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News |  15 Jan 2010 09:39 |  By RnMTeam

Amjad Ali Khan puts damaged sarod behind him, to perform in Mumbai

MUMBAI:  The national carrier may have irreparably broken his beloved sarod, but Ustad Amjad Ali Khan is determined that his music will play on.

Khan's instrument was received by him in a shattered condition when he reached Mumbai on Monday evening for a performance at the Chembur Fine Arts Society  Even as he was lamenting the loss and apologising to patrons for a wasted evening, he asked his wife to fly down pronto with a replacement for the other two concerts he was scheduled to perform over the next two days - at the CFAS on Tuesday and the NCPA on Saturday.

Khan turned up for the show at the Chembur Fine Arts Society in north-east Mumbai and displayed the sarod, which he claimed was damaged during a flight from Ahmedabad to Mumbai Thursday morning.

"The sarod, weighing around 15 kg, is a very delicate instrument. It was packed in a tough box. I had booked it as a check-in baggage on the Air India flight, IC-614 which left Ahmedabad this morning at 7.20 a.m.," Amjad Ali Khan told the media.

A visibly upset Khan also said that he had decided to show his fans and music lovers the broken and damaged sarod, which happened to be his favourite one. As luck would have it, the person who had crafted the teak wood instrument 25 years ago and could have possibly repaired the sarod, Hemendra Chandra Sen, a noted name in the field, passed away in Kolkata just a few days ago.

"My heart is bleeding. I don't want to make any claims since Air India is our national carrier, but I do wish they had taken more care of the delicate baggage," he told the media.

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