Vedha Music
C 72, Pocket 2, Kendriya Vihar II, Sector 82, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201304, India
Vedha Music is a hidden gem that first-timers often mistake for just another instrument shop wedged between the betel-leaf stalls and sari emporiums of Mylapore’s East Mada Street. Step through the two-foot wooden threshold—where the gold-foil calendar from 2010 still enjoys pride of place—and the sound layer peels back. No traffic horns survive here; instead, the drone of a tanpura is permanently floating out of a decades-old Phillips cassette player perched behind the counter.
The shop itself is no bigger than a single-car garage. Its walls, dark with decades of agarbatti smoke, disappear under stacks of hand-tuned tabla pairs from Meerut, veenas strung with real deer horn pegs and, inexplicably, a basket of bean-shaped Shanti bells labeled “child grade.” Proprietor T. K. Vedhagiri—called simply “Vedha sir” by every violinist from Santhome to Singapore—floats among these treasures like a benevolent ghost. His narrow frame, always wrapped in a threadbare blue veshti, drips Ganesh-shaped silver rings from every finger; blind in one eye since birth, that milky iris seems to notice timbre rather than color.
Lessons are the heartbeat. At 4:30 p.m. sharp the folding plywood door that separates the storefront from the back studio is rolled aside. There, under one glowing tube-light, three generations sit cross-legged on the cool red floor. A nine-year-old learning varnam No. 2 is flanked by a retired bank manager trying to master Thyagaraja’s “Nagumomu” on a cheek-pinkried acrylic sruti box. Vedha sir swivels on a low stool, reducing intricate raga phrases to bird-call whistles, then demanding the same whistle back in perfect swara. His corrections are infamously gentle: “Close your left ear trumpet, kanna—the note lives closer to the skull.”
Recordings leak constantly from the studio. Old Wollensak reel-to-reels capture debut kutcheris, while newer Zoom devices archive fusion experiments—last year a Swedish nyckelharpa player overdubbed a Behag alaap Vedha’s daughter sang at twenty-one. Those tapes are shelved behind the cash tin in biscuit cans labeled “Student Gems / Do Not Feed Milk.”
Beyond instruments and instruction, Vedha Music is a matchmaker. When a visiting Hindustani flautist needs a mridangist for a midnight concert at the Music Academy, Vedha sir simply dials one of sixty numbers memorized in no particular order. Middle-aged mothers arrive clutching handwritten wedding invitations for “light-music orchestra” quotas; college boys come back from the U.S. on holiday, borrowing a spare kanjira so they can join December’s kacheri brunch back in Jersey.
When the shutters finally clang shut at 9:45 p.m., the music does not stop—it migrates to the street itself. Vedha sir, minus his rings, sits on the threshold and lights a half-beadi, humming Vasantha till the security guard turns his key in the ration-shop padlock next door.
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- Published: July 28, 2025
