How Bengaluru band Savaari’s anthem resonated with Team India’s World Cup performance

How Bengaluru band Savaari’s anthem resonated with Team India’s World Cup performance

Pruthvi Mangiri, the drummer and one of the founders of the Bengaluru-based multilingual fusion band Savaari, listened to the official anthem of the 2023 Cricket World Cup while commuting. He found it somewhat underwhelming. The quadrennial event — the biggest and the most prestigious in cricket — was returning to India after a decade. And Pruthvi and his band felt the occasion needed a better anthem to welcome it. So, they took it upon themselves to create it. Not only compose a song but also release a music video with it. The thing is, India’s first match against Australia was less than 36 hours away. And the band wanted to release the video before the game.

“We literally didn’t sleep the whole night. We kept working throughout the 36 hours,” says Saravana Gowtham, Savaari’s guitarist. The number 36, incidentally, is a memorable one for fans of the Indian cricket team as it got all out for 36 in the second innings of the first Test match before bouncing back to script a historical series victory in Australia in 2020-21.

“We were performing at a show two days before the India-Australia game. That’s when we decided we were going to make the anthem. We didn’t even rest that night. We just went to our homes, freshened up, returned to the studio and started working on it,” Gowtham recalls.

The process was exhausting yet exhilarating. The band members, for instance, engaged in a street cricket match for the music video. “It took us back to our childhood,” says Pruthvi.

The anthem, titled ‘It’s World Cup Time’, is accompanied by visuals of the men in the band playing gully cricket with a tennis ball, a small, gripless bat, and two vertically arranged building blocks as makeshift stumps.

The first few lines of the song are: ‘Rise up baby, It’s World Cup time; 12 years before, We crossed the line; Upwards and strong, We believe it’s time, To win again we want to thrive’.

These words were vindicated when India coasted to a comfortable victory in its first match against Australia. The band members — Pruthvi, Gowtham, Suraj Rajan (vocals and acoustic guitar), Mahesh Jude Pereira (bass and vocals), Ramcharan SR (violin), Abhishek MB (flute and saxophone), Tejas Rajput (percussion), Nadeera Banu (vocals), Pathikrit (photographer and videographer), and Apurba Das (live sound engineer) — were chuffed.