More than String Mastery: L. Shankar on the Cosmic Nature of Music and Consciousness
A journey through 75 years of devotion, invention, and the question of what music actually is
"If you serve music, music will serve you." — L. Shankar
When he woke for dawn prayers on his fifth birthday in 1955, Shankar Lakshminarayana didn’t ask for the tricycle his parents had ready for him. He asked for a violin.
His father V. Lakshminarayana—renowned Carnatic vocalist and violinist, professor at the Jaffna College of Music in Sri Lanka—must have recognized something in that request. The boy had spent three years listening. Just listening. Too young to hold an instrument, he’d absorbed every lesson his father gave to his older siblings and students. He’d memorized complex Carnatic compositions by ear, hummed along from the sidelines, and fashioned imaginary violins from two sticks.
“When my brothers practiced violin, I would imitate with an imaginary violin made of two sticks,” Shankar recalls in our recent conversation from his home in Malaysia.
He got the violin. A quarter-size instrument from Germany.
“It was like a temple of music,” he says about his childhood home. “My father had students from the morning to the evening. Always somebody’s coming and going out. Performers he was coaching and helping them rehearse for their shows. Always music was around completely.”
By age seven, he was performing at the Nallur Kandaswamy temple in Jaffna. Temple music wasn’t commercial performance—it was devotional service. “I performed so many times at the temples when I was young,” Shankar remembers. “Those temple concerts, I know they don’t pay you anything, but they give you prasadam, food and things. A whole lot of people, they’re all very into music and they love music very much. Music was part of the temple culture.”
By seventeen, he was appearing regularly on Indian national television, sought after by the legendary masters of Carnatic music—Chembai Vaithyanatha Baghavatar, Palghat Mani Iyer, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Alathur Srinivasa Iyer—as an accompanist capable of following their most intricate improvisations.
That would have been enough for most musicians. A virtuoso career in one of the world’s most demanding classical traditions, grounded in centuries of mathematical precision and devotional intensity.
L. Shankar was just getting started.
THE DISCIPLINE OF 4 AM
The lineage runs deep. “My father was a musician and he was the eldest brother. All his brothers—he had two sisters—except the two sisters, all of the five brothers were musicians, singers, violinists, mridangam player and things like that,” Shankar explains. “My father had six children, three daughters and three sons. I am the last one, youngest one. The three sisters, they all sang. They all sang and played violin too. My brothers, they all played violin and my father taught us singing too.”
The house in Jaffna operated on a schedule that would break most conservatory students.
“I started to sing at the age of two,” Shankar says. “Then started violin at the age of five. The singing was very easy. All the time I’m listening, even before I learned to talk. I started studying Mridangam at the age of seven.”
“Father used to get up around 4:00 AM and wake us up,” Shankar recalled decades later. “He’d practiced with us for an hour or more. We went to school at 7:30 but when we returned at 1:30 father was waiting for us with another lesson. After dinner we’d all get together and have a kind of jam session.”
This wasn’t academic study. This was total immersion in a tradition where music isn’t separate from consciousness—it’s a technology for coloring the mind itself. The word “raga” comes from Sanskrit meaning exactly that: that which colors the mind.
In Carnatic music—the classical tradition of South India—each raga carries specific emotional architecture. Not mood in the casual Western sense, but precise states of being that arise from particular arrangements of notes, specific ornamentations called gamakas, relationships between dominant and subdominant tones. These aren’t scales. They’re personalities. Frameworks for conversation with the infinite.
The melakarta system Shankar learned contains 72 parent ragas—a mathematically complete architecture covering every possible seven-note combination. From these, countless janya ragas derive. It’s exhaustive. It’s rigorous. And somewhere in that mathematical scaffolding, something else lives.
“If you learn vocals and instruments and get an all-round education in music, it makes you a better performer,” Shankar has said. He possesses a vocal range spanning five and a half octaves. The voice came first. The instrument followed. This sequence matters in ways most Western musicians never consider.
