The South Asian Musical Landscape of Ottawa

I've only been in Ottawa for a few weeks now, and in the limited excess time I've had (which is still more compared to what I had in Toronto), the thought of learning a new instrument has found its way to my brain twice.

The first time I was tempted to finally take up my long time desire to learn and play sitar. As any normal urbanite, I hopped on to google at the first chance I got of being online, and typed in: "Ottawa Learn Sitar" in everybody's favourite search engine. I came up with a restaurant named Sitar Ottawa. Subsequent meaningful searches lead the path back to Toronto only. In Toronto, I know of at least one very good source of learning Sitar: named aptly, The Toronto Sitar School run by Anwar Khurshid. Anwar, played at our waleema (which was my choice vs. some lame bollywood singer), where my friend Umer Joseph who's probably the most impulsive person God ever created, ended up getting the same idea as me. The difference was, that where my idea is still just that, an idea, Umer actually ended up visiting Anwar the following week, purchasing a $1000 Sitar, and actually seriously started practicing the bloody thing. For a few months at least anyways. The last I spoke to him before moving, he told me he'd stopped.

The second time, today, I was tempted to learn tabla, in the shower. Not really a long time desire, but I think it was more like, "Ok, so as long as I'm in Ottawa, Sitar's out. What else?". Again, right after the shower, I googled, this time: "Ottawa Learn Tabla". The fact that I am writing this blog entry instead shall give some clue of my success rate. I also came across a couple of local acts that were using the above instruments in their music - ouch! The couple of downloads were instantly fed to my ever hungry recycle bin.

Conclusion, while I never realized it living there, the musical, and especially South Asian musical landscape of Toronto is much, much richer than Ottawa.

Side note, I am realizing that my entries lately are making Ottawa look bad, and make it seem like I miss Toronto. That as it may be, I will have to try and give Ottawa a decent view in my future posts.