Relating her experience of learning music from Dhondutai, Devidayal says, "She taught me with such riguor that even today I can reproduce aalaaps and taans I learnt back then with more ease than what I may have learnt last month." She says that when one is young one is blessed with senses of marvellous acuteness, due to which she, as an adult, was able to recollect all her childhood moments, musical and otherwise, that she spent with Dhondutai, lucidly.

Writing about music was a marriage of her two greatest loves, she exclaims. Her book while it attempts to explain the basics of Indian classical music also tells about what it takes to become a great musician and explores the vulnerabilities, joys and struggles that are part of the world, she informs.

The book was endorsed by Pandit Ravi Shankar and saw Sonia Gandhi stating it as her favourite read of 2007. It is currently being translated into European languages.

The wooden resonance in her voice tells of the singing talent she is endowed with but she confesses of the dedication towards the art that she lacks. In the book, Devidayal takes refuge in a passionate exaggeration of this insufficiency of hers.

Devidayal has a degree in Political Science from Princeton University and vacillates between being a journalist and a writer. Still a journalist at heart, she says that journalism has kept her grounded and journalistic reporting and writing have given her fantastic skills and an eye for details.

Her voluble prose in the book speaks of indelible characters in the history of music but about the prevalent music culture she notices, "Classical music in India today is doing really well. With changing patronage structures, performance will also change." She says that the real problem lies not with practitioners but with Indians obsessed with being part of a global world so much so that they are losing touch with their own traditions. "I hate it when people hark back to the good old days that never were", she repeats Ogden Nash's famous words with epigrammatic point.