CHILD PRODIGIES OR JUST LEARNERS?

Here is a picture of my brother and myself. My elder brother is holding the violin and I have my arm across his shoulder, watching him "play".
As I have already said we had the most indulgent father in the whole world, HH Shri Bhola Nathji, who, we were sure , would even get us the moon if we wished for it.
And so we wished for a violin. And here we are in this photo with the violin, dressed in snazzy suits, which were a rarity for children in those days, but which were made for us by our father.
The violin had the words "Stradivarius" written on a label inside, but it was an imitation of the real Stradivarius, even though it was made in Czechoslovakia.
Learning the violin was an agony we were unprepared for. The screeching and scraping sounds we made on it made the dogs in the house howl. Our parents bore it in silence.
They got us a long-haired music teacher who made even worse scraping and screeching sounds on the instrument while trying to teach us how to play it! He used to tell us that he was actually 80 years old but looked young because of the black hair dye he used.
It is said that the violin is such a tough instrument to play that you need several lifetimes to become a Yehudi Menuhin or Isaac Stern. Here you actually have to produce something called "music".
On a piano if you touch a key you get a musical sound, but on the violin if you pull the bow across the strings all you hear is a weird screeching cum scraping sound.
Our Music Teacher would teach us Classical Indian Ragas and made us note down the notes on a small music book in the house. Things went well until the dog sprayed it with his diarrhea one day and obliterated the Ragas for posterity.
Somehow we managed to "master" the instrument, which meant we ceased to scrape on it and were able to produce some music.
By that time our father got us a second violin so that we could play a duet.
I recall a concert the two of us gave at a school, and how we were applauded by the audience. The music teacher was behind the curtain beating out a rhythm on the tabla as background music.
Later he said proudly to the audience:
"I taught them how to play the violin!"
And several people amongst the audience got up to say to him:
"And now they play better than you!"
I cannot say whether that was a compliment to our playing or an unkind reference to his!! He had been known to have tomatoes cast at him in many concerts in the city where he played.
My advice to music lovers is : - if you want to start music please don't do so with a violin. It is said that it takes several life-times to master the instrument, and till then it is a torment on the learners as well as the listeners.
The violins still lie in my house, without strings or the bows, but the wooden structures are still intact which makes them look like violins, or Stradivariuses.