Return

Back in school, my best friend and me spent hours listening to music. While he always loved pop and had a great music system, which’d play everything from George Michael to the Pet Shop Boys to A-Ha, I was always interested in music that had 'real' drums — The Police, for one (even at that point of time, I liked a resonant, 'real' drum sound over the flat, reverb-fed 80s glam sound).
It wasn't until a year later that I actually mustered enough courage to tell my father that I was gonna spend Sunday mornings at "drum class", under this guy who was playing with a local rock band called Fahrenheit. They nailed a very cool (or it seemed at least at that point of time) version of Eat The Rich, and I was very impressed.
In any case, after that fateful first sitting, my Sundays weren't ever the same again.
I loved walking to the class, in Mandeville Gardens, from my Dover Lane residence. At 14, I was pretty sure that I'm gonna be playing drums for the rest of my life. There was a curious pity at my mates watching Mahabharata; I liked to imagine, as always, that I was gaining entry into this strange and mysterious world of rhythms, melodies and harmonies which fellow-mortals my age weren't even aware of. At least the non-musical ones at that.
The following year, just passing my Class X boards, I walked into Kochuda's (http://theorientexpress.tripod.com/) class. That was another big event as far as my drumming life goes.

The first-ever kit that I played on with the band was a see-through fiberglass kit, built by Bapi Music Company — otherwise known as 'BCM' — Calcutta.

'Em drummers

I just came across the Kumu Handmade Drums website (http://kumu.fi ). Beautiful drums, aren't they?

In the history section of the site, founder-owner Pekka Helanen talks of his childhood and how he started out playing drums. It gave me enough inspiration to take a peek back into mine and just blog about some serious fun we had, back in the last century.
I started getting interested in the drumset as an instrument at the age of 12 or 13 — relatively old in comparison to prodigies like Eloy Casagrande. Back in school, me and my best friend would spend hours listening to music.

I didn't have my own drumkit till I was about 21 years old. I started playing friom age 16. I have played in two semi-pro bands through college, for all three years, on someone else's drumkits. Yeah, that makes me a strong contender for WFPD ('World's Funkiest Pillow Drummer').
As a kid — why, even when I was about 16, I used to hang bedsheets and towels from the bed posts to act as 'cymbals' and had multiple cushions stacked up to act as 'hi-hats'.