Singer Vasuda Sharma chats with Soma Das about her latest music video Maula, a modern take on Kabir’s sayings with an altruistic twist
Singer Vasuda Sharma
While her album Attuned Spirits released last year, singer Vasuda Sharma (29) recently released the music video for the song Maula in August, this year. The video, made in collaboration with digital video entertainment company Culture Machine, has a thought-provoking video on a father abandoned in an old age home by his son. Its lyrics stress on the importance of letting go and are inspired by Kabir’s famous quote: ‘The soul is a slave to illusion, letting go is liberation’.
Singer Vasuda Sharma
Sharma explains that the video is an ironic comment on how people have lost their perspective on attachment, relationships and responsibility. Inspired by her visit to an old age home where she interacted with the inmates and sang songs for them, the idea of the video germinated. “I had a great time but it broke my heart to see their state. Along with my director friend Padmakumar Narsimhamurthy, I wanted to shoot something that could bring this out in front of people. And Maula fit perfectly with what we wanted to put forth,” she explains.
Sharma’s Folk-Fusion album Attuned Spirits features Indian raag-based elements with a Rock feel. There is a heavy usage of Arabic percussions and violins. The album has a global touch and features 30 musicians from different parts of the world, including India.
“I recorded the album partly in Boston and the rest in India. It has musicians from Canada, Egypt, Norway, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey, US, etc,” elaborates the singer.
To release the album, Sharma took recourse to crowd funding. She reminisces, “After I got back from Berklee College of Music, I had almost zero bank balance but new material and ideas. I needed to find a way to make all of it possible. Since this was a big project, crowd funding seemed like an innovative way. In a span of two months, I managed to exceed my target amount of Rs 5,00,000.”
Sharma is currently working on the background score for the Parsi (English) film called Path of Zarathustra. Apart from that, she keeps busy writing new songs. “The next album won’t be out anytime soon as I am still writing, although I do plan to shoot some videos in the near future,” states Sharma.
The singer emphasises that she took some ‘absurd turns’ in her musical journey but is glad she did so: “I got to become a popstar in my teens with the band Aasma. I got the taste of glamour at a very young age. But I took a different turn as a music director for the film Shahrukh Bola Khubsurat Hai Tu. Post that, I realised I needed to learn music for my own growth and decided to go to Berklee for a year. Since then, I thoroughly love my work as an independent musician. I have absolutely no regrets.”
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