In less than five years, ‘Paradigm Shift’, a progressive Hindi rock band from Mumbai, has earned a pretty good fan following and their famous tribute to A R Rahman (an instrumental version of the Roja title track), an exceptional piece of work on violin, has got lakhs of hits on video sharing site.
The band, which comprises of Kaushik Ramachandran (vocals), Chinmay Agharkar (guitar), Nikhil Nandakumar (violin), Ariel Samson (bass guitar) and Aamir Ismail Shaikh (drums), recently performed in Vadodara for a college fest. While their tribute to Rahman has become a huge hit, Kaushik says that they were pretty apprehensive about the same initially, “Initially, I was dead against it, as I was scared of touching such a cult song. It could have backfired but luckily for us, it turned out amazingly well and it has completely transformed the image of our band. And we have been told that Rahman sir has heard it and said that he liked what he heard. There can’t be a bigger compliment for us than that!”
He adds, “Probably our biggest USP is that we are a Hindi band, which fuses our classical music with Western elements. It has been a great musical journey and our album Coalescence was received very well. In fact, ours is the only Indian band that was recently nominated for one of Italy’s most prestigious music awards!”
