Striking Chords, Composing a Life
Ravi CA had resolved at a fairly early stage that time mattered more than the accumulation of stuff. After working for twenty years in an IT career, he quit the well-paying, beaten path to pursue an interest that many would fence into after hours. Or into the sidelines of a hobby: music. His midlife swerve – from being a Senior Director at EDS and earlier, a Regional Director at Dell India R&D – was particularly intriguing because the odds seemed stacked against him. He still had to support two school-going kids sans the safety net of a partner’s earnings.
The shift itself was anything but impetuous. After all, Ravi had always been a planner and still is. He even models possible futures with his four-member family on Excel, projecting into the next ten or twenty years. “You have to document your dream and forge a roadmap to turn it into a reality.” An approach, for the large part, that seems to have fitted life’s bumps into a relatively even, somewhat cool-headed track.
Aside from Excel plans, how did Ravi summon the courage to explore an alternate career? Pointers might lie in the manner he has gleaned lessons from his own life experiences, illustrating that the pursuit of fulfilment often requires stepping off familiar trails and embracing the uncertainties that accompany offbeat choices. Vignettes from our conversation can inspire others contemplating midlife shifts.
Evoking Harmony From Diversity
Ravi grew up plucking sounds and rhythms from everywhere. From his grandmom and aunt, who hummed Carnatic tunes or film songs as they milked cows in Thrissur, Kerala, their fingers beating a tala against milk cans. Or from Ameen Sayani’s Binaca Geetmala, which scattered the soulful strains of Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar between catchy instrumental interludes.
He was to appreciate the sheer diversity that stitched up the nation as he moved between the vivid festivals and Malayalam-inflected Tamil of his Thrissur kin to the tumbling waterfalls and Hindi sounds of Ranchi (then in Bihar, now in Jharkhand), where his father worked. Despite transferring to Frank Anthony’s in Bangalore from the third standard, his Bihar days at St. Xavier’s in Doranda endured in memory.
Speaking Through Strings
Such zest for variety seeped into his musical journey. To begin with, he listened to an eclectic playlist that spanned genres. Ranging from Deep Purple, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton to pop favourites like Boney M and Abba, or to Indian numbers across languages.
When he stumbled on a cousin’s harmonica as a fifth-standard student, he learned to evoke tunes from it in a week. And so too from his aunt’s harmonium, and later from a guitar. When Sholay was released, he excitedly blew into his harmonica, playing Yeh Dosti to jubilant listeners.
As a college student, he found that tunes had started occurring to him. As in, he would be lying in bed, the guitar propped up against splayed legs, his fingers absently plucking at the strings. And a melody would emerge, one that he hadn’t heard anywhere. Listeners passing by would like it, and ask him to repeat it. Unwittingly, he had become a composer. It was a form of self-expression that he needed to tuck out of sight during his IT years. But that urge to do something with music and creativity kept gnawing at him.
When it comes to creating new pieces, Ravi says the creation happens on the instrument, while fiddling with the strings. It’s not something that plays inside his brain first, before being transposed to a guitar. Since he’s been formally composing works since 2013, a lot of the melodies have been simultaneously created and recorded: “A lot of the music is spontaneous, the melody just happens.”
A Quiet Crescendo: Finding his Voice
As a young adult, Ravi was shy and rather introverted. It was only at college, when compelled to play instruments in certain situations, that he started overcoming the discomfort of public performances. And of projecting his own views to others. Recognizing that being too quiet wouldn’t help him later, he often sought settings that required him to perform or speak up. Some of these were inter-class or inter-college events, where he started winning awards for his compositions.
Gut Beats Gold Rush
Keen on heeding his gut instincts after graduating from Christ College, he chose to enter the up-and-coming IT sector. This was in the late ‘80s when the IT sector wasn’t yet a clear winner. Foraying into other fields like marketing seemed more lucrative. But Ravi had already determined that his choices were not going to be shaped by just money. His father had even tried to persuade him to head to the Middle East to garner a high-paying job. “But I was keen on writing code at that time. Opportunities outside the country were non-IT related.”
Wealth in Joy, not Currency
Dwelling on his relationship with money, Ravi recalls forging a distinct clarity even at that stage: “While I recognize the value of money, I was not going to do anything for the sake of money.” Such relative indifference to money as an end in itself wasn’t fashioned by having too much. Rather, he recalls his parents even occasionally scrounging for small change.
Once, during their Ranchi days, they were frantically searching for 10 paisa so that his father could fill his cycle tyres with air. Recognizing that even 1 Re in today’s context could offer similar value, Ravi adopts a conscious frugality. But his family’s relative austerity accords them with a different richness: to inject pleasure into their work, without foregoing critical joys.
