Band, Baaja, and Bachelor's Degrees
Fresher’s Talent Show 2019 at Kirori Mal College, New Delhi - Photo: Karan Madhok
From the lecture halls to elevated stages, how aspiring Indian college bands survive external pressure to keep the music playing.
I can hear the echoes of snare drums from the outside, of mics with too much feedback, of an occasional strum of the electric guitar. There are no signs leading the way in the rest of the Kirori Mal College (KMC) campus in North Delhi to the ‘old gym’ area. No signs indicating the small orientation event for the college’s Music Society freshers.
But, when I hear the sound of music outside that small, hastily-soundproofed hall, I knew I was at my destination. Gingerly, I open the doors, and I’m transported into a different space, away from the academic drudge and campus politics and placement fairs of the world outside, and into a small hall crowded—overcrowded—by around 50 or so musically-inclined young students, ready to listen and to perform.
The Music Society—‘MuSoc’—at KMC is a standalone student society, unrelated to any of the academic programmes offered at the college. KMC, a constituent college of the University of Delhi (DU), has a reputation for excelling in its economics and humanities programmes. But students who hope to carve a more creative route have to follow their independent set-up. They form bands, hold musical events, fuse Indian and Western classical tunes, and go out for national competitions.
And they don’t do it for the grades.
“This is our own ‘society’,” says Divij Kapoor, one of the most accomplished young musicians at KMC. “There is no department backing us. No grades, no marks, no academic connection… We’re doing this solely as a hobby.”
Kapoor is a multi-instrumentalist, and depending on the band set-up, plays the lead guitar, the bass guitar, or the keyboards. When he’s not playing with one of the college’s MuSoc bands, he freelances as a session musician for bands around New Delhi. And when he isn’t doing that, he is in class, a third-year Political Science student.
“Some people here [in MuSoc] have a musical background, and some don’t. There are no music teachers; our seniors created a tradition with this society, and they’ve passed it down to us, and we’re passing it down to our juniors.”
I visited Kapoor and other members of the MuSoc band during one such event of the society carrying out the tradition for the next generation: The Freshers’ Talent Show. The society’s new students are here to give a musical performance in the tiny old gym hall in front of their friends and some supportive faculty. A space has been left in the front corner of the hall for the ‘stage’, back-lit by an array of Diwali-like bulbs and a bright green poster. In front of them, the audience sit on the dozen wooden chairs, or fold their legs together to sit on the floor, or crowd around standing in the back. It’s stuffy and hot and crowded, and the few tiny fans in the hall aren’t enough to cool anyone down in the afternoon heat.
But once the music begins, all the elements are forgotten, and we’re transported into a new world. Kapoor continues his role as a ‘session’ musician and a senior at MuSoc, serving as a backup musician for first-year singers showcasing their talents. Some come up and sing Bollywood classics while some choose feisty new Ariana Grande hits. Some sing in regional languages and some remove the standing-mics to ground themselves over the hard floor, showcasing their skills on the sitar and tabla.
And behind them all, Kapoor plays along on the guitar, a drummer provides the beat when necessary, and a keyboardist dazzles up a melody. These are some of the city’s brightest young musical talents—and like many more around the country, they are hunting for a way to balance their creative ambition with academic burdens.
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India’s colleges and universities have long had a reputation of being academic pressure-cookers, a transit between the last days of happy youth and the drudgery of adult-life to come. India has the world’s largest youth population, with over 600 million people—about half our population—under the age of 25. Tens of millions enter college every year, and tens of millions more finish their studies to land a place in the competitive job market. Numbers are large, the economy is on a slowdown, jobs are few, and unemployment rates are much higher than the global average.
The few years of higher education come under a spanner for each individual, as anything but excellence could affect their professional and personal future for a lifetime. The burden leads to depression, addiction, and often, to suicide. College is when parents (or society) expect the young Indian to pick a vocation that would lead to the most stable or lucrative career.
It’s no time to fool around.
This is why career vocations of the creative arts are only attempted by the truly dedicated, the truly fearless, or the truly foolish, or those who have an inkling of all of the above. While India has a vibrant popular music industry in Bollywood and other mainstream sectors, the student-artists I spoke to had dreams of making a mark with their own voice, their unique brand of music.
As you may have already guessed, that is much easier said and done.
