Fourth time lucky?

Jameel Khan and Geetanjali Kulkarni play a couple in the series

Only weeks after the release of his last series, Panchayat, composer Anurag Saikia finds himself prepping to analyse viewers' responses to his next show, Gullak season 4. Saikia, who came aboard the project in 2018 after being approached by the makers, was initially "unfamiliar with the format of a web series", but was "blown away" by the first episode, when it was aired for him.

While Saikia was initially appointed to create the background score of the project, he restricted his work to the soundtrack alone in the successive seasons. "Sometimes, when we keep working on the same project, we encounter a creative block. To avoid this, I decided to only work on the songs in the recently released seasons. I wanted to give someone else the space to create the musical portions," he says of the show, starring Jameel Khan, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Vaibhav Raj Gupta, and Harsh Mayar.

It is owing to the technical expertise that he had to display that Saikia considers the series among his most "special works". "The reason that it was difficult to score for the first two seasons is that they were shot entirely inside a house, and with only four characters involved," says the composer, who has Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba, and the next season of Mismatched in his kitty. Saikia will also contribute to yet another web project by director Amrit Raj Gupta.

Music milestone

1943: Manna Dey bagged his solo break with Ram Rajya after KC Dey refused to serve as the playback singer. Manna Dey chose to sing in his uncle's distinct style