Once while he was trekking in Manali, Shantanu Moitra met a sadhu who told him that the music inside him was like a jar of fireflies. Whenever he made music, he used up some of those fireflies. He needed to give time for the jar to fill up again before he drew from that luminous well of creativity.

Moitra has never forgotten the hermit’s words. As a composer, he has tasted phenomenal success with the music of films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Parineeta, Lage Raho Munna Bhai, 3 Idiots and so on. Whether he does playful or poignant, a moody Kaisi paheli (Parineeta) or a peppy Aal izz well (3 Idiots), his melodies are always memorable, always top of the pops. Yet he has no desire to milk his creative genius ceaselessly in an effort to produce an assembly line of “hit” songs. “Sometimes, when you are successful, you want to grab everything. I don’t believe in that because it puts you under a lot of pressure,” says the 43-year-old composer. “I am not a man in a hurry.”

Actually, he is something of a man for all seasons — one who hasn’t let his Bollywood musical stardom engulf his varied interests. So while he scores music for films with heavyweight directors like Sudhir Mishra, Rajkumar Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Shyam Benegal et al, Moitra continues to travel around the country to archive India’s folk music, composes the odd ad jingle, dabbles in photography and cooking, and takes off on trekking expeditions whenever he can. “Music is God’s gift to me,” he says. “But I believe you need multiple exposures to do that one thing well. The more things I do, the better will be my music.”

And so I find Moitra not amidst Bollywood big wigs in the hurly burly of Mumbai, but in Jaipur, where he has come to attend a conference that showcases innovative ideas. He has brought along Gokul Das, a well-known dhaki from Bengal who plays the instrument with a distinctively non-traditional twist. As the folk artist bursts into his electrifying drumming, Moitra stays on stage, visibly enjoying the performance. At that moment, they seem like twin souls, at one with each other in their passion for rhythm and music.

But I am impatient to talk about Moitra’s own brand of music. What makes it so catchy and unforgettable, I ask him, when we sit down for a chat in his hotel room. Dressed in a dark grey T-shirt, a casual jacket and light grey distressed jeans, he looks relaxed and easy-going. He offers me tea, and makes some for himself. He speaks fast, his words almost tumbling over each other as he tries to explain his thoughts about music. “Well, a catchy tune doesn’t necessarily make a song great and neither does it necessarily make it a bad song,” he says. “There is no formula for a song that will work well in the marketplace. Human beings are so variable as a species that you cannot predict anything about them with certainty. So I just let my creativity flow and let the rest take care of itself.”

Moitra admits that he has been fortunate to have worked with directors who never insist that he produces a hit. “I work best when I am not under any kind of pressure to perform,” he says. “That is why I like working with the same directors again and again — Sudhir Mishra, Raju Hirani, Shyam Benegal… It’s because I have a comfort level with them. Because creativity in the context of a ‘collective’ medium like film is all about trust.”

An important cornerstone of his musical output is also a relationship based on trust. Almost all his songs have been penned by lyricist Swanand Kirkire, and right from that first haunting, anthem-like Bavra mann in Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, the collaboration has been astonishingly fruitful. In fact, Moitra thinks it was nothing less than divine intervention that brought him and Kirkire together.

It was the year 2002. He had quit his job in an ad agency in Delhi some time ago and had composed the music for the pop-classical track Ab ke sawan sung by Shubha Mudgal. Sudhir Mishra heard the song playing in Javed Akhtar’s house on Holi. He liked it so much that before long he offered Moitra the job of directing the music for his next film. “But I was this happy Bengali guy living in Delhi,” Moitra says with a smile. He simply didn’t want to move to Mumbai to do film music.

He did go eventually, and that’s when he met Kirkire, who was an associate director working with Mishra in Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. Kirkire had written a song for the film — Bavra mann — which Moitra heard him recite in a taxi amidst the tumult of Mumbai’s traffic. He was entranced by the lyric. He put it to music, persuaded Kirkire to sing it, and the two have gone on to make magic ever since.

Despite the wide appeal of his music, Moitra can sound like an elitist at times. “My music is cerebral,” he says. “I do not believe in making music for the lowest common denominator. It’s not elitism,” he insists, “it’s just that art is cerebral — it’s not art unless it makes you think, unless it tickles your brain.”

Moitra was musically inclined right from childhood. It was braided into his genes as it were, as both his parents were musicians. He discovered his gift for composition almost by chance — thanks to Durga Puja in Delhi’s little Bengal, Chittaranjan Park, where he and his friends sang songs that he wrote and composed. “By the time I left school, I had already had a few years’ practice composing songs for my own band,” he says. But music remained no more than a hobby. He baulked at turning professional for his parents knew the kind of financial hardship a life in music entailed.

But fate had other plans for Moitra. It turned out that the music inside him would simply not play second fiddle. So, while he began work as an accounts executive in an advertising agency, he ended up composing ad jingles. And from there the journey to Mumbai’s filmland happened almost as if it was always meant to be.

If a musician or a singer has to do hours of riyaaz, what does a composer have to do, I ask him. Essentially, he has to listen to a lot of music, he replies. His own taste in music is vast and eclectic. “I listen to everything — jazz, pop, rock, classical, funk, eastern, western... If there is a complete no no, it’s death metal!” These days he also tries to listen to music as he did in his school and college — without analysing things too much. “I want to recover that purity, that innocence,” he says wistfully.

Since he is a huge devotee of the late music director Salil Chaudhury, considers him to be a sort of Dronacharya to his Ekalavya, in fact, I wonder if he thinks Hindi film music of the 1960s and 70s was by and large better than that in our own time. He sidesteps the question somewhat. “Art is often best judged from a distance. The music that feels so remarkable now, perhaps didn’t seem so then. It’s time that makes it outstanding.” But then he goes on to concede that maybe the pressure of the marketplace is eroding the quality of contemporary film music. “For example, you are clearly told, ‘hey, make a song that will sound good as a ringtone’ — as that is a major source of revenue.”

But while others may abide by such diktats, Moitra remains free. “I refuse to restrict my creativity within set parameters,” he says. Perhaps that is the secret of his success. That and the fact that he does not let the pushes and pulls of Mumbai’s frenetic, and often ferocious, world of showbiz get under his skin. “Mumbai is just my place work,” he shrugs. “If I didn’t have my other interests maybe I too would have succumbed to its pressures. As it is, I always know that if I get fed up of all this one day, I may just go off and do something else — maybe do potato farming in Nagaland.”

Seriously?

“Sure,” he replies. “Potato is a rarity in those parts. I would love to have a potato farm there one day.”

In the last five years Moitra has, in fact, seen a lot of India as it is lived outside the metros. For he has embarked on a mammoth initiative to collect and archive the rich tradition of folk music that lies forgotten in our rural backyards. “It’s still work in progress,” he says. “My plan is to create a dialogue about it, pick up individual artists and thereby familiarise people with that particular brand of folk music, and even incorporate it in film music where possible.” The whole idea, he stresses, is to talk about folk music and make it mainstream so that this enormous legacy does not pass into oblivion.

It’s projects like these that infuse Moitra with his joy of living. And that shines through his music as well. “I am completely aware of the finiteness of my life,” he says simply. “And I think my one lifetime would be totally wasted if I just stayed inside a studio and composed music. So I do what I want to and it’s been an incredible journey so far.” Of course, the journey would not have been possible, he admits, without the support of his family — his parents and his wife — who have stood by him whenever he has wanted to go off the beaten track.

So even as he continues to compose film music — his latest work includes the Bengali film Aparajita Tumi by director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, and an as yet untitled movie by Shyam Benegal — Moitra remains a footloose spirit, always ready to respond to the call of the unknown, the whisper of a breathtaking adventure lurking somewhere out there.

And, who knows, maybe that’s what makes his jar of fireflies fill up again and again.