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On stage, performing on campus or on the road at a competition elsewhere, The Leading Drops—a student-run rock band from Punjab’s Lovely Professional University (LPU)—are best known for their cover of ‘Dil Se Re’. The Hindi A.R. Rahman song from the film Dil Se allow the band to explore their best instincts of stadium-rock, and further allows their lead range—Shreyansh Verma—to showcase his vocal range.
“This is the song that we’re best known for,” Verma had told me earlier this year. “But we also made an Indian/Western rock fusion, mixing up the song ‘Anjane’ by the band Strings and Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.”
Verma is following his dream. The 3rd-year student is studying Performing Arts at LPU, a large campus in a small town in Punjab’s Kapurthala district. Verma and The Leading Drops have served as the university’s official representative band this year, and in recent months, taken part in a number of state and national-level ‘Battle of the Bands’ competitions—colloquially known as ‘BoBs’. Most recently, they won the BoB at the Maharishi Markandeshwar University in Ambala.
With the experience of several gigs under their belt, Verma knows that, to please the audience, The Leading Drops have to perform a variety of music. “Whatever time slot we get, we pick songs of all genres. We try to cover it all: some hardcore-type for headbanging, but something soothing at the start. Sometimes we do our cover of ‘Tum Ho To’ from Rock On!! The most audience reaction we get is from our cover of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’. We try to interact with the audience and be energetic.”
It is the inescapable fate of a lot of aspiring bands and musicians at this level in India to play these familiar hits, to choose covers of popular songs over their original compositions, or OCs. Whether they’re playing in front of an audience of fellow students, at a private party of drunken uncles and aunties, or a friend’s cocktail party, covers are a shortcut to an easy applause.
For many artists I spoke to, the creative satisfaction of an original composition isn’t worth the silent audience, nodding their heads uneasily to a tune they’ve never heard before—or worse, checking out from the music completely.
The Leading Drops - Photo: MMU Universumm Team
Kapoor, of KMC’s MuSoc, said that the original music of his band is “basically a fusion between Hindustani classical and western.”
The band’s drummer Manik Oswal added, “We play Western, try-hard jazz, something like funk… We are influenced by the drummer Jojo Mayer. We haven’t done drum and bass and jungle before, but we are experimenting.”
With experience in playing in competitions and gigs in Delhi and beyond, both Kapoor and Oswal have faced audiences that insist on traditional or ‘unoriginal’ music.
It is the inescapable fate of a lot of aspiring bands and musicians at this level in India to play these familiar hits, to choose covers of popular songs over their original compositions, or OCs. Whether they’re playing in front of an audience of fellow students, at a private party of drunken uncles and aunties, or a friend’s cocktail party, covers are a shortcut to an easy applause.
“It really depends on the kinds of gigs you’re doing,” said Oswal. “The music scene in Delhi is kind of different in all other states. In Bangalore, there’s more of an indie-music scene. In Delhi, I have seen jazz and improvisation music a lot. That’s what many venues want.”
Kapoor added, “Some gigs you get, you’re only allowed to play covers to make people dance. That’s the basic requirement.”
If it’s the covers that gets them the local gigs, it’s the excellence in original compositions that usually determine their success in BoB competitions. Bands here are judged on their musical creativity and song-writing skills. The Leading Drops have found recent success with songs they have penned themselves recently, such as ‘Aatmak’, written by lead-guitarist Nishant Tiwari.
Karti rahi wo ummide gadaron se
Dhunde khushi who ghum ke bajaro mein
Har aaina aaj bole
Jhooti hasi too bhi role
The song tells the story of a girl Tiwari knew that committed suicide. “It was something he experienced in his own life,” said Verma, “And he was inspired by that. One of our teachers told him that when someone commits suicide, the pain doesn’t end—it just passes.”
The Leading Drops are writing more OCs in Hindi, and their performances are in the grey space between hard-rock and metal.
“I think we have potential,” said Anto A. James, the keys-and-keytarist of the band, and a third-year B-Tech student at LPU. “We have only been together for seven months. We’re pretty young and we have a variety of tastes. I like Bollywood. Sreyans [Verma] has a classical background. Our bass-player is a metalhead. The drummer and lead guitarist are into rock. So, whatever we make, it’s completely honest and has a touch of everything. I think people will like it.”
“Making pop music is becoming very easy,” James adds. “And people are aware that pop and EDM are easy. I don’t want to disrespect any genre, but people are realising that with rock, it is real music played by people instead of machines. This is the reason why rock is making a comeback, because it will have a groove in Indian society. Rock is an acquired taste - but if you get into rock, it's hard to get into other genres.”
