Krishnokoli

Sunlight and Soulful Singing

Singing newcomer Krishnakali, a carefree tomboy from Khulna talks to Sanam Amin about her music and her latest album ‘Surje Bhadhi Basha’.

Though her mother was a government college teacher, and her childhood home in Khulna was filled with books, singer Krishnakali claims to be ‘completely uneducated.’

‘My only good quality is that I’m honest,’ she says. ‘I don’t lie. Apart from that, I only have bad qualities.’ This, of course, is despite the influence of her mother, who in her old age became a pathological flower thief.

Sitting in her compact apartment, dressed in the same vibrant orange used for the cover artwork of ‘Shurje Badhi Basha’, she shares her earliest memory of her mother.

‘Every morning at dawn, for as long as I can remember, my mother went for a walk outdoors and plucked fresh flowers. It didn’t matter what kind of flowers as long as they were fragrant. She’d pick a few of whatever she could find and bring them home. We invariably find them on the table after we got up.

‘In later years, after moving to Dhaka in 2000, my mother continued taking morning walks and bringing home flowers. The only difference was she was stealing them from the science laboratory nursery. I couldn’t talk her into stopping
Her six-year-old daughter, Amritanjali, hardly improved matters but rather encouraged her grandmother’s flower-stealing habits by making floral necklaces every day.

Dedicated to her mother, Krishnakali’s debut album, ‘Shurje Badhi Basha,’ was launched on Pahela Baishakh. The songs are written and composed by her as well, with the musical arrangement being done by musician and Bengal Music Company CEO Ornob. She described Ornob as ‘talented and communicative’ and appreciates that he did not try change around her songs too much, though most people who heard them thought they were too depressing and needed to be more upbeat.

She jokingly says that ‘had I known what would have come out of launching an album, I wouldn’t have done it. Cameras and pens look like weapons to me now.’ Though a self-claimed former tomboy, she is extremely uncomfortable in front of cameras. ‘I just don’t know what to do, how to look. I stiffen up.’

She says that depression did contribute to her music, and making her songs more cheerful would be unnatural and untrue to what she feels and who she is. ‘Hot-hath rode,’ one of the songs on this album, was written as an effort to jar herself out of severe depression. ‘It’s like when you have mud or dirt stuck to something,’ Krishnakali explains. ‘You just try to shake the dirt off. That song was the act of shaking, freeing myself of those negative feelings.’

The title of the album comes from Krishnakali’s mother Meherun Nessa’s explanation of what happens after death. ‘She told me that when people die, they become stars. And when I asked her what would happen to her when she died, she said she would become the sun.’

‘We were a broken family, and so, growing up, me and my brother were extremely sensitive. Bangali social values are stupid, they centre on saris, jewellery, land—material things. School life was hard for me in the sense that children in my own class would ask demeaning questions about my home life and why my parents didn’t live together, why I knew little of my father.’

‘My mother was an introvert, and she had a painful life. I wanted to do this album for her. When she died last December I stopped singing, I couldn’t go on. But then I realised that I should try end this self-destructive cycle, because it can only do damage, not just to me, but to my daughter as well. If I don’t end it here she will only learn it from me and it’ll keep going.’

‘Parents always make sacrifices for their children. It’s God’s commandment. Although, when my daughter turns eighteen, it ends there. We can go our own separate ways, she can choose her path and I’ll finally follow my own.’

She says she had no female friends while growing up in Khulna, quite simply because there weren’t any. She had all male friends and had a lot of freedom as far as spending time outside home was concerned. When she moved to Dhaka in 1996 in high-spirited protest, she found it difficult to adjust and learn how to deal with the mundane details of everyday life. ‘Renting a house, dealing with the landlord, dealing with the neighbour of the opposite house—these things were new to me, and I wasn’t sure how to behave.’

‘We’ve got a shortage of glasses in this house,’ Krishnakali laughed, ‘because I keep throwing and breaking things when I’m angry. Anything I can find, I break to pieces. It’s a bad habit; I admire people with self-control who can contain their anger instead of being so destructive.’

Although her contract with Bengal Music Company is for three albums, Krishnakali says she has no idea when her next one will appear. ‘If it happens, it happens,’ she says humorously. ‘Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.’

