The purpose of music......

Sometimes, i wonder....who should be called a better performer(in music). Often, I get to hear things like Manna de is a better singer than rafi or kishore. Because, what he could sing rafi and kishore couldnot. It makes me wonder: who can be called musically better??

These questions often trouble me whenever I am faced with the situation of song selection. Quite a no. of people told me that the mellow romantic song i performed in the latest event concluded did not do justice to my skills and callibre.

But, oflate somehow I have made this realisation that the purpose of music goes far beyond proving my skills and capabilities to people. There was a time when I was in the race of proving myself to others. But now I feel, music is about emotions and feelings (ofcourse emotion can be of any type). So, as a performer the only job at my hand should be to make people feel exactly the same way I felt after listening to any particular song. And, there is where my "skills" should come into picture. If the audience couldnot feel the pain/ecstacy/passion/humor which I felt in a particular song, then my skills are no good.

Its not important to show people how many notes I can touch in a song, but how many hearts I can touch.........There is a causal relationship between the latter and the former. More the no. of notes are there in a song, more they get mesmerized. But, again the star in such case is the singer and not the song!

I feel that any performance should be such that the "personality of the song" should come to life and not the personality of the singer!!

A Gold for our sweat......

TAKE AWAY MY PAIN......as i was singing these lines in netaji, i was sweating profusely and i felt a bit giddy. There was too much of stress on me at that time. Much was at stake, and the competition was very very stiff. But we did it finally and i was as much happy yesterday as i had never been in the history.Reason????.......RK won a gold in an entertainment group event after I dont know how many years.And that victory was in western groups, which was one of the tuffest nuts to crack given the fact that every hall had something to give a stiff competition to us.While our strongest competitor RP had a dreaded line up of apro, kartik, mohit, vinod, andre;Azad had rathore;llr had podu n mukul.And all of the above 3 halls produced a great show.

For the last 5 days, my wingmates had been calling me "halu", "frustu". Reason?I had been very loaded thinking about every single details about the whole thing.Let me recount all that i did, so that i or my juniors can revisit them sometime later in the future.

1>Song Selection :- We took care of the fact that we dont select any song which uses any heavy metal patch (MT ) .Funda was simple.....such kind of distortion has never sounded good in netaji on Abir da's sound system (unless u have a really costly processor).Especially when u have a time constraint there in mind in sound checking

2>Sounds:- We had taken 2 amps for the 2 guitars to be used.While sound patch setting, we adjusted the volume knobs of the 2 amps such that for the same volume parameter(say 18) on the 2 processors, the volume level comes out the same on both guitars.Taking it as the reference we adjusted the leads volume and patch accordingly.Also care was taken that once the volume level of the first song(smoke on the water) is set, then the volume level of the other songs to follow come out in the right amount automatically.This strategy worked perhaps as they say that the sound was very properly balanced in all the songs.

3>Showmanship:- Sunday morning was the Bong drams lights practice.We leveraged this opportunity. Me, Ashish, Nishad, Sudeep were there in the netaji to have a look at what all we can do with the light system available there. We made much plans there and thanks to the lights team (aayush and Co.) that they implemented all of them beautifully.

4>Vande Mataram Intro:- This really brought out some effect. Me, Ashish and Laddha worked out the leads of this intro at 2 am in the nite, just before the event.And Ashish and Laddha executed this beautifully on the final day.

5>Uniform:- We had thought initially to have some kind of uniform. But RP were very clever in leveraging their second slot position by being the first team to come in formals in judges' eyes. Any other team that wud have come out doing the same wud have been viewed as copy cats in the judge's eyes(althought the idea originally belongs to Nehru). So we dropped the idea of having any uniformity in our dresses as we believed that all the 4 teams on the second day wud be following the herd. We just had our lead guitarist ashish and vishal dressed differently, while me , KC and ion were sporting whites. Guess wat.....we got 5 out of 5 in showmanship :)(offcourse the credit goes to the lights team more than anybody else).

On a more sentimental note, i would like to devote this Gold to Denzel, the erstwhile lead guitarist of RK who first showed us the importance of playing clean music.

Also, my personal regards for Dash, who inspite of being an avid follower of DEATH METAL drumming came out to play single bass for all the songs with us setting perfect example of team-spirit for others to follow.On an even more sentimental note, suddenly in the morning i realised that this was perhaps my last show with ashish and dash, and i m surely going to miss them so much.

Thank You!!!

I dream......

While everyone was so ecstatic about the inevitable victory of RK hall in inter hall eastern vocals, I could be seen very quiet ( hallucinated ). No, not that success had gone to my head. But, in a very unusual manner I was pushed into some retrospection.

I remembered the days when I used to participate in the Bhajan competition in my primary school . My mom used to teach me the bhajans which she thought I would be able to manage. And those songs used to be very simple. Not that I wasn’t in tune. But, I couldn’t handle the variations, embellishments and minuteness in songs well. My sister, on the other hand, used to get pretty difficult songs which she used to execute perfectly. She always came first and I used to come on second, third ( once no position at all) position. My cousins often used to mock me for I could not handle even simplest of the embellishments. My teenage came, when my throat started cracking whenever I attempted to sing. I said quits to singing.

Then I came to this place. With a cassette of Sonu Nigam, which my seniors had gifted me. (My sister often used to pull my leg me by saying that they want you to listen to the songs properly before you try singing them again :) ) .With no source of amusement available at this place, I often found pleasure in listening to that cassette and singing along. Slowly, I fell in love with his voice. I looked for more of his songs and I came through the list of following songs, which a guy of much limited capacity like me found almost impossible to be done:-

1> Satrangi re :- the song had so much of variation + high pitch + no breathing time + passion

2> Zindagi maut na ban jaaye :- “desh mein…………” alaap was almost impossible

3> Mera rang de :- so much of embellishment in the introductory line.

4> Saathiya( title song) :- fine embellishments again.

5> Deewana tera :- Voice scatting which is very difficult to be done.

By then, my band was formed in kgp. I met people with absolutely amazing musical callibre like kartik, vamsi, saurabh, apratim, coke. I had decided by then. By the end of my stay in kgp I will develop my caliber as much as to cover all these songs elegantly.

Instead of going for a classical training, I kept on practicing on my own. And I practiced much. I always knew my weakness as well as I was confident about my strength which was building up slowly. I still remember how I used to practice “satrangi re” riding a bicycle so as to develop the capacity of my lungs to hold air. I don’t know whether these things helped or not, but the important thing was….I had the passion to improve. And that is what was most satisfying in my retrospection.

After my inter hall performance on 1 Feb 2006, I got a feeling somewhere that I have been successful in my attempts ( offcourse Successful with a capital S ). What could be a better testimony to this than the achievements of the duo ( Vamsi + Me ) in Inter Halls.

2003 :- 4^th place

2004:- silver medal

2005:- gold medal in a very stiff competition

2006:- gold medal in a very comprehensive manner.

While, I was watching some of the singers singing some kishore/rafi songs in tune, I remembered my old days when being able to sing a “rafi song “ perfectly in tune on stage meant so much for me. Now, somehow there was a feeling that I have come ahead of those old milestones. Film songs, old songs etc. make me feel challenged no more. I am standing at the foot of the mountain( read challenge). The challenge to be able to sing a pure classical no. perfectly. I have to move up now. To conquer this mountain.

And this is also my guru’s (Mrs Prema Mukherjee ) dream.

Thank you for tolerating this narcissistic blog. :)