About
Hi, I’m Ashish.
A Seattle dad learning Indian music with my two daughters.
Our family pays for SMA · no platform pays usHow we stay honest
- 6+years learning together
- 4academies compared
- $0paid placements
“The brutal 6 a.m. India-time class slots: the very problem this site now exists to help families avoid.”
How we stay honest
- Free, and no platform pays to be listed
- Same criteria for every academy
- Unverified facts marked “?”
- Our family pays for SMA, and we say so
Our full honesty statement
No platform pays Sound of Roots — no affiliate links, commissions, referral fees, sponsorship or paid placement — and it is free to use. We don’t sell lessons and we don’t get paid when you book one. We may add affiliate links or ads later (the comparison-site model: we’d still genuinely help, and could earn a fee at no cost to you). If we do, we’ll disclose it clearly on every affected page, before you click, and it will not change our picks or how we choose them. We lock our comparison criteria (see methodology) before we scored any platform, check every platform against the same criteria, and keep the full field we considered visible.
One conflict we disclose up front: the author’s family are paying students at Shankar Mahadevan Academy, one of the academies we compare, so we know it firsthand — and we keep our write-up of SMA honest about its trade-offs (it runs on fixed 12-week terms rather than pay-per-class). Found a mistake? Tell us and we’ll fix it.
More about Ashish and this site
Who made this
Hi — I’m Ashish. I live in Seattle, USA, and for the last six-plus years my two daughters and I have been learning Indian music together. Not as experts — as a regular NRI family figuring it out in real time. The practice-versus-homework standoffs. The afternoon I realized I couldn’t actually tell whether a teacher was any good. And, in the early days before I found academies that teach diaspora-friendly evening and weekend hours, the brutal 6 a.m. India-time class slots — the very problem this site now exists to help families avoid.
This site is the guide I wish someone had handed me on day one. Everything here is grounded in what my family has actually lived, and in years of swapping notes with a community of other diaspora parents and students wrestling with the same questions — which tradition, which platform, is the app enough, does this exam even count in India.
I’m not selling lessons. I’m just a parent who wrote down what I found.
What this is
Sound of Roots is a research guide for NRI families starting Indian classical music. No platform we list pays for it, and it’s free to use; our own family are paying students at one of the academies we compare (Shankar Mahadevan Academy), which we disclose.
Why it exists
If you’re an NRI parent or student who wants a real connection to Indian music, the first hour of research is genuinely brutal: dozens of platforms, two traditions you half-know from growing up around them, conflicting forum opinions, and pricing hidden behind “book a trial.” We did the research once, organized it, and published it — so you don’t have to.
How content is maintained
Platform details — prices, formats, course structures — change constantly. Where we could not verify a fact, we say “pricing varies — check site” rather than guessing, and figures that come from third-party listings are labeled as such.
Image credits
Illustrations on this site are original artwork. With one exception, the photographs on this site are AI-generated images (Higgsfield), commissioned for this site — they depict illustrative scenes, not real families. The exception is the photograph at the top of this page: a real photo of the site’s author, Ashish, with his two daughters.