- Lived:
- 1922–2011 · Gadag district, Karnataka (the record gives Ron; the family home was Gadag) → boyhood in Dharwad, apprenticeship in Kundgol, and Pune for the sixty years the voice filled India
- Field:
- Hindustani classical vocal music — khayāl — in the Kirana gharana, as the foremost disciple of Sawai Gandharva
- The Big Idea:
- A voice is built, not born. An eleven-year-old who heard one gramophone record spent three years wandering north India hunting for a teacher, five more years hauling water for the right one — and the machine assembled out of that obsession became, for half a century, the sound India itself made when it wanted to feel like one country.
- In their words:
- "I have already come out with most of my winning numbers" — refusing to pad his catalogue, as recalled by G. N. Joshi of HMV
- If you remember one thing:
- The man whose voice opens Mile Sur Mera Tumhara — the closest thing modern India has to a second anthem — was once a boy with no ticket, singing in third-class train compartments for his supper, because somewhere in India there had to be a guru worth all this trouble. There was. He was three stations from home.