Wish you all a belated Happy New Year and thank you for all the feedback and comments you gave all through last year! It's great to resume my writing and no better time than now, the start of another year!
The dawn of a new year brings with it new opportunities and new challenges. I'm just reflecting on some of the new things that are happening in the different facets of my life.
Firstly, I'm so very grateful for my new job at the Gulf Medical University. It is an entirely different setting here after having worked in a Christian international NGO. My new role here seems pretty basic for the moment and what I'm doing now is quite different from what I'm actually capable of. However, looks like God is bringing me back to the basics, in this side of my life, to help me get a better grip of things in the corporate world before He brings me to newer and higher things. Good to have a boss who is both an MD and a Ph.D and it's great to be assisting him in some critical areas and getting to know his style of functioning and dealing with things. One of my first assignments was to initiate business development for our Computer Based Testing and I am so glad to have successfully completed the SEED phase and hand it over to the Marketers to carry it forward.
Secondly, it gives me great joy to be part of a project by VOICE for a UAE based inter church choir that will accompany Michael W Smith this March. After a dearth of choir music for more than a year, it was great to be back in this choir, getting our voices warmed up for some great harmonies and the grand concert that's coming up.
My mind went down memory lane back to my choir days in Chennai. It began with singing harmonies with my ex-boss Christopher and my good friend Aloysius back in the early 90's. I then moved on to sing in the World Vision choir conducted by another good friend, Alfred Ling, where we made life difficult for him but yet made it well on the final day. Then came the New Calvary Church Choir in the late 90's where I started out as a bass singer before deciding to move to singing tenor in order to save my voice for the solo's. All thanks to Mr.Asir for being that tower of patience in teaching us. Never can I forget Uncle Theodore the choir master who commanded such respect in the choir circles of Chennai. The one year I spent with the Faith Prayer Tract League(FPTL) Choir was one of the best learning times. With none other than the maestro Rajeevan David as Director, it was a great time of fun and learning the finer things about choir singing. I stay grateful to him for giving me some of the juicy solos to sing. Last but not the least, the brief three months I spent practising with the Handel Manuel Ensemble directed by Mrs.Sharada Schafter was definitely of a higher calibre where for the first time I was exposed to singing Spanish and Latin lyrics. While I began to enjoy this I had to pack my bags and leave India and move to the UAE over a year ago.
Finally now, after my association with Sabu George and the 'VOICE' and the opportunities they have given me to sing along, it is truly a privilege to be part of this project at such a time as this. God has given a great vision to them to reach out to this part of the world through music and what a time for God to have moved me here. One of the things that they have thought about is to use the local genre as a vehicle. Now this gives me a new idea to explore a new genre that could suit this part of the world. I've begun to tune my ears to the playing of a lot of Eastern European and Middle Eastern melodies and their rhythms. Hope I get a good grip of it someday soon!!!
So here I am, looking forward for a good year of a lot of new things - new melodies, new harmonies, new associations and new horizons for my work, singing and music!!!!
Cheers and thanks for your time!!!!
