As resident Guru at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy for the past two decades, Ulhas Kahsalkar has mentored several excellent students,amongst whom many are well known performers today. Sri.Vijay Kichlu, who headed the SRA from its founding in 1977 until 2001, said Kashalkar “is not only one of the country’s finest performers, he is also one of the academy’s most sought-after and successful Gurus”

 

“Kashalkar’s students similarly swear by him. “I became a completely different person after my time with him,” the vocalist Shashank Maktedar, one of Kashalkar’s first students at the SRA, said.. “He taught me much more than music. He taught me how to think and how to live a musician’s life." 

 

“He is probably the best guru in Hindustani music today,” the singer Ranjani Ramachandran, who studied with Kashalkar for nearly five years, told. “He recognises each student’s strength and gets him or her to exploit that. He’s very shrewd in estimating your level. For example, he began by teaching me how to fill an avartan, then how to make it aesthetic, and further how to make it expressive. Even though he is a traditionalist, he would tell us not to get bogged down in grammar and gharanas, to absorb as many influences as possible. He doesn’t talk much—what he says is concise, precise and extremely analytical. In these senses, he’s also very modernist.”  

- The Caravan Magazine, 2015