The Workshop I Carried From London Back to Gujarat and Why It’s the One I’m Most Proud Of.

I grew up knowing what it means to be from somewhere that the world doesn’t look at. Dang, Gujarat, India isn’t on anyone’s radar. It’s a district in Gujarat tucked into forest and hills, home to tribal communities, and about as far from a London DJ space as geography allows. I know both of those worlds now. The first time I went there at this school of physically challenged and visually impaired, I did it blindfolded and set a world record for the longest blindfolded DJ performance. 1 hour, 16 minutes and 57 seconds, no sight, no screens, just sound and muscle memory and the quiet of a room full of visually impaired students who understood exactly what was happening, probably better than anyone else in the world could have. 

 

That record was my way of saying something without a speech. But I always knew one visit wasn’t enough. So when I sat in London designing a full DJ workshop for those same students, working out how to teach rhythm without a single visual cue, how to make a DJ controller make sense to hands that had never touched one, it felt like going home and finally having something useful to bring with me.

This trip started with a phone call I didn’t plan for

I was teaching here in London, and working full-time. It was an early morning phone that came from home in India and this became one of those trips that don’t get planned months ahead. Just a decision and a bag getting packed. But somewhere between booking the flight and landing, a thought settled in that I couldn’t shake loose. I was going to back to my roots.

So I reached out to Andhjan Madhyamik Shala, the school in Shivarimal, Dang district. I told them I was coming and asked if they’d be up for something more than a visit. Not a performance but an actual workshop. Teaching their students to DJ.

They said yes before I finished the sentence.

My friend Chintu came on board to handle the event side of things and if you’ve ever tried to organise something with 100-plus participants in rural Gujarat with a tight window, you understand what that kind of help is actually worth. He’s an excellent event manager and he made the structure possible while I focused on the one thing I was still working out, how do you actually teach DJing properly when nobody in the room can see?

I’ve run workshops before. But this was different. This was building an entire teaching method from scratch, no waveform displays, no “watch what I do,” no visual reference points of any kind. Just sound, touch and the kind of listening that most sighted people never develop because they’ve never needed to.

It took me a while to get the approach right, everything clicked into place. On the 9th of March 2026, we were ready.

What I kept getting wrong in my own head

Here’s something I had to work through before I even landed in India.

I’ve been DJing long enough that the technical side is second nature. I don’t think about where my hands go, they just go. But teaching is completely different to doing. Most DJ education leans heavily on sight, waveforms on a screen, colour-coded cue points, BPM numbers, watch my hands, watch the mixer, the levels drop and so on. The whole architecture of how DJing gets taught assumes the person learning can see what’s happening. Nobody designed it that way deliberately, it just ended up there because that’s who was in the room.

So, I went back to basics. The basics of how I actually know what I’m doing when I DJ. What do I hear that tells me where I am in a track? What does my hand feel when the crossfader is at the right point? How does the body learn a platter before the brain catches up? I’d been doing all of this by instinct for years. I just hadn’t named it. Hadn’t made it teachable.

That was the work I did before March 9th. And it turned out to be some of the most useful thinking I’ve done about my own craft in a long time.

The day itself

We started before anyone touched a controller. Just rhythm, clapping, counting out loud, feeling a beat land, holding it steady, passing it around the room. It sounds simple, and in one sense it is, but watching over 100 students lock into a shared pulse without a single visual prompt, some of them finding the pattern faster than people I’ve taught in fully equipped studios, told me everything I needed to know about the room I was in.

Then came the equipment. I walked them through the controller by touch, where the platters are, what the crossfader feels like at each position, how to locate a cue button by where it sits rather than what it looks like. Before anyone moved a fader, we talked about what crossfading actually does. What you hear, what changes, what stays the same and understanding first, then hands on. And then they played.

It wasn’t clean and polished. But it was real, actual rhythm being tracked. The energy in that room was the same energy as any workshop I’ve run anywhere, the energy of people discovering they can do something they didn’t know they could do.

Vastavikta News, regional news channel, came and covered it. I’m so happy they were there. There are things that happened that day that I want people to see, not for me, but for those students. So that the record of it exists somewhere beyond memory.

The letter I didn’t expect

A few days after the workshop, the school sent a formal letter of recommendation supporting my UK Global Talent Visa application in Arts and Culture. The visa application was already in motion and the workshop came about because I was going to be in India and it felt wrong not to use that time properly. The letter wasn’t the reason. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t mean something. Because it was specific. 

It will go with my visa application. But it’ll stay with me longer than that, as a reminder of why this kind of work deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms, as commitment that belongs inside an artistic practice, not alongside it.

What these students does to you, if you let it

I’ve built my career in London. The pace, the network, the constant forward motion of a city that rewards people who keep showing up, I understand that world and I’ve worked hard to be part of it.

Communicating with these students is the opposite of all of that. The teachers at Andhjan Madhyamik Shala are serving students who come from communities that formal systems consistently underestimate, visually impaired children from tribal and rural backgrounds in one of India’s least visible districts and they’re doing it carefully and consistently and without an audience.

I’m from that part of the world. I carry it with me. But going back, really going back, with something to offer rather than just something to feel, that’s when the connection becomes something more than nostalgia.

Every time I return to this school, I leave knowing more about my own craft than when I arrived. This time, designing an audio-first DJ curriculum taught me things about how I actually process music that years of performing hadn’t made explicit. Teaching forces you to understand what you know, not just use it.

And beyond that, there are 100-plus students who now know that a DJ controller is something they can touch, use and make music with. That knowledge belongs to them and no one can take it back.

That’s the work. That’s what keeps pulling me back.

And I already know it won’t be the last time.