Having a sense of nationalistic fervour is bandied about these days as if it's something that's as important as being a humane person. But musically speaking, if there's one thing that we can be truly proud of as a country, it's our age-old tradition of mastering the art of percussion. We aren't talking necessarily about the tabla here. Or, say, the dholak. For, our musical culture is so rich that it involves a 5,000-year-old technique where the human voice acts as a percussive instrument. That technique is called konnakal. You've most likely heard it when Indian classical musicians keep "taal" in the form of vocal beats where, say, a person goes "taa dhum taka dhum" (or something else on those lines). And a workshop this evening will illustrate how it can apply not just to music, but even to the other arts, like oratory and writing for instance.

Viveick Rajagopalan, a mridangam player who will be conducting it, tells us, "The idea of having a language of percussion is unique to India in the sense that it was really evolved even centuries ago. And konnakol was a language that was used to teach people instruments. But what happened is that it eventually became an art form by itself. That kind of died down with time, though the vocabulary — or the language — remained."