Wah Ustad!

Ustad Zakir Hussain teaches Indian Music in Stanford. Last quarter, he had called for teaching assistants. My little sis PeeVee sent across her (music) resume. He liked it, called her for an interview, and selected her and two others as his teaching assistants.

And since we are a music-loving lot, the news of PeeVee being a TA to Zakir Hussain spread far and wide in family and friend circles, and she probably got more congratulatory calls for this than when she got an admission to Stanford!

So for three months, she interacted with the Ustad pretty closely. It is quite obvious to anybody who knows of his existence that his is a very charming personality, and according to P, he is a "genuinely nice person, very down to earth, light-hearted, friendly and affectionate. Goes out of his way to help everybody." Heart-warming!

Anyway, during this quarter, the Little One was born, and when she was about a week or two old, when we played music to her, she would go all silent and listen intently. When that part of the rendering began, in which the Tabla dominated, she used to go all round-eyed and would start beating her limbs non-stop. Well, it happened too many times to be a coincidence, and so we decided that she loved the Tabla. And since most of the music we played for her had Zakir Hussain's tabla, we jokingly concluded that she was a fan of Zakir Hussain's.

Well. On the last day of the music class at Stanford, Zakir Hussain, his wife and daughter took PeeVee and the other TAs out for dinner. PeeVee took a printout of one of the snaps of the Little One I had sent to her, took it to Zakir, and told him that this baby, her niece, was his youngest fan and could he please autograph it.

He was fascinated by the snap. (Says PeeVee). He took it in his hands, and said "Oh, what a beautiful baby... beautiful hands....look at her long fingers...touchwood.. touchwood...". Then he asked PeeVee for the Little One's name, and wrote out a little message on the snap, and autographed it.

PeeVee showed it to us through the webcam, and man, am I thrilled! :)

Why am I posting this almost two months later? Coz I have been waiting and waiting for PeeVee to take a snap of that autographed picture which is a printout of a snap that I sent to her and send it to me (confused you, didn't I?), so that I could put it up along with this post. But she is too lazy busy. So I am going ahead with it.