to perform at various venues – a recital of multi-faith songs for bedridden, terminally ill cancer patients at a hospice, a neighbourhood temple festival, or Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary (songs in different languages, from the prayer meetings he used to hold at Delhi). 

Singing at the hospice, said one, “was a moving experience – I felt I had done something useful, for the patients, to take their minds off their illness for a few minutes”.  The patients had to be wheeled out on cots from their rooms to the quadrangle around a small pond in the centre of the garden where the recital took place, at the hospice. One of the patients, a nineteen-year-old male, even joined the singers when they took up a popular composition from a famous movie. The group sang for the aged relative of one of the singers, who was wheelchair-bound with Parkinson’s Disease. They sang at a club for senior citizens and even did a radio recording for a woman’s program slot.

The group became fast friends. One of them does Ikebana, and the others pitched in to attend the exhibition she held. They exchanged recipes and shared baked goodies brought to eat after class. They drove each other to various events,  celebrated birthdays, exchanged CDs and tapes and gifts. A great time was had by all, notwithstanding their diverse backgrounds and preoccupations and routines. And music brought them together as friends, even if none of them was learning to sing to acquire a degree or to become a full-time professional vocalist or teacher. It was, as they put it, “fun, therapy as well as personal enrichment.” Music was merely the catalyst.