Last Friday evening, Bhai Baldeep Singh, is a rare combination of musician with rich inheritance, a searching mind within and beyond the Sikh tradition. He is the 13th generation of musicians since his forefathers sang and played music for the Sikh Gurus in 16th century as he also plays with many contemporary European musicians.


Bhai Baldeep Singh has almost singlehandedly revived mostly extinct traditional instruments used by his forefathers such as Rabaab, Saranda, Taous, and Dil-rubaa. In this process he has also revived the musical traditions those have also disappeared along with the instruments.

Bhai Baldeep Singh when could not find these instruments, he created them by carving from wood and using natural materials such as goat skin, horse hair and animal gut materials; he even sought help from European instrument makers.
This evening Bhai Baldeep Singh talked about his upbringing and his training under his father, grandfather and other music masters. He very precisely explained the process involved in creating his music, how before his fingers touch the strings of an instrument, the intent behind the touch makes sure of the outcome - the right sound - the right note.

He explained that it was the intent behind the touch which controls the outcome and creates the unique vibrations into the atmosphere and in turn creating the intended sounds/feelings in the listener’s mind. He was talking about the same intent that works behind the brush strokes of a painter that makes sure of the exact combination of brush strokes using intuitively selected colours. It’s the same intent that creates the picture that was in the mind of the painter or a sculptor.

Ancient Yaqui Indians wise men of Mexico understood the ‘Intent’ as the force that created this universe and keeps it moving right down to the pulsating energy within an atom. This force is so incomprehensible men over the ages have tried to humanise it by calling it God and other names.
The beauty of this force is that it makes itself available to the artists, poets and musicians when they rise above the mundane concerns of everyday life. Very rarely Intent manifests itself to other human beings, when it does, they become religious and often they lose the illusive link and become empty religious demagogues. It’s the creative people who keep this link alive without becoming arrogant about it.

I call artists the ‘magicians’, who use Intent to stretch such abstract thing as TIME, to create a loop of extended time; the space/time created within the loop is exclusive domain for artists’ creative activities. Within this magical space/time domain artists have a direct link with intuition. Intuition is an expression of Intent when it allows creative humans to use it.

Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus were within this space/time loop when they intuited the theory of atomic physics without the logic and scientific labs of 20th century. In his space their intuition had laser like focus when they conceived the idea of the smallest particle the ‘Atom’ a Greek word means ‘a particle that couldn’t be further cut/divided’. Using their sharp intuition, they also intuited the movement with an atom.

It took the mankind more than two thousand years of further development before atomic physicists such as Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli proved with their experiments and mathematical provings that these atoms are not inert matter as Newtonian theory supposed, but are vibrating entities as intuited by the Greek philosophers.

In the bigger picture, according to the Indian thinkers of the Vedic era, this universe, that we can see and we can’t see, is the manifestation of the same force, ‘Intent’, or ’Brahman’ or the ‘Tao’ as known to the Chinese. Luckily artists, poets, thinkers and men of knowledge have learnt to use this force for their creative pursuits without becoming religious.

As a rule, all sentient beings are endowed with this magical facility but most people are not aware of we are all born with this wonderful gift. Animals not having encumbered with human logic keeps this link intact, what we call instinct. There are examples that on rare occasions even common people have used the same intent without knowing about it.

Many years ago, a young woman, a teacher watched my interview on Indian television, felt the strong urge to meet me. After some search she found out that I came from a village only few miles from the town where she was teaching. She even found out that she had a student in her class from my village.

Couple of weeks later, I was visiting this town with my sister, I met a man from my village whose daughter was a student in this young teacher’s class. He stopped me on the road, and asked, if I had any spare time, could I visit this young teacher, and he handed me a piece of paper with her name and address. We had come to this town to visit one of our cousins. By chance our cousin was not at home and we have about an hour at our hands. My sister suggested that we should go and visit this young teacher in the meantime.

When we arrived at her house un-announced, we walked through a large open gate into a wide courtyard; this young woman was standing under a tree with one of her colleagues. She had just narrated a dream that she had the night before. In her dream I had visited her at her home. She was wondering how it could be possible since she had never met me. On the other hand I didn’t even know until half an hour ago, that such a woman existed?

Before her colleague could respond to her question, I physically arrived on the scene. On seeing me walking into her house, she was totally shocked and her skin colour went white. She was about to faint, when my sister quickly made her sit down and brought a glass of water to drink. It took a while for this young woman to realise my walking in to her house was not an extension of her dream that she had the night before.

Without knowing, this young woman had used her intent to create my circumstances to come to her town that day, made this man to give me her address just in time, sent my cousin to go away for an hour, and created the loop in space/time for me to walk to her house at the very moment, when she had just related her dream to her colleague.

She could not believe that it was her strong intent had really made all this happen. Or we can say, the universal force, the Intent had placed itself at her command to make things happen very precisely with laser like precision on that day. Bhai Baldeep Singh uses this magical facility every time he touches his musical instrument.

Avtarjeet Dhanjal Thursday, 25 February 2010 Amritsar, India
First published in ‘Last Drop’ a regular page in ‘Universal Colours’ published by EU-MAN in Helsinki.