Parikrama Explore The Importance of Organ Donation In Hopeful ‘Translucent Night’ Video

New Delhi-based rock band Parikrama’s latest song “Translucent Night” comes with a music video that encourages organ donation to fix the skewed ratios in India, starting with themselves. All six band members have pledged to become full body organ donors and the music video – co-directed by filmmakers Bhanu Wadhawan and Prem Singh Gambhir – proudly claims that no actors were used in the making of it.

The release on August 3rd coincided with India Organ Donation Day, while the audio will be out on August 13th, when World Organ Donation Day is marked. Parikrama founder and organist Subir Malik recalls becoming a eye donor and receiving a card back in his school days itself, but admits he may not have even had a full grasp of what it meant. “This has been a subject close to me from the beginning,” he says.

More recently, upon coming across articles that spoke about organ donation, Malik researched further about the cause only to find that despite India having the highest population, organ donation is under 1 percent per million people. There is stigma, blind faith and other aspects which prevent successful organ donations in India, according to Malik. “Talking to people, I got to know that some think that if an organ is donated, then in your next life, you will be born without that organ and stuff like that. Then we do have progressive people who don’t think of this [organ donation] because of a lack of awareness,” he adds.

In the process of making and releasing “Translucent Night,” Parikrama members all became organ donors and Malik says it was pretty much an instant yes from everyone. Along the way, the campaign for the song is not just to get individual pledges, but rather start a chain reaction where entire families can be encouraged to become donors. That way, more pledges get converted into donations and another gap reduces, according to Malik. “We’re just an indie English rock band from Delhi, so we hope that a lot of celebrities and influencers pick up on this campaign, even if not the song. We’ll be more than happy if it makes a difference,” the organist says with a smile.

The song, for its part, marks the first single with guitarist Abhishek Mittal (from instrumental act Submarine In Space), who worked on the initial idea with vocalist-guitarist Nitin Malik. Intended to be as much open to interpretation as possible, “Translucent Night” trudges along dreamily, like a typically soaring rock ballad from the veterans, complete with guitar solos by Mittal, who stepped into the band following the passing of guitarist Sonam Sherpa in 2020.

There are going to be a few more studio releases from Parikrama in 2023 and Malik admits they used to hate the recording studio before, but that’s changed in a bid to add more to their streaming catalog. Their next single “Demons of Time” rounds off a trio of songs they recorded drawing from film adaptations of fantasy epic Lord of The Rings, following songs like “Am I Dreaming” and “Tears of the Wizard.” Malik adds, “We’re working on three songs in clusters and releasing them and we’re not even talking about the older songs which have never been recorded, like ‘Open Sky,’ ‘Vaporize,’ ‘Whiskey Blues’ and ‘In The Middle.’ We’ll be recording those as well. You’ll be hearing lots from Parikrama in the coming months.”

Watch the video for “Translucent Night” below.