“People like rock music,” Verma added. “Bollywood also has a lot of rock right now—and we are inspired back by Bollywood, too.”
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Verma is originally from Champaran, a small town in western Bihar bordering Nepal. His music journey began when his father gifted him a guitar. “There was no place where I could even buy strings around there,” he said. “There was no one around to teach me.”
He learned to play with the help of YouTube, and soon gained confidence to follow his musical dreams. After a rock performance at a school Independence Day programme left the small-town audience in confusion, he said he was told, “Beta, this is not a performance for a place like this.”
LPU, a cosmopolitan campus, turned out to be a boon for his musical dreams. “The best thing about LPU is its extra-curricular activities,” he said. Already from a musical background, he was able to find bandmates from other streams of business and engineering to compose, travel, and play along with him.
But there are countless others from backgrounds like Verma’s who don’t find that way forward to creating their own work. If The Leading Drops were finally able to jump out of their comfort zone and start creating more originals, bands in smaller institutions from smaller cities, far away from urban influence, have to continue making do with the demands of their local culture.
Born in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, vocalist Vivek Singh is a Bachelor of Music 3rd-year student at the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith, a public university in the heart of his hometown. Singh had a vocal ‘guru’ when he worked on his Hindustani classical music, but it was this guru’s son who ushered him into a new direction.
“He worked for a mutual fund company, but his real plans for many years had been to start a band,” Singh said. “Suddenly, we decided to go for it last year—to finally get our band going.”
They named this band Achintya, a Sanskrit word that is an alternative name for Lord Shiva and means ‘inconceivable’ or ‘beyond comprehension’. Singh is the band’s leading singer, and he brings his classical background to mix with modern and classic Bollywood music. There are half-dozen members in the band that use a mix of western and Indian classical instruments.
Achintya perform on-campus, at Indian music college fests such as the one in the nearby Banaras Hindu University, and for off-campus parties. Singh said that, while Achintya have experimented making original compositions for their Hindustani classical tunes, they haven’t ventured into new creations in modern rock yet.
“We know seventy to eighty percent of the type of music the audience likes,” said Singh. “We just need to make them happy. If somebody makes a song request, we have to figure out to play it on demand. We’ll play Bollywood songs with a classical touch. We’ll play some western rock, too—we’ll do everything.”
There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of bands like Achintya in the country, who survive on their basic tenet of remaining as amorphous as possible. Like The Leading Drops, they have to be able to “play anything”.
It’s what allows Achintya to continue being hired, providing either the background or the foreground music for parties in hotels like the local Radisson or HHI. It’s the type of band that is ubiquitous, whether comprised of college students or talented elder professionals, furthered by their musical skillsets, but limited by the demands of their audience.
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“To be very honest, as I speak to you, I' m rubbing my head… I’m barely getting any sleep. It’s really fucking hard. We have assignments coming up, tests coming up. My marks in exams are also not very good… It's pretty hard and you've got gotta do what you gotta do.”
Near the end of the October, the KMC MuSoc band and LPU’s Leading Drops joined dozens—or up to hundreds—of other college bands from around the country to take part in regional or national Battle of the Bands competitions. These are the events that the musicians work all year for, the type of showcase that allows them a small taste of the rock-star life, that sees them travel together, share a stage in front of a cheering audience, play their hearts out, and leave to thunderous applause. Participation in BoBs helps in greater visibility, and victory in such events brings credibility and prestige.
MuSoc headed out to the Birla Institute of Technology and Science—BITS—in Pilani, Rajasthan for their prestigious BoB event, Rocktaves. One of the oldest band competitions in India, Rocktaves claims to have been a springboard for prestigious Indian bands like Parikrama, Indian Ocean, Them Clones, Euphoria, and more. It has become a rite of passage for the brightest young stars in Indian rock music.
Other colleges and institutions, particularly those with strong IT/Science backgrounds, are continuing the culture of providing a stage for young musicians. The Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru has the BoB event of their Pravega festival. The School of Engineering and Technology of the Nagaland University in Dimapur hosts Techaura. IIT Kanpur is famous for its festival Antaragni. Online, companies such as Parx and Musical Dreams have launched competitions to hunt for the next great youth band from the country.
The travel can be a thrilling and often, life-changing experience. But for many artists trying to juggle between academics and musical ambitions, the ‘rock-star’ life comes with sacrifices and a heavy burden, too.
