Paintings for Charity

In 2007, Zansam, the music group that I am a founding member of in Bangalore, was in its infancy. We were a group of music enthusiasts and aspiring musicians that would get together on weekends to appreciate a shared taste in music and jam to old Bollywood music. The more time we spent together, the more we aspired to get on stage and perform.

The trigger that made us organize our first concert came in the form of Socare Ind, a non-profit organization that works in the interest of children who have often lost one parent to death and the other to imprisonment. Many of these children suffer psychological trauma of having witnessed one parent murder the other.

We were so moved as a group that we organized our first concert, Nostalgia Night, as a fund-raiser in aid of Socare Ind. While the concert barely managed to break even, we still managed to raise a modest sum of Rs 25,000 for the organization. The bigger impact of the concert was that many of the audience members who worked in the corporate world stepped forward to help the organization…

Yahoo! India built Socare Ind’s website and started a Purple Hearts initiative where employees could donate any sum of money that would be sent to the company. Goldman Sachs started an old newspapers drive where employees were encouraged to bring old newspapers to the offices once a month. These would be sold as scrap and the proceeds were sent to Socare Ind. Another organization started a greeting cards drive purchasing hand-made greeting cards made by the children of Socare Ind during festivals. Many individuals too stepped forward to support the organization.

This exposure that the concert got a worthy cause encouraged us to organize our second concert: Pancham – A Musical Tribute. In addition to promoting a charitable cause, some of the musicians also did paintings that were sold for Rs 500 each, the proceeds being given to the charity. Below are some of the paintings I did during that concert.