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Piano

Music has played a key role in my life, starting from the time I have been alone, when I used to listen to some kind of music on TVs. In those days, you don't have control over which music you want to play. You just tune into some music channel, like MTV before, or some other channel like Sun Music, and they play the music and you hear it. Even before that, you can hear the radio, but the radio is one of the easier ways you could get access to music even though you don't play the music you'd like.

Slowly, I started listening to music on devices once it became more accessible through mobile phones. I remember my first mobile phone with an MP3 player was around my college days, around 2007. That's when I got the first glimpse of playing the music which I like, and slowly over time music has helped me to teleport into a different world.

It has been a complete mood changer, irrespective of whether I'm feeling low or I don't have enough energy to work through the day. Once I put my headset on and tune to the song I like, it automatically changes the whole mood. It feels like a drug to the brain without causing any harm.

And around 2011, when I had officially started my career in a full-time job, I was an IC, like an individual contributor as a software engineer. I had a lot of time to focus and less time for distraction, so that's another time when I reconnected with music and all my libraries. Typically, 4-6 hours, I will be listening to music, maybe a couple of hours for the meeting and just spending time with friends and other companies. During those days, it played a much more key role

Then, during the COVID time, I started listening to a lot of ambient music without lyrics because when you have the lyrics, it kind of distracts you. It doesn't help you go into full flow mode and get the work done. I started listening to music without lyrics or vocals, so it kind of helped me stay in the flow. At the same time, once you hear the lyrics, you go into that particular scene. It's good for teleporting, but it's also bad because it just gets you into a different mood or distracts you. Another thing is that you might want to see the video and so on.

I started listening to ambient music during the COVID time. It was around 2021, I believe. I was listening to a lot of piano music, and that's when I started listening to the movies I love, like:

All the ones by Hans Zimmer, I really liked. It was slow-paced but still so soothing to hear. It could go anywhere from easy to very complex, but I felt like, okay, this feels good. You're not just listening to music, but also you are part of it. You are the one creating it. That mindset itself felt really good.

That's when I bought a ₹10,000 version of a Casio keyboard. I tried a couple of pieces but never got the time to work through it in a proper academic way. I used to listen to YouTube tutorials and play that song from the film. That's the closest I had, but I always had this aim to learn it like how all the classical pieces are being learnt.

Then came the time when I got a kid who understands music. The good part is she was also a person who likes to listen to music whenever she gets a chance, whether we go for a drive, whether we are sitting idle, or whether we are in a happy mood. Whatever the occasion is, music is always the solution, so she likes to play it. Around four years old, she already started playing. She started singing songs, and she has a good hum. She can catch her music and kind of sing in a couple of goes.

Then we introduced her to piano class when she was five and a half years old, when we moved closer to piano class. She was learning the wrong way when they wrote the letters C, D, E, F on the keys, and they were asking us to press those keys. After six months, we moved her to a proper classical piano class. That's where I felt pretty good about how she was playing. She can see the notes, and she can play those classics, like the ones you see from the 19th century, all the classical piano pieces. She didn't get that far, but she's kind of getting towards that. She's learning the proper way. She unlearned some of the bad things she learned, and she's getting it the right way.

Now, since I took a break, I'm also planning to get into learning it. Now I'm lagging behind. She already completed Book 1, and she is almost 80% through Book 2. I need to just get started from Book 1 and hope to catch up and also play together. Also, she has a recital in December 2026. I'm pretty excited about it. She's playing Sonatina 57, No. 1, that's a piece, and I'm pretty excited about it. I would also love to learn some part of the piano.

Music has revisited multiple times in my life. I feel this break might give me more exposure to go deeper and learn more. Some classical piece of piano: I want to read the notes and play instead of memorizing from my YouTube Shorts and trying to impress people by playing some film songs. Yeah, the journey continues. I will be trending towards learning