Narendrapur:
Asit Sil can feel the calluses on his fingers from hours of playing the sitar but still won’t use a plectrum.
Touch and feel are integral to the music created by this 16-year-old and his friends, part of a band of talented teens from the Ramakrishna Mission Blind Boys’ Academy in Narendrapur.
The band comprises more than 10 members, all of them students with varying degrees of visual impairment. Asit has 90 per cent blindness. Vocalist Dipu Roy, 19, was diagnosed with Nystagmus disease as an infant and lost his eyesight by the time he turned 2.
“Sight is not a must-have for musicians. But it is a different ballgame when you are playing in a group. In a concert, one wrong note can disrupt the entire performance. It takes hours of practice to get the coordination right,” said Bishnu Deb Chakraborty, one of the music teachers at the academy.
The band performs at concerts in the city round the year. From Tagore to SD Burman, instrumental compositions based on ragas to bhajans and folk, the band’s bouquet of music spells variety.
The boys have been invited to perform at pujas in different parts of the country in the past couple of years. Last year, it was Mumbai. This festive season, they performed at a celebration in Delhi.
“They had been invited by a puja near Dwarka. Most of them went to the capital for the first time,” said Biswajit Ghosh, the principal of the academy.
Indranil Kesh, who plays the violin, is from Bardhaman. He had joined the academy in 2011 and has been playing for close to four years. The VG Jog admirer remembers “sweating in panic” the first day he took the stage for a concert at the Rahara Ramakrishna Mission.
“Now I don’t get nervous unless the event is really big,” smiled Indranil, who loves listening to Arijit Singh’s melodies.
If Indranil’s favourite raga is Shivranjani, its Yaman for Asit, who is from a family of farmers in South Dinajpur.
Asit had started taking singing lessons at a very young age. Joining the academy seven years ago changed his passion. “I fell in love with the sitar,” recounted the teenager, who loves listening to Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar on YouTube.
On normal days, the boys practise in an auditorium at the academy for an hour after their regular classes. “They put in more hours before an event,” said principal Ghosh.
Sandip Sen, 18, plays the tabla. The Asansol boy’s only memory of music before joining the academy in 2012 is of his mother singing him to sleep. “I had kept my formal initiation into music a secret. When they first heard me in a programme in Calcutta, they could not believe it,” Sandip recalled.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Debraj Mitra / Tuesday – October 17th, 2017