Hindi rock and rock n’ roll shared the spotlight at Rolling Stone Stage

Charan Singh Pathania during his set in Rolling Stone Stage. Photo: Sairaj R Kamath

This weekend’s Rolling Stone Stage had quite the varied line up for the crowd at R-City Mall. Switching around its predominant formula of acoustic rock so far, this edition of the gig series featured a capella and beatboxing group Aflatunes and an unplugged set by Mumbai alt-rockers, the Anand Bhaskar Collective, on May 16^th, and singer-songwriters Charan Singh Pathania and Vivek Date with their respective bands on May 17^th.

Aflatunes had the crowd hooked with their rendition of the classic Hindi film song “Sar Jo Tera Chakraye”. With some bass heavy beatboxing and harmonized vocals, Aflatunes presented a covers-based set that included songs like Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.” The group won the most applause for some improvised tunes based on requests from audience.

The next performance by the Anand Bhaskar Collective was the calm after Aflatunes’ storm of a capella and breakbeats. The group played their debut album Samsara in its entirety, giving their originally heavy compositions such as “Hey Ram”, “Fanaa” and “Tere Binaa” a soulful, acoustic twist. The Indian classical influence in Bhaskar’s vocals was a big draw, but the skilful violin-playing by Ajay Jayanthi also got the crowd cheering. The band even showed their love for Bollywood oldies by covering the Hindi film classic, “Ye Raat Ye Chandni Phir Kahaan.”

Charan and his group were all smiles as they took to stage on the second day of RS Stage. Although Charan is more famous as the guitarist for Mumbai metal band Providence, the singer-songwriter threw his metal persona out of the window to play original Hindi compositions. Charan also threw the crowd a curveball with his song “Take a Bow,” which included some pacy rapping in Hindi that wowed many of the younger members of the audience.

The last performance by Vivek Date packed some bluesy rock n’ roll to cap the night at R-City. Date first performed some of his originals such as “Mr. Brown”, “Blue-Eyed Boy” and “Make Love to the One You Love” with percussionist Suyog Risbud, before he was joined by his blues rock band Sweet Wine. The band went on to cover rock classics like Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love”, and proudly showed their devotion to rock n’ roll with their original tunes such as “Cool Blues” and “Keep Playing Rock n’ Roll.” Guitarist Keith Veigas’ frenzied solos turned out to be the highlight of their performance.

Photos: Sairaj R Kamath

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