Delhi’s legendary rock outfit Parikrama are setting up to embark on a fifteen city tour, Parikrama @23, across India and Kathmandu (Nepal), beginning tomorrow, i.e. October 29, through to December 5 for ‘Play For A Cause’. “Its basically a full fledged initiative by 100 Pipers,” keyboardist Subir Malik told us, “All the live shows that we’re doing this year, for example the show for kashmir that we did on September 24, we raised about fourteen lacs in that tour, not just us but all musicians of Delhi. I was happy that the it was an effort by the entire music community of Delhi. For this tour we’ve tied up with Khushi Foundation, and the idea is that it just takes twenty bucks to feed a homeless child. So, essentially what we’re going to do is: at the venue there will be these coupons that we’ll be printing, and we’ll also have a counter at the entrance where if one feels, they can come and just donate, and get those five or ten coupons as a recipet. The idea is to be able to do something for these kids, and at least generate enough funds for 30,000 meals. That is the main reason.”

An interesting piece of information to all the fans out there is that 100 Pipers is going to be conducting on ground contests at each one of the fifteen cities, giving out a brand new Fender guitar signed by Parikrama. “People need to just attend the concert,” Subir told us, “There will be an onground contest there conducted by 100 Pipers. The idea of not doing an online contest was to increase the flow of the people, so that’s why we’re doing an on groung contest only. And, there won’t be any waiting; the winner wil be announced there, and they will be awarded the guitar right there on stage for all the fifteen cities. And, the biggest prize will be a Fender Stratocaster Ehsaan Noorani model signed by ehsaan noorani; that’ll be the grand prize.

“Since it is our own tour we’re pretty excited about it. We’ve been through a rough time, and for me personally, it’s been nine months since I’ve been working on this tour and you can understand, nine months mein toh baccha ho jaata hai yaar. For me it’s like my kid, we’ve worked really hard on it. We’ve come up with a few songs, there is a new music video to be released in the coming weeks, and stuff like that. In fact we wanted to add in a lot of cities that are not in the normal rock scene, because we want to go there and promote rock. If today we go, and ‘touch wood’ we are acceptable, it’ll be good for any other rock band tomorrow. This year we’re doing fully organised tours; in India what we see is a lack of organized tours. You know, bands end up doing three or four gigs, through different organisers, in different colleges, spread over two months, and they call it a tour. This is actually a tour in that sense, you play, you travel; okay our roads are not that great that we can travel by bus, so we’ll travel by air [chuckling]. Just because the tour is in November, a lot dates had already gone. In the middle of these dates Parikrama has played a lot of gigs, but we purposefully haven’t added those gigs to Parikrama @23. This is like a one organiser, one sponsor, kind of tour which doesn’t happen too often in India. The idea is that next year when the band turns 24, we’ll be doing 20 gigs. In 2016 when the band turns 25, we’ll be doing 25 gigs. That is the wishlist idea that we spoke to our sponsore about, lets see how long we can excecute it.”

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