Monday, May 17, 2010

Talk about passion.Talk about giving up worldly desires.Talk about sticking to what you do best.

Dang! You’re talking about Indian Ocean.

25 years. Dig this, for 25 years; these guys have just ‘wandered around, playing, singing folk songs like minstrels for peace’. Out of one vision, grew an entire experience called Indian Ocean.

But the ride wasn’t at all bliss. In a country rampant with a standard verse-chorus-verse music scene, where the musicians would seldom gain recognition, four ‘babas’ from Delhi emerged, telling people about various folk tales, current issues, through their songs which followed a simple pattern of music where no strict structure ruled the songs, they were based on musical scales (and not chords), hence, letting the music just flow like a river.

With Amit Kilam on drums,Susmit Sen on guitars,Rahul Ram on bass,Asheem Chakravarty on tabla and all of them sharing vocal duties, Indian Ocean made their foray onto the Indian music scene, with nothing but good music. No big names backing them. No inclination towards the run-of-the-mill type of Bollywood music. What they brought to the Hindi-language music scene was novel and pathbreaking.

All-in-all, what they did was just stick to their passion. Had they given up and sucked up to the corporate culture, the richness of folk music would’ve been away from our ears. Sure, times of tragedy struck them. Haughty record labels dismissed off their music as’ unsuitable for the masses’. The band, together, struggled balancing their day jobs and jam sessions.

Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachna
Karmaphalehtur bhurma te sangostvakarmani ||

Lord Krishna’s words, Indian Ocean just applied it to their way of living.