I started playing music when I was really young. I didn't start off on guitar because I couldn't fit my hands around the neck and fret board. So I did the drums. And back then, all I did was hit things.

Since I had a lot of love for music and a box guitar by my side -- a hand-made guitar used to belong to a martyr known as "Oromo," I continued to develop and focus on my musical skills with "sne-Tbeb" until 1987.Since at that time I was very young, I had very easy time to master the "Krar" and also the box guitar. And also since I kind of felt a very strong love for music in general, learning the instruments was very simple for me.

The first thing I did when I picked up any instrument, when I was five years old, was write a song. It's kind of funny; I thought about it, statements that it's a "solo effort" — it's kind of like, "Oh, well I've been doing this since I was five." I was kind of doing this before I did anything else.

My father was a wrestler and though everyone liked music in the family, it was a taboo to even think of a musical career. I used to wrestle to keep him happy. When I was about nine years old, I started learning vocal music from Pandit Rajaram, secretly! At the age of fifteen, I heard the flute for the first time on Allahabad radio. It was as if I was being transported to heaven. The flautist was Pt. Bholanath and that was the major turning point in my life. Soon after, while I was still in my teens I got an offer to work as a staff artist on Cuttack radio in Odisha/ and I accepted. It was then that my father found out that I was a musician. It was a major shock for him.

I was three and a half years old when my father brought home a toy fiddle," playing "with which I am very happy fancies himself a street musician... I thought not and could not be happier than go from house to house with a violin ".

I started lessons when I was three and a half. In the beginning I just played a little but, when I was five, I played my first recital, and from that point my parents had high hopes for me; especially my father.

When I was about eight, my father started to compose new music for me, which I memorised and played until I was 15, when I started to compose music by myself.

I started making movies when I was 20. I started playing piano when I was about 3 years old, so I'm probably a musician first. But when I'm working on a movie, as an actor, I'm an actor - 100 percent. And when I'm on tour, I'm a musician 100 percent.

I've always been a painter. I didn't come to it late. I was always the school artist. I came to music late, you know, relatively. I mean, I picked up — I tried it at 8. I took a year of piano lessons and wrote my first song when I was 8, wrote it out in notes.

I started playing judo and kung fu at an early age.

First of all, when you enter a conservatory, it’s already too late. The kind of connection that has to be made with an instrument, be it a piano, strings, a wind instrument, it really has to start much younger – five, six, seven - eight years-old is already getting late. The instrument must really become an extension of yourself. That neuromuscular connection between intention and realization is something that really has to be started very young. And the years between nine or ten and twenty, that’s when one should learn the whole repertoire.

A big turning point happened when my son brought back a guitar into the house — You know, 'cause I'd given all those guitars away to charity — way back in 1979 and hadn't really touched the instrument, you know, for like two decades. … So then one day … when everybody's asleep and nobody's watching, I pick it up — and lo and behold, I still know where to put my fingers and out comes this music. I said, "Maybe I've got another job to do." And in this time and period it's probably the best thing I can do because lecturing, politics, God, I've got nothing to do with that. I want to just get heart-to-heart, make sure people understand some of the real subtle beauties of what I've discovered.

I always had a knack for it [music]. I bought a drum kit for like 50 bucks, and within three weeks I was in a band. Not only was I in a band, but people were saying that I was really good. Being someone with a short attention span who didn't have much patience for anything, that was great, 'cause it didn't take much. I could just sit down and do it instantly. I could play a basic rock beat right away, so it didn't require much patience, and that's probably why I ended up doing it. As I got some of the rewards for it, it fueled me to want to be better. Then the rewards thing gets old, and what you really want is to be good and understand it, 'cause you're so enthused by it. That's what got me into all the other instruments and songwriting and singing.

I annoyed the shit out of them [my parents] by spending my whole childhood beating on things. I drove them to distraction and I never thought they'd give me a drumkit in a million years. By the time I was 15 my mom had just about given up on me. But she must have figured that at least I had an interest in something other than drugs or being a criminal, so she bought me a snare drum. After a couple of days whacking that, I bought the rest of the kit for $50 from a guy I knew. Two weeks later I was in my first band.