In 1958, ethnic riots tore through Sri Lanka. The Shankar family home was raided and set ablaze. They fled with nothing, returning to Madras, India.
That year, Shankar and his two older brothers—L. Vaidyanathan and L. Subramaniam—formed the Violin Trio with the legendary mridangam player Palghat Mani Iyer. The trio made history in 20th century Carnatic music. Three violins, one percussion master, navigating improvisational territory that had never been mapped before.
Shankar’s family wanted him to become an engineer. Even as he performed concerts, appeared on television, built a reputation across India, they pushed for the fallback career. In 1969, at age 18, he left for America to study ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University.
He would never return to live in India.
THE GURU-SHISHYA TRADITION IN MODERN TIMES
Speaking in March 2026 from Malaysia, Shankar reflects on how the ancient guru-shishya parampara—the teacher-student lineage—functions in contemporary life.
“I find really sincere musicians, my students who I give masterclass—they have always been the same kind,” he says. “But nowadays in India, Guru Shishya Parampara, they come to you many times. Sometimes if they are going to college, then they come to you on Saturday, Sunday. Or they’re completely devoted for times. Nowadays, the time is a little more less for people. They have to work and do other stuff. Their life demands a lot more in a different way.”
The traditional model was total immersion. “People like Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Palghat Mani Iyer, all these people—previous generation—students just lived there. So they were always devoted to music and they would also do service to the Guru, whether helping them or different kind of things. But they live with the Guru. So in a different way they found out their lifestyle, how they are devoted. That’s an interesting step and sometimes it’s difficult.”
The essence survives even as the form adapts. “I do find very sincere students or I mentor musicians who are really established too. They have a busy schedule, their family and things like that. But they are very focused too. Different times are very different. Their demands are different.”
SHAKTI: WHEN MATHEMATICAL PRECISION MEETS JAZZ FREEDOM
The move to America changed everything about context while changing nothing about core.
“When you are very young, when you are doing all these things, it’s very strongly implanted in yourself,” Shankar explains. “So no matter where you go, it’s deep within yourself. It’s only the surrounding is different.”
The surrounding was very different indeed.
“I went to America and the attention span is much less. If you’re playing a concert, for example, in India I could play a raga for one hour. In America, after 20 minutes, people’s minds start drifting. It’s not that the music is boring—it’s just culturally they are not used to listening for that long of a time.”
At Wesleyan University, Shankar met Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Garrison, and a British guitarist named John McLaughlin who was obsessed with understanding Indian music.
McLaughlin had played with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew. He’d founded the Mahavishnu Orchestra, electrifying jazz fusion that drew from Eastern philosophy without fully entering its musical architecture. He was curious. He wanted more than surface exoticism.
In 1973, they formed Turiyananda Sangeet. By 1975, with the addition of tabla maestro Zakir Hussain and ghatam virtuoso Vikku Vinayakram, the group became Shakti.
What they created wasn’t fusion in the way that word had come to mean—Western musicians borrowing “exotic” flavors. Shakti was a genuine conversation between traditions that, on paper, shouldn’t have been able to speak to each other.
Carnatic music operates on complex rhythmic cycles—talas that can span 9¾ or 6¾ beats, mathematical structures that Western musicians struggle to even hear, much less navigate. Jazz improvisation builds on harmonic progressions and blues structures utterly foreign to Indian classical tradition. McLaughlin’s guitar couldn’t produce the microtonal slides and oscillations fundamental to raga.
They made it work anyway.
“Shakti’s music is Shakti’s music,” Shankar said when pressed to define it. “It is like defining a colour you haven’t seen before.”
The albums they recorded—Shakti, A Handful of Beauty, Natural Elements—became what critic Lee Underwood called “the standard to gauge the playing and composing abilities of any world musician following in Shakti’s expansive wake.” DownBeat’s Critics Poll ranked Shankar fourth among Established Violinists in 1978, second in the Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category.
