Music_Man

This weekend I finally got a chance to hangout with the man of the house. He’s an Ayurvedic doctor with some famous clientele. He’s developing a new technique of massage set to music. So he demonstrated on my shoulders and neck and I have to say that the tension that I carry dissipated after that 6-minute massage. He doesn’t do the normal kneading, but it’s a light tapping: tap, tap, tap-tap-tap-tap-, tap-tap, tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, tap, ta-a-a-a—p, tap.

He got into the business about 15 years ago. At that time he was a business man who had been diagnosed with stage II cancer. Twenty-eight days that he spent in the hospital has changed his life forever. “I felt an energy go through me. It was a gift. I realized that I must help people heal.” He then said, “I went to the other side and came back.” From that point on “I had to do good. Not do things for monetary reasons, but because people feel better after I help them.”

I like listening to his way of saying that music is the great equalizer when talking about how Zakir Hussain, “though a staunch Muslim,” performs any venue be it temple or church, or Carnegie Hall. Then in the next breath he tells me he liked Wisconsin because “there aren’t that many blacks there” and the streets are organized and quiet. Then the next story he says he can’t live any where else because he would miss the chaos and buzz of this city. Despite these turns and contradictions he wholeheartedly says that he is always working to be a better person. He says no matter who he meets, he looks for the good in that person and works with that. He discusses the world in terms of energy and the world being about the handling of this energy. I like talking to people who don’t see the world in concrete terms. When you think about how vision works, how sound works, how color comes to be what it is, how light works, how the senses work by explanation of science/ physics, it’s actually a beautiful metaphor he weaves.