Music: Music: Ajay Bijli forms a band at age 55

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It’s never too late in life to pursue a passion. And Ajay Bijli is proof of that. When he started working at his family business in his 20s, he no longer had the time to focus on his passion for music, which he had honed through school and college. But now that he’s the chairman and managing director, PVR Limited, India’s best-known cinema chain which he founded, and found himself relatively freer during the pandemic, he’s finally living his schoolboy dream, singing with his own band at the age of 55.

Rock On IRL 

“I tried to do a Rock On! thing by trying to get my old band mates from my college days back together during the first wave of the pandemic. But somebody was a lawyer, another didn’t want to get on stage,” says Ajay. So, Gaurav Raina of MidivalPunditz, Ajay’s friend,

got him in touch with Manu Saxena—now the manager of Ajay’s band—who suggested that Ajay rope in full-time musicians instead.

Thus, Random Order was born. Called so as the band doesn’t want to be bound to one musical genre, it includes millennial musicians who are also parts of other collaborations: guitarist Shashvat Pandit, drummer Kabir Uppal, vocalist Adityan Nair (also Ajay’s vocal teacher), bassist Gaurav Balani, pianist Archit Anand and drummer Suyash Gabriel.  

Gaurav is a bass player/composer from New Delhi who has been playing with Parikrama for over nine years as well as Shubha Mudgal’s pop fusion set-up, Koshish, and Aditi Singh Sharma
Gaurav is a bass player/composer from New Delhi who has been playing with Parikrama for over nine years as well as Shubha Mudgal’s pop fusion set-up, Koshish, and Aditi Singh Sharma

“It made more sense to have musicians who would be happy to come aboard than friends who might be busy with work,” Ajay explains. “I also need to be dedicated or they will be put off. I am quite aware that these are musicians and I am a businessman.” 

Random Order is not just a passing phase for Ajay. To ensure the band is always at its best, he found a teacher from Berklee named Adrianna Ballack and took music classes from her at 5 am India time, thrice a week. Even now he practises for an hour at 6 am every day.  

Ajay’s band mates are thrilled to work on retro music. “Albums back in the day were made with big budgets, and you can hear that. To be able to get our music to that quality is inspiring,” says Shashvat.

The passion for retro music shared by the band members also works as a bond. “I think of him [Ajay] as a 16-year-old. The band works because we love the same kind of music,” says Shashvat. Adds Archit, “He comes prepared to jam. So, it doesn’t feel like we are working with someone who is not doing music professionally.”

Age: Just a number 

For Ajay, the biggest challenge isn’t singing. It is how not to look and feel self-conscious on stage. Does he, as the chairman and managing director of one of India’s best-known companies in the field of entertainment, feel strange when he is corrected by his band mates?

Ajay shrugs, “Not at all. They point out where I am not doing the right thing, as they should. Adityan keeps telling me my posture is not right. They are the artistes.”  

Meet the band
Meet the band

The band has now come up with its own rendition of an Elton John song, after getting permission from the recording label. This song, which will release soon, is dedicated to the medical fraternity.

Ajay loves his retro hits because those were the first songs he related to in the 1980s, when he was in school. When he heard The Beatles for the first time, they stuck in his head on a loop.

“I also have some cheesy influences like Saturday Night Fever and Grease. I used to sing a lot in falsetto because of the Bee Gees. Then I got into the school choir and was introduced to Simon and Garfunkel with The Sound of Silence, and noticed the depth in the music as well as lyrics,” Ajay reminisces. And of course, there was a lot of Kishore Kumar, Jagjit Singh, Mehendi Hassan, Nusrat etc.  

Career vs passion 

Was Ajay ever tempted to venture into music as a career? “Always. I cut an album called Rhythmic Showers when I was 17-18 years old and wrote songs. But I knew my main responsibility was to run the business and my family—I was married at 23,” says Ajay. “I was never a trained singer but aspired to be. But I never thought of leaving the business to pursue music.”

Ajay felt he needed a certain stability in life before he could pursue music the way he wanted to. “Dad passed away when I was 25 and my formative years were spent running around the country, opening cinemas,” he says.

By forming a band in his 50s, Ajay Bijli is proof that age is just a number, especially when it comes to pursuing something you love (Vidushi Gupta)
By forming a band in his 50s, Ajay Bijli is proof that age is just a number, especially when it comes to pursuing something you love (Vidushi Gupta)

Now that PVR has not just settled but grown, Ajay is ready to pursue his schoolboy passion, though this time perhaps with a better understanding of the financial implications of indie music.

“You shouldn’t think of doing music to earn money,” warns Ajay. “Though if you do a great job, it will be monetarily gainful. There are musicians abroad who are multi-billionaires today. Like Ed Sheeran. And K-Pop is everywhere.”  

But that’s not in India, we point out. Does Ajay agree that that may be because musicians in our society are still viewed as entertainers or background noise, and not artistes? “Yes and no, because India is a disparate country. There are incredibly prolific artistes like Lataji and people who struggle as well,” he explains.

With Random Order beginning to get into its groove, Ajay promises HT Brunch and its readers two things: “We will release an original soon and venture into supporting and giving other musicians a platform too.”  

Follow @kkuenzang on Twitter and Instagram

From HT Brunch, March 27, 2022

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