From Code to Chords: Kickstarting a Music School
After 20 years in the IT sector, Ravi decided to found a music venture. Starting off with minimal infrastructure, The RaGa School of Music was sparked off inside his house. Shortly, while scouting around his neighbourhood with his son Rahul, he stumbled on a two-bedroom house where they could host classes. “My initial investment was INR 70,000 towards advance and INR 7000 for the first month’s rent.”
Kickstarted with two students, seated on metal and plastic stools, the school gradually gained a reputation. And grew at a rapid clip from thereon. In a short period, two students had ballooned to 25 or 30, till they reached a peak of about 300 students at a time. While Ravi himself taught guitar, he hired teachers for other instruments like the keyboard. To date, they have trained over 25,000 students: “In guitar alone, I think I have taught over six and a half thousand students.”
Play First, Learn Later
He was careful when designing the curriculum that the course would be taught in the way he might have liked to learn. “The whole design is influenced by teaching the person to play.” Ravi sees the instrument as a means to articulate ideas, to speak a particular kind of language. And he also sensed that the learning could be significantly accelerated to accommodate learners who wanted to play for pleasure. Rather than for those who wished to evolve into professional musicians.
Instead of having students wade in theory and or be subjected to tortuous scale exercises, he quickly taught them to evoke melodies and tunes. After all, in this digitally-distracted age, it was important to keep students motivated about their own progress. He comments that he used the AGILE approach to teaching.
To optimize the usage of the rented space when classes were not being conducted, he started a music store to sell and service musical instruments. He also hired a college student as an intern, offering to mentor him in addition to paying a salary: “Today he’s a post-doctorate in Germany,” Ravi notes with pride.
Forging Family Ventures
After running the music school and store for a decade, Ravi found himself at a crossroads again. He had the choice to scale his school, but he was hesitant to adopt the conventional approach to “growth.” He knew when it came to education or teaching, scaling often entailed a compromise on quality.
Besides, his own kids were grown now, and each had specific musical talents that they wanted to explore. His son, also an adept instrumentalist, was keen on music production. Ravi partnered with him to cofound a studio: MeDad Media Studio. His daughter, Raksha, a trained Carnatic singer, was keen on forging a vocalist’s career. His wife Gayathri, an expert veena player, had also taught classes at the music school. Between the four of them, they possessed the capability to create inventive musical content while leveraging their expertise in different directions.
Harmony In Other Spheres
Shutting down the store and pruning the school to a few skeletal, online students, Ravi also chose to explore another interest: human development. During his corporate career, mentoring and coaching had always been a strong suit. He founded AltEd, an enterprise that bridges the gaps between academic knowhow and workplace demands. With a focus on imparting applied thinking, skills and communication to children, young adults and professionals, AltEd conducts targeted workshops run by experienced practitioners.
Such forays had always been baked into his Excel plans. Clear that he does not plan to retire at any point, he wants to ensure that his life stays stimulating. And that can happen by being engaged in a series of purposeful activities, rooted in domains that feel enjoyable to him. “I have interest in gardening, photography, writing, cooking and painting.”
Adopting a Craftsman’s Code
Right from childhood, Ravi had always been very hands-on around the house. He fixed his own ceiling fans, and electrical fittings, repaired his water pipes, unclogged his sinks. He was also familiar with carpentry, and with fixing different appliances. This practical set of skills came in quite handy at the workplace, since it enabled a certain kind of problem-solving that many theoretical engineers struggled with. He has ensured that his kids too have imbibed this hands-on approach to day-to-day tasks, which goes against the grain for many middle to upper-middle class households that outsource such jobs to household staff or plumbers and electricians.
During visits to his grandfather’s place in Kerala, he would help with watering the garden through channels on the ground. This was a large field like garden, with rows of coconut trees and watering involved opening and closing channels manually, to ensure water flow in real time: “It was like dynamically controlling the flow of a small stream.”
At his IT workplaces, Ravi feels his hands-on approach also helped forge an entrepreneurial mindset that organizations were quick to recognize. In companies he worked in, he was always tasked with setting up a new capability or team: “Creating something brand new every 18 months.” In stints that spanned five years, he had set up at least three new teams or units. For instance at Dell India R&D, where they had practically nothing when Ravi joined: “In six years, we did phenomenal work together.”
Crafting a Distinct Legacy
Besides his involvement with AltEd and MeDad, Ravi also releases his own compositions on a channel titled Instrumental Conversations. Confident that all interests can be plumbed to generate meaningful outcomes, he bucketizes his passions, so that he can focus on each area at various stages in his life. Recognizing that doing too many things at once would denude quality, he allots at least ten years to explore each domain with reasonable depth and intensity: “That’s my way of saying that when I am 80 or 90 years old, when I look back, I should feel happy looking at the diversity of the legacy.”
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