<p>Many today know Manasi Prasad as the Director of Indian Music Experience, South Asia’s first interactive music museum. Manasi’s role, significant for Karnataka today, stretches beyond being a musician, as it took nearly eight years to see IME in its present form. Manasi led a creative team to explore and gather an impossibly vast repertoire of Indian music — classical, devotional, folk, film, rock, regional and even protest-music and is proud of its collection of no less than 60 versions of ‘Vande Mataram.’ Manasi’s relentless work in bringing India’s music, culture and history under one roof has brought her many laurels. Born in Bengaluru to music teacher Tara Prasad, Manasi, when still a toddler, moved to Kuwait and returned when the Gulf War broke out. “I grew up in a musical atmosphere and took initial lessons from Jahnavi Jayaprakash and Dr Varadarangan. As I entered my teens, I came under the full-time guidance of vocalist R K Padmanabha who chiselled my musical talents. I travelled extensively with him for concerts,” she says.</p>.<p>Manasi elaborated about her many projects to DHoS. <span class="italic">Excerpts from the interview.</span></p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">How would you describe your school and college years?</span></p>.<p>With unstinted support from my guru RKP, my first album was released at the age of 14 and I became a regular at sabhas. From winning a reality show on Doordarshan to being a judge and singing with S P Balasubramanyam in another show, I cherish my television experiences. I am also trained in Bharatanatyam from danseuse Narmada while I was studying Information Science engineering at BMS College in 2000. I concurrently learnt Hindustani under Nagaraja Rao Havaldar. My college days too were busy with music opportunities from Mumbai and Chennai. I won the National Young Artist Award from the Shanmukhananda Sabha in Mumbai. I was also invited to travel to Chile as a cultural ambassador, where I performed in different cities…all this before I reached 22. Since I was exposed to the finer aspects of Carnatic and Bharatanatyam, I started singing for prominent dancers in Bengaluru and later bagged a seat at IIM Bengaluru. And in the same year, I performed for the Madras Music Academy during the music season.</p>.<p>In 2009, I when had just won the Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar from Sangeet Natak Akademi, I was offered the chance to lead the development of a music centre by M R Jaishankar. That’s how I ended up spearheading the Indian Music Experience museum.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">Multi-tasking has been your forte and you did that in classical Carnatic too with your training in the tricky Avadhana Pallavi...</span></p>.<p>Avadhana Pallavi is a special form of Pallavi singing involving the use of different talas in each hand. I started practicing this when my guru RKP had challenged me to put the Adi tala in one hand and Rupaka on the other during one of our music travels. My deeper study into this led me to Padma Gurudutt, another exponent of the form. I started performing Avadhana Pallavi and even gave lecture demonstrations on it later. It’s challenging as one has to keep track of two talas, the pallavi, the raga grammar, the <span class="italic">manodharma</span> (spontaneous expression) and swara combinations. It trains the brain in multitasking. But, we cannot over-present this as it is only a skill.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">You have always maintained music has to be relevant to the changing times...</span> </p>.<p>I believe that classical music has the infinite capacity to retain its essence and still evolve with changing times. In my personal journey as a musician, I have tried doing that. In the past few years, I have presented classical numbers and poetry with contemporary music arrangements. What is core to music is sruti, raga and tala and respect for the composer. And there is space for a whole gamut of expression from ultra traditional to modern. Classical music will continue to evolve over time. And some changes are also cyclical as attention spans have reduced. I would compare this to the early days of recording where the 78 rpm records could only hold three minutes of music and artistes condensed their renditions! The push and pull between tradition and modernity defines classical music.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">How difficult was it for you to <br />make IME happen?</span></p>.<p>Making IME happen has been one of the biggest challenges and the most rewarding as well. It wasn’t easy by any stretch of imagination to conceptualise an abstract idea like a music museum into concrete reality, then raise enough funds and finally assemble a team to execute the vision. It’s been a mammoth team effort, with the core team (besides me) being the founder Jaishankar and <span class="italic">vainika</span> Suma Sudhindra. I think my success was the ability to build consensus, move the project forward in small steps and persevere for over 10 years, while also growing my own family! I have to mention the ‘women angle’ here, as IME is a team mainly led by women.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">You are also part of the Metronome Station band and the popular<br />track ‘Janani’?</span> </p>.<p>Sometime back, I was asked to put together a new collaboration of women for a festival. I had a vision for the group; the idea was to combine classical music with more contemporary and global influences, specially rap. So I reached out to my musician friends, Shalini Mohan (bass guitar), Sumana Chandrashekar (ghatam) and others. Over the course of a few months, we came up with new ideas that spanned both classical and contemporary. We performed a few times until the lockdown happened. ‘Janani’ was one of the tracks we had worked on and we decided to record and release it as a typical ‘lockdown video’ with all of us recording from our own homes.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">Tell us more about your work on the website for Chowdiah...</span></p>.<p>Last year, I had been invited by the Bharatiya Samagana Sabha to present a concert of Chowdiah compositions for their festival on Mysuru composers. My difficulty in locating his compositions convinced me that much more needs to be done to<br />popularise his work. So I took on a project to record Chowdiah’s compositions and invited Bangalore Brothers and Ranjani Vasuki to collaborate. I realised there was a sea of information on him apart from photos and write-ups that had a lot to offer in terms of archival material. I sought to bring the project under IME’s umbrella of activities with the team developing the content, while the Shankar Mahadevan Academy partnered with us under its ‘Archive to Alive’ initiative and gave us the software support.</p>