KMC MuSoc’s talented drummer, Delhi’s Manik Oswal, said that he made the decision to follow his music very early in his college days.
“In my first year, some of us decided that we were going to focus on music over academics,” said Oswal. “For us, it’s the step to go on to other things, to meet other people. The academic part comes second, because I’m doing music first.”
Oswal is a 3rd year BA Economics student. He said that there is no musical background in his family, that he is the first to trail down this path. “[They] are surprisingly okay with it… on some days. But there are days when they’ll stop and ask me what I’m doing!”
MuSoc’s vocalist Aroonema Koteyal comes from a more musically experienced background. She is the daughter of popular Garhwali singer Anuradha Nirala. Hailing from Dehradun in Uttarakhand, singing was always in Koteyal’s bloodline. Now, she mixes her traditional background with popular western influences, citing artist like Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande as inspirations.
Koteyal is in her second-year at KMC, and this season, got her first taste of the BoB circuit. But when she’s not performing, she, too is a BA English and History major.
“I had a humanities background and I generally like history. I like to read novels. So, I knew that these are the two subjects that I wouldn’t suck at.”
All of the band-members agreed that their academic vocation was only a periphery, a decision to do something they wouldn’t “suck at” while ensuring they kept their focus on their music or the bands intact.
James, the keyboardist for The Leading Drops, admitted that the pressure often gets the best of him.
“To be very honest, as I speak to you, I' m rubbing my head,” James said. We were on a phone conversation—him in Punjab, me in Delhi—but I could feel the stress in his voice across the distance. “I’m barely getting any sleep. It’s really fucking hard. We have assignments coming up, tests coming up. My marks in exams are also not very good. It’s really hard. I haven’t worked out in two months. My eating order is disturbed. But we need to balance it out, and we’re making good music. It's pretty hard and you've got gotta do what you gotta do.”
KMC’s MuSoc Band - Photo: MuSoc
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“We’re not a band, we’re not a family.”
Verma knows that, sometime in the near future, there will come a moment of reckoning for The Leading Drops, when the song comes to an end, when the carefree and creative environment of college gives way for the harsh melodies of the outside world. It’s a well-known narrative about the last days of youth, most famously depicted on screen in India in the 2008 film Rock On!!
Spoiler alert: Rock On!! ended on a happy note. The film’s fictional band Magik reunites a decade after their breakup to continue their musical journey (and their friendship). They have their stressful (and sometimes lucrative) day-jobs, but music remains their true passion. The film was even succeeded by an ambitious and less-successful sequel.
Reality in India is tougher than fiction, though, and Verma had clarity of the challenges that The Leading Drops could face in the future. He knows that their drummer Rakshan Gupta, who is an MBA student, will soon leave campus. “It will be difficult to get another guy in the band to make that coordination,” said Verma. “But we will try.” Verma was sure that James will get a job placement somewhere and leave, too.
“I am hoping to extend my course to stay on campus longer, to stay one more year,” said Verma. “I want to do more things. I don’t know about the rest—I’m a music student, while they are in other streams.”
Over in Delhi, the backbone musicians of KMC’s MuSoc—Kapoor and Oswal—have already dipped their toes into the professional side of music-making in India. They understood the challenges of keeping a band together after college, but hoped to contribute their considerable musical talents in other ways.
Kapoor has been a session musician in New Delhi for a few years, and hopes to continue that journey in the future as a primary source of income. He said he could envision himself forming more bands of his own on the side, too.
Oswal admitted his looming weariness of keeping the band together.
“It’s very difficult to sustain a band. It takes a lot of work to form a band, make sure it’s decent. If you’re coming out with albums or marketing yourself, I think that’s really, really tiring. It’s only something I would do if I found out something that I was really into. But except for that, I also aim to mainly be a session musician.”
Koteyal, the daughter of a renowned musician, doesn’t foresee herself going down the ‘band’-route, either. “I hope to get more into teaching music,” she said. “And I’ll probably do some performing on the side.”
There are many changes looming ahead for these young musicians—some will disband, some will go solo, some will face circumstances that might force them to leave music altogether. But Verma of The Leading Drops hopes to keep the band together.
“I want to do other projects as well. I want to go to Mumbai for a Master’s in Vocals. I want to do studio work. Some sound engineering. Make contacts. I would prefer for my band to be there. I want people to know about my band.”
