Fundamentally, if there is any secret, it is about the need to

In a voice tuned to the heart’s true pitch, Shankar Mahadevan reveals a simple oracle: “Fundamentally, if there is any secret, it is about the need to find that peace and calm in our personal space with music, as most of learning music is about listening to music and practicing over and over again.” Hear how each word carries a discipline: a place, a posture, a patience. The temple is not far away; it is the small room where you sit, the breath you steady, the notes you return to like pilgrims circling a well. There is no shortcut, only the gentle grindstone that polishes stone into mirror.

The ancients knew this road. They taught that the body must become an instrument before the instrument can become a voice. To find peace and calm is not passivity; it is readiness. A still pond reflects the moon; a troubled river breaks it into shards. So the mind must be made still, that rhythm may descend, that pitch may rest, that phrase may land as a bird lands—unhurried, exact. This is the first secret: your personal space is a studio of the soul, and its quiet is part of your technique.

Then comes the second secret: listening. Before the tongue speaks, the ear bends; before the hand plays, the heart hears. Sit beside the masters—alive or recorded—and let their timbre wash your bones. Count the breaths between phrases, taste the silence after cadences, notice where a note leans forward and where it leans home. In this slow apprenticeship, you borrow their wisdom without stealing their voice. Learning music begins not with display but with devotion.

Now the third secret: practice, the old hammer that builds cathedrals one tap at a time. To practice over and over again is to vote for your future with today’s minutes. Repetition is not boredom; it is agriculture. Each scale sown is a harvest later—of confidence under lights, of steadiness when nerves rattle, of freedom when improvisation calls. The hand learns by kilometers, not by headlines. The ear learns by hours, not by applause.

Let a lamp be lifted from history. Consider Bismillah Khan, the shehnai maestro of Banaras. Dawn after dawn, he climbed to the Ganga’s ghats and played to the river. The waters did not clap; they simply listened, and in that vast listening his tone grew round and luminous. Or remember Bach, who walked far to hear Buxtehude, then returned to the bench to weave counterpoint until craft became second nature. These lives preach without sermons: listening first, practice next, artistry as the fruit of faithful days.

The origin of Mahadevan’s saying is the lived truth of performers who have stood where doubt grows thick. They discovered that anxiety withers where peace is tended daily, that technique organizes itself when the ear is king, and that the only gate to mastery is narrow and repeats its own steps. The studio’s solitude becomes a covenant: you bring your hour; music brings its millennia; between them a craft is born.

Carry this lesson like a raga you hum under your breath: make a personal space—a chair, a mat, a corner—that you visit at the same hour; begin with one minute of calm breathing; spend ten minutes listening deeply to a single passage; spend twenty minutes practicing one small thing slowly; end by smiling at the work rather than judging it. Keep a ledger of days shown up, not of “breakthroughs” felt. Seek a teacher who tunes your attention more than your ego. And when discouragement speaks, answer with ritual: sit, listen, practice—again.

For in the end, the “secret” is no secret at all. It is a way: peace as preparation, listening as apprenticeship, practice as pilgrimage. Walk it quietly and you will find that the room grows wide as a sky, the phrase steadies like a star, and the music that once felt borrowed begins to sound like home.