Kunwar Siddharth
Violinist II
Rabindranath Tagore first drew the artist out of me. Since he, Albert Einstein, and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar all played the violin, I thought I would simply copy them. I began practising in 2016 with a teacher in Kolkata. I never became an expert — the instrument has a way of humbling you — but I kept at it. When I reached Portsmouth, I found the university orchestra, and the music director took me into the team without any audition. Had there been a test, I am sure I would not have made it; my practice was far too thin for that. Still, being part of the ensemble pushed me to get better, and surrounded by real musicians I slowly learned about one composer after another. Our first performance was Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, on 30 November 2019.
Playing Orpheus in the Underworld alongside the actors was one of the best times of my life — sixty musicians and a hundred performers moving as one, all in time with each other. There is nothing quite like it.
Paintings
I picked up a canvas during Covid. It became my way of staying grounded in the middle of all the chaos. When the lockdown began in March 2020, my colleagues went home, but I stayed back in Portsmouth — and suddenly I had a great deal of time and a fair amount of loneliness and restlessness to sit with. So I started painting. It helped, more than I expected it to. Some of the pieces are inspired by videos I found on YouTube, but the technique mattered less to me than the act itself: doing something positive, something steadying, when things felt hard. Painting was how I stayed resilient.
A selection of my paintings, made between May and December of 2020.