Chord of misery

Last week I was introduced to a musician who shares his surname with our Test captain Anil Kumble.

The Kumble I met had just had spine surgery, and was depressed. He works as a sessions artiste (he plays the keyboard at studio recordings) and also as a concert accompanist to singers. In the course of a long chat, he told me something I instinctively believed.

Kumble has developed diabetes in the last four or five years, and his family hasn't been able to figure out why. He has always exercised well: walked 2 km to the Lal Bagh lake and done 40 laps on its stone steps. And he has eaten well: no footpath food, no wedding hall food, just plain home food. At 50, he looks young, with not a grey hair, but feels psychologically mauled.

And the worry, he told me, concerns the use of chords. He is a self-taught musician, but he doesn't understand how the left hand ought to work. He has consulted pianists and other music teachers and asked them question after question.

"One just wanted money to drink, another said he hated Indian music," he said. "And no one had any answers."

Kumble has bought books worth Rs 10,000, which he has stacked up in his tiny house, but is none the wiser. "Where is a seventh appropriate? Why should I play this chord and not that?" he asked, like a child insisting on one proper answer to a homework sum.

He believes his obsession with trying to understand chords pushed him towards diabetes. "I am sure I brought it upon myself by worrying day and night about chords," he told me. "I simply went crazy."

A friend told me Kumble plays well, and is needlessly weighed down by his inferiority complex.

But I could empathise with him. I told him he was asking a philosophical question to which there could be no final answer. One composer may use a diminished chord where another uses a seventh. Who is to say who is right? It's art, it's aesthetics, and it's anxiety!