Palash Sen: From Doctor to Rock Star, Euphoria's Journey

Palash Sen’s basement studio at Greater Kailash II is an eclectic place. Deep Purple and Tagore are framed on the wall. Eric Clapton, Jane Austen and Wisden jostle in a small bookshelf while a synthesiser masquerades as a piano nearby. In these creative surroundings, the gym equipment looks sheepishly out of tune. The studio is called The Clinic, more a memory than an evidence that Sen, the 60-year-old frontman of rock band Euphoria, was once a practising doctor. There was a time when he treated patients at the clinic originally set up by his father near Shiela cinema in Paharganj. He stopped in 2000, after the music video of ‘Maaeri’ came out. “It would be a crowd outside. It became difficult,” says Sen. Indi-pop was the hot new sound in town then. By the mid-90s, satellite channels such as MTV, Channel V, Music Asia and others had discovered the inadequate reach of western pop. The young and the restless wanted something groovier than the regular film music they were being force-fed. Indi-pop emerged as a hip alternative. Daler Mehndi, Alisha Chinoy, Lucky Ali, Colonial Cousins, Sunita Rao, Shweta Shetty and Baba Sehgal colonised airtime and mindspace. “With Daler, the genre’s popularity went through the roof. He gave all of us hope that we, too, could do it,” recalls the singer-composer. Euphoria rode the wave. Originally devoted to rock and heavy metal covers, their debut album, ‘Dhoom’, pursued a new Indie identity. “We didn’t want to sing someone else’s songs all our lives,” says the self-taught musician. The title track, ‘Dhoom pichak dhoom’, with Shubha Mudgal’s tidal wave take-off, had a strong homespun feel. Ad film director Pradeep Sarkar’s music video, smartly shot in Benaras, created a cool physical aesthetic of the ancient city while retaining its familiar persona of a soul kitchen. “We wanted to do something different,” says Sen, dressed in a black ‘AC/DC Highway to Hell’ T-shirt and knee-length denims. Then ‘Maaeri’, co-written with Jaideep Sahni (‘Chak de! India’), happened. For Euphoria, the chartbuster was a great leap forward. Sen’s high scale rendition of the pining Punjabi folk-flavoured number became the band’s calling card. Many 40-plus Indians would still recall the music video: the girl with toothpaste on her nose and the boy with a coin crushed by a train, a totem of lost love. Sen was born in Lucknow to doctor parents: a Bengali cardiologist father and a Dogra gynaecologist mother. Early years were mostly spent with family elders in Jammu and Benaras before his parents moved to Delhi. “I retain a longing for these towns,” he says. In Delhi, his mother worked at the railway hospital. Fellow doctors at the railway colony would drop by for evening tea, often unannounced. Sen vividly and fondly remembers walking to his school, St Columba’s, just 2km from home. “It was a clean and safer city then,” the singer remembers. Euphoria was founded, by his own admission, primarily to impress college girls at Delhi’s University College of Medical Sciences (UCMS) in 1988. “I quickly also realised that the girls were impressed when I was on stage, but no longer when I was off it,” he laughs. At UCMS, he wrote and composed his first number, ‘Heaven on the seventh floor,’ a tribute to his hostel room. The band was euphoric when paid a grand Rs 25,000 for a gig at BITS Pilani in 1995. This was also the same time when Sen and company had to make the tough choice of being a serious band or a part-time one. The decision took time. But packed concerts and hit music videos — remember Vidya Balan in ‘Kabhi aana tu meri gali’? — provided the answer. “College students were our main backers. We were the first artists they would ask for. Most people still struggle with English. We sang in Hindi, Punjabi, and a smattering of other languages,” Sen explains their success. At their peak, Euphoria performed 100 concerts a year. “Even now, we do about 50,” says Sen. Their 3,000 concerts were belted out over every state except Jammu and Kashmir, and in countries as wide-ranging as Turkey, Russia and Japan. “We also performed with Pakistani rock band, Junoon, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2001. It was a sort of peace concert, organised by Shashi Tharoor,” Sen remembers. Concerts back home are more localised nowadays. “Twenty years ago, they would ask for rock covers. Now we get requests for songs in Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Bangla.” ‘Dhoomsday’, Euphoria’s forthcoming work, collaborates with artists from different languages. The audience has changed in other ways too. “In the past, they would listen to our songs. Now everyone is busy shooting them on mobile,” he says. Euphoria will turn 40 in a couple of years. The band has been a caravan where many have come and left to start new ventures. Apart from Sen, bassist DJ Bhaduri is the only other remaining member from the ‘Dhoom’ days. Sen has simply rolled with the changes. He has done films (Meghna Gulzar’s ‘Filhal’, among others), been a judge on TV shows and directed shorts. “I have done films and shows in Mumbai, but Delhi is my home, a city that makes me happy,” he says. He has one unfulfilled dream: making a feature film. Sometimes, Sen still gets to play doctor. In Kolkata, he once administered CPR to a fan during a concert. On another occasion, he gave a backstage injection to fellow band member Gaurav Mishra, who had an asthma attack. And his specialty in orthopaedics came in handy when a girl slipped and broke her arm at a Goa concert. “I gave her a splint,” he says.