An accomplished keyboard player and the driving force behind one of India's oldest rock bands, Parikrama, Subir Malik has many facets to his personality. In a candid chat with Metro India, Malik expressed that having a positive approach towards anything in life is the step to success.

When did you discover your love for music?

I was into music since my seventh and eight standard, but not professionally. So basically I used to end up playing at my cousins house who had all the equipment and stuff like that, basically in my 12 standard, pretty late compared to what others do, that I actually discovered the base guitar and fell in love with it and because of that only I got admission in college. In college I played in lot of bands but it was only in my last year, I had to join my family business and I really wanted to play hardcore classical orchids’ so I stepped in purpose before I said goodbye to music. So met this bunch of four guys and thought let’s make a band together. The idea was to find different people with the same purpose and on 17th of June, 1991, the whole band got completed and that is what we celebrated recently. And, that’s it, we started off playing the covers we love and stuff like that, but today we play mostly our music with a couple of classic that we love to play.

Why non-Bollywood songs don’t get the promotion that Bollywood songs get?

The thing is that in our country, whatever you say or do is still standing on Bollywood. So, it is basically a very Bollywood pushed industry because, not really for bollywood as a genre, it is basically also because when they see a song from Salman Khan movie, the majority of the janata still does not relate a song to, let’s say the singer is Shankar Mahadevan, they will relate it more to Salman Khan singing. So the problem is in India people are so star struck with bollywood that everything in their life revolves around the same thing but things are changing now, people are giving chance to other people and stuff like that. One can never expect to promote a non-bollywood song in a way a bollywood song is done but it has its own avenues like the music festivals coming up. Rewind too five-six years, there were hardly any music festivals; today you can see so many music festivals happening.

What has been inspiring you to continue in the field?

My inspiration to do music, of course all the classic rock acts, Zep Zeppelin stuff like that. Frankly now since things are going out well for the last so many years that sometimes it feels like we really don’t need any inspirations now to get expired but yeah the main reason that Parikrama is ‘Parikrama’ today is because of all the classic rock gods, otherwise probably I would not have been doing music.

Your message or advice to upcoming bands?

The advice is the same that is probably given to everyone, to succeed ones needs focus, hard work. Basically discipline, hard word, ego, being ground etc count to succeed in any field. Acceptance is also a big word that our society needs right now.

-LPK