A-44-R.VAIDHYANATHAN- COMPOSER FOR HARI-THUM

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by GOWRI RAMRARAYAN,

a playwright, theater director, musician, and journalist

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"For me an indelible childhood memory is of a man with unkempt hair, crumpled clothes and piercing eyes, playing the Moonlight Sonata on the piano. "Can you believe that a deaf man composed this? You don't need to "hear" music. You have to feel it," says he and shifts from Beethoven to bhairavi.

Telling stories about Mira and Surdas, he makes me sing their songs. "We know that Krishna teases gopis, but see how this gopi teases Krishna," he smiles, as his long fingers dance on the piano's keys, lighting up the jubilant images of Ras Khan. With R Vaidyanathan, music making is as natural and joyful as a butterfly floating on a flower.

Only later did I learn about the man's unusual journeys.

Trained in the Carnatic violin, Vaidyanathan learnt to play many instruments — in Hindustani as well as western genres.

He excelled in academics.

His postgraduate thesis in Presidency College, Madras, so impressed Sir CV Raman, that the Nobel laureate's recommendation took the young man to Cambridge, to study under another Nobel laureate, Lord Rutherford.

Vaidyanathan was expected to become as world famous as his colleagues at the Cavendish Institute — astrophysicist Dr S Chandrasekhar and nuclear physicist Homi J Bhabha. But a spiritual epiphany made him quit and return to a disappointed home.

Known as "Piano Vaidyanathan" for playing western classical music, and composing Indian music on the piano, he was persuaded to join the Gemini Studios, where his little room drew writers and technicians to hear him expound philosophy. He didn't care about his contributions to blockbusters like Chandralekha being unacknowledged. He forgot to cash cheques.

Soon Vaidyanathan became Remaji, the wandering renunciate, staying with anyone who put him up, expecting nothing for whatever he taught.

He spent two years in musician MS Subbulakshmi's home, endlessly playing the grand piano in the music room, melodising the songs of Mira, Kabir, Sur and Tulsi for her.

He set to haunting music Gandhiji's favourite bhajan — Hari tum haro — recorded in Subbulakshmi's voice and played at the Mahatma's prayer meeting. It became a requiem for the Mahatma, broadcast with the news of his assassination.

Enigmatic, eccentric Remaji remained a man of disconcerting silences. Rueful about lack of response for Masquism, a philosophical system he developed to reduce human suffering ("Ï have spoken passionately but not one has been moved in the slightest"), he took his own path towards "limitless truth".

He died in Amritsar, alone.

Was his brilliance wasted? I ask myself. Then I hear the piano — frolicking, sighing, laughing, weeping..

. I "feel" music, seeking the true, the tender, the sensitive. I am back in a sunlit home, no longer weary or cynical. I am nurtured by joy, renewed by hope. "

BY GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician, and journalist writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature.