— Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
In the sandalwood-laced stillness of Narada Gana Sabha, where December evenings once swelled with anticipatory murmurs and rustling silks, this Margazhi has arrived with a quieter cadence.
On Saturday, 20 December 2025, at four in the afternoon, the hall listened attentively to Dushyanth Sridhar—BITS Pilani alumnus, best-selling author, director of dance productions, and a globally followed exponent of Sanātana Dharma whose upanyāsams on the Rāmāyaṇam and Mahābhārata have long bridged tradition and modernity. Few contemporary speakers command his reach or rhetorical assurance.
It was therefore ironic that he had earlier, with disarming courtesy, contested my lament on dwindling rasikas, offering his humble opinion that post-pandemic turnouts were buoyant, even furnishing photographs of full houses. One acknowledged that experience can differ, and wished him well. Exceptions, after all, do exist.
Yet the hall that evening spoke its own arithmetic. The balcony—sustained by daily-ticket rasikas and of relatively modest capacity—was reasonably full, a familiar and comforting sight.
The ground floor, however, with its far greater seating capacity and once the true barometer of Sabha vitality, remained conspicuously under-occupied. This was no fleeting impression. Quiet conversations with the canteen staff, those unacknowledged auditors of cultural footfall, confirmed that this was symptomatic of the season rather than an anomaly of the evening.
If the turnout felt ‘high’ to the speaker, that would indeed be a different matter. But the hall was nowhere near the fullness it once routinely achieved, especially on a weekend at a major Sabha. Numbers, stripped of nostalgia, remain stubbornly factual. One rests one’s case there.
