My father wanted us to find our own paths, says Shubhada Mulgund

‘My earliest memories of my father’s music was when I was about four-year-old and sleeping in my mother’s lap. I remember getting up with a start to the sound of clapping at one of my father’s late night concerts. And, soon it was dawn.

My brothers Jayant (six years my senior) and my younger brother Shrinivas (nine years my junior) grew up in a home full of music. My mother Vatsala was also a trained vocalist, my father’s first disciple.

Hence we grew up listening to both our parents doing their daily riyaaz (training). My parents were like the sun and moon in our lives. The biggest gift my parents gave us, is music.

My father never forced us to learn music. He wanted us to find our own paths. I am a science and law graduate, who also has a masters degree in music. My older brother Jayant is an artist, while my youngest sibling Shrinivas, is a Hindustani classical vocalist today, after completing his engineering degree from IIT, Delhi.

My father was never the ‘big and famous artiste’ with us. To me, he was just my father. As a young girl, I remember him taking me ‘double-seat’ on his bicycle around the neighbourhood to pick up home groceries.

If there is one lesson I have learnt from my father, it is to be simple and level headed. Very often, people, give my siblings and me, a lot of importance, because of my father’s fame. We have learnt to take this in our stride and not get carried away.

In fact, as I have played the tanpura for him on numerous concerts, I am amazed by his ability to move his audiences to tears. One very clear memory is of a Washington concert in 1982, when he sang the Vrundavani Sarang.

There was this elderly, Afghan gentleman sitting in the front row and weeping constantly. We later found out that he had attended my father’s concert in Kabul in the 1960s!

Health problems bogged him down since 1996. It started with a fall at home in 1996 and a surgery for ulcers in 1998. One month after the ulcers operation, he had to undergo a brain surgery to remove a non-cancerous tumour.

He performed on stage in the years that followed, but a spinal chord surgery in 2005 laid him low once again. My mother, Vatsala, who was a kidney patient passed away that year and my father has never been the same again.

He told media persons after being awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2008, ‘The one person I miss badly today is my wife Vatsala’.