Salt Doll Gita is the music video for a song included on Bachelors Anonymous’ EP, Like. Below, Bachelor Rob Berg discusses the song, its lyrics, and its video..
The Music
In February 1987, Bachelors Rob Berg and David Hughes contributed the score to Zack’s production of Home or Future Soap by Megan Terry during his first year in UCLA’s MFA directing program (details available here). As I recalled in 2021,
when I discovered [this track] on one of our reel-to-reel tapes, I knew it needed to be released. Listening to what was formerly “Honeymoon” from the Home soundtrack, I envisioned it in an entirely new way. It reminded me of the Hindu parable about the salt doll that I had read about in The Gospel of Ramakrishna:
A Salt Doll Went to Fathom the Ocean
ONCE, a salt doll went to measure the depth of the ocean. It wanted to tell others how deep the water was. But this it could never do, for no sooner did it get into the water than it melted. Now, who was there to report the ocean’s depth?
What Brahman is cannot be described. In samadhi, one attains the knowledge of Brahman—one realises Brahman. In that state, reasoning stops altogether, and man becomes mute. He has no power to describe the nature of Brahman.
The Bachelors released “Honeymoon” as “Salt Doll” on the album In the Land of Nod (2021). In 2024, I wrote:
Well over a year ago, I had the vision of using this instrumental to deliver the message of the Ashtavakra Samhita. I worked hard to choose the right slokas and come up with the right melody to support them.
The slokas I chose to mirror Ramakrishna’s parable are thought to have been composed between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE by the Hindu sage Ashtavakra in his eponymous Gita or Samhita. Legends state that the Vedic student Kahoda was chided by his son Ashtavakra while the child was still a fetus in his mother Sujita’s womb. At issue were his father’s poor intonation when reciting the Vedas as well as his having misconstrued them, his child having been schooled in the womb by aural exposure. Enraged, Kahoda issued a curse on his son, that he be born with eight deformities: अष्टावक्रः ashta [eight] vakra [bends or deformities].
In April of 2024, I set to music the eight slokas I’d culled from the work’s original twenty chapters. That same month, I began reaching out to fellow musicians and engineers as well as local South Asian music institutions, requesting leads for a female vocalist to sing the slokas—in Sanskrit. In May, Rajib Karmakar, of Los Angeles International Music and Arts Academy, responded and referred me to local musician Reewa Rathod. As we wrote last year:
Reewa is an award-winning singer-songwriter, having worked and appeared with the likes of Bryan Adams, the late Zakir Hussain, and Kenny G, among many others. As we learned, she is accomplished in Western, Carnatic, and Hindustani vocal styles as well as piano. And when we mentioned that the lyrics to “Salt Doll Gita” were in the original Sanskrit, she told us she’d be recording them in Mumbai, where her mother happens to be a scholar of that ancient tongue.
The result, as you can hear, is perfectly stunning.
The Video
For the video’s visuals, I called upon my old friend Yo Suzuki, with whom I’d worked on Ramayana 2k2, which I produced at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica in 2002. Yo provided me with mesmerizing royalty-free CGI as well as the ocean imagery at the video’s beginning and end.
The Like EP (including “Salt Doll Gita”)
is available via
HearNow and Bandcamp
I married the visuals with the text (both Sanskrit and English), submitting the video to another old friend of mine, visual artist (and former Hindu monk) Gregory Fields, who is fluent in Sanskrit. Greg found a single typo in the first letter of the text: an errant M (म) having been substituted for the correct Y (य).
After I set the text to a tune, David remarked that he’d been pleasantly surprised by my choice of text. In the 1990s, he’d read from an earlier translation, by Thomas Byrom, at satsangs in L.A. with Robert Adams, a student of Ramana Maharshi. Here’s what Ram Dass had to say about Byrom’s edition:
This is an extraordinarily fine rendering of the Ashtavakra Gita, a book of unadorned compassion. As water wears away stone, so these profoundly simple truths wear away illusion.
Credits
Selected Sanskrit verses from the Ashtavakra Gita (500–400 BCE), India
Translation by John Henry Richards (1934–2017)
Conceived by Rob (DigiRob) Berg
Edited by Yo Suzuki and Rob (DigiRob) Berg
Ocean Videos by Yo Suzuki
Music Performed and Produced by Bachelors Anonymous, The Men’s Dept, Pasadena, 1987
Vocals Performed by Reewa Rathod, Mumbai, 2024
Mixed by Bachelors Anonymous, The Men’s Dept, Pasadena, 1987
Re-Mixed at Architecture, Pasadena, 2024
Mastered at Listen 2, Pasadena, 2025
© ℗ 2025 Berg & Hughes, Celibataire Music (ASCAP)
See the Bachelor Blog for additional credits.