Riyaz... and the useless practice of counting the hours of your practice

Moments back I was listening to Pt. Ravi Shankar’s sitar and it suddenly stirred so many thoughts inside me, especially after some recent experiences and thoughts I have been having about my relationship with music.

This particular sitar piece was indeed marvelous. He just effortlessly touches most minute of the musical notes and magically passes to the next one as if what he is doing is nothing more than ringing a bell. And all this just makes you realize the countless number of hours musicians like Pt. Ravi Shankar must have put in to reach what they are today. Yes, agreed, it takes a lot of luck to have the right guru at the right age, but nevertheless, these musicians pursued it thereafter lifelong.

And here we are. Young musicians like us. We are so desperate to achieve greatness, consciously or unconsciously we end up counting the number of hours of riyaz we are doing daily/weekly. (I am talking about the ones who are at least aware of the necessity of a regular practice. There are plenty of others who are quite content playing the same level of music year after year. I can’t comment on those though; different people, different opinions, different priorities.)

At least, in the last few months, to make my decision of devoting more time to music more tangible, I have been keeping an unconscious mental track of such hours. And suddenly, and fortunately, because of the timeless classical melodies like the one I just heard I realized how useless all this calculation is.

I don’t think Pt. Bhimsen Joshi ever wondered: ‘Hmm, did I practice today for 4 hours or 5 hours? I guess I need to practice everyday for 6 hours now onwards.’ No bloody way! When the teachers of these legends (in their young age) told them to practice a particular piece of music for 100s, 200s, 500s of times, did they go ahead and calculated the required number of hours for that? I sincerely don’t think so! There was no ‘ratio analysis’, there were no ‘time-bound objectives’, nor any ‘projected growth’ for the next 5 years.

Now that I come to think of it, the thought of ‘greatness’ might not have even touched them before putting those millions n millions of hours of riyaz in the first place. And most of them must have got so humbled by the end of this particular phase of journey that I don’t think the so called greatness even meant anything to them any more. They just kept on going, walking the path, trying to dive further in the endless abyss that music is.

Some times, all this may sound unpractical to some people, including me; but at the end of the day, I guess there’s no other option anyway.