What comes to mind when I say azureus rana? I asked my friend, Brainy. Why, are you studying for the SAT exam or trying some new Harry Potteresque curse? I was asked sarcastically.
Neither. It appears there’s a new animal in town and I am trying to understand its genesis, I countered.
What is that supposed to mean? quizzed Brainy.
And that’s what I set out to find. What really is azureus rana or Blue Frog?
That, said Srila Chatterjee, is the saving grace of India.
Oh sure, I understand, I responded not really understanding at all. It’s India’s answer to the global warming crisis, thinking I had stumbled onto something fantastic and novel.
Actually, retorted Ashu Phatak and Dhruv Ghanekar almost simultaneously, it’s the future of music in India that’s really going to raise the bar.

Blue Frog and music? I could find no pertinent relevance, so I probed further. Can you enlighten me about the connection?
See, almost every global city has its own musical identity; whether it’s New York, Berlin or Paris. But in Mumbai, there has really been recognition of only two kinds of music: Hindustani classical music and Bollywood music. In contrast, if you were to travel to places in the North Eastern part of India, like Darjeeling or Assam, they are listening to a completely different kind of music. They have their own subculture and don’t really seem to care about what’s happening in the rest of India, declared Dhruv. In fact, he continued, it’s almost as though we musicians in Mumbai are musically isolated in our own country.
But how could this be true in a country whose population exceeds one billion people? Whose urban centres are completely plugged into the Internet revolution? And whose youth are the catalytic converters of most of the trends set globally?
Intrigued, I asked again.
How can you two, who are successful and recognised in this industry and who have unlimited access to new sounds feel isolated? And what does this really mean for the indigenous Indian music industry locally and globally?
I had asked the million-dollar question. The floodgates were opened and out spilled the raison d’ or ‘attitude’ of Blue Frog, as Srila likes to describe it.

Blue Frog is the brainchild of five like-minded people whose common interests are the passion to create and to, in the immortal words of Star Trek, boldly go where no man has gone before. In recognition of a shrinking global culture where boundaries merge and cease to exist, the group felt that they did not have to conform to a particular national or artistic stereotype and needed a musical culture and space to express this view.
Furthermore, extrapolated Mahesh Mathai, why are we being ostracised in our own country because we want to musically create something fresh, new and different?
The gauntlet was thrown and I could not resist.
So, basically, what you want to do is to allow musicians to perform and create in a space that allows for musical integrity to flourish; or you want to give an opportunity for the ‘almost there’ to become the next Indian Idol because everyone, according to Warhol, needs their 15 minutes in the sun?

I could not have been farther from the truth. Blue Frog is actually a musical complex that will be housed in the erstwhile run-down Mathuradas Mill Compound in Lower Parel, Mumbai. It comprises four arms that will offer clients complete audio solutions, support up and coming composers and musicians and expand upon its mammoth digital library of original music; it is ‘Blue Frog Soundlabs’, home to a state-of-the-art recording studio for anyone who wants to be digitised; it will be the proud parents of ‘Blue Frog Records’ to encourage artists to develop their own indigenous sounds that will be marketed globally; and lastly, it will be the ‘Club’, featuring live, cutting-edge national and international talent coupled with a restaurant and bar.
It will be a movement, Srila proudly said. A great big tsunami that will hit these shores but not create havoc and devastation; rather, it will crash and bind together different sounds, different people and different ideas; it will catapult Indian sounds onto the global musical map; and it will encourage the freedom to create.
I thought long and hard about all that I had heard. And it seemed so appropriate in the Chak De and India Shining phenomena that were shaking the world. So when I next met Brainy and was asked about azureus rana, I replied with confidence and great expectation that there’s a new order in the jungle; the lion has given way to the frog!