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Tabla, Drums Are Easy? Yeah, Right!

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ByFaizal Sohaimi
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How often do you see someone doing something, and you thought, Bah! That’s easy! You saw a friend who didn’t do much, nor well at school, recently being appointed as a non-executive director of a listed company. Bah, easy! Or so you thought. Or even being a pilot; you visited the cockpit (in the old days before 911) and you saw that all they did was chat – autopilot you’d say…

Or you saw on tv that all policemen did was eat doughnuts, cruise on big bikes around the city, or stopped and harassed some people sometimes.

The rock drummer

I fancied myself a rock drummer. I played the drums – more than 20 years ago perhaps. A bit of a percussionist too. We had the bongo for our band kit during my school days which I repurposed as tom-toms.

a man playing drum

Look at the sets of Neil Peart of Rush or Terry Bozio, you’d think that drumming was a complex business. Looking at how Neil Peart played, especially his solos, it was. Or even Buddy Rich with his simple kit. They can do seriously mean drum solos. Not much of Ringo Starr though.

Drumming was easy to pick up or learn. It’s like you have it, or you don’t. I never had any drum lessons. My dad was stingy, he’d buy bullets for his hunting gun instead. Fortunately, my secondary school had a decent drum set. Drums n percussions were sort of in me. If I listened to a song, after a while, I could play it. Even complex ones. I practised drumming with my teeth! Listened to the song a few times and knew how it flowed, I could replace the drummer. Except for maybe the ones that require double bass work. But with a little practice to give a bit of stamina to the tibialis anterior muscle, I could likely replace the drummer too. Kind of a natural at it. 

Most rock songs could do. Jazz with a funky time signature, maybe. I couldn’t accept it then that many people couldn’t play the drums. I had to play the drums for two bands at school because I was the only person in my batch who could play. I practised, imaginary, with my teeth during class. Yet still paid attention in class. No, kidding, only during boring subjects with lousy teachers.

The Tabla (the small Indian hand percussion)

When I heard that my friend, Perthpal Singh Khosa, could play the tabla, I thought “what’s the big deal?” I used to watch the Orkestra RTM tabla player dude played it on the television all the time. Looked easy. Very easy. Until the time I had the opportunity to touch a tabla. Tapped it, nope! The sound that came out was nowhere near what I heard on television. You know the tak-ke-tak-ke-tum.

The tabla (the small indian hand percussion)

Whoa…

Didn’t they tune this thing properly? How the heck were these things tuned?

At the recent Malaysia Association of Professional Speakers (MAPS) Convention, Perthpal, who is a great trainer and speaker, shared about his journey of learning the tabla. The rigorousness and patience along the journey were astounding to me. I believed that I would throw the tabla out the window not even half of that journey! But not Perthpal. He persevered.

He played them very well! He demonstrated the tak-ke-tak-ke-tum, tak-kri-tak-ke-tum-tum-kri-tak-kri-tak-ke-tum-tum and I was mesmerized!

I had a different level of appreciation now for tabla playing and a whole gamut of other things in life. Especially, those things that I took for granted as I found them to be easy. Perthpal shared with us about the years he diligently invested learning the tabla. That took him to a certain level of mastery. Just like what Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outlier.

When I looked at my drumming, I realised that I could play, but my mastery is nowhere near Perthpal’s, on his tabla. Of course, light years away to Neil Peart’s! When Perthpal shared his father’s life journey and when he resigned from his job as a security guard for probably more than 30 years and took up calligraphy, my jaw simply dropped! And he learned calligraphy from a teacher who was only in her 20s.

Simply Big Deal

While you might think, no big deal as I initially did, Perthpal’s father, Jaswant Singh Khosa, had atrocious handwriting, allegedly, according to his oh-so-loving son. This part got my attention as my handwriting was and still is atrocious! Passion and persistence, however, carried Jaswant to beauty and the status of a legend. 

That beauty was in form of the holy book of the Sikh’s people, the Guru Granth Sahib Ji. 

Read this slowly; one thousand, four hundred and thirty handwritten pages. Didn’t that blow your mind? And that’s with the 1.5m x 0.5m in size. That handwritten holy book is now on display and use at the Sikhs’ Golden Temple in Amritsar, India; replacing the previous copy that was 200 years old. It was used in their daily prayers.

Calligraphy was something that looked deceptively simple to me. I could write decent Arabic script and dabbled a bit in Arabic letters calligraphy. However, passion and persistence were not there for me, though I potentially had the talent. Something that looks deceptively simple, can be composed into a complex piece, which requires years of practice and mastery, to untangle and unravel to get a beautiful result.

Selling – a combination of talent and practice

Isn’t that similar to training, and selling?

Many would think or say, you can talk, you like to talk. Go out there and sell, be a trainer, bla bla bla. From my experience, both, training and selling are like being able to play the drums in simple or typical songs. However, you have to put in the diligence of a tabla student in learning and practice, to be a great player.

Business, or being in business can be deceptively simple. Look at Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, all they seemingly do is talk and make statements. However, if you have the opportunity to spend every second with them, for a week, you’d know why it is deceptively simple. Everyone has a talent for something. This talent makes something – like drumming, tabla playing, writing, singing, connecting with people and so on, feel natural to those who are talented. It doesn’t immediately make that person an expert or a master, though he or she has a certain level of advantage.

While Jaswant’s writing might seem to be horrendous, to some eyes, it could be artistic. One of my teachers said that to me horrible, most times unreadable, yet there’s some artistic angle to it – about my handwriting. In Jaswant’s case, that artistic talent had been channelled and honed into a work of art.

He had a very strong desire which once he started to channel it into learning and practising calligraphy, became a strong passion for realizing his dreams. While some people were fortunate to have discovered and developed their talents in early age, Jaswant had to keep it on hold, and got his children all educated before executing his plan – bought the calligraphic writing material and took a class.

Did you immediately discover that you wanted to be a salesperson during school, after school or once you were out to find a job? My guess would be a no. That was true for me. Though I wanted to be in and have a business, I never thought that I wanted to sell. When I was a field engineer, my potential in sales was noticed by my seniors and superiors. Still, I was in denial. 

Only six years later when I was out of a job and had a family to feed that I decided to try selling as I couldn’t get a decent-paying engineering job. As they say, 23 years on, it’s history and now I am teaching sales and business development.

Realise your talents

We are all born with many talents. Many of which we don’t easily realise.

We know that we are good at something, or something comes easily to us. Many of us too chose careers which were typically dictated to or at least influenced by family, friends etc. Often too, we kept our in-born talent hidden or worse, suppressed.

Some were fortunate to have these talents exposed earlier and went on to develop these talents into real skills and strengths. We often see this in prodigy musicians. And maybe some painters. For painters though, we often hear that people dropped out of the rat race and painting or being an artist full time. Years after they started their professional careers as lawyers, accountants, engineers, and whatnot.

What about you? Do you feel like there’s something that is easy for you, that you’d want to develop?

I realised that speaking and writing come easily and are fun for me. While I had been an engineer and a professional salesperson for years, there is this yearning to speak, as a speaker and voice-over actor, and, as a writer; be it non-fiction or fiction. I am developing the speaking as a trainer part and as a columnist on sales and business first.

I am having fun, seek yours.

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