The group disbanded in 1978. “I felt enough time wasn’t given to rehearsals and I wanted to do it right,” Shankar explained.
Perfectionism or vision, it’s hard to say. What’s certain is what came next.
INVENTING NEW ARCHITECTURES: THE DOUBLE VIOLIN
By 1979, Shankar was recording his first American solo album for Frank Zappa’s label, produced by Zappa himself. The guitarist who’d defined avant-garde rock recognized something in the Indian violinist’s approach to sound.
The sessions revealed a problem.
To capture what Shankar heard in his head, he was overdubbing violin, viola, cello, and bass parts. Carrying multiple instruments between genres—classical Indian, jazz, rock, experimental—was impossible. The solution didn’t exist.
So he invented it.
Two years of prototyping with luthier Ken Parker produced the LSD—L. Shankar’s Double Violin. A ten-string stereophonic instrument covering the entire orchestral range from bass to violin. Not just expanded range, but the capacity to play chords, create textures, imitate flutes and guitars and synthesizers.
“In Indian music, certain ragas sound best on lower registers, each with different frequencies and emotions,” Shankar explained. “My Double Violin reflects this versatility.”
Think about what that means. He didn’t just learn an instrument—he invented one that could contain all the instruments his musical imagination required. The double violin became his signature, a physical manifestation of his refusal to be contained by existing categories.
He toured with Zappa, succeeding Jean-Luc Ponty in the position. Briefly joined McLaughlin’s One Truth Band. Recorded eight albums for ECM, the German label known for pristine sound quality, touring jazz and world music festivals with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Trilok Gurtu.
His 1990 album Pancha Nadai Pallavi—featuring those mind-bending 9¾ and 6¾ beat talam cycles—spent three months in Billboard’s top ten world music chart. It was the first traditional Indian record to achieve that status.
HOLLYWOOD, SCORSESE, AND THE SOUND OF DIVINITY
In 1988, Martin Scorsese needed music for The Last Temptation of Christ.
The film was already controversial—Willem Dafoe as a Jesus who doubted, who struggled, who experienced temptation in the most human ways. The music couldn’t be conventional. It had to sound ancient and immediate, sacred and visceral, Mediterranean and transcendent.
Peter Gabriel took the project. And Gabriel brought in Shankar.
The album Passion won a Grammy in 1989. Shankar co-wrote thirteen tracks, performed vocals and violin throughout. His voice—that five-and-a-half-octave range trained in Carnatic precision—carried the weight of something beyond doctrine. Not Western sacred music, not Indian devotional music, but something that existed in the space between.
Sixteen years later, Mel Gibson needed music for The Passion of the Christ.
Again, Shankar’s voice. His unmistakable sound. The album won a Dove Award for Instrumental Album of the Year.
What is it about Shankar’s approach to sound that keeps drawing these projects about the divine, the transcendent, the liminal spaces where human meets something larger?
Listen to him describe his practice philosophy: “I see myself as an athlete—like a long-distance runner. Every musician should prepare like an athlete. It’s mind over matter. Anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”
Not mysticism for mysticism’s sake. Rigorous discipline applied to states of consciousness that Western rationalism tends to pathologize or dismiss.
THE COLLABORATIONS: ZAPPA, GABRIEL, SPRINGSTEEN, AND WHAT THEY HEARD
The list of people who’ve sought out Shankar’s contribution reads like a tour through forty years of musical innovation:
Frank Zappa produced his debut American album and contributed lyrics. Peter Gabriel featured him on So and Us, brought him into the Last Temptation project, toured with him extensively. Phil Collins collaborated on Face Value. Bruce Springsteen and Sting brought him onto the Human Rights Now World Tour in 1988. He worked with Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, U2, The Pretenders, Echo & The Bunnymen, Stewart Copeland of The Police, Ginger Baker, members of Toto.
Jonathan Davis of Korn collaborated with him on the Queen of the Damned soundtrack—Shankar recorded eight songs, five made the film—and later on Davis’s solo work. Wendy & Lisa, Prince’s longtime collaborators, worked with him on the NBC series Heroes score.
