OORJA – 20 years laters – The story of a generation by Supratim Sanyal

ORJA – 20 years laters – The story of a generation by Supratim Sanyal

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(This story is dedicated to Dipankar (‘Dips’) – wherever he is, and…)

The story begins circa 1989, in those same hallowed canteens of Jadavpur University, Calcutta (which politicians call Kolkata), that have consistently produced legends that retain Calcutta as the leader in thought for an entire subcontinent.

There are many characters in this story, but let us start with an 18-year old named Saikat Banerjee with dreamy eyes, an awfully quick wit guaranteed to send you into mindless laughter, and a guitar in his arms. His is a heart with a song – he wants to sing, and write poetry, and generally waste his life doing useless stuff like that, if it were not so that nature and society and economics would require basic survival skills of him. Therefore, he has to also pass the semester examinations.

So Saikat runs into this other character, nicknamed “Dadu” – a name carried on to JU from school by classmates – who is, from all accounts, a happy-go-lucky Joe, with no idea of how to survive the rest of his life, and no indication of worry due to the failure to have any such idea. By the majestic maturity which only folks who are 18 have (and that maturity is, obviously, lacking in anyone beyond 22), and having been exposed to mind-blowing stuff like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and a myriad of Heinlein classics, Dadu has decided that there is really not much point in trying to do anything with life, since it does not matter, anyway – an idea that is so deeply instilled in his mind that at the age of 37, his prime pastime is playing Grand Tourismo HD on a Playstation-3. As Kallol, a buddy of Dadu, recollects, in the final year when one was supposed to worry about placements, “Chatty”, and campus interviews, he once asked Dadu what the possible repercussions might be if one does not get a job. Kallol still fondly remembers Dadu’s answer which is unprintable, but refers to removal of hair from certain parts of the body, as the suggested alternative activity for joblessness.

In any case, Dadu had a little keyboard, a Yamaha PSS-470, a gift from his Father, obtained through a very complicated route from a market in Nepal called Dhulabari.

Therefore, it so chanced that Saikat, who was also a Jethro Tull addict, would listen to one of the classics of their time, a song called “Where the streets have no name”, and being a pretty talented guitarist and not-bad-at-all singer, would pick up the guitaring, and add his voice, and being super-impressed with the results, run to Dadu’s house one fine morning to demonstrate.

Now Dadu, being in perpetual awe of everyone around him – especially talented ones, listens to Saikat strumming away on a beat-up acoustic and singing a song which only Gods like Bono could sing before Saikat (let alone the fact that the Edge and Bono were being rolled into one person) and lets his jaw drop, for a long time. Then Dadu started banging on the keyboard, and after much racket-making in the house much to the consternation of rest of the family and neighbors, it was decided that all this was good. It was an opportune moment to head over to Sankar-da’s tea stall – tea and wills filter were in order to celebrate that moment (like many hundreds of such moments spent in that tea-stall that does not exist any more, though Sankar-da is still around, and no one really knows what happened to the “Khata” that Sankar-da had with a gigantic amount due from Dadu for unpaid bhaanrs of tea and numerous wills filters).

This set of activities was going on pretty often, and eventually the two had a repertoire of many classics, running from J J Cale’s Cocaine through tracks like Careless Whispers (markedly feminine, in their opinion).

Now, there was this other gentleman named Debashish who lived off the Sulekha bus-stop, within walkable distance from JU. It was two bus stops if you wanted to hop on a bus. And Debashish is an awesome guitarist, capable of delivering, to unbelievable perfection, the whole of “Stairway to Heaven”, on guitar and in voice. Dadu runs into Debashish one day while Debashish was strumming away and singing to himself under a tree near the campus. Much dropping of jaws followed, Saikat was introduced, and Debashish was quickly nick-named Jimmy Page, and accused of having five limbs – two arms, two legs and one guitar.

This is a story which will be written by many people. Suffice it for now to say that – fast forward to 2008, and Saikat and Debashish got together again, with age catching up causing voices to falter and fingers to slip. But they did not let that matter – they went ahead and wrote their own songs and sang them and had a lot of fun on the way – and Dadu being a long way off and doing the grind with a job and family and paying the mortgage in another continent, they missed him.

Songs by Oorja

1. Bewarish Ghuri

2. Aarshi

3. Line

4. Bus Stop

5. Krishnochura