Rock star prefers life as U.S. student

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 28, 2003 by Todd Dvorak Associated Press writer

GRINNELL, Iowa -- Back in Bangladesh, he has a hit rock album.

But at a small, liberal arts college in Iowa, 23-year-old Yasir Mehboob is studying economics and computer engineering, hoping for a job that will keep him in America.

As a senior at Grinnell College, he is far removed from the emerging music scene in Dhaka, where he began playing nightclub gigs with adult bands in his early teens.

"My mother never liked that part of it," jokes Mehboob, who began playing keyