#LifeIsMusic: 18 year-old Mohini Dey's love affair with the Bass

A few hours of being around the 18-year-old Bassist Mohini Dey on the set of #LifeIsMusic, followed by a 20-minute interaction with her in her green room during a short recess can be confusing. 

On set, she’s focused, conversing, if at all, only with her instrument. On the shoot floor, the candid photographer seldom manages to click a snap where she’s smiling; pictures of her nimble fingers passionately slapping, plucking, sliding on her Cort A5, her favorite of the 12 Bass Guitars she owns, however, are in plenty. On stage, she’s poised; organized; standing tall, balancing herself on a pair of high brown leather heels; make up et al in place.

The green room is another story; clothes, bags, accessories, water bottles strewn all around the room, she sits hunched on the couch, trying hard to pay attention to the interview questions but looking visibly famished after a marathon shoot session. The food arrives just as the interview begins and she digs into the fried fish on the steel plate, destroying it with amazing efficiency, like any self-respecting Bengali would. It’s a sight that may not be palatable to others, but goes well with me. In the green room, she manages to smile, giggle even, at her own answers. 

About 10 minutes into the interview, ‘What have I done with my life? Why have I been wasting my time? What on earth was I doing as a teenager?’ are the questions that go on in my head. Her responses belie her age, as much as her performances do.  

She wants to start a music school after she turns 40, which is a good 22 years away. The idea is to give exposure to less popular and relatively unknown musicians and genres of music. “There are so many things that the audiences are not even aware of; there are genres they haven’t heard, instruments they haven’t seen. People are inventing new sounds. People are experimenting with so many new things that no one knows about. I want to bring all these people – inventors, new-age thinkers, musicians etc. together. I want them to come to the school, do their thing, work on their passion and their projects and I want to get the audiences to see what is happening,” Mohini says.  

So you want an incubator of sorts? One that’ll be open to public, I ask. “Umm, yes! There’ll be theory also, of course. But it won’t be on just a class on music. There’ll also be learning on how to lead a life of a musician,” she says, chomping away at the fish, looking for her bowl of rice. 

What do you mean? Is a musician’s life different? “Yes,” she says emphatically. “It’s very different from a regular person’s life; the regular kind (of life) you lead with your family. You can’t be with your family if you want to have a career and life in music. You have to spend a lot of time away, travelling, focusing. It’s not easy to deal with that,” she explains. A music academy that not only teaches a musician how to play an instrument and perform but also how to deal with the life, the stardom, the travels, the schedules etc.; insightful, thoughtful and ambitious, isn’t it? 

But, it’s not what she plans to do 20 years later that can give you a complex; it’s what she’s achieved thus far that can give most adults a feeling of being under-achievers. At the age of three, when most kids are rolling in the mud and playing house with Barbie dolls, Mohini was fooling around with a 4-string Bass Guitar that her father Sujoy Dey, a widely-respected sessions artist, had personally crafted. “Yeah, that was my game. When the kids played outside the house, I was playing the Guitar indoors,” she admits. 

At the age of 6, she had formally started to learn the instrument from her father. At 10, she gave her first-ever stage performance at a packed Rangana Hall in Kolkata. At 11, she managed to blow away with her skills ace drummer and composer Ranjit Barot, who she now looks up to as a father figure and gives credit to for honing her skills and introducing her to the world of professional music. At 13, she had already recorded a track for Ranjit Barot’s album, Bada Boom, and played with big commercial names like Shreya Ghoshal, Suchitra Pillai, global music producer Nitin Sawhney and Sitar virtuoso, Niladri Kumar. Also at 13, she shared the stage with Ustad Zakir Hussain at Bombay’s Prithvi Theatre; after being informed only a couple of hours before the performance, I must add. 

What followed, ever since, are a barrage of television music shows and film recordings, including with A R Rahman, and global tours with the best and most well-known musicians in India such as Sivamani, Louiz Banks, Taufiq Qureshi, Gino Banks, Stephen Devassy and Prasanna. 

Ask her if she misses college and the life of a regular teenager and her response is a quick and emphatic, “No!” What she does now, she says, has been her dream. “In any case, I didn’t have any friends because they used to find me very weird. Like, I would not agree to what they’d say. The wavelength wouldn’t match. My behavior was probably of a person that was older. They used to be all cheesy; you know how teenagers are? I wasn’t like that. I am still not like (that). My maturity level was a little higher because I had started working with older people,” says Mohini, who was asked to leave college due to low attendance owing to her gigs and recordings and was advised to finish graduation via a correspondence course. 

Ask her if she feels the pressure to keep performing and getting better at what she does and living up to the expectations of top musicians in the country she collaborates with and the answer yet again is a confident, “No.” The pressure, she says, was when she started out. “At the time I would worry and keep thinking what they’d (top musicians and mentors) like, what they wouldn’t. I kept thinking that if they didn’t like what I played and how I played, I wouldn’t get the next gig or that they wouldn’t call me for the next recording.” So, you were a 13 year-old, worried about your career, I asked to reconfirm. “The worry to live up to the expectations of a big legend helped me find my own style, my own voice and polish my skills. It’s important for an artist to find that voice, else anything you play will sound rubbish,” she quickly adds. 

Merely listening to her talk about her global and India tours, her recordings, live performances, practice sessions, forgetting to eat and practicing till 2 am, learning new skills such as playing Percussion phrases on the Bass, playing the Bass like the Piano and a Banjo by YouTube-ing videos is an exhausting exercise. I then ask her if her schedule exhausts her as well and the answer, for a change, doesn’t make her sound super-human. “The travelling makes me tired. The flights, the long schedules; the North America tour then coming back to Bombay and then going to Chennai and then back to Bombay and then to Singapore.”

Isn’t it fun to get to see new countries and cities though, we ask, to which the answer, yet again, is an unexpected one. “I hate going to places, especially public spaces. I like to be alone, in my own space. I love silence. I’ve started to like silence and enjoy my time alone probably because I am always surrounded by so much sound,” she says with absolute nonchalance.

Just before giving up, the interviewer has a last counter; so you don’t have a favorite vacation spot? “No, no!” Mohini says, almost dismissing the thought. Do you even remember the last time you went on a vacation? She pauses; perhaps, the only time through the course of this interview.  After an extended silence, she says, “I don’t remember the last time I took a vacation.” 

Stumped! I secede. 

To catch the complete webisodes and interesting updates about all things music, follow www.lifeismusic.in