What were they hearing?
Not exoticism. Not world music flavor. Something structural. A different relationship to time, to improvisation, to the space between notes.
“Listening is crucial for any kind of music learning,” Shankar has said. “If you listen, you will learn.”
He listens. Always has. From age two, absorbing his father’s lessons to students. From age three, memorizing compositions through the walls. The Western musicians who collaborate with him discover someone who doesn’t just play differently—he hears differently.
Carnatic music trains you to understand that silence carries as much information as sound. That a note approached from below generates different emotion than the same pitch approached from above. That rhythm isn’t just meter—it’s architecture for consciousness.
THE PHILOSOPHY: OBSTACLES AS GROWTH AND MUSIC AS SERVICE
“Obstacles are challenges to overcome, and I welcome challenges—they help you grow,” Shankar explained in a 2021 interview. “The more you learn to deal with obstacles, whether personal or musical, the more effortlessly you can handle life. They make you think. Personally, I like challenges; they’ve given me inner strength and the confidence to move forward. Without moving forward, life has no meaning. One must constantly grow and not remain stagnant—you might as well be dead.”
This isn’t motivational speaker rhetoric. This is someone who fled ethnic violence as a child, who left his homeland at eighteen, who spent decades translating between musical languages that had no shared vocabulary, who invented instruments because existing ones couldn’t express what he needed to say.
“The process of struggling teaches you things you would never have learned otherwise. The mantra is: keep trying. Don’t give up. Repetition is the road to improvement.”
Repetition. The same principle that drove his father to wake him at 4 AM for practice. The same discipline that builds virtuosity in any tradition. But Shankar applies it to something larger than technique.
“Everything depends on what one wants to achieve in life. Violence breeds violence; love breeds love. Hate spreads fast. The environment we grow up in makes a big difference. If you put your mind to it, anything can be achieved. I practice these philosophies every day.”
But there’s something deeper still—a philosophy that emerges from decades of devotion to something beyond commerce or recognition.
“I don’t expect any money or payment or anything else,” Shankar says simply. “If you serve music, I always thought if you serve music, music will serve you.”
Let that sit for a moment. Not “make music your career” or “monetize your passion.” Serve music. As you would serve the divine in a temple. As his father’s students served their guru. As an offering rather than transaction.
This isn’t naive idealism. This is someone who has collaborated with Zappa, Gabriel, Springsteen, Collins—who has sold 100 million albums, who headlines international festivals, who has Grammy awards and Dove awards and a career most musicians couldn’t dream of.
And still: “If you serve music, music will serve you.”
He grew up in a house that was, as he described it, “like a temple of music.” His father taught students from different countries. Music wasn’t entertainment—it was spiritual practice, intellectual discipline, emotional education, all at once.
When that house burned in ethnic riots, the family fled with nothing but their training. The instruments could be replaced. The hours of practice, the absorbed knowledge, the relationship to sound itself—that traveled with them.
CARNATIC MUSIC: THE ARCHITECTURE UNDERNEATH
To understand what Shankar carries, you need to understand what Carnatic music actually is.
Western music thinks of scales as neutral structures—C major, A minor, equally available at any time. Carnatic music understands ragas as living entities with specific characters, optimal times, seasonal associations, emotional colorings that aren’t metaphorical but fundamental to their structure.
Unlike Hindustani music from North India—which strictly ties ragas to specific hours and seasons—Carnatic tradition is more flexible about time. The music can be performed at any hour. But certain ragas still resonate with specific states. Morning ragas evoke purity and serenity. Evening ragas foster introspection and aesthetic depth. Night ragas cultivate devotion and meditative calm.
This isn’t superstition. It’s accumulated wisdom about how melodic structures interact with human consciousness at different points in circadian rhythms.
The melakarta system gives you 72 parent ragas covering all possible seven-note combinations. It’s mathematically complete. Every possibility is mapped. And within that exhaustive architecture, musicians find infinite room for creativity.
