Avicii wasn’t the only concert that the Johns Hopkins community attended this weekend.
On Saturday night, the Hopkins chapter of Association for India’s Development presented the famous Indian musician Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia at Shriver Hall in honor of its 10th anniversary on campus.
Chaurasia plays the bansuri, an Indian bamboo flute, and his extraordinary talent has earned him many awards and honors, including the Padma Bhushan, India’s award for distinguished service to the country, in 1992. He also earned a spot in the Symphony Orchestra in London at the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Concert. Chaurasia started playing the bansuri at a young age with the belief that instruments bind the world with “one common language.”
Chaurasia, accompanied by tabla player Anubrata Chatterjee and his student, fellow bansuri player Prasad Bhandarkar, met a standing ovation as he walked on stage for the first time. His quips kept the audience laughing and in good spirits all night.
He began his performance by playing a beautiful hour-long raga. A raga is a common and traditional Indian melody that had the audience feeling “mesmerized, relaxed and pensive,” as freshman Neil Mallinar said.
While some of the audience were listening to Chaurasia for the first time, simply intrigued by the idea of such a legendary musician, others hummed knowingly along to his melodies.
“My dad always played me his album, Call of the Valley, and I recognized his name. I listened to him all the time as a child,” senior Ram Sundaresh said. A half-hour intermission was scheduled, which the audience hoped he would play through; unfortunately, the house lights went up anyway.
Soon after, Chaurasia began the second hour of his performance. He started by asking the audience what he should play, a request that was met with a roar of suggestions. “Well, let me finish the raga,” he joked.
Once the second half of the raga was finished, Chaurasia actually started to take requests from the audience.
He responded to suggestions from voices across Shriver Hall, even though it seemed as though each one requested a different kind of melody.
One song seemed to be a question-and-answer between the flutes that had the audience both chuckling and enthralled.
The last song, however, meant the most to the audience. It was “Om Jaya Jagadeesha Hare,” an incredibly popular Hindi devotional song often chanted during Pūjā.
“It’s a prayer that everyone knows the words to and everyone can be a part of,” sophomore Anvesh Annadanam said. “Om Jaya Jagadeesha Hare” certainly made the audience more excited than it already had been.
After that, the music may have ended, but the audience’s spirits didn’t die. The crowd mingled in the front hall and on the front steps of Shriver, discussing the performance with the same enthusiasm that had been in the air the whole night.
“It was mesmerizing, soothing and inspirational. At points, I had goose bumps,” remarked Ashima Khama, a recent Hopkins graduate.
She wasn’t the only one. For new listeners and old fans alike, the evening with the legendary musician lived up to its name.
