Welcome

For the last ten years or so I have been painstakingly trying to collect Salil's songs, his poems, his short-stories, his plays, all his films in video and anything else I could get hold of, such as articles about him, reviews about his music, interviews with him etc. I met Salilda for the first time in the early '80s and since then I have been quite fortunate to meet him regularly in India and abroad and got to know him quite well. To me he was an inspiration, a teacher, a friend and above all the most talented and complete music director India had. He was also a wonderful person to be with. Highly intelligent and a wonderful sense of humour. His music filled my life with joy and made it richer. Salilda has left us now but I tend to believe that he has just moved to a distant address. Seems like I can still communicate with him through his songs and feel that he is still around us.

Recent Updates

November 19, 2008

Today is the 86th birthday of Salilda. He left us 13 years ago and it seems that over the last thirteen years his popularity has increased dramatically. What is so encouraging is that more and more young people are discovering Salilda's compositions. More people are writing about him and more albums are being released.

Happy Birthday Salilda and thanks for those wonderful timeless songs.

September 5 , 2008

Salilda left us on this very day 13 years ago. It seems only the other day that I was talking to him. All these years passed by but his memories are as strong as ever. Over the last 13 years we discovered nearly 40 unpublished Bengali songs. Most of these songs were composed in the '40s and '50s, a few as late as the '90s. Besides these priceless songs we discovered unpublished poems and plays. It seems that Salilda is still creating for us. Recently his songs from the '40s ("Hei saamaalo dhaan ho" etc) were performed to protest against the unlawful and often forced acquisition of land of the poor farmers by West Bengal's current left wing government.. History repeats itself and Salilda lives through his songs.

Thank you Salilda for the precious gift.

May 8, 2008

Sachin Shankar Ballet Unit and Salil

Its not very well known that Salil was getting his early training in composing music for dances and plays during his college days. This not only helped him financially and helped him to buy his study books, it also laid the foundation for his uncanny understanding and interpretation of situations and express it in music. In the '50s and '60s Salil composed some remarkable background music for Films Division and other documentaries. In fact he always composed the songs and the background music for his films. In Mumbai he was highly sought after as a composer of background music only even when other composers were composing the songs. From the early '70s till about the end of the '80s he composed some wonderful music for Sachin Shankar Ballet Unit. Read all about it here.

February 7, 2008

Recently Kolkata's most popular newspaper Anandabazar Patrika and the equally popular magazine Anandalok published two articles discussing salilda.com. It was good to see that 10 years after the launch of this website the West Bengal press has suddenly woken up and has taken notice. As a result I have been inundated with emails from many admirers of Salilda. Unfortunately in the Anandalok article our last 8 years hard work of collecting and trying to publish Salilda's unreleased songs from the '40s and '50s has been strongly critisized by some people. That is really sad. The journalists of both these publications have very kindly sent me the articles and I have decided to make them available for you all to read. Let me know what you think.

Anandabazar Patrika article
Anandalok article

July 3, 2007

Few Moments with Salil Chowdhury

Kalpana Biswas talked to Salil in 1978 in Bombay for a considerable length of time and its probably the most candid and frank interview of Salil till date. The original interview was published in the bengali magazine "Kaalpurush" in 1978. Its a long interview but full of amazing facts. Salil talked about his early days starting from early '40s and his days of struggle. I urge all Salil admireres to read the full interview once. I can assure you that you will not only be astonished but will learn a lot more about Salil as a person and what influenced him, what really mattered in his life. Just go to the Articles page or click here.