Journal
Two Years in India
This chapter covers two years in India, the stillness of lockdown, and the collaborations that turned distance, uncertainty, and the search for freedom into music.
Two Years in India
In 2019, after Masa ended and I grew tired of my day job, I did what I had been doing since I was twenty-one: I went to India. This time, I did not come back for two years.
I moved through Rishikesh, Parvati Valley, and eventually Auroville, the international community in South India. Then COVID hit. Borders closed. Movement stopped. For the first time in my life, I was not going anywhere.
So I did what I always do. I built something. During lockdown, I collaborated with every musician I could find. Katibim with a Turkish def player on the banks of the Ganges. Om Nama Shivaya with an Indian singer, which became my most viral video, with over 109,000 views. A Bob Marley cover with local Rastas. Somewhere Over the Rainbow on sitar in Kashmir. And a sitar rendition of Psalm 23, גם כי אלך בגיא צלמוות, an ancient Hebrew prayer given new breath through an Indian instrument, thousands of miles from Jerusalem.
Two songs from my upcoming EP were born during those years. They were later revamped in an Israeli studio, but their soul is Indian.
And together with the Auroville community, I filmed and recorded a song called Freedom, a reminder of what freedom means, made at the exact moment when everyone on earth was feeling it taken away.
It was the same instinct that drove the protest songs a decade earlier. Something essential is under threat, so you pick up your instrument and you respond. The only difference was that in 2011 the instrument was a guitar in Levinsky Garden, and in 2020 it was a sitar in South India.