Sach Holden: Biography
After two years of waking up before daybreak to go for piano lessons, Sach had to finally face the truth. The middle school student stood solomn as his piano teacher told him that he was pretty much tone deaf and would never be a musician. Walking back home wet from the light drizzle, he did not know how to tell his mother that he had been thrown out of piano classes forever. The piano his dad saved up and bought was now expensive firewood.
Determined to prove his piano teacher wrong, he took up guitar lessons. Soon it drifted into a one hour session where he and his guitar teacher, who was his friend from the church choir, laughed and cracked jokes. Guitar classes didn't last long either. Then came the Bangalore Children's Choral. Sach joined this choir to train his voice, probably the only instrument he had full control over now that the piano and guitar were too much of a challenge. For a young boy breaking through puberty, the Bangalore Children's Choral with a strength of forty girls and two boys, was not the ideal place the train his voice.
Years passed and he flirted with singing and the guitar with the seriousness of a one night stand, until he started medical school. Exam times can be tough and lonely. He took breaks between study spells on the terrace of his hostel surrounded by trees under the moonlight, teaching himself how to play the guitar. Over time with each relationship, words slowly accompanied the strumming, and emotions stirred a whirl of stories, each more intense than the other.
A few years later, just before the annual college battle of the bands, he managed to get emotionally blackmailed to represent the class as they couldn't front a band. As he stood backstage alone with his guitar, watching each rock band perform, Sach was overwhelmed by their stage presence and mastery over their instruments. When the competition chief judge Mr.Carlton Braganza, owner of the famous Opus Radio, read out the list of winners, it was probably the first time that an independent singer-songwriter-guitarist had placed first among full fledged bands.
The guitar accompanied Sach through internship. He along with his co-doctor from Bhutan did mobile health clinics for remote villages. They drove in a rickety world war II repainted Willy jeep in the most hardcore Veerappan (an outlawed jungle-bandit with a notorious penchant for smuggling ivory and sandalwood. He had killed approximately 184 people including police and forest officials and also had the distinction of evading arrest for over 20 years) forest area where health facilities were abandoned by state governments because even with all the arm-twisting they could hardly get any doctors to go there. Veerappan's children had apparently been delivered in the village clinic many yrs ago where Sach now worked in so the two doctors were relatively fearless in the area. Towards the end they had a database of select grandmothers in each village who made the best dishes, among them were porcupine fry and wild pumpkin curry. The guitar came out every night in the village, on the terrace. The lack of city glare on pitch-black nights and solitude inspired new songs with raw emotions. More expressions spewed through lyrics in riot camps where he worked treating victims during the Gujarat genocide and in dense forests where he trekked with his childhood friend who was a National Geographic adventurer.
Through the years his quest has been to write the simplest songs with maximum emotion, to slice off lyrics until nothing could be removed any further.
Sach's performances are extremely minimalistic, intimate and personal; leaving the audience with an afterglow or disturbed (usually both) depending on their individual state of mind.