How?
Through gamakas—the oscillations, slides, and ornamentations that give each note personality. Through neraval—taking a line from a composition and exploring it through rhythmic variation. Through kalpanaswaram—improvising melodic passages using solfège syllables. Through the relationship between the composed kriti (the fixed composition) and the improvised exploration around it.
It’s simultaneously more structured than Western classical music—compositions are precise, ragas have rules, talas are mathematical—and more free. The improvisation isn’t “jazz” in the Western sense. It’s disciplined exploration within defined frameworks, like working variations on a theorem in mathematics.
Shankar absorbed this architecture before he could read. He learned it in the same way children learn language—through immersion, repetition, and play. By the time he encountered Western music theory, jazz harmony, rock structures, he already had a complete musical operating system running in his consciousness.
He didn’t abandon Carnatic music to embrace fusion. He brought its principles with him, translated them, found equivalents in other traditions.
THE JOURNEY CONSCIOUSNESS: WHAT 75 YEARS TEACHES
At 75, Shankar has released 28 solo albums. His most recent—Full Moon and Over the Stars—came out in August and September 2024.
He’s sold over 100 million albums through his solo work and collaborations. He’s performed in temples and stadiums, sacred spaces and rock venues, recording studios and film soundtracks. He’s worked with jazz legends, rock innovators, classical virtuosos, electronic pioneers.
“I used to visualize having an audience and perform for them,” he’s said about his childhood practice. “So even today, whether I perform for five people or 10,000, it’s all the same to me. Performing is an opportunity to share your ideas and music.”
Read that carefully. Five people or 10,000—the same.
That’s not false humility. It’s someone who understands music as transmission rather than performance. The audience size doesn’t change what’s being communicated. The venue doesn’t alter the relationship to sound.
“Animals, birds, and nature have influenced me—and continue to do so every day,” he’s noted. “When you look at the clouds, you can often tell what’s coming: rain, sunshine, or a storm.”
What does cloud-reading have to do with music?
Everything, if music is understood as a way of perceiving patterns in consciousness itself. Ragas map emotional weather the way meteorology maps atmospheric pressure. Both are systems for recognizing what’s coming, what’s present, what’s passing.
“It’s like breathing to me,” Shankar said about music. “I’m only in competition with myself, not with anyone else. There are so many talented people around the world. One should recognize their own talent and work hard to achieve the best they possibly can.”
Competition with yourself. Not against standards set by others, but against your own understanding of what’s possible. This is what 4 AM practice sessions for 73 years produces—not ego-driven ambition but relentless refinement of perception.
WHAT WESTERN AUDIENCES MISS
When Shankar performs in the West, audiences hear virtuosity. They hear exotic sounds. They hear world music fusion.
Most of them miss the architecture underneath.
They don’t know that those glissando techniques—the slides between notes that make his violin sound almost vocal—come from specific gamaka patterns with Sanskrit names and precise emotional functions. They don’t hear the tala structures, the rhythmic cycles that organize improvisation. They don’t recognize when he’s exploring a raga versus when he’s composing freely.
And Shankar doesn’t stop to explain.
He performs. The music communicates or it doesn’t. Education happens through listening, not lecture.
This is itself a Carnatic principle. In traditional teaching, the guru doesn’t necessarily explain the theory upfront. Students absorb patterns through repetition, internalize structures through practice, understand meanings through embodiment. Intellectual knowledge follows physical knowledge.
Western classical training works the opposite way. Theory first, then application. Notation as primary, sound as secondary.
Shankar learned sound first. The notation, the theory, the systems of classification—those came after his body already knew how to produce the music.
When he invented the double violin, he wasn’t solving an abstract problem. He was creating an instrument that matched what his consciousness already heard. The physical object had to catch up to the inner architecture.
THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS
Seventy-five years of devotion to sound. Child prodigy to elder statesman. Carnatic tradition to global fusion. Temple performances to Hollywood soundtracks. Jaffna to Madras to America to everywhere.
What does music itself become when someone refuses every boundary placed around it?
Not fusion in the commercial sense—marketable hybrids designed for crossover appeal. Something deeper. Recognition that the categories themselves—Indian classical, Western jazz, rock, electronic, sacred, secular—are conveniences, not truths.
When asked to describe Shakti’s music in the 1970s, Shankar said: “It is very hard to describe it as this or that. It is like defining a colour you haven’t seen before.”
Fifty years later, he’s still creating colors that don’t have names. Still exploring what happens when mathematical precision meets improvisational freedom, when ancient devotional traditions meet contemporary technology, when discipline meets experiment.
“Without moving forward, life has no meaning,” he said. “One must constantly grow and not remain stagnant—you might as well be dead.”
At 75, he’s not stagnant. Full Moon and Over the Stars aren’t nostalgia projects or greatest hits compilations. They’re new work. New explorations. The journey continues because the journey is the point.
This is what Western audiences often miss about traditions like Carnatic music. The goal isn’t to arrive at mastery and then coast. Mastery is the beginning of real practice. The fundamentals you spend decades perfecting aren’t preparation for the work—they are the work. And the work never stops because consciousness itself never stops evolving.
THE COSMIC AND THE PRACTICAL
There’s a paradox at the heart of Shankar’s approach.
On one hand: cosmic. Music as technology for consciousness. Ragas as emotional architecture. Sound as meditation. Performance as spiritual practice. Collaboration as conversation with the infinite.
On the other: utterly practical. 4 AM practice sessions. Repetition as the road to improvement. Mind over matter. Viewing obstacles as challenges. Preparing like an athlete.
These aren’t contradictory. They’re the same thing from different angles.
The cosmic requires the practical. You don’t access altered states of consciousness through intention alone—you access them through disciplined practice that rewires your nervous system over decades. The transcendent moments in performance aren’t gifts from the universe. They’re the result of 70 years of training your body to become a more precise instrument for the transmission of something larger than ego.
And the practical requires the cosmic. Without belief that this discipline serves something beyond personal achievement, who would sustain 4 AM practice for seven decades? Who would flee violence carrying nothing but training? Who would invent new instruments because existing ones can’t contain what consciousness demands?
“I practice these philosophies every day,” Shankar said. Not “I believe” or “I think.” Practice. Daily. The cosmic made practical through repetition.
WHAT COMES NEXT
At 75, most musicians are writing memoirs, doing farewell tours, resting on accumulated laurels.
Shankar is releasing new albums, forming new collaborations, continuing to explore. In 2024, he formed a collective with Vikku Vinayakram (the ghatam player from original Shakti), Vinayakram’s son Selvaganesh on kanjira, grandson Swaminathan Selvaganesh on percussion, and Fazal Qureshi on tabla.
Three generations. Multiple traditions. Still building new conversations.
“I’m also working on another classical project with Tarun Bhattacharya, amazing santoor player,” Shankar mentions during our conversation. “We did a lot of shows in India and also with Vikram Ghosh—he got the Padma Shri this year. We did a lot of shows, me, Tarun and different tabla players. We are making an album with Vikram Ghosh, the tabla player. He played with Ravi Shankarji for 12 years. We are going on a tour to America, Europe and all those kinds of stuff.”
His March 2026 schedule alone spans continents: Big Ears Festival in Tennessee on March 28th, LearnQuest Festival in April, Swapan Chaudhuri’s festival on May 31st where he’s headlining, tours through Malaysia in July, a full American tour in September and October.
But he’s clear-eyed about the challenges facing younger musicians trying to follow similar paths.
“There are lots of people who are very interested, but time will tell. They have to be patient and keep at it. There’s sometimes making a living of it and they will get a lot of pressures. But one thing is also—with the internet and everything, with social media—sometimes it has nothing to do with followers to get the real depth of music. They have to play and keep on going. The natural, the organic followers and all those stuff. Very important. So they cannot give up.”
