The Odia rap song Sabda Prahar is what we need in these testing times, when the pandemic is upon us and a celebrity's suicide is taking centre stage. It's like a shot of motivation, a rap of gratitude that reminds us that whatever one is going through, a solution can be found. Released by The Urban Loafer, a video production company, featuring rappers MC ToR and Juggernaut, this song that's just over two minutes long, was released on June 28 and it has crossed 17,000 views already.
It took them a day in May to shoot the video in Cuttack's Chandni Chowk area. "While taking all precautions and maintaining social distancing, of course," says MC ToR AKA Tanmaya Sahoo, whose brains we pick to understand what it takes to rap in Odia and what he is going to come up with next.
"When I write in Hindi, I myself don't connect with it. Odia is the language I am most fluent in and that's what I choose to write in," says the 23-year-old. He has been writing Odia rap for over two years now and before that, he was drawn to this medium of expression by listening to several rap artists. A rough patch in life that the otherwise introverted rapper was going through in 2017 also spurred him on in the direction of writing and expressing himself.
It was in June 2019 that MC ToR released his first track, Hip-Hop ZindaBaad, a free verse that he recorded at home with the help of his brother, Shakti Darshan, who Tanmaya refers to as his backbone. "That song really helped me feel validated," says the rapper who pursued his MCA from Trident Academy of Technology, Bhubaneswar.
But MC ToR's initiation into the hip hop community happened when he took part in a cypher, an informal gathering of artists where they jam together, in Bhubaneswar. This meeting led to another track, Utkal Cypher in March 2020. And now that Sabda Prahar is out, MC ToR has started working on other collaborations as well. We are surely looking forward to them.
Writing in Odia restricts one's reach and there is no doubt about that but the Rourkela-born rapper would rather write in his mother tongue than anything else. "If one runs behind an audience, fame or money, the art gets affected. I don't want that to happen. I am confident that there will come a time when people will listen to me on loop," he says confidently. Here is where we must add that the ToR in his rap name expands to Tanmaya the Odia Rapper. Need we say anything more?
For more on him, check out instagram.com/its_tanmay__
