Old beats: (Clockwise from top left) Subir Malik, Sonam Sherpa, Rahul Guha Roy, Palash Sen, Raghu Dixit and Bobby Cash

Aditya Shroff was an investment banker, so busy crunching numbers that he had no time for his beautiful wife and certainly none for his first love — music. And then one day he decided that he should get back to music and the band that united — and separated — Adi and his musician friends.

Sounds familiar? It should, for that’s Farhan Akhtar’s character in the new hit in town Rock on!!.

But Adi is no larger-than-life image. Outside multiplexes, there are musicians who have done just that —given up the good life in search of a muse.

Take Rahul Ram, bass guitarist and vocalist of Indian Ocean. He holds a PhD in environmental toxicology from Cornell University. He had an academic career ahead of him, but chose to join the Narmada Bachao Andolan and then form Indian Ocean in the early Nineties. Or take Palash Sen, lead vocalist of Euphoria. He trained as a doctor, but he’s been composing music for the last 10 years.

Subir Malik, founder member and keyboardist for Delhi band Parikrama, had a thriving business in automobile parts which he ran for 15 years. He quit his business to devote all his time to Parikrama. Raghu Dixit of the Bangalore-based group The Raghu Dixit Project worked for SmithKline Beecham, only to switch from PowerPoint presentations to live gigs. And if that’s not enough, Rahul Guha Roy, singer and lead guitarist of Calcutta band Cassini’s Division, worked for eight years in advertising and journalism before plunging full time into music.

Many of these musicians claim the switch to full-time music from a well-established career wasn’t as nerve wracking as it may seem. “Initially, I started singing to impress the girls,” chuckles Palash Sen, “but my heart was completely immersed in music.” Dhoom, Euphoria’s first album in 1998, was an instant hit and Sen hasn’t looked back since.

Fear of failure, clearly, has never been a factor. While on a company project in Belgium in 1999, Raghu Dixit got to perform live on a local radio station in Brussels. The show was a hit and the station was swamped with requests for more. “I decided then and there to quit my job on coming back home,” recalls Dixit.

As in many cases, the news didn’t go down too well with the folks. “There was a time my mother wouldn’t speak to me. But as I started getting recognition, things changed,” says Dixit. In Sen’s case too, there were familial anxieties about his decision to become a professional musician.

For Ram, who had been singing and strumming from his school days, it was a fairly straightforward decision to plunge into professional music. Guha Roy of Cassini’s Division, however, was nervous about the change. “I had told my office then that I would give the band a try for a year or two, and if it didn’t work out I would be back at my desk.”

Malik admits he was apprehensive of his band’s commercial viability in the beginning. But financially, the shift has been a sound one. “If I calculate,” he says, “I made more money in three years in music than in 10 years in the automobile business.”

Country singer Bobby Cash, an economics graduate who was running a school in Dehra Dun, was already married with a child before becoming a professional musician. He decided to give himself two years. “If it clicked fine, if it didn’t, I’d come back” He didn’t have to. He is among the most prominent country singers in this part of the world — and has often hit the top of the charts in Australia.

For all the homework they did, risking one’s job for music is still a shot in the dark. Says Deepak Castelino, who worked with a Japanese multi-national for 15 years before going professional, “The worst is always much worse than you think,” he says of his six months in Hong Kong in 1992, when he chucked his job to pursue music. “I had no money. But at one party I picked up the guitar and started playing on an impulse. A lady liked it so much she asked me, ‘How much do you charge?’ That’s when I realised there’s always money at hand.”

Castelino came back to Delhi and hasn’t looked back since. He has performed across India and has played at concerts abroad.

But the transition is not always smooth. Industry insiders rail against the lack of encouragement for serious musicians. “Our record industry has relied largely on film music. It is the artists who have pushed themselves and created their space,” says Amit Saigal, managing director, Rock Street Journal.

Adds N. Radhakrishnan, editor and publisher of the magazine Rolling Stone India: “By the 1990s, most rock and roll band members in Mumbai had started doing jingles. Advertising became a form for sustaining themselves.”

But now, he adds, the scene is looking good. “These days it is hard to find bands doing covers. They are all performing their own songs. But we’re still a good 4-5 years away from a situation where people can actually think of music as a career,” he adds.

Fans of Magik — Farhan Akhtar’s cinematic band — can’t wait that long. And for that matter, neither can the real life fans of Indian bands.

Additional reporting by V. Kumara Swamy in Calcutta