Why I stopped listening to music—and how I’m finding my way back

And music? Music was my oxygen. For 42 years, it was the pulse of my existence, the rhythm of my being. I lived inside its intricacies, its ragas and talas, its rises and falls. I studied it, chased it, lost myself in it. My guru, Marina Ahmed, shaped my ears, my voice, my understanding of the universe itself. She taught me not just how to sing, but how to listen. “Music,” she would say, “is not sound—it is silence wrapped in melody.”

She was right.

And I understood that silence. I lived in it, let it speak between the swaras, between the alaps that stretched time, between the breaths that carried my voice through space. My mornings, my afternoons, my nights—they were all hers, all music’s. Raga Bhairav at dawn, Yaman at dusk, a stolen moment with Malkauns in the quiet of the night.

And then, one day, the silence turned against me.

First, came the helicopter.

Its blades didn’t just hum; they hacked, tore, and throbbed through the air, through my mind, through my body. It started subtly—a distant noise, a tremor on the horizon. But it grew louder, closer, until it wasn’t just something I heard. It was something I felt. Deep in my bones. Inside my chest. A vibration that rattled my teeth, my nerves, my very being. It lived inside me, a mechanical beast that battered my mind, stealing my thoughts, scattering them like autumn leaves in the wind.

I would sit, frozen. Muscles locked. Breath shallow. Heart hammering.

The helicopter made a home inside me, and no one else could hear it.

Then came the scorpion.

Where the helicopter was blunt, the scorpion was cruel. It didn’t attack with noise—it stung with precision. It found the places where I was weakest, where I was rawest. My eyelids. My skull. My eardrums.

The pain did not crash into me; it crept. Slowly. Methodically. It spread like ink in water, seeping into every corner, pulsing with venom.

It did not strike every day. No, the scorpion was far too patient for that. It let me breathe, let me believe I had escaped, then returned when I least expected it. Some weeks, it came every few days. Some weeks, it gave me false hope before sinking its sting back into me, sharper than before.

And I hated it.

I spoke to it sometimes, when the pain was unbearable, when my body was too exhausted to fight. “Why are you doing this?” I would whisper. “What do you want from me?”

It never answered. It didn’t need to. The pain was its response. The suffering was its message.

But it wasn’t just pain. The scorpion and the helicopter stole something more sacred than my comfort—they took music from me.

They rewired me, made sound unbearable, made silence sinister. They turned the thing I loved most into something I feared. They took Marina’s voice, my riyaz, my mornings filled with tanpuras humming in the background, and they shattered it all. The thought of music became unbearable. The idea of listening felt impossible.

I stopped.

And that is where people find me now—stopped, silent, caught between the echoes of who I was and the uncertainty of who I am becoming.

But what they don’t know—what I don’t tell them—is that the scorpion and the helicopter didn’t stop at sound. They left smaller, quieter scars. Things no one sees. Things I barely speak about.

When I talk for too long, saliva builds in my mouth, and I have to pause, discreetly swallow, absorb it before it spills over. And when I sing—oh, when I sing—drool sometimes drips before I can stop it. And I hate that. I hate it so much I want to stop singing altogether.

But I don’t. I can’t.

My lisp, once so faint it was barely noticeable, has become more pronounced. Words sometimes slip, trip, tumble out of my mouth awkwardly, refusing to shape themselves the way they used to. My voice, once my greatest instrument, now betrays me in ways no one can see but me.

And yet, I sing.

Not because it is easy. But because it is necessary.

The strange thing is, my own voice does not unsettle me the way other sounds do. Where the voices of others arrest me, invade me, fill me with distress, my own voice feels… safe. Like an anchor. Like a bridge between the man I was and the man I am now.

It is not the same voice. It is not the same music. But it is still mine.

And there are conversations I have now, between the man I was and the man I have become. The old me, the one who lived and breathed music, asks, “Why are you afraid? Why do you let the scorpion and the helicopter define you?”

And the new me sighs. “Because they didn’t just hurt me. They changed me.”

The old me watches. Listens. Waits.

One day, I will have an answer for him.

My friend Smita Tharoor, wise and sharp as a blade, once taught me about unconscious bias. About the way we inherit fear, the way it moulds us without our permission. She made me realise that the scorpion and the helicopter trained me to fear sound. Conditioned me to see it as an enemy.

She made me wonder—was it truly music that terrified me now? Or was it memory?

So I am trying.

Trying to let sound back in. Trying to listen to a song here, a raga there. Trying to unlearn the fear, to separate the melody from the memories.

Ashish Sharma, my mentee, once said to me, “Chef, you’re a musician. How can you not listen to music?”

And the truth is—I can. I just have to choose to.

I know I will never be the same man I was before the scorpion and the helicopter. But I don’t need to be. The man I am now is different, yes. Changed. Marked. But he is still here. He is still telling stories, still cooking, still mentoring, still searching for himself in the spaces between sound and silence.

And yes—he is still singing. Not with the same ease. Not with the same freedom. But with the same love.

So when people ask me why I don’t listen to music, I still don’t know how to answer.

But maybe the answer doesn’t matter.

Maybe it’s enough to say that sound is complicated for me now.

It is both my torment and my solace. My fear and my hope.

And maybe, one day, I will listen to music not with hesitation, but with joy.

Until then, I will keep moving forward.

One note, one breath, one sound at a time.