“Whatever they [rest of the band] do, the face is that they’ll do it for their career and money. But they won’t enjoy it because they’ll all musicians. No one will really leave music. I know that we might be in different places for two or three years. But my plan is that, as soon as I can get to a good place, I'll bring us back together.”
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23-year-old Sanjay Sridhar graduated last year from the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering in his hometown in Bengaluru. By day on campus, he studied Electronics and Communication. By night, he redefined his ‘electronic’ talents as a keyboardist for the semi-professional college band, 8 GB RAM.
The story of 8 GB RAM’s origins on campus was familiar.
“A couple of like-minded friends from college came up with the idea of playing music together,” said Sridhar. “We found a big group who were interested and were free to welcome them. We used this platform and formed a band.”
Like other young Indian bands of this era, 8 GB RAM experiment between the old and the new, playing Indian-fusion music that is multilingual and mixes contemporary folk with classical music. The band has gained popularity with shows around the country since graduation.
“We are currently planning on taking a step into the professional sector, to make more original music and compositions—which we are best at,” he said. “Our future goal would be to release our songs all over the music market and help sustain live music as a ‘happening’ thing in India.”
Like many other college bands, 8 GB RAM had faced a moment of reckoning after college. Some old members left, some drifted away. Some replacements had to be made to continue the rock-n-roll dream.
“But it was not that difficult, because we are so close to each other,” said Sridhar about sustaining the band after their campus days were over. “Though some members left the team midway, we were able to find a permanent set of members from outside campus. We meet up for regular practices, involve ourselves in shows, and also mingle together like a family.”
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Even after leaving college, however, 8 GB RAM haven’t ended their tryst with campus life. They continue to play shows at various university and college festivals around the country, and they were last seen at the BITS Pilani ‘Rocktaves’ in October.
College campuses haven’t just been fertile ground for growing young bands like The Leading Drops—they have also set the stage for grassroots growth of India’s indie sound. Sometimes this sound is inspired by mainstream Bollywood pop and sometimes it’s an offshoot of classic rock bands from the West. Young musicians play headbanging metal, or trippy progressive tunes, or heart-wrenching Hindi ballads, or remixed folk songs in Punjabi or Bengali or Tamil. Sometimes they rap, sometimes they play jazz or blues, sometimes they rock out with a sitar, and sometimes with an electric guitar.
The ‘new’ sound in India seems to be a fusion of all of the above, the new and the old, the Indian and the Western. Often, there is a necessity of being versatile with sound, a chameleon-like quality that allows young performers to play in front of a larger variety of audiences. But it’s also the signal of the new Indian youth, those who are mixing their local heritage with international influences, without going off-beat.
The college stage, ultimately, also helps the youth see a glimpse of their best-case future scenarios. Often, the top college festivals in the country invite popular Indian bands to not just entertain, but also inspire the next generation. The success of bands like Soulmate, Parikrama, Indian Ocean, Bhayanak Maut, Pentagram, Men Who Pause, Them Clones, and countless more—like 8GB RAM—is proof that excellent music finds a way through.
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Back in that old gymnasium at the Kirori Mal College in Delhi, I’m far away from the big festival scene. I do see a lot of enthusiastic young performers at MuSuc’s Fresher’s Talent Show, but it’s clear that only a few of them will likely take their talents outside that gym. Even fewer will get a chance to perform in front of a large audience on a big stage, and even a smaller percentage of those will have a chance to make a living through their music. And those who ‘make it’ will have the responsibility of keeping the cycle going—to pass down the music culture to the next generation, and the next.
In my last conversation with him, I had asked James of The Leading Drops if, with all these sacrifices he has to make in his life, he feels extra pressure, to ensure that the time spent in college with the band yields future success.
“It’s kind of a leap of faith,” he said. “You can’t put a timeline or pressure us, otherwise creativity will die. Then, you’ll surely not make it. Sometimes, we take fifteen days to make a song; sometimes, a song is ready overnight.”
“But we have to succeed. If it's god's plan, then I'll consider myself lucky. I really want us to succeed, because music is something we're very passionate about. If I have the opportunity to leave everything else for music, I’d love to do it.”
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Karan Madhok is a writer and journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, ANMLY, F(r)iction, Solstice, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and his sports journalism has been published for NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Firstpost, Scroll, and more. A graduate of the American University’s MFA programme, Karan is currently working on his first novel @karanmadhok1
