The so(u)le of music

"Daayam Padaa Hua" one of the many fantastic renditions by Ghazal maestro Hariharan which proved that no one can beat him either in expression, variations, ease, mastery or rendering.....It is heartening to know that some one can expose your soul to the vagaries of life, love, loss, happiness, joy so breathtakingly....lay it bare, strip it of anything but emotion and passion......when you can only gasp at that depth that you have somehow reached unwittingly.....when he sings, you hear each word for what it means and what he has made it mean.....you are not just concentrating on the tune or the beats or his voice.....he makes the entire song one whole which you get totally absorbed in.....when he sings "Sharaab la Sharaab de" you feel as though he is asking you for it....and the slight tease in the song makes you smile and snatch your hand away before giving it to him.....To the contrary, a song like "Ab ke baras bhi" brings out the loneliness, the craving where you get this image of sitting solitary on a rock with the ocean lapping at your feet and the horizon stretching forever.....At that moment you feel that Hariharan is more than a singer.....He is the life that makes a song breathe, molds it, gives it shape like a sculptor......He makes you reach that height if only for an instant......and at that moment I feel the way Jonathan Livingston Seagull felt when he got in through the crack and discovered eternity......