Read that again. “Sometimes it has nothing to do with followers to get the real depth of music.”
In an era where success is measured in Instagram engagement and Spotify streams, Shankar points to something older. Depth. Organic connection. The discipline to keep going regardless of metrics.
The question he poses to Western listeners isn’t “appreciate my exotic tradition.” It’s deeper: What if music isn’t entertainment? What if sound is actually a technology for exploring consciousness itself? What if the boundaries between traditions are administrative conveniences rather than fundamental truths? What if mastery is just the beginning of real practice?
And the most challenging question: What if this requires 4 AM wake-ups for 70 years?
Most of us aren’t willing to pay that price. We want the transcendent moments without the transcendental discipline. We want fusion without understanding what’s being fused. We want world music as background texture, not as worldview.
Shankar offers something else. Not easier, not comfortable, not reducible to Spotify playlists or TED Talk inspiration.
A lifetime devoted to sound as portal. Mathematics as mysticism. Tradition as foundation for innovation. Discipline as path to freedom. And after 75 years, still the same fundamental stance:
Keep listening. Keep practicing. Keep moving forward.
The music isn’t in the notes. It’s in the consciousness that perceives them. And that consciousness—whether you call it raga, or spirit, or just rigorous attention to pattern—doesn’t have a knowledge cutoff. It doesn’t plateau. It doesn’t retire.
It just keeps coloring the mind, one disciplined moment after another, until the boundary between player and instrument and sound and listener dissolves into something that has no name but can be precisely demonstrated.
“Listening is crucial for any kind of music learning,” Shankar said. “If you listen, you will learn.”
So listen. Not to classify or categorize or appreciate from aesthetic distance.
Listen to learn what music becomes when someone spends 75 years refusing to let it be anything less than what consciousness itself demands.
EPILOGUE: MUSIC AS UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
When I mentioned to Shankar that this interview would be published from Kyiv, where I’ve been based since January 2022 covering the war in Ukraine, his response was immediate and heartfelt.
“All my love to Ukraine people and you and everybody else,” he said. “Wish them all peace and everything. I’ll hold on to it. I think peace will prevail always and love will prevail. There’s nothing can beat the love, really. And the music—music is part of it. We are all united together.”
Music as uniting force. Not metaphorically. Actually.
I shared with him a story about driving aid into formerly occupied Ukrainian territory with volunteers who spoke no English while my Ukrainian remained rudimentary. “We would watch the windshield wipers go and I’d say, ‘Okay, ta ka din na ta ka din na, ki ta ta ka din na, tun na ka ta, ki ta ta ka ta ka din na, ki ta ta ka din na tom.’ And then I said, ‘Now you do it. Ta ka din na.’ So we already had rhythm together and they didn’t have to worry about what it meant. They had fun with it and we had hours and hours of konnakol, Carnatic konnakol in the car.”
Shankar laughed with recognition. The rhythmic syllables of Carnatic music—ta ka din na, ki ta ta ka—transcending language barriers in a war zone. The same patterns his father taught him at 4 AM in Jaffna 70 years ago, now creating connection between an American journalist and Ukrainian aid workers navigating cratered roads through Kherson oblast.
This is what he means by serving music. This is what happens when you treat sound not as commodity but as technology for consciousness, connection, and something larger than any single tradition can contain.
“I have sat down with people from many countries,” I told him. “I hosted a world music show for years in Houston. I sat down with people who could not speak the same language as me, but if we could find an instrument, even if it was the voice, we would do this.”
“Yeah,” Shankar agreed simply. Because he knows. Has known since age two. Has demonstrated through 75 years of practice.
Music doesn’t need translation. It is translation. Between cultures, between eras, between the mathematical and the mystical, between discipline and transcendence.
Between human beings trying to find each other across chasms of language and history and war.
All it requires is listening.
And 75 years of devotion to getting it right.