His time to fly solo

Sarthak Karkare's solo project is called Maqta. Pic/Simone Gandhi

Artistic endeavours take time to blossom. It's not like fast food where you slap a burger patty between two buns and you're good to go. It's more like a slow-cooked meal, where you put in hours of effort before the right combination of ingredients complement each other to produce a delectable dish. Rome wasn't built in a day, and a creative project doesn't flower overnight. You plant the seed, water it diligently, watch the sapling grow, and pick the fruit only when the time is ripe.

That's what Sarthak Karkare has done with Maqta, his solo musical avatar. The 24-year-old Mumbaikar is the vocalist for Unohu, one of the more recognisable bands on the country's indie circuit. But he tells us that he'd also been mulling the idea of branching out on his own for a long time. Except, that the market demands of a still-nascent independent music industry clipped his wings. His duties of constantly gigging and touring with Unohu to fill the band's coffers exhausted his creative energies. Then, the lockdown was announced. The music business was forced to hit the brakes and concerts came to a screeching halt. So, suddenly, the youngster had the leisure to stir the pot of his solo project and he eventually released Dor, Maqta's debut single.

Sarthak Karkare's soulful new single

It's a song that tugs at the heartstrings. The lyrics in Hindi have a level of maturity that belies his age, and Karkare sings with a sense of feeling that has a discernible genuineness to it. But the musician reveals that he doesn't plan to stick only to this sound. "I want to create songs in every genre that has influenced me, and not necessarily in the singer-songwriter mode. When people are listening to an English music playlist, they are comfortable shifting from one type of song to another. I want to try the same thing in Hindi, releasing single after single, experimenting with as many genres as I can, be it old or new," he says.

That resultant diversity is reflected in Jaane bhi de, Maqta's second single slated for a mid-August launch. While Dor is a wistful ballad, this one has a playful cinematic appeal that can easily be picturised on Shammi Kapoor in his younger years. Karkare tells us that he's already readying a third single, and it's anyone's guess what its sound will be like. That puts him in a rare space within the Hindi indie spectrum, where artistes usually box themselves into one compartment, such as Sufi or folk rock. The singer tells us that he wants to challenge the listener. He says, "Our job as artistes is to try and do things that haven't been done before. There's also a huge role that people play in the way they are listening to music. They are always on the lookout for something fresh and new. And after the lockdown, I think that musicians, too, are less afraid to think out of the box. They aren't getting any gigs anyway, so it makes sense to put your best foot forward and experiment in the best way that you can."

Maqta, it thus follows, is Karkare's own experiment. It's born out of a family lineage of proficiency in both Hindi and Urdu, and an avid interest in Hindustani classical music. Unohu - which, incidentally, has his brother Shashwat on drums - is a wholly different beast with its unfiltered western sensibilities. But with his solo project, Karkare has dipped into the reservoir of his earliest influences, creating a sound and lyrics that, in his own words, are deeply embedded within his skin. And the best part is that he didn't hurry the process. He let it simmer for as long as it took for the musical flavours to mingle instead of simply flipping a burger, so to speak.

Log on to MaqtaMusic on YouTube to listen to Dor

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