Bengaluru: Anshuman Mohapatra, the founder and President of Visionate, a youth organisation, organised a fundraising event for Odisha’s cyclone victims at a cafe in Bengaluru Friday.
Visionate is a youth organisation registered under Yuva Sangathan, Bengaluru Urban, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India, and its founder Anshuman Mohapatra has been felicitated by organisations like The Indus Entrepreneurs of Chennai (2015) and the Harvard Conference of Hong Kong in 2016 for his contributions to entrepreneurship and society.
Interacting with Orissa POST, Anshuman said, “I am hoping to raise enough funds to help my state.”
Around 600 people attended the concert. The performers were Girish and the Chronicles, a hard rock band founded by lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Girish Pradhan, Thermal and a Quarter, another Bengaluru rock band founded in 1996.
Thermal And a Quarter’s music is one of comfort with the Western rock idiom as nearly everyone in Bengaluru speaks a bit of English. But it’s not just rock. There’s blues, funk, jazz, prog and may be even some soul.
Bruce Lee Mani, the face of Thermal And a Quarter is the only Indian guitar player to have won the Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘Guitar Player of the Year’ award twice, in 2009 and 2012. In 2011, Bruce also won the Leon Ireland ‘Vocalist of the Year’ Award.
Apart from him, the group has Tosh Nanda Tosh, a music composer, multi-instrumentalist, artist, performer and sound designer with many international and regional feature films to his credit. He has also composed music for news channels, games, advertisements and music videos. He is one of the pioneers to bring Epic Rock to the Indian music scene.
Kailasa, Raghu Dixit Project, Shaair & Func and Gauley Bhai, another Bengaluru-based band, sang many songs thrilling the audience.
The event created a sense of awareness about natural disasters and the sufferings caused by them. The organiser, Anshuman Mohapatra, gave a detailed account of the natural calamities suffered by Odisha, and how it has impacted the state, although the loss of lives has been minimised.
Anshuman pointed out how cyclones destroy infrastructure, property and agriculture. He said the money raised by the event would go to the Odisha CM’s Relief Fund.