Salil Chaudhary

Trivia

• His father inherited a large number of western classical records and a gramophone from a departing Irish doctor. While Salil listened to Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, etc. everyday, his daily life was surrounded by the sound of the forest, chirping of the birds, sound of the flute and the local folk-music. This left a lasting impression in young Salil. He became an excellent self-taught flute player and his favourite composer was Mozart. His compositions often used folk melodies or mel
• Salil's love for Western classical music started when he was a young boy growing up in an Assam tea garden where his father worked as a doctor.
• Salil's music was a unique blending of the Eastern and the Western music traditions.
• To the music connoisseurs, he was better known as the non-conformist music composer whose unceasing search for perfection towered above everything else in his life.
• Since Do Bigha Zameen, he has composed for over 75 Hindi films, over 40 Bengali films, around 26 Malayalam films, and several Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Oriya and Assamese films.
• Salil always retained his strong feelings against the social injustice and he very often wrote songs which reflected this outlook.
• Living through the Second World War, the Bengal famine and the precarious political situation of the 1940s, he became acutely aware of his social responsibilitie .This is when he joined the IPTA and became a member of the Communist Party of India.
• A lot of his childhood was spent in listening to the Western Classical collection of his father, which shaped his musical thinking.
• Salil was fondly and reverently called Salilda in Bollywood.
• Regarded as one in the league of intellectuals having born in the state of West Bengal, he was also widely acclaimed and admired for his inspirational and original poetry.

Quotes

• "I do not know what to opt for: poetry, story writing, orchestration or composing for films. I just try to be creative with what fits the moment and my temperament' he once told a journalist."
• "I want to create a style which shall transcend borders - a genre which is emphatic and polished, but never predictable."