Dr Vinod Hasal Brings 500-Drum Bhakti Jamming To Mumbai, Where Everyone Is Part Of The Beat
· Free Press Journal
There are very few artists who can say they have performed for Fortune 500 boardrooms and temple courtyards, taught Kathak in townships as apartheid ended, and been quoted by Nelson Mandela. Dr Vinod Hasal has done all three. Now, the eighth-generation Jaipur Gharana Kathak exponent and Director of Drum Cafe India is bringing that journey full circle to Mumbai with Maha Bhakti Rhythm Yatra - billed as India's first-ever 500-drum bhakti jamming experience.
The format is simple and radical: nobody is a spectator. Every seat comes with a djembe. No experience needed. For Dr Vinod, the power of that moment was realised over years of working with rhythm. “When you give every person a drum, you remove the boundary between performer and audience. Nobody is sitting outside the experience. Everyone becomes part of the rhythm. At first there may be chaos - 500 people playing 500 different ideas. But slowly, the human instinct to listen takes over,” says Dr Vinod, adding, “That is where the stress release happens. You are no longer thinking about your office, your phone, your problems or your worries. You are simply present in rhythm, in sound and in community.”
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That collective pulse is why, Dr Vinod believes, young India is moving from nightclubs to what he calls bhajan-clubbing. “I don’t think young people have stopped wanting entertainment. I think they are searching for meaning within the experience. A traditional concert can make you a listener. A rhythm experience makes you a participant,” says Dr Vinod. “There is no VIP section in rhythm. There is no important person and unimportant person. There is only one beat, one rhythm and one purpose. And perhaps that is exactly what young people are looking for in an increasingly fragmented world.”
The Yatra opens at ISKCON Juhu, Mumbai, at 7 pm and will run across four weekends - October 24-25, October 31-November 1, November 14-15 and November 21-22. A part of the proceeds will go towards a new 1,200-seat auditorium at ISKCON Kharghar. The first five minutes, Dr Vinod says, are always beautiful chaos. “Five hundred people arrive with five hundred minds, five hundred stresses and five hundred different rhythms. Then I ask them to listen. Not just to me but to each other,” he says. “One group finds a pulse, another group follows, and eventually the entire room begins breathing together. I have seen senior corporate executives remove their jackets and ties and become like children again. I have seen people who arrived as strangers leave as a community. The drum does not care whether you are a CEO, a student, a labourer, a musician or a spiritual seeker. The drum simply asks you to listen.”
Raghu Dixit On Russia Gig After War: ‘There Is An Awkward Silence’That philosophy was forged in the early 90s in Johannesburg when a weekend jam in Warren Lieberman’s house with executives whose ties came off became Drum Cafe, now in 28 countries, and in the townships where Dr Vinod took Kathak just as Nelson Mandela walked free. “I wasn’t simply teaching dance. I was opening a cultural door,” he says. “When I saw students who had never previously imagined themselves performing an Indian classical art begin to dance Kathak with pride, I understood something very important: Culture belongs to humanity. It does not belong to a colour, a country or a particular social class.” It was in Durban in 1992 that Mandela told him, “You Indians gave South Africa Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the advocate. We gave you back the Mahatma,” a line Dr Vinod says transformed his yatra. “One country gives something to another. The other gives something back. And both are transformed.”
For Mumbai, the idea is the same but the scale is the start. “When I close my eyes, I don’t see 10,000 drums. I see 10,000 human beings breathing together. I see the sound of thousands of drums becoming one enormous heartbeat. And yes, Mumbai is only the beginning,” says Dr Vinod. “Rhythm is already inside us. We don’t create it. We simply learn to listen. From 500 drums to 10,000 drums, the destination is not noise. The destination is unity. The destination is bhakti. The destination is one heartbeat.”