The Zakir Hussain Interview

What's happening in today's world is that everything is happening so quickly that the minute a good idea comes along it doesn't have a chance to drop root because we have already moved on to the next idea and then another idea and then another idea

You find people clamoring to sink into one and before they are really able to experience it and understand it and enjoy it they are thrown into another little pond. So I can see people narrowing their viewpoint.  They are saying, "hey let me get used to this one before I move onto the next.

It's the rapidly changing nature of our cultural journey. The world has gotten smaller quite rapidly much faster then it needed to. To much is out there and too much is being thrown at everybody and they don't know how to react to it. You find people who enjoy rap fighting with people doing hip hop. "Hey rap is where it's at, no hip hops the best" when in fact both have similar ingredients.

With someone like Ali Akbar Kahn you have to say he made the ultimate sacrifice. He was @ the height of his professional career as a performer in the 60s. He was accepted as one of the greatest musicians of our time.

He said, "well if I have to pass on this knowledge I'm going to have to drop anchor and stay somewhere. Have students come to me and be available day in and day out. If that means I have to sacrifice my professional career as a musician then that's what's going to happen. So that's what he did. When you went to his class you felt like you were in a Temple, a place of worship. A place where the whole world was blocked  out by something so Reverent and so strong  that no negative energy could pierce it. There you were in that world learning from him with no distractions at all.

The one thing about him was that he was so spiritually at peace with himself. The idea of the material world, having great success and accolades did not matter. What mattered was preserving, nurturing and passing on the knowledge that he grew up with and the wondrous nature of it."

That kind of sacrifice is something only spiritual gods and sages are capable off."