``It's a gift, a God-given gift,'' he says of his musical fingers. It helped, of course, that Silas was born into a family in Kanpur where the gift was well-distributed. ``My grandfather played the piano,'' he says, ``and though my family was into music, they concentrated more on religious hymns.'' Though religious music is not his forte, there's a bit of the devotee in Silas. When he sits on the piano, it is with a passion that verges on reverence. `I can never play without that feeling... it is something that comes from inside, an involvement, it is almost like meditation. '' If he doesn't feel it, he stops midway. ``I've done that often, when I'm playing in front of people. I just leave the piano.''

Much about Silas' career is based on similar instinctive ``feelings.'' Before he started playing the piano professionally, he was a marketing executive, a job he didn't much like. One day, while he was playing the piano at a hotel, the F&B manager walked up to him and asked if he would like to play for them. There was only one catch: Hindi tunes wouldn't do in the hotel; he would have to play English ones.

Silas didn't feel comfortable about the offer. So he simply said: ``No, thank you. Call me when you're ready to take me on with Hindi tunes.'' For Silas, it was simple enough. He thought Hindi film songs had the best melodies, and he felt the piano was ``the king of all instruments.'' And he insisted on a marriage of the two.

His stubbornness won out. They came back and suddenly the odd combination of Hindi songs on the piano, accompanied by a tabla, were the rage not just at this hotel but at other ones, and also on trains, in airplanes and in the privacy of homes, as each of his eight albums sold out.

There is something about the old masters that he can relate to. ``The songs of yesteryear bring back childhood memories,'' he explains. ``It reminds you of your mother singing to you as a child, of you sitting in your aangan with the family as a radio played on.''

Musically speaking, he feels, ``There was a certain depth in their music, in the compositions, in the lyrics. With today's songs, you can just jump around.'' Getting more specific, he says, ``After R.D. Burman, I don't think there has been any good music.'' You dare to suggest Jatin-Lalit but he points out, ``They are based on the old masters. Their own contribution is just 20 per cent.''

To actually get the tunes on the piano was not easy, though. ``Even in Hindi films, they would use the piano, if at all, in the interludes. That's because the music was not written for the piano. The sound often breaks, cutting through the flow.'' But he just went ahead and worked around the problems, creating a sound that was as close to the tunes as possible.

He's often been asked why instead of just ``copying '' he doesn't ``adapt'' the tunes when he plays. Silas has a simple answer: ``There is nothing you can add to that music.'' It's respect for the masters he finds lacking today with `mixes' and `re-mixes' clamouring for space on the Indian music scene. Still, though he has spent the last eight years recapturing that old perfection of the masters, he does have plans for composing his own music. And he promises it will be ``totally original.''

``I have wanted to do it for a while, but then I find that my cassettes are selling well anyway, so I just keep postponing it,'' he explains. Besides, he has not studied music since he found the idea of studying music ``very boring.'' There have been some Bollywood offers he's considering, one of them from Subhash Ghai. That should get him to shrug off the sloth and get down to some real filmi business. Like the old masters once did.