'In Taranath, world lost a fine musician and a finer human

Bengaluru, NT Bureau: His friends and fellow musicians describe pandit Rajeev Taranath as straight forward to the point of being acerbic – in fact Carnatic musician T M Krishna calls him 'extremely combative' in a film documenting his life, 'A Life in Music'.

And, yet, at the same time, they also recall how he was kind to a fault. The passing away of sarod maestro pandit Rajeev Taranath, said his friends and fellow musicians, is a great loss to humanity.

Taranath, 92, the first south Indian musician to achieve fame as a sarod player and who performed even after he turned 90, died on June 11, while undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Mysuru.

"He fell down and broke his hip bone and had to go through surgery because of that," said Pandit Ravindra Yavagal, a tabla player who had been his friend as well as accompanying him on tabla for 40 years.

How Taranath fell in love with sarod is a legendary story by itself, said his fellow musicians.

"He was a great fan of Pandit Ravi Shankar. I think it was in the early 1970s, Taranath had gone for a jugalbandi concert between Ravi Shankar and legendary sarod player Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, held in Bengaluru. He went for Ravi Shankar, but he fell so in love with the way sarod was played by Khan that he gave up his cushy job as professor and head of English department at REC in Tiruchirapalli," said Yavagal.