<p>Many today know Manasi Prasad as the Director of Indian Music Experience, South Asia’s first interactive music museum. Manasi’s role, significant for Karnataka today, stretches beyond being a musician, as it took nearly eight years to see IME in its present form. Manasi led a creative team to explore and gather an impossibly vast repertoire of Indian music — classical, devotional, folk, film, rock, regional and even protest-music and is proud of its collection of no less than 60 versions of ‘Vande Mataram.’ Manasi’s relentless work in bringing India’s music, culture and history under one roof has brought her many laurels. Born in Bengaluru to music teacher Tara Prasad, Manasi, when still a toddler, moved to Kuwait and returned when the Gulf War broke out. “I grew up in a musical atmosphere and took initial lessons from Jahnavi Jayaprakash and Dr Varadarangan. As I entered my teens, I came under the full-time guidance of vocalist R K Padmanabha who chiselled my musical talents. I travelled extensively with him for concerts,” she says.</p>.<p>Manasi elaborated about her many projects to DHoS. <span class="italic">Excerpts from the interview.</span></p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">How would you describe your school and college years?</span></p>.<p>With unstinted support from my guru RKP, my first album was released at the age of 14 and I became a regular at sabhas. From winning a reality show on Doordarshan to being a judge and singing with S P Balasubramanyam in another show, I cherish my television experiences. I am also trained in Bharatanatyam from danseuse Narmada while I was studying Information Science engineering at BMS College in 2000. I concurrently learnt Hindustani under Nagaraja Rao Havaldar. My college days too were busy with music opportunities from Mumbai and Chennai. I won the National Young Artist Award from the Shanmukhananda Sabha in Mumbai. I was also invited to travel to Chile as a cultural ambassador, where I performed in different cities…all this before I reached 22. Since I was exposed to the finer aspects of Carnatic and Bharatanatyam, I started singing for prominent dancers in Bengaluru and later bagged a seat at IIM Bengaluru. And in the same year, I performed for the Madras Music Academy during the music season.</p>.<p>In 2009, I when had just won the Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar from Sangeet Natak Akademi, I was offered the chance to lead the development of a music centre by M R Jaishankar. That’s how I ended up spearheading the Indian Music Experience museum.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">Multi-tasking has been your forte and you did that in classical Carnatic too with your training in the tricky Avadhana Pallavi...</span></p>.<p>Avadhana Pallavi is a special form of Pallavi singing involving the use of different talas in each hand. I started practicing this when my guru RKP had challenged me to put the Adi tala in one hand and Rupaka on the other during one of our music travels. My deeper study into this led me to Padma Gurudutt, another exponent of the form. I started performing Avadhana Pallavi and even gave lecture demonstrations on it later. It’s challenging as one has to keep track of two talas, the pallavi, the raga grammar, the <span class="italic">manodharma</span> (spontaneous expression) and swara combinations. It trains the brain in multitasking. But, we cannot over-present this as it is only a skill.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">You have always maintained music has to be relevant to the changing times...</span> </p>.<p>I believe that classical music has the infinite capacity to retain its essence and still evolve with changing times. In my personal journey as a musician, I have tried doing that. In the past few years, I have presented classical numbers and poetry with contemporary music arrangements. What is core to music is sruti, raga and tala and respect for the composer. And there is space for a whole gamut of expression from ultra traditional to modern. Classical music will continue to evolve over time. And some changes are also cyclical as attention spans have reduced. I would compare this to the early days of recording where the 78 rpm records could only hold three minutes of music and artistes condensed their renditions! The push and pull between tradition and modernity defines classical music.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">How difficult was it for you to <br />make IME happen?</span></p>.<p>Making IME happen has been one of the biggest challenges and the most rewarding as well. It wasn’t easy by any stretch of imagination to conceptualise an abstract idea like a music museum into concrete reality, then raise enough funds and finally assemble a team to execute the vision. It’s been a mammoth team effort, with the core team (besides me) being the founder Jaishankar and <span class="italic">vainika</span> Suma Sudhindra. I think my success was the ability to build consensus, move the project forward in small steps and persevere for over 10 years, while also growing my own family! I have to mention the ‘women angle’ here, as IME is a team mainly led by women.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">You are also part of the Metronome Station band and the popular<br />track ‘Janani’?</span> </p>.<p>Sometime back, I was asked to put together a new collaboration of women for a festival. I had a vision for the group; the idea was to combine classical music with more contemporary and global influences, specially rap. So I reached out to my musician friends, Shalini Mohan (bass guitar), Sumana Chandrashekar (ghatam) and others. Over the course of a few months, we came up with new ideas that spanned both classical and contemporary. We performed a few times until the lockdown happened. ‘Janani’ was one of the tracks we had worked on and we decided to record and release it as a typical ‘lockdown video’ with all of us recording from our own homes.</p>.<p class="Question"><span class="bold">Tell us more about your work on the website for Chowdiah...</span></p>.<p>Last year, I had been invited by the Bharatiya Samagana Sabha to present a concert of Chowdiah compositions for their festival on Mysuru composers. My difficulty in locating his compositions convinced me that much more needs to be done to<br />popularise his work. So I took on a project to record Chowdiah’s compositions and invited Bangalore Brothers and Ranjani Vasuki to collaborate. I realised there was a sea of information on him apart from photos and write-ups that had a lot to offer in terms of archival material. I sought to bring the project under IME’s umbrella of activities with the team developing the content, while the Shankar Mahadevan Academy partnered with us under its ‘Archive to Alive’ initiative and gave us the software support.</p>