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It was a strange moment when Bose, son of maestro Sunil Bose, picked up the guitar in the early 1970s. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, Bose hummed Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger and it wasn’t long before he penned his first song, Talking contradictions. “We lived in such dichotomous times. On the one hand, we had the Vietnam War and on the other, there was Flower Power. We even had a man on the moon! We had to take a stand, make a choice about how we wanted to live our life,” says Bose, who adds that his naïve ideologies soon received a rude shock. After college in England, Bose returned to India in the late ’70s only to discover that there was no space for a musician who wanted to sing “social songs” as opposed to entertaining songs. “One Christmas in Madras, I found myself singing, monkeying around in colourful costumes, and the audience loved it. I was disgusted and disillusioned with music,” says Bose who traded his guitar for a “real” job in an advertisement firm. But he soon returned to music and began recording his songs. His first album Winter Baby was released by HMV/EMI in 1971 and there has been no looking back. “I’m driven by issues that concern the common man, about the disparities in our economic ‘boom’, about starvation deaths and more. I can’t sing about love and mush. I don’t want to be a star, the cause of global justice means more to me than my own name,” asserts Bose. He’s right, a working class hero is something to be.
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