Being a piano teacher in rural India, I constantly battle the nagging thought that piano lessons are, well…I can never find the exact word for it – but something along the lines of “not really necessary or useful.”

The odds the children of Shanti Bhavan face are enormous. They come from extremely poor, disadvantaged families – and in India, the words “poor” and “disadvantaged” take on entirely new meanings when you truly start to see the effects of the caste system. These children are the first in their families to make it through high school. They do not have any academic role models: no father who is a lawyer, no mother who is a doctor, no one pushing them to go to college and follow in the prestigious footsteps set before them. Instead, they are blazing a trail. And they must walk this trail with the weight of the poverty of their entire family resting on their shoulders. They do not go home after school to parents who ask “What did you learn in school today?” or “How did you do on that math test?” They live here, amongst each other, with only themselves, their teachers, the volunteers, and their “aunties” (residential staff) to guide them – personalized attention and support is never a guarantee. If they do not succeed at Shanti Bhavan, if they were go to back home – they would face the realties of manual labor, factory work, early marriage…

So given these circumstances – where they come from and what they are trying to achieve, it is literally IMPERATIVE that they do well in their classes and successfully pass the entrance examinations for college. They need to learn math, physics, chemistry, biology, English, writing, Hindi, Tamil, economics, civics, history…the list of needs goes on. But where on that list does “learning how to play an E-harmonic-minor scale” fit? Does playing a Bach Sarabande REALLY help?

This is my existential dilemma. Is my year’s purpose really to equip these students to fight against the odds with…piano?

Inevitably, I return to my own experience to begin to answer that question. Music has never paid my rent or bought me food. But was it useless to me? What has it given me? Besides the obvious: work ethic, patience, artistic sensibilities, “culture” – it has also given me who I am. Quite literally. Sometimes I forget how much music is a part of me – but subconsciously, it’s always there. I felt this my first week at Shanti Bhavan when I walked to the cafeteria for lunch one day. My jet lag was waning, I had begun to settle in, and get used to life here. As I was eating, the music that had been playing on the CD player in the cafeteria switched suddenly to a Mozart piano sonata. It was like someone I knew and loved had walked through the door. It was the first time I had listened to classical music since leaving Colorado and starting my life over here – and without even realizing what was happening, my eyes completely teared up. The purity and depth, the meaning, the memories… If in the middle of rural India, an American girl can instantly feel at home through a few clear notes of Mozart, the implications of music must run deep in the veins.

So there it is. If my piano lessons can provide that touchstone in the hearts of my students here…if I can help them cultivate their own self-discovery, self-acceptance, and self-confidence…then I won’t just be teaching piano lessons – I will be making a real difference.