About 3 or 4 years ago on a cool and breezy
monsoon day here in Mumbai, I was busy searching the internet for some new
songs. I was sitting on my balcony, the dark monsoon sea stretching out in the
front, and the distant lights of the Mumbai ships and the city forming small
glittering dots all around.
Most of the English and Hindi tracks were
already known, so I typed in ‘Bengali’ in the keyword for the search.
As I sat there in the quiet and soulful
hours much past midnight, I saw a track that I had not yet heard of, but one
that came popping up in all my searches.
I tried using a few different words, but
the same song was popping up everywhere. Just the fact that it was mentioned
everywhere and came up in every search I did was enough reason for me to give
it an ear.
Before this, I don’t remember the last
Bengali song I had heard, or enjoyed, or learnt enough to sing along. I don’t
remember any song actually. Maybe one or two that I had heard sometime when I visited
Calcutta as a kid, but even then, there were no Bengali songs that I could say I
knew or could sing.
I clicked on the song. The video had a very
sepia feel to it. And these frames are of course a pull for me. So I was glued
on instantly. As the music began, I could feel a stirring, I could feel a pull.
There was something magical happening here, something different.
