There is a point in our phone call with Shivank Menon when the conversation veers almost into the domain of cosmology. We ask him how being a musician is helping him evolve as a person. He tells us that the art form has allowed him to grasp the value of time. It's made him understand how important fleeting moments in life are since — unlike a painting that you can stare at for 30 minutes before coming back to it again — a live musical performance lasts only for a transient period. "That makes you mindful not just about the passage of time, but also about its qualitative nature. It's easy to say, 'Oh, I have wasted these many hours.' But that creates an idea of time as a quantity. Music made me realise that time doesn't get wasted — time just passes," he says, adding that we thus have to appreciate all that's happening around as our hours — even if spent idly — flow by like a cotton bud floating in the air without ever resting on the ground.

Menon is 16 years old. These are inferences that belie his age, as does his self-realisation about the perils of being overconfident. The Malad resident tells us that his journey into music started initially with the guitar, and then with the drums when he was hardly 10 years old. But he quickly grew tired of these instruments and — with encouragement from his parents — took to the piano that his family had at home. This was also the same time that he first heard Western classical music by the likes of Frédéric Chopin and Claude Debussy, and something clicked. "When I started playing the piano, it was just an obligation. But when I first heard Western classical music, I fell in love with it and that injected the passion [to play the piano] in me. The two things went hand in hand," Menon tells us.