Anupam Roy is back with another soulful number to add to our summer playlists, this time as part of the soundtrack of the Raja Chanda film Chandrabindoo. The song, titled Boipoka, is a light, bright, and sparkling track that is sure to leave a smile on your face.
The word ‘boipoka’ means bookworm, and has been part of Bengali vocabulary and childhoods, immersed in Tagore and Bibhutibhshan Bandhopadhyay, long before being a nerd became cool. Roy, through his lyrics, essentially tries to evoke that sense of nostalgia that reminiscing about our memories of our childhood always leaves behind. As grown-ups, it is easy to feel a sense of being without direction, or being alone in the world, but there is always that one anchor that roots us to our sense of self, and reminds us that at least we have our own stories, and the past and future, each a story of their own, to depend on. That seems to be the spirit of the song, written, composed, as well as sung by Roy. Boipoka is an addition to the many feathers in Roy’s cap.
The lyrics, at first unassuming, gather weight the more one considers them. Roy describes a solivagant looking for a path that might lead him home. When finally he stumbles upon one – after assuming that it was beyond his reach – it beckons him closer and tells him a secret. The memories of his childhood will ultimately show him the way; the same ‘boipoka’, the same nostalgia, the same life he has always lived that will make him realise, again, who he really is. And finally, when the wanderer, after having spent aeons in the rain, sets his sight for home again, he sees golden light falling onto pages of dark, printed letters, all shade and curtains finally having been pulled away. The imagery is poetic yet fragile, haunting yet familiar. Roy uses his trademark blend of minimalism and emotional depth to evoke a landscape that is as much internal as it is external. The home the solivagant seeks is not a place but a recognition, a reconciliation with the self he left behind; and in the end, the song is less about arriving and more about awakening.
The music video depicts scenes from the film, set in a bookstore in London and starring Ankush Hazra, Oindrila Sen, Anirban Chakrabarti, and Tulika Bose, juxtaposed with the familiar Calcutta sights and sounds of College Street and by the lake. This gentle oscillation between the foreign and the familiar mirrors the emotional core of the song — the ache of distance and the pull of belonging. As the visuals shift from the misty greys of London to the sunny alleys of north Calcutta, the viewer is reminded that home is not always a place, but a feeling, a memory, and almost always, a story waiting to be told and retold.
Subhalakshmi Dey