Sitting at the piano with her eyes on the notations, fingers flying on the keyboard and a foot on the pedal, Seerat Sidhu slowly floods the room with strains of Bach. At seven, she is the youngest student of a piano academy in Mohali. In bhangra country, that’s not a sound you’re used to hearing. And if arias and concertos are finding a place in this city’s musical vocabulary, it’s thanks to a cross-cultural exchange of a rare sort: the school is run by Jong Mun Oh, a South Korean businessman who came from Seoul and stayed back to spread the music.

“Call me Jagmohan,” he grins. That’s how the Punjabis insist on addressing him. It helps to have a wife called Kwi Suk Kang (Kang is a pucca Punjabi surname) and a daughter who’s become Sonia from Seon Ha. In 1996, Oh, then a visitor to India, stopped at Chandigarh on his way to Shimla and promptly fell in love with it. “The wide avenues, the beautiful trees, the fragrant air… compared to Delhi it seemed divine,” he says. He returned to Seoul but the city continued to tug at his heart. And then he figured out a way to return—with a family. “At that time, most well-heeled South Koreans were sending their children to Australia and New Zealand to learn English. I thought India would be a perfect destination.”

Though their four children soon took to schooling in Mohali, Kwi Suk Kang who had come here with a piano, was struck by the absence of classical music in their curriculum. “I found even three-year-olds belting out film songs. There was no concept of songs for different occasions.”

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