Rahul Ram talks to Forbes Indian about the passion that imbues his life and music
Rahul Ram is super-busy. The fatigue is audible, and you can believe he’s on the other side of 50, though the livewire red-bandanaed stage persona wouldn’t give you that impression. The Delhi upbringing is evident in the hard Rs and the seamless and frequent switches between English and Hindi.
We start, as these things do, with his early years: An idyllic childhood, running around, playing games, no major pressure from his parents—despite both being career academics—to excel at studies. Oh, and he lost an eye at age 11. This information is delivered only to explain why he didn’t take up sports and other things that require stereoscopic vision. How, I ask, horrified. He dismisses it with a laugh—another child’s toy arrow—and goes on to his college days at St Stephen’s.
Rahul had begun playing bass guitar in school, with a band otherwise made up of college students. Now he played with three bands, handled a heavy academic schedule, and volunteered with an environment action group, Kalpavriksh. And he had a girlfriend. How on earth did he fit all that in? He laughs. He just did.
Well enough to make it to IIT Kanpur to study chemistry. Back then, after IIT, everyone went to the USA. And so, in 1986, Rahul set off for Cornell to earn a PhD in environmental toxicology while music took a back seat. His girlfriend Amita Baviskar joined him—to do a doctorate too—and in ’88, they got married. In 1990, the freshly minted Dr Ram had a dilemma. “My wife was going back to India to work in the field for a year before returning to finish her thesis. I could either go back or find a way to keep going in the US for a year. I wrote to all the big environmental agencies—Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth—but nobody replied. I also applied to teach chemistry in high schools in the West Indies. I sent off 30 letters. And got three replies: One ‘no’, two setting up interviews. One of those never called, and the other spent half-an-hour persuading me that I didn’t want the job. I guess they were perplexed. You have a PhD from Cornell. Why would you want to teach here? Either you’re a CIA plant, or you’re mad.”
So he came back to India, with no idea what he would do. A friend from the Kalpavriksh days told him that the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA)—then in its infancy—needed a ‘campaigns co-ordinator’, salary Rs 2,000 a month. It dovetailed well with his wife’s research on the proposed dam on the Narmada river.
After a month, he returned to Delhi, then went off to Anjanvara, a remote village where his wife was doing fieldwork. Really, really remote: It took two days to get there; the last part a 20 km walk. “There was nothing. No piped water, no electricity, no school, no shop, forget health care.
“Four months earlier, I’d been in college in the USA. This was a completely different vision of life. For instance, those guys never hit their kids. And there’s awesome mahua to drink!”
Then he came back to Delhi—though his commitment to the NBA kept taking him back to the Narmada for the next five years—and Susmit (Sen, co-founder, with Asheem Chakravarty, of Indian Ocean), who he knew from school, got in touch. He had this band, and wanted Rahul to play bass guitar. “I didn’t even have a bass: I had given mine away when I went to America, and I had to get it back. I started playing with Susmit.” The band didn’t really practise at that time. “It was a band, but only in theory.” He also played with other bands—“I needed the money”—even a jaagran band. “Suddenly, from being this middle-class foreign-returned graduate, I was in remote villages looking at development’s dirty side. And playing at service sector shaadis!
“Then, in ’93, I went to jail for a few days.” Wait, what?
“In Narmada. They could put you in jail for no fault of yours.” Loud laughter follows. “It was an Adivasi jail, so there was lots of singing and dancing.” He then tells a hilarious tale of going out for his morning ablutions in the fields, while handcuffed to another man, with a gun pointed at their backs.
Rahul was also doing research into data around the Narmada project. “There was a lot of fudging! I’m still convinced that our analysis will be proved right.” He went back to the US with Amita when she was working on her thesis, “as support staff”, and wrote some papers while there.
Along the way, Indian Ocean recorded an album (in ’92, called, simply, Indian Ocean) which came out in ’93. It sold over 40,000 copies within a year, the highest-selling record by any Indian band ever at the time.
“I came back, I got my bounce back. We only got divorced last year, but in 2005, I moved out, with perfectly amicable relations: We’re still friends. I’m sure there was bitterness on both sides, but we managed to put it behind us.
(This story appears in the 26 July, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)