He can barely speak a few words but give two-and-a-half-year-old Truptraj Pandya a tabla and the toddler uses his hands to speak the language of music. Truptraj was recently acknowledged as the world’s youngest percussionist on the Guinness World Record website where a video clip of his first public performance has also been uploaded.

It’s a sunny Sunday morning at the Pandya household in Mulund and Truptraj is frolicking around the house with his collection of toys. Every five minutes he goes to the tabla set kept in the corner of the room, delivers a resounding thump on it and then returns to his toys. Hailing from a traditional Gujarati family of music-lovers, Truptraj has grown up in a household filled with musical instruments, listening to Gujarati bhajans and old Hindi songs.

“His tryst with music started when he was barely 18 months old. He would sit at the kitchen listening to my mother singing devotional songs. One day, we saw him hammering away furiously on two aluminum dabbas. We initially brushed it off as an act of playfulness but the two months later when his aunt got him a small dhol to indulge him, he began playing it in tandem to the beats of the song that we were singing,” said Truptraj’s father Atul Pandya, a tax consultant by profession who started Swar Sadhana, a music group comprising people who may not be formally trained but nevertheless love music.

Incidentally, Truptraj’s first public performance was at a weekly Swar Sadhana meeting in January when Pandya decided to put his son on stage to see whether his musical proficiency was a fluke. “That day he played the dhol with rhythm that I was convinced that he has an inborn talent on the instrument. A couple of weeks later Truptraj also performed at a festival organised in Somaiya College and he received a vociferous response and a certificate,” said Pandya.

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