Pic courtesy/Nisha Sonde

"I would bang tables and pans as a kid, before my grandfather decided to replace them with a tabla," laughs Gurpreet Chana, while talking about his love for percussion and training under tabla exponent Parshotam Singh. Based in Canada, Chana often used to be the only Indian in his school and university. While that never affected his passion for Indian music, it gave him an unusual identity in a multicultural diaspora. 'The Tabla Guy' is how the world now knows the 30-year-old musician-engineer, courtesy the university summits where he represented his college with a pair of intriguing Indian 'drums'.