Malhar And The Sea: How Music Offered A Moment Of Stillness In A Busy Life
An invitation to Malhar and the Sea offered a welcome pause, bringing together music, nature and community in a deeply reflective escape
Excel sheets, revenue targets and H1 projections had swallowed my days. The pressure to make the numbers speak became a low hum in my chest — one that stole the mercy of a full night’s sleep. Then, like a hand extended at exactly the right moment, came an invitation to Malhar and the Sea at Taj Exotica.
The festival opened with Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar, the twentieth torchbearer of a Dhrupad gharana five centuries old and his voice seemed to reach backward through all that time. Between phrases, the maestro offered a quiet truth, that even time deserves time, and spoke of the five Ps of music, Pause chief among them. Perhaps that’s the whole secret of Malhar by the Sea: an invitation to practice that pause.
Shujaat Khan followed, and what he gave was spectacular, a tribute rendered in strings and silence to Jagjit Singh, Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, and the others who taught a nation how to feel. Each note landed somewhere between memory and transcendence.
One conversation stayed with me longer than the rest. It was with Shivam Bharadwaj, founder of ‘Tasawwur Ensemble’, a word that means imagination. Bharadwaj’s mission is simple: to keep qawwali honest, and to summon, wherever he performs, the same spiritual charge one might feel inside a dargah.
I wanted to hold onto all of it, the ocean, the melodies, the enveloping stillness that seemed to invite self-discovery. Morning came without alarms, without a notification, only sweet birdsong.
Over two nights and three days, nearly 150 guests and 100 members of the Malhar and the Sea team built something larger than any one performance: a temporary community bound by music.
At the end of the day, Malhar and the Sea is not really a music festival. It is a reminder that sometimes the greatest gift we can give ourselves is the permission to pause, to listen and simply be present.
This trip helped me find something in me that spreadsheets had silently buried, my connection to music, and through it, my connection to myself. Before it could be anything else, the music helped me come home to my own company.