3 Things That Inspire Me Besides Business

Welcome to the Freedom Business Podcast. Your host, Siddharth Rajshekhar here. Great to have you here. This is where we are going to be talking about how we can redefine our education system by building vibrant learning communities. Take your knowledge out to the world and be awesome. Let's get in.

So today is day number 13 in my 90 day podcasting challenge and I thought I'd just share with you, make it more casual, not like a high intensity knowledge podcast is talking about different, different topics. I thought I'll make this more fun and tell you about what helps me unwind, what helps me, what all do I do to just relax besides work and not just be always work, work, work focused. And what are the things that gives me the kicks besides know building communities and building products and stuff? Okay, so as some of you may know that I'm a musician. That's my background. If I have to like go back in time. The first time that I really played a keyboard was when I was 7 or 8 years old. I remember a family member had a keyboard, they had come home. I was really enamored or it was like I was in shock to see a device like that and then, you know, touching the keys, feeling the tones and then it was like a love at first sight. And then ever since I started to play keyboard much in my younger days When I was nine, 10 years, I started to pick up different books, went through the formal system of learning the scales and the notations and. But over time, over a period of time, I didn't really like the reading notes and playing. I wanted to play by ear. So I had one book I still remember long back. It's a pop songs book and I love playing chords for all the top English songs, pop songs. My mom and dad used to sing at home. My brother's a guitarist, my mom and dad also play guitar. So we used to take all the old hits, you know, Beatles.

You name it. Like Michael Jackson and all the old songs, Lionel Richie.

The really good pop songs that were there at that time. I used to work out all those chords and I would have the pop songs book. Mom and dad would sing, brother would sing, I would also sing and then we'd play. And the next phase was when we got more into spirituality. I started to learn the Indian percussion called kol, which you might have seen in many of the Hare Krishna temples in the Iskcon center. So my brother and I, we both play that as well and started playing at age of 10 and later on, you know, just built that Skill. I used to travel to this temple town called Mayapur and learn from, you know, from some of the, you know, best experts over there. I also used to travel to Vrindavan during this Marty this month called the Kartik month. And one of my favorite musicians of all time in the space of spiritual music is a person named Aindra Das. A I N D R A Aindra Das. He is an American, but who used to live in Randavan for more than, I think 40 years. And not married in the temple all, all day long he would only be, you know, vibrating the holy names of God, you know, the Hare Krishna mantra and stuff. So whenever we used to go to Vrindavan, I used to look forward to that experience of sitting around his, you know, he would be performing kirtan. So on one side I had like this western music, you know, influence and I also had. I used to play in the school band and stuff. But then later on when I got these experiences, it was really different. It was extremely soul fulfilling, I should say, and soul touching.

This, you know, there's a. There's a particular temple, there iskcon temple in Vrindavan where they would have 24 hours kirtan so they would never stop chanting the names of God and in the musical form, chanting the mantra. And my brother and myself, we would go like at 11pm in the night when everything closes and there's a small group of four or five people sitting there and just doing. And we would go on till morning, you know, like 4:00am we'd come back and of course the aartis and all would start at 4, but we would see the opening, the Brahma Muhur time, the Aarti. Then we would go back to the room and then crash and sleep and get up in the. Later in the morning and you know, do all the other activities. So I just want to tell you that my musical experiences have been pretty deep. Later on after that, you know, so I got into the sound engineering, especially if, you know, like when I was 18 years old, I left home. I did my sound engineering and because of the experiences of music that I had before that. So right from when I was 10 all the way till 18, I was in all kinds of music, like western music, spiritual music, play in different bands. I was part of the school band. We were at the ICSE school band even in school. And I was a keyboardist and backing vocalist. We, I got the first place. Our band got the first place award out of some 50 or 60 ICSE schools all over India. And I was a Cottonian. I studied in Bishop Hortons. So I had many of these musical milestones. And I also won an award called the Peter Cohelo Award for music in the year when I was in 8th standard. I do not know the exact year. I think it was 1998 or 1997, if I'm not mistaken. So in Bishop Cotton Boys School, which is. Which had over, I think 2,000 students at that point of time, got the number one award for music. It was an interhouse music competition. So when I did my sound engineering, there was a lot of other stuff. I learned the engineering side of sound. I learned how to manipulate sound. I learned how to design my own sound. I started to work with, you know, what you call a synthesizers. I'm not talking about digital synthesizers. I'm talking about analog synthesizers. Like, how do you take a tone? And there are four types of tones, like a sine wave, there's a saw wave, there's a square wave, and a triangle wave. And how you can take a waveform and manipulate that with filters and combine different waveforms to create different sounds. So I got very deep into sound design and did that for quite a few years. And some of you may know this, but I used to teach at the age of 19 on how to use digital audio workstations. And I used to teach people how to make music. I'm talking about more from a production perspective, like the different styles of music that were there. So it's like how to arrange music, how do you mix music, how do you.

Record music in terms of miking and even physical instruments. So I learned the ropes over there, and I used to teach people that. And then how do you edit the music? When I'm talking about editing, it's more like sound design. So if you have to process multiple tracks, how do you process that in the right way? Which plugins to use? And I was an expert in MIDI during my, you know, sound engineering days. So I used to teach people how to use MIDI controllers, MIDI instruments. How do you integrate different. And that was a very new topic at that point. I'm talking back in 2001, 2002. It was just the transition that was happening, you know, from the analog to the digital world. So what people used to take. They used to record on analog devices. They were moving to the digital devices and digital audio workstations. And I'm very glad that I was part of that, you know, that transitionary phase in the sound industry. Because now if you see everybody, like they make music on their. On Their iPads, they make music on their laptops and it's so easy as compared to how it used to be before. But I'm glad that I got to see both of both of the worlds because I've done quite a few sessions recording music even in the. On the side of the analog world, on adats and different kinds of machines. And many of my close friends, they are now working with Rahman, my very close friend was part of the Slumdog Millionaire, Grammy award winning team. And I mean, that was my world. And I also got into the DJing world. As some of you know, I play Elevation tracks music and multiple things in my events as well as I launched that on my SoundCloud channel. But the whole thing is these varied experiences of music have really helped me.

