Music has been an integral part of my life, whether it was my mom singing us to sleep with her sweet lullabies or my brother and I knocking on an empty blue water drum in our backyard to an unknown beat that only made sense to us.
When I turned three, I would listen to the catchy Bengali songs on TV and dance to the beat, trying to copy the dancers. It was then my mom decided that it was time to put me in dance.
At the age of 4, I started to learn an Indian classical dance called Odissi. Odissi was how I learned to connect with everyone around me. It was through Odissi that I started to come out of the shell.
The person I am today is partly because of the influence of music in my life. With all the negative things in the world right now, music helps me focus on the good of the world. It helps me clear my brain and de-stress, creating a shield from what I consider “the outside world”. It is because I have this shield that I can feel more comfortable interacting with people. And as time went on, I grew out of my social awkwardness.
But music has impacted not only how I interact socially, but how I regard this meaty shell that is flesh, skin, and bones, for all its drawbacks and triumphs.
More specifically, playing the violin helped me with that. At the age of 9, I learned how to play the violin. Compared to some of my classmates, who had started from the age of 4, I was a bit late to the game. However, I loved playing my instrument. I loved the different styles I could play, from classical to rock, and everything in between. Now, before I started to play the violin, I did have a little musical experience with my dancing, where I physically learned about how to portray a piece’s character, or how to count beats. I already had a physical sense of the workings of my body and how it moves. But through the violin, I learned how the violin was made for the human body. The way you hold the bow and the instrument allows you to perform different techniques to make sound in different ways.
It was through music that I started to love science. Learning about how the violin was centered around the human body made me learn more about the human body than I ever knew. I learned about frequencies and sound waves and how I could project my tune louder and softer with a combination of moves. Learning to play the violin and dancing made me more self-aware and helped me find my inner grit in life. At the end of the day, I love music. I love everything about it.