"What every person needs are koodu (food), gudda (clothing) and needa (a roof on our head). If these are essential needs of a person, the same are needed for an art to sustain and please the audience. Bhava is the food (which sustains the art); raga is the appropriate clothing which gives the bhava shape, beauty and musicality; and tala is the dwelling in which we live because the bhava and raga in our art are pegged to the abode of tala".1

Thus spake a lean, withering man, in his 80's wearing a lion cloth and an angavastra, sitting on the 'portals'2 of his verandah (a low-roofed thatched house) to a tiny group of youngsters in a low voice, as though he was speaking to himself; as though he was speaking out his conviction of an art form; which he conceived, ordained to his people as their sole property for the next one hundred years and more - almost like a second Siddhendra Yogi, reborn to resurrect the waning lives of the artist community of his village - perhaps to resurrect himself and in the process find the emancipation of the future generations.