Should you find yourself in select civic body run schools around the month of June, you have a fair chance of running into teachers from singer Shankar Mahadevan’s online music academy, disentangling concepts of mathematics and geography for students. Not through ho-hum texts, but interpretive music.

“It always struck me as unfair that children without the means to enroll in certain kinds of institutions miss out on the joy of music,” explains singer Shankar Mahadevan, who has joined forces with Shiv Sena’s youth wing Yuva Sena head Aditya Thackeray to introduce Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation school students of Classes I-IV the mellow delights of fine arts.

“The idea isn’t to turn each one of them into a Kishore Kumar or a Mohammad Rafi,” he clarifies. Instead, Mahadevan, whose enterprise Shankar Mahadevan Academy (SMA) has earlier taken music to the financially disadvantaged, hopes to leverage the good cheer of melody and rhythm to make lessons exciting. Of course, if the process throws up some bona fide talent, the students would stand a chance of being nurtured by the academy, or Mahadevan himself.

Keen to start slow before replicating the model elsewhere, Mahadevan’s troupe started with pilot classes in the Adarsh Nagar Municipal Primary School and the Prabhadevi Municipal School this week. The larger programme, slated to coincide with the next academic session, would involve a few more schools. And what kind of music would the students be learning? “All kinds! Only the medium would be vernacular. The content would include everything from Punjabi or Kannada songs to world music,” shares Mahadevan, as Archana Hegdekar, the music teacher behind the pilot classes, adds Rabindra sangeet, Japanese folk and African melodies to the exciting list.

City Programme Manager with SMA, Hegdekar can’t stop talking about the buzz that her twice-a-week presence in the two schools have generated among students. “Even students of higher grades throng the classroom, partaking in our activities with a craving that is palpable,” she says. One of the first activities involved introduction to the basic swaras through storytelling.

“We chatted about a group of seven friends, Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni, in which each friend is just a little bit taller than the one before them.” Meanwhile, peppy visuals and lyrics flashing on a projector eased the kids into a sing-along mode. “Once they caught on to the basic song, we incorporated synchronised claps to teach them the idea of rhythm,” says Hegdekar. While training would be imparted to actively involved class teachers, the curriculum is the academy’s own.

Clearly, this is an initiative raring to positively impact. “My academy has been teaching music to students across the world, but talent does not limit itself to specific economic classes. Aditya, a dear friend, jumped on board as soon as I raised the issue,” the composer adds.

Sound of music

Shankar Mahadevan’s online music academy, has joined forces with Shiv Sena’s youth wing Yuva Sena head Aditya Thackeray to introduce Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation school students of Classes I-IV the mellow delights of fine arts.

Mahadevan’s troupe started with pilot classes in the Adarsh Nagar Municipal Primary School and the Prabhadevi Municipal School this week. It will involve more schools in the upcoming academic session