When Vishal Moghe’s bada khayal rendition at the Lab @ Shanta auditorium on June 7 hooked the audience with a lilting aalap in Raag Jhinjhoti, you could sense a shift. A collective stirring in the hushed, air-conditioned air that also echoed a rarefied atmosphere insulated from the surrounding commercial city streets.Over the next hour and a half, every time Moghe and his accompanists landed perfectly in sync on the sam after an avartanand the laya(tempo) of the bandishes progressed, one could hear the small sounds of appreciation quintessential to the city’s classical music aficionados.“If you wish to play more, we will listen,” Harish, an organiser from Prakriti Foundation, smilingly signalled after the third bandish, mirroring the audience’s keen enthusiasm to soak in the non-quotidian music recital in the city. A sizable crowd had stayed back after the book launch ofThe Secret Master — Arun Kashalkar and a Journey to the Edge of Music on June 6.“I wish Chennai got to engage more with this form and other parts of India with Carnatic music. Both Carnatic and Hindustani musicians and their ecosystems as a whole would benefit from a closer and sustained interaction,” pointed out author and journalist Sumana Ramanan. Her literary non-fiction is both a biographical account of her guru, Arun Kashalkar, a khayal artiste in Mumbai’s fringe classical music circles, and an analytical narrative of the history, evolution, and current ecosystem of the Hindustani form.“It’s also an intense meditation on what it means to learn a form. The struggles of learning, of the rigor and practice, of the isolation and insulation,” pointed out celebrated Carnatic music exponent TM Krishna.He was in conversation with the author, highlighting the book’s context in the present-day profit and social-media-driven Indian cultural ecosystem, where classical music rings out more as a compromised commodity than the previously held connoisseur’s citadel.Sumana has been keenly tracking this evolution over the past decade, when she started learning khayal — an art form that calls for much improvisation, vigor and rigour — in earnest.