Jo Dooba So Paar

An immersive workshop with artists Vedanth Bharadwaj and Mir Rajak and team. It's a musical journey into surrender through the songs of Meerabai, Kabir and the Sufi mystics.

Jo Dooba So Paar is an invitation to surrender: to step beyond the instinct to hold on, control and understand, and to discover what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be carried by the song.

The phrase carries a beautiful paradox. In ordinary life, we learn to keep ourselves afloat, to hold on to certainty, identity, control and the familiar. But in the songs of mystics, surrender can become another kind of crossing. When the grip loosens, something deeper can reveal itself.

Across the Bhakti and Sufi traditions, the language of drowning is not one of defeat. To drown is to let the separate self loosen its grip; to cross is to discover another shore. In this paradox lies the heart of the workshop: perhaps the way across is not through resistance, but through surrender.

Through songs, poetry, collective singing and deep listening, we will explore longing, love, devotion, dissolution and the mysterious movement from 'I' towards something larger than oneself.

Drawing from Kabir, Meerabai and the Sufi saints, the workshop brings together diverse musical traditions that speak, in different voices, of the same inward movement.

Sometimes, the shore is found only when we stop trying to stay afloat.

Jo Dooba So Paar is an invitation to take that leap: to enter the song deeply enough that, for a moment, there is no need to know where we are going.

Perhaps that is the mystery of the mystic's path. The one who dares to drown discovers that the other shore was never far away.

No prior experience of singing is required. The emphasis is on listening, participation, voice and the shared experience of letting the song take us somewhere.