The lexicon describes ‘dharma’ as being synonymous with practice, customary observances, statute, virtue, and righteousness. Dharma tells us how to live life with honesty and integrity. We must take the path of dharma or righteousness in all walks of life.

Music represents divine beauty and the grandeur of creation. Just as the Upanishads say that God is the greatest poet, music that expresses this poetry is equally divine. Everything that happens in this world has a purpose and a meaning that we may be unaware of. So also music is not something that happened accidentally. It is a sublime creation.

The history of Indian classical music can be gleaned through treatises starting from Bharata’s Natya Sastra, Matanga’s Brihaddesi, Sarangadeva’s Sangeeta Ratnakara, Parsvadeva’s Sangeeta Samayasara and so on. Apart from the theory of music, they speak about the practice of music, but in the absence of any recording, we can only roughly surmise how the music of that time was. Curiously, at every turn in the history of music, there is a lament about changes that crept in.