How Mumbai’s traffic woes made this Mumbaikar play the guitar at the Saki Naki traffic signal

Many Mumbaikars who travel by road daily either by public or private transport may curse at the never-ending traffic that leads to them getting late to work but not Gaurav Kumar. Kumar has found a solution - he combines his love for guitars and sound with his need to travel for work. The Mumbai-based engineer, who travels from Thane to Andheri plays the guitar every time he is stuck at the Saki Naka traffic signal. "Everybody knows that the Saki Naka signal is the worst signal in Mumbai, and we end up spending at least 30 - 45 minutes there daily," shares Kumar, who is an electrical engineer and insurance professional living in the city since 2008.

Everybody who has lived in Mumbai long enough knows how it is infamous for its traffic and that only gets worse in different areas of the city including Malad, Goregaon and Andheri - all of which have offices, that people travel to from different parts of the city. Mumbaikars travel from as far as Virar in the north to Thane in the east and even Churchgate in the south. The vehicles come from all over make it a total hodgepodge at Andheri, particularly at the Saki Naka signal, as Kumar has experienced. However, most people have just accepted their fate and bide their time on the phones or talking to someone. With his love for the guitar and his love for electrical engineering, the 40-year-old decided to do something about it.

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Finding bliss in Andheri
It all started when a little over two years ago, Kumar was approached by his former boss to join him on a project that involved creating a health insurance plan for a state bank in the western suburb. However, at the time, the Mumbaikar, who moved to the city in 2008, after completing his degree in engineering in Himachal Pradesh, didn't want to work and instead wanted to start something of his own. "He said, ‘you give me two years because after that even I am retiring and maybe even I will join you'. Being a pioneer in the field of health insurance, I was convinced and said let's do it. So, I had to travel for two years from Thane to Andheri near the Mumbai International Airport. From Thane to there, it is madness because you had to spend two-two and a half hour in travel time. Most people leave office at 6:30 pm - 7 pm and at that time Mumbai's most infamous signal is the one at Saki Naka. I used to wait at the signal for about 45 minutes and even one hour. If I practice for 45 minutes every day, I will become a really good guitarist," shares Kumar.

Armed with his electrical engineer knowledge and love for the guitar, Kumar decided to make a guitar cable. He explains, "It is one that is a 6.3 mm plug and goes into a guitar on one end and on the other end, I cut it off, and connected an earphone jack, and put it into the car amplifier and it gave a nice overdriven sound." After that, every time Kumar was at Saki Naka signal, he started removing his guitar, which had found its place in the back seat, and started playing or practicing it. While it was earlier only limited to him playing alone, soon his friends started joining him on his journeys and on one such trip, they shot a video, that showcases Kumar at his best. "My team was in the car, and I told them ‘I will show you something' and then I played ‘Sultans of Swing' by Dire Straits," adds Kumar.

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While that has been the case for the last two years, Kumar still continues to do it every time he goes to Andheri - which is mostly once every week. He shares, "I continue to do it whenever I travel to Andheri. One of my guitars is permanently in the car. I also have a small amplifier that runs on six AA batteries; I also have a charger that charges my batteries, but the amplifier is also always in the car." While he may not always have recorded videos, it is certainly a stress buster for the Mumbaikar who picked up the guitar very late in his life at 24 years in 2008, compared to most other people. While Kumar fell in love with music and the guitar because of Pink Floyd, he takes the liberty to play different kinds of things like practicing his scales.

Falling in love with the guitar
Interestingly, Kumar's journey with the guitar did start over 15 years ago but it was when he was in college at the National Institute of Technology in Himachal Pradesh's Hamirpur. Kumar reveals, "All the projects I worked on in college were naturally inclined towards sound and processing of sound."
With people from all over India coming to the college, he was introduced to different kinds of music in his fourth year of college and English rock band Pink Floyd was one of them. "I was inclined towards them because I believe nobody can beat their sound quality level," the electrical engineer in him explains. It was also around this time that he first picked up the guitar and more particularly the Strat electric guitar and absolutely loved the sound and has never looked back since then.

After coming to Mumbai, he started working at the Tata power plant but the itch to buy a guitar started to develop and it only increased after watched the film ‘August Rush'. "I took a day off from my work and went to Marine Lines in Churchgate and bought a Chinese acoustic guitar," shares the Mumbaikar, who says at the time he didn't even know how to tune the guitar but really wanted to learn how to play his favourite song ‘Coming Back to Life' by Pink Floyd. It is also when he actually fell in love with the sound of the English band. Going into a rabbit hole of reading research papers on the different kinds of electronic devices they use including works by the eminent record producer Alan Parsons. He adds, "I knew every tiny bit of detail of Pink Floyd's rig - how the amplifier is, what tubes are there, what kind of guitar and string gauge they had - everything."

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Eye for detail
You can call the electrical engineer a guitar nerd because even though he went on to study further at IIM Lucknow, he used to go back to his Yamaha electric guitar and even had a digital Fender Mustang amplifier to beat the competitive environment on campus. While playing the guitar, he was also studying music theory online and started to go deeper into it. The real bug to build his own custom-made devices really came in when he joined Raymond's car parts division as the head of strategy. Being a bachelor at the time, he stayed in a rental apartment and being obsessed about electrical parts, his house looked like a garage. "I used to finish work at 5 pm and work till 2 am to build my custom-made amplifier. I was sourcing parts from 13 countries at that time. I wanted to make a guitar amplifier, a guitar cabinet and a stereo amplifier, a transmission line speaker and pedals. After one year, I made a guitar amplifier that is the exact replica of what David Gilmour (of the Pink Floyd) still uses today."

Meeting several like-minded people in the guitar community, Kumar started getting orders to make amplifiers and in two years from then, he started a brand Insignia Hi-Fi from 2015-2017, and everything used to usually get sold in one month. With an ear for refined sound, he has built transmission line speakers over the years, and currently has speakers weighing 100 kilograms each in his home studio, and two base amplifiers too. "To make this amplifier, I contacted the author of the research paper who is an 85-year-old from Denmark, who is a music director and engineer. To my surprise, he replied to email after one month." While he said he was too old to make chart on a computer, so he would draw it and send it to him. "After 10 days, I received a post in which there were 15 - 20 pages of the circuit diagrams to help me make it," adds an extremely grateful Kumar.

Six years later, Kumar who became obsessed with collecting guitars now boasts of 15 guitars in his home. Over the years, he has even dabbled with music as he released an instrumental psychedelic rock music album ‘Beyond The Horizon' (2017) digitally and produced 1,000 CDs with his group of friends as a band called Grooved Cranial Highway. "It is a total analogue recording and nothing digital in it," boasts Kumar. The Mumbaikar is onto his next venture of setting up a software company, but not without an interest in guitar and sound that with only grow louder even if it means at a traffic signal in Mumbai.

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