The souvenir that I couldn't return...
It was an October afternoon in 2001 I walked into the house of violin maestro Lalgudi G Jayaraman with a ‘sorry’. I was late by almost an hour for the interview that I had fixed with him over phone a week ago. But there was no problem. With his trademark humility, he invited me to his house. “Music is like a painting. The seven swaras denote seven colours...” He began the conversation with music. “A violinist should be a vocalist,” he explained, “Otherwise he can’t play the lyrics correctly.” Lalgudi Jayaraman was trained in Carnatic vocal, but he later chose violin because he was fond of the instrument. “Violin gives an extension of my imaginations. It’s a part of me. I can’t see it separately,” he said. When I asked him about the violin that renowned American violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin presented to him while attending the Edinburgh Music Festival in 1965, he smiled and started talking about Menuhin. “He loved our music, art and culture. He was a good friend.” Wh