Kiki Says

Before #kickstarter or #crowdfunding, I crowdfunded a CD for my Sanskrit Professor Dr. M. A. Jayashree. It was the year 2000 (or so), before smartphones, before everyone could easily and effortlessly record a video or an audio file. Back then we simply walked away with our knoweldge, and other references and memorized (certainly we tried our very best) what we had toiled to learn. After a spell away, I returned to Mysore and immediately Jayashree said, “everyone wants a CD of the Yoga Sutras”.

By everyone, that meant 12 or maybe 20 students. On my way to Jayashree’s I first visited the the stationary store in downtown Mysore, where my friend, the exemplary flute musician, Ravi Mishra, was overseeing his family shop. I was buying my supplies for my Sanskrit studies, notebooks, a fountain pen and colored ink. Sanskrit study is always more engaged with sepia-hued or Jaguar green India ink scrolling from an art deco fountain pen. The shop counter displayed Ravi’s just relelased flute CDs, which I enthusiastically added to my shopping bag. Then on to Jayashree’s.

A CD? Well if Ravi had recorded CDs, then we could too! I showed Jayashree Ravi’s CDs, and she studied the production notes and exclaimed, I know the producers with the recording studio. Two brothers had recently opened the first digiital recording studio in Mysore and both had studied Sanskrit with Jayashree at the college where she was tenured. Destiny was guiding us to her CD. I invited members of the current tribe of intrepid chanters to pre-purchase CDs at $5 per CD and so we gathered our studio and production fees. I was in Mysore for 3 months. The CD, recorded, mixed, pressed, and in a case with cover art, was completed 1 day shy of 3 months.

The CD we produced had red cover art and though it is no longer red, we call it the Red CD. There was a time you could buy a hard copy in the “shop” in Jayashree’s library classroom, but you can always find it digitally from iTunes.

Jumping ahead, in 2008, when I arrived in Mysore, Jayashree said, everyone wants a call-and-response CD of the Yoga Sutras. And so it came to be. It is a 6-hour mp3 of she and I chanting in call-and-response. I have faced many learning challenges in life and the recording of this CD was one of the greatest. Why? We sang from different sound booths, imagine hot glass closets, within the studio and I was unable to see her. And so the teaching which seems to flow like honey from the Guru’s lips into the shishya’s ears… well I think you get the picture. Also she chose to use a recording studio of another former student of hers, a highly skilled Sanskritist and a seasoned producer, in Bangalore. On a map, the royal cities appear side-by-side, and mighty Ayravarta, Indra’s celestial white elephant, thunders across the heavens in a flash, not so the big white luxury express bus of the same name. We recorded it over two weekends. Professor Narasimhan was our Sanskrit consultant, or I should say mine, as he deftly identifed my every unaspirated aspiration. This CD is chanted in the traditional time-tested method of śruti paramapara; Jayashree calls out the chant, piecemeal, with my response, and when the sutra is chanted in full, the response is chanted three times. This peerless learning method, is the very best way to learn, to know, and to memorize the Sutras. This CD is called the Blue CD, which as you can see from the above photo of our cover art photo, has a blue theme. The four chapters of The Blue CD are available in audio for free on YouTube.