Two flutes adorning the wall catch the eye as you step into a room at renowned flautist Kudamaloor Janardanan’s home. Black pouches of different sizes are kept in different parts of the room. Around six or seven of them are kept stacked against the wall, a bigger pouch is kept on a small bench and a couple of others are seen on the floor.
Nothing seems to be in order here, still there is something intimate about this room at the flautist’s home. “If you want me to call this my creative space, then it let it be,” he says with a smile. His home is on the first floor of a rented house on Keston Road, near Christ Nagar school, Kowdiar. “My creativity is not limited to this room because I don’t sit here and do sadhakam daily. I don’t have anything against those who do sadhakam. It is just that it works differently for me. I might find inspiration and creativity while conversing with a virtuous person, for example,” explains the musician who has broken free of shackles of orthodoxy and plays from his heart.
He has been living in this house for the last one year. In fact, he has mostly lived in rented houses till now. “I don’t feel bad about that. I have learnt one thing, love the place where you are. You have to adapt yourself to the space you live. Even when I don’t call this my creative space, this room gives a lot of positivity to my music, it has a special vibe. I like being here, the adjacent room is my daughter, Kalyani’s study room. Also this room opens to a balcony where I usually sit with her in the morning…. Actually my creative process happens during my travels, especially when I travel alone. I get inspiration from my tastes, my subjects of interest, my drives…,” he says.
So is it in this room that the music flows? “Not really. It mostly happens on the stage. Once I finalise a raga, I work on the basics and the rest of it happens during the performance,” he says.
Janardanan says that silence is a must when he is on the stage, but not when he is at home. “I do prefer silence and I often get it here. But at times there is noise from the road, with the school nearby, or from the day care school behind this house. I am comfortable with that. I try to create my own world amidst all that…,” he says.
However, he is quite a perfectionist in certain ways. “When I am sitting on a chair, I make sure that the chair is on a straight line with a particular point. If I am lying down, the cot or mat should not be in a slanted position. Sounds weird, right?” he says with a laugh.
He enjoys reading; the book shelf in the room says so. “There are books on music and some general topics. I love reading books by Cherussery and Kunchan Nambiar,” he says. We also find an elathalam on the wall. “My wife, Ramya, and daughter use it when they have their prayer session in the evenings,” he says.
Coming back to the flutes on the wall, one is kept above the photograph of his father, the late Krishna Iyer, he says, “When I walk around the house it feels so nice when I see them. In fact I love looking at my flutes. When I don’t have concerts, I often take out all the flutes, put them together somewhere and keep looking at them. It is like looking at a sleeping baby,” he says.
He keeps adding flutes to his collection, they come in different lengths, with each having a different sruthi. “It is some kind of greed, you know?,” he says.
(A series that explores the workspaces of creative people in the city and its suburbs)
