Paresh Pahuja: `I wanted to get on stage because I was feeling lost`

As actor and singer Paresh Pahuja performed his final gig on April 28 at the Royal Opera House, which was to mark the culmination of his first tour, the one song his audience couldn’t have enough of was his rendition of late KK’s Yaaron. “It was emotional for all of us because after every show, we’d be preparing for the next one. This time, we knew this was the last song we would be performing,” he says, when we get on a call with him. 

The singer tells us that the Voice Notes Concert India Tour, which kicked off in March, was not your standard concert. In an era of over-the-top shows, his tour blended voice memos, evocative storytelling, and stripped-down live performances to reimagine what a musical journey could feel like. Having toured Delhi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Mumbai, he says that its genesis came from a personal low phase. He reflects, “I wanted to get on stage because I was feeling a little lost in life, a little powerless, because I was not working last year. So I asked myself, when was the last time in my life I felt empowered? It was in college, while performing on stage. I connected with a few friends whom I’d met on Bandish Bandits, and we started jamming. We booked a small venue in Mumbai. And that little thing [led us to begin a tour].”

The actor and singer featured in Tiger Zinda Hai (2017), and Tandav (2021). He broke out with the Amazon Prime Video series, Bandish Bandits, for which he learnt to play the sitar; Bengaluru; Ahmedabad

Pahuja — who caught everyone’s attention with his performance in Bandish Bandits 2 — has often heard this question: Are you an actor or a musician? The tour was his means to assert his identity. “I am an artiste first. Being an artiste is to authentically share whatever I’m going through so that people feel less alone. That way, they feel that it’s normal to go through [different] human emotions. Otherwise, you’re constantly fed the happiness emoji on every hoarding, at every point,” he smirks.

Through the tour, the musician not only reimagined a stage performance, but also how music is consumed. He intentionally built each concert as an intimate, personal gathering. To describe it better, he borrows what one of his fans said to him at the end of one show — that it “felt just like home”. He elaborates, “I love watching concerts around the world, but [in India], I get so stressed [ahead of a gig] that I will get stuck in traffic. So, I planned the concert such that people were comfortably sitting, chai and water were being served, the toilets were clean and stocked with sanitary napkins because most of our crowd was women. It’s a concert where the experience was to calm your soul and not make you more anxious.”

In his five-year musical career, he has composed and lent his voice to many singles, including Dooron dooron, Mascara, and Shaam o seher. Music, he says, has been a part of his life since his growing-up years. “I’m from Gujarat, and I experienced a lot of Garba, Gujarati folk music, even theatre. I grew up on Kishore Kumar and Mohammed Rafi’s songs, and jazz music!” It all helped him as he starred in Bandish Bandits 2, in which he played the frontman of a band. He is grateful that the series made people sit up and take notice of him. “Every time there is a [boost] in my career, music has been an integral part of it. Bandish Bandits made me feel seen and heard.”

This article first appeared on Mid Day