2.5 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in India, the third largest population affected with this illness. There is especially a high prevalence among impoverished female sex workers because they are unaware of safe sex and prevention of transmittance. Afraid of the stigma of being perceived as promiscuous, many Indian women do not wish to receive help if they are tested positive because they will be shunned from their parochial villages. Since India likes to keep a conservative façade, a disease caused by sex is appalling and demoralizing. Hearing these depressing details at a meeting for Association of India’s Development(AID) during my visit to University of Buffalo, New York, I was motivated to expose this hidden crisis. The only question was how could I help, especially since I did not attend this college. I needed to find a way to unite people for this noble cause by sending a message of humility and harmony that everyone could understand. It then came to me—the piano would be the perfect medium for communication because the language is universal. So, I decided to create a CD to speak on behalf of the subservient population in India who are afflicted with HIV/AIDS. Illuminating the universality of emotions including sorrow, happiness, and empathy, I wanted to create a united front in combating this disease by sending a message of diversity appreciation, compassion, and humility. I was able to accomplish this overarching theme of unity by selecting songs to create an emotional narrative, practicing and learning the songs through different approaches, and using the composers’ and my own stylistic elements such as tempo, tone and style to represent each emotion explicitly and distinctly, resulting in my piano charity CD—A Hidden Crisis: The HIV/AIDS Challenge in India, my biggest artistic achievement.
Because I had a very particular goal to create awareness and unity around this hidden crisis through my music, song selection was a very crucial part in completing this emotional narrative. To accomplish my vision, I consulted with my piano teacher and told her that I wanted to create a story with each song representing a universal emotion such as sorrow and happiness. I also wanted to incorporate different genres and periods of music into this CD to symbolize the diversity in the world. Hence, for thirty days straight, I went through thousands of new and old songs in order to choose the perfect amalgamation. After listening to the songs about twenty times each, I finally chose six songs that represented the project perfectly. The first four songs were from each period: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary; the last two songs were from the Bollywood genre. Choosing the perfect fusion of songs was a very important step in my process because these unique songs needed to come together in unity to create a cohesive story based on universal emotions, which ultimately served to help ameliorate the high numbers of people afflicted with the fatal illness.
After choosing the songs, the next most important part in bringing awareness to HIV/AIDS in India was learning and practicing them until each represented the universal emotion or experience that every person faces, despite social and ethnic barriers. Luckily, I already knew how to play the first three songs: “Sonata No. 6” by Giovanni Battista Pescetti, “Sonata” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and “Consolation No. 1” by Franz Liszt, so I approached them in a similar fashion. The last 3 songs—“Variations on a Slovakian Folksong” by Dmitri Kabalevsky “Kal Ho Na Ho” by A.R Rahman and “Kisna” by A.R Rahman—took a longer time to accomplish because I had to start at the beginning phase. The indicator that told me these songs were ready was when I memorized them and physically felt the emotion of each song. These universal emotions—sadness, happiness, consolation, appreciation of diversity, compassion, and humility—are experienced by everyone, forming a cohesive story on unity in order to bring people together for the cause.
Hence, in order to create a sense of unity among the people, these songs represented the entire theme of the piano CD: to unify the people by creating a universal message to which everyone can relate. We can relate to each other because of our analogous emotions and experiences. Appreciating our similarities, we could uncover the hidden crisis of HIV/AIDS in India and help diminish the skyrocketing numbers, which is the ultimate purpose of this CD. The piano was the perfect instrument in fighting this cause because it was language with no barriers. Each note of the piano is a letter; each stanza is a sentence; each phrase is a paragraph; each song is a story. This emotional narrative successfully united people to form a united front in battling with the hidden crisis.
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