She is fond of classical music, old Bangla songs as well as some Bryan Adams, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, whom she describes as ‘revolutionary’. She finds Bangla cinema songs to be irritating though, and sees much of contemporary Bangla music as rather formulaic. Her mother taught her to sing at the age of three, but Krishnakali says it would have been better to start later, because the voice is not really developed enough to sing until the age of seven or so. Her daughter Amritanjali is the best singer she knows. ‘She’s a much better singer than her mother,’ she laughs, pulling her daughter into her lap and hugging her hard.

Amritanjali is not just a precocious singer but an artist as well. The sun image on the album cover was her work. Asked what inspired her to draw the picture, she has a very simple answer. ‘My mother told me to. And I used orange and yellow and light yellow.’

Article Published in: April 26, 2007 Issue of Glitz, the entertainment weekly from NewAGE.

Straight to the Soul

She sings with an intensity and power which pierce themselves into your very soul. Her lyrics speak of longing, hope and a need for love. Her haunting melodies find themselves carved into your memory, relentlessly forcing you to listen, to pay attention, to feel what she is saying through her music.

 

There is nothing frilly about Krishnokoli. The 32-year-old is too real to be bothered with frivolities as is obvious in her album, Shurje Badhi Basha, to be launched during Pohela Baishakh. The album features songs written, sung and composed by Krishnokoli herself, with background music by Dhaka’s favourite music maestro Ornob. One cannot put a label on her sound. It fuses and incorporates a mixture of folk and classical melodies with a hint of the blues, which her soulful voice intensifies tenfold.

 

Although this is her first solo album, Krishnokoli sang for the Ektaar Valentine’s Day album titled ‘Ami Tumi.’ She began singing from a very young age. The woman behind her inspiration — her mother — encouraged her to sing and compose songs from a young age.

 

“My mother taught me how to sing,” says Krishnokoli. “From a young age, I used to recite different lyrics to the tunes of Rabindra Sangeet. My mother encouraged me to make up more songs. The first song I composed was ‘Chaader Maburi’ When I was fourteen I composed the song Bondhua, which is in this album.”

 

Singing is not Krishnokoli’s only talent. She worked in an Audio/Visual company for a while before working at the production house, Krishnochura as the Creative Director between 2005-2006.

 

Krishnokoli also spent three years studying music at Dhaka’s Chayanaught. When she was 16, her friends persuaded her to make an album. Unfortunately, instead of supporting Krishnokoli’s unique sound, many of the artists that she attempted to work with wanted her to change her music style in some way, claiming that her music was too depressing.

 

“They wanted me to add upbeat songs, but it is really not possible for me to sing songs that I don’t feel from the heart,” says Krishnokoli. “Ornob, however, didn’t ask me to change a thing. He let me explore and do my own thing.”

 

Krishnokoli’s lyrics are inspired by her own personal experiences.

 

“If you listen to my lyrics they are all about longing and an intense desire to be loved,” she says. “I guess these lyrics are inspired from the fact that I come from a broken home. I feel that children who are in this position always tend to become more sensitive especially because Bangali society is so judgmental about these things.”

 

Despite all the suffering she went through because of her parents’ separation, Krishnokoli has managed to overcome her pain because of the overwhelming support she got from her mother, who passed away in December of 2005. She was a constant source of love and affection. So much, in fact, that this album is dedicated to her. She wrote Chue Chue Dekho, the last song on her album, when her mother passed away. A Bangla teacher at the Government College in Khulna, Krishnokoli’s mother was the reason she is a singer today.

 

“My mother was an amazing woman,” says Krishnokoli. “I have still not found anyone in this world who is like her. She had a really difficult life but I never once saw her lose her faith in humankind. She was one of those people who seemed to know about everything because she read a lot and for that reason, she always tried to encourage us to read a lot as well. To her, reading was as important as eating. Losing her was very hard for me.”

 

Despite the loss of her mother, Krishnokoli has another source of inspiration — her six-year-old daughter Amritanjoli Sresthheshori. She wrote the first song on the album, Dubi Dubi, right after Amritanjoli was born.

 

With lyrics that bare her heart and soul, Krishnokoli hopes to show the “Banglish” generation of today that there is beauty in the Bangali language.

 

“I want people of today’s generation to appreciate the language that our parents and their parents used to speak,” says Krishnokoli. “I feel that today’s generation is really superficial and sometimes lacks depth. The problem with us is that we have gone further away from ourselves. I want to bring us back and hope that people hear my songs and feel and understand where I am coming from, and at the same time, learn to appreciate and love our language as much as I do.”

by Srabonti Narmeen Ali | original source