ConnectUs Youth Spotlight EP 17: Vedant and the Kalashree Foundation, Preserving Cultural Heritage through Musical Education

In today's episode we spoke with Vedant Bhonde, a passionate student from the central Indian state of Maharashtra. He runs business development for the Kalashree foundation, a musical charity that trains young and aspiring musicians, and uses music for community outreach, healing, and cultural preservation. Back when Kalashree's programs drew fifty or a hundred people, the members split the costs and paid out of pocket. Now they fill a theatrical hall with five or six hundred, accompanying things like renting the hall and paying every musician who performs - things Vedant is in charge of.

"There is heavy cost involved," Vedant says. "So for that purpose we needed a BD team, business development team, and I am there where I pull sponsors and raise the fund."

Business development here means finding companies willing to sponsor an event. It starts with a cold call, which starts by phoning an unknown company and asking for a meeting. If they say yes on the phone, the team shows up at the office with a PowerPoint.

"We pitch them our entire PPT and entire goal, our vision. What can I provide them? What will they get or output after our program?"

He's answered that well enough to bring in Senco Gold, a well known Indian jewellery chain, and IDFC First Bank.

Who Is Vedant

He grew up in Nagpur, and although he concentrates in a tech field, he enjoys public speaking, hosting events, Model UN, debate.

"I like to connect with people, as well as share my opinion with them. I also like to listen their opinions... I always enjoy opening up my stuff to everyone."

For context, Grades are called standards in India, so tenth standard is about sophomore year and twelfth is about senior year. At the end of tenth you pick a stream, and if engineering or medicine is the goal you take PCM: physics, chemistry, math. Then come the entrance exams that decide your college. The big one for engineering is the JEE, which more than a million students sit for every year, and an entire industry of coaching institutes exists to prepare you for it in the evenings, on top of a normal school day.

Photo of Vedant giving a speech at his school

Vedant spent two years in Aakash Institute for JEE coaching, in rooms full of students ranked above him. In India the highest ranked student in a class is called the topper, and he's blunt about not being one:

"I was just surrounded with the topper student," he says, "but I am not a topper type of student."

The classroom wasn't where he was good. In tenth grade he was his school's sports minister, a student council position, and he ran the annual sports meet for the whole school. In eleventh he even started a company with a co-founder, built around a legal gap: teenagers in India can't open their own trading accounts, so the two of them went to parties to find kids from wealthy families with money to burn and pitched them on investing it instead of spending it. However, soon after it had closed, under a mix of academic pressure and personal reasons.

The Kalashree Foundation

Instead of pursuing his original goals, he reached out to the Kalashree foundation, a charity organization started by Kala Ramnath, a violinist known internationally for Hindustani classical music, the tradition of northern India. Noting what music education was doing for young people elsewhere, such as in Venezuela and Hungary, Kala asked her friend Sayan Mukerji, a musician with a corporate career alongside it, to help her start a nonprofit empowering underprivileged children with music in India, which later expanded abroad.

Photo of Vedant at the Kalashree foundation

The main activity of the foundation runs through workshops that follow the traditional Indian model, where a student learns directly from a teacher over years instead of over a semester. Renowned artists and musicologists give lecture demonstrations, and students perform at recitals and at Guru Poornima, the annual day in India for honoring your teacher. The foundation also mixes genres on purpose, collaborating with western musicians and inviting artists from other traditions to share a stage. There is work with sick children too, built on the belief that music can supplement the recovery along with medications.

The recent program Vedant worked on was an abhang event. Abhangs are devotional songs written in Marathi, the language of Maharashtra, and performed in praise of Vitthal, a deity central to religious life in the state. Performing them is closer to an act of devotion than to a normal concert.

"It was a very good moment for us. People praised us for the event."

Almost everyone in the core group plays something. Some are vocalists, some are guitarists, and the foundation works with kathak dancers as well, kathak being a classical Indian dance form. Two weeks before we spoke, the group did something with no music in it at all. They partnered with a semi government school near Ramtek, took the students up a hill, and threw seed balls across it. A seed ball is clay and compost packed around seeds; you scatter them, and the seeds take root where they land.

Photo of Vedant at the Abhang Event

His Advice

Most of Vedant's working hours go to negotiating with people two and three times his age. Asked what he'd tell a student trying to build something similar, he said nothing about business plans or connections.

"People should value their communication very much, because I personally feel that if you have a good communication, you can achieve anything in any domain. Just focus on your tone, just focus on your pitch. I deal with people over twice my age, and one thing is very common. If you have to show one thing clearly to them, you should be confident to your own voice. You just confident with your own voice, your agenda, and things will be superb. I can say proudly."

We hope you enjoy this episode of the ConnectUs Youth Spotlight! Stay tuned for our next episode...

Kalashree Music Foundation: https://www.instagram.com/kalashreemusic/