You know, fall in love with sound. And in the year 2006, when I got initiated into my spiritual process, when I surrendered to my spiritual master, he gave me the name. Like, normally when you surrender yourself to a particular spiritual process, they change your name or they give you your name. It's like a rebirth that happens. So in 2006, I was in Mayapur. I surrendered to my spiritual master's holiness, Jayapadaka Swami. I've been following, had been following the principles for many years, you know, of whatever was a part of the process. And he gave me the name Shabdahari Das. Okay, like, and if you search for Shabda S H A B D A H A R I Shabdahari Das, you'll find my other music, all my other spiritual music, which is my. The name, the meaning of the name is to be the servant of the sound, incarnation of God. And that kind of became my path of my life. So 2009, we launched an album my wife and I called Illuminize I L L u M I N I z e around 12, 13 tracks. We took some ancient Vedic text, put that into modern sound, I think couple of tracks have crossed over a million downloads and stuff. And you know, within the, the particular community that we were a part of, and we are still a part of many of them, listen to those tracks even till today. And so I have that side. So what I've been doing what I like a lot to do besides my work and business, is a lot of music. Now I don't get that much of time to make music like how I used to, but I spent a lot of time, you know, spending time with my kids, both the boys, both my sons are also having those inclinations. My elder one is playing. He Plays electric guitar, acoustic guitar, as well as keyboard. And I keep, you know, I taught him the way that I learned chords and everything else. So he's picking up tunes and playing on his own. And the younger one is getting inclined more towards percussion and drums and those kind of. He does a lot of beatboxing in his mouth. And because my wife is also a singer, so she is in the other side of the spectrum. She's like Carnatic music, classical music. And that is a world that I've never gone into. But I really appreciate that world. It's a very, very technical and it's a different space altogether. So I think the combination of us coming together, as with the musical inclinations, also have kept our, you know, even our relationship has blossomed beautifully because of respecting each other's musical talents, musical tastes, and also exchanged a lot of ideas and we discussed a lot of music stuff. So besides music, the other area, other two areas I want to share with all of you is the area of gaming. So while I was growing up, just like music, gaming has been a part of my life. From Sega, from Atari, Nintendo, you just name it. Like, I've just done a lot of gaming right through my childhood. And I felt. I truly feel that if you look at gaming at the right p, with the right perspective, it can help your kids improve their reflexes, it can help them improve their skills, it can help them improve their sol, you know, problem solving, thinking, critical thinking. And as I was bringing up both, both my boys, we've done a lot of gaming together. Even now we do a lot of gaming together. We just pick up a game. There's one game called Zelda, Breath of the Wild. It's a Nintendo game on Nintendo Switch. It took us six months to beat that game. It is a quest, like a conquest kind of a game. Took a lot of time. And then, of course, it is a combination of me playing and then giving it to my son, getting him to finish some levels and come back. So even the bonding has been really good because of the gaming thing that we do even till now. And the other area, which is something that I love doing besides music and gaming, is visiting temples and partaking in any kind of services or activities around temples. So my wife and I, we every month we do like abhishekas, we give away. We give clothes and, you know, vastras for the deities which were temples that we like, you know, that we have a connection with. And every month we have, like, our rituals and routines that we do when it comes to temple visits. Temple activities just to soak ourselves in the game. So you would see a totally different avatar of me if you come and meet, meet me in a temple because I would not be wearing dry fits and T shirts. I'd be in like proper traditional dhoti with my tilak and all the other stuff. So. And I feel that is my true self, that's the real me. This is just the business side of me. I need to just be who I am over here to do what I'm supposed to do. But my core is connecting with the creator, doing those activities and getting into warrior mode like Arjuna when he has to get on the battlefield, he wears all his battlefield clothing, his armor and goes, gets to work. But otherwise he's just who he is. So similarly, I'm really inspired by Arjuna when it comes to having an intention to serve in my heart. And I switch my roles whenever I have to the role of the businessman, the role of a parent, the role of a husband, the role of a spouse, the role of a son, and the role of, of just being me and a servant of God. And you know, I move into that zone very smoothly because that's who I am. So this is. These are all the things that I wanted to share. I think many of you might have not heard about this or you might, you might not have known about this side of me, but now you got to know a deeper side of me which I might have not shared before. And all these dots connect. You know, if I had not gone through sound engineering, I would not be able to understand editing and stuff like what I'm doing right now. If I had not understood music, I would not be having both the sides of my brain firing. Because music is something that helps you fire both your creative and your logical side of the brain. Both left and right brains fire equally when you are into any kind of instrument or music. And I would highly recommend that if some of you are more logical, get into music, some of you are more creative, still do music, because music has structure as well as creativity in it. And if I had not really gone to gaming from my childhood, then I would not be able to gamify my community. If I had not gone to spirituality, I would not have a spiritual foundation to building a business. So everything, everything matters and all the dots connect. I hope you found this podcast useful and I'll catch you in the next episode. Bye bye Sam.