Parikrama, the big daddies of Indian rock, turn 20.
Nigel Britto
Many years ago, Parikrama ceased to be just a band. To most of India's rapidly expanding rock brigade, the New Delhi classic rock behemoth is a national institution; to the Maiden-obsessed Indian teen who wants to play a distortion guitar for a living, Parikrama is the epitome of rock achievement. The band, ambassadors for English music in a country and time when anybody and everybody was going Hindi, turns 20 this week. Over two decades, the merry bunch have lost none of their sheen.
In ways more than one, Parikrama is perhaps the most unique rock band this country has produced. Firstly, few rock bands have a tabla player and violinist as part of their line-up. Also, not too many frontmen go around bellowing "go ahead and pirate our music" to the crowd. Known for showing zero regard for copyrights, Nitin Malik, Parikrama's vocalist, lyricist, guitarist and founding-member, says the band "wants to be heard by as many people as possible". The band's website proclaims "not the musicians, but the music for free".
"People pay good money and come for our concerts, so the least we can do is offer our music free to our fans, " Malik says. Parikrama's songs, all of which have their lyrics written by Malik, are available for free download on the band's website. The band's most popular and enduring hit, But it rained, a haunting song penned by Malik about kidnapped and missing persons in Kashmir, has been downloaded over 5 million times. The popularity of the song was amply evident in Bangalore in 2008 when 40, 000 sang along - It's been so long, so long a time, still I miss Daddy at night - as the band opened for British metal legends Iron Maiden. Though Parikrama has never recorded an album and doesn't intend to, Malik says the band will continue to record original music and give it free to fans.
The band gained most of its massive fan-following in the '90s and early 2000s, when it firmly resisted 'warnings' from music czars to 'go Hindi or go bust'. During its formative years, its set consisted mainly of covers of popular songs like AC/DC's Highway to hell, Guns N' Roses' Sweet child of mine, and the sing-along, collegegoer's favourite, Pink Floyd's Another brick in the wall, where the crowd chanted rebellion against education before pushing off back to college the next day.
Somewhere in the middle of the 2, 600-odd concerts the band has played to date, Parikrama started pushing originals into its set list, a successful experiment that has resulted in the band performing mainly original music in its recent concerts. "People understand, demand and appreciate original music much more than before, which is really, really great, " Malik says. Till I'm no one again is a slow ballad with violin and tabla taking centrestage. Superhero was written for Bill Gates, a cheeky tribute to a programmer: (Springs up from the bed with a crossword in his head. . . /prays to all his gods, even captain Kirk/ hoping he can make it in time for the bumpy ride), Rhythm 'n blues (with Usha Uthup), Am I dreaming was inspired by Lord of the Rings, and Open skies is a slow violin instrumental that gradually accelerates to a rousing climax.
Nitin is the younger Malik in the band;the other is his big brother Subir, who plays keyboards and manages Parikrama and Parikrama Inc, one of India's biggest artiste management companies. Some of the country's biggest acts across genres such as Soulmate, The Raghu Dixit Project, Them Clones, Indian Ocean, Rabbi Shergill and Mohit Chouhan, are managed by the elder Malik. Outside of the band, he also has his finger in various pies including event promotions and a music school.
He's not the only band member to have a life outside Parikrama. Nitin has his own studio, youngest member and drummer Srijan Mahajan plays for two bands apart from Parikrama, guitarist Sonam Sherpa heads his own music school, bassist Chintan Kalra is a video and music producer and Saurabh Choudhary has a master's in business administration. The line-up, which usually also includes Imran Khan on the violin and Shambhu Nath on the tabla, has jammed with a variety of personalities including violinist Sharat Shrivastava and actors Saif Ali Khan and Farhan Akhtar.
Over the years, Parikrama has built a reputation for throwing its weight behind a number of causes such as Free Tibet. Frontman Malik is a brand ambassador for animal-rights group Peta, and the band's official slogan is Peace, Trees and Rock n' Roll, a cheeky and goodhumoured take on the Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll lifestyle many bands end up following. Their very first gig in 1991 was for Aids awareness.
Since then, they've taken their music to England, Canada, the USA, the Middle-East, Bhutan, Nepal and South-East Asia. The England concert came about when they opened for Maiden in Bangalore, 2008, and Mighty Maiden themselves walked out to see the band. They then invited Parikrama to open for them elsewhere too. Some time later, Parikrama played at the Download Festival alongside established acts like Dream Theater and Motley Crue on its UK tour, which Subir Malik then described to TOI as "an awesome experience".
Back home in India, they've inspired many a young musician such as Deepak Nair, frontman of Punkh and Bandish. "Parikrama's song list and showmanship dazzled me as a young rocker, " he says. "Back then (in '96), most upcoming bands wished to open for them...I guess they are a perfect example of a band that has stuck together through thick and thin. Definitely India's answer to the Rolling Stones. " Delhi-based communication designer Piyush Singh describes himself as the band's biggest fan. He's been to over a hundred Parikrama concerts. "Twenty years and they are still going strong. This itself is the biggest proof of their wonderful connect with the audience. You won't often find bands that manage to magically blend Western and Indian instruments and make it sound so appealing. Not only have they been around as a band, but also as a source of inspiration to many youngsters who claim that they started their bands because Parikrama inspired them. "
What has changed in these 20 years is its view of Hindi music. Back in the '90s, it was a symbol of a musician's compromise. Not today. "Honestly, Bollywood has changed leaps and bounds in the last decade," says Nitin Malik. "From the kind of films being made to the kind of music that's there now. And it has done so for the better. Now there are some awesome off-beat films which actually have Hindi rock music, some even have English songs, so I don't think it's that much of a taboo anymore for anyone. " So will Bollywood ever get a touch of the Parikrama magic? "If something really interesting and off-the-road comes along, I think it surely will be worth thinking about, " he says.
This article was first published in The Times of India's Crest edition dated June 11, 2011.
