One-man band lends music to protest against Mula riverfront project

“As an artist, I feel that the river is very, very close to my heart. The river is my source of inspiration. I am a nature lover,” says Thakur, who plays 10-12 instruments including guitar, saxophone and flute.
Search the internet and one gets a sense of awe and admiration that one-man bands generate the world over. One-man bands are musicians who operate different instruments by themselves and can offer a complete bouquet of sounds. In India, one of the most famous is Gladson Peter of Mumbai.

Thakur was inspired by a European musician to create his own one-man band. “I did some trial and error for three to four months and came up with my arrangement,” he says. Sometimes the welding was wrong and, at other times, the arrangement of instruments needed tweaking. Finally, Thakur had it all figured out. Soon, he was being invited to open mics and shows. It helped that his early interest in music was nurtured by his family and he can play a range of instruments. He had trained in the tabla but the rest, including the guitar, was picked up from YouTube, among others.

Thakur is an engineer who was born and raised in Madhya Pradesh and first arrived in Pune to join a major company. “In 2019, I met with a horrible accident in which nine bones of my body were broken and I had to get three metal implants, in my humerus from shoulder to elbow and collar bones. It was because I was wearing a helmet that my life was spared,” he says. Thakur never returned to work. Instead he set up a business of wood-pressed oil in Wakad and devoted the rest of his time to honing his musical skills.

He talks passionately about the pain of watching the river being polluted with sewage. “The river has made its own path over the period of thousands of years. It has raised warriors like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj. The authorities are not giving a chance to nature, the natural biodiversity is being threatened and, though it can never be restored to its original form, we can try to halt future damage,” he says.