Preserving Prafulla Kar’s Legacy: Best Of His Musical Treasures In Digital Dark Zone

Naturally, Social media was flooded with condolences and memoirs on the day Prafulla Kar, the legendary music maestro of Odisha, passed away. That was expected and obvious. A musician of Prafulla Kar’s stature deserves all this, and even more. He was extremely popular during his lifetime as a singer and composer, lyricist and public intellectual. Many of his soundtracks surpassed the time and can easily be categorised as classics.

Ironically, the story of Prafulla Kar does not end there; rather it begins with his end. With his demise, I am here to talk about a different story. We do cry and dig out all the memories when a legend is gone. At the same time, we conveniently forget how criminally we neglect their existence when they were very much alive and kicking. In that context, the last part of Prafulla Kar’s life must be discussed a bit in detail to know what we are really doing to our musical heritage and as a so-called culture-loving people or society how we cherish our cultural values.

Prafulla Kar as a musician lived through the digital era and had faced the most difficult transition of musical composition from manual to digital. His journey from the old school of music to the high tech –post-truth music-making must have faced the atrocities of new technologies and the overpowering impact of social media. At this time, if you are not a YouTube sensation or have a bag full of “Virals” your existence as a musician is questionable. In this new era, classicists like Prafulla Kar and many of his illustrious contemporaries are seen to be in a dark corner.

The day Prafulla passed away, out of curiosity I wanted to know how his musical presence is valued on digital platforms and social media. Anxiously I was browsing through hundreds of his musical scores on YouTube to know whether Generation G knows and appreciates his musical genius or not.  The footprint of his time-tested music on digital platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc is no doubt visible but the viewership numbers or the hits are found to be in a few thousand only. There are few extraordinary Odissi compositions where the viewership number is abysmally low.

Not only Prafulla Kar’s music but all kinds of serious music in Odisha lack the appreciation and attention of social media users. Hardly you can find a classic piece of music, which is viral or celebrating “Million or Billion Hits” on YouTube.  All our great musicians like Nimain Harichandan, Balakrushna Dash, Shyamamani Devi to Prafulla Kar are somewhere living in an unbrowsed zone of silence on the Internet. Even the most popular Akshyay Mohanty or Prafulla Kar are no exception.

Will it be an overstatement if I say, not the best of our music, but chaos and slang attract the millennial in Odisha? Music as an audiovisual slaughterhouse has taken over the sanity of our time. We live in an era where slang and slugfest get a billion hits on YouTube. People watch putrid garbage in millions and they do generate a good amount of advertisement revenues. In this terrible time of chaos and cacophony, music of peace, harmony and love is bound to be in a dark zone.

Am I praying for a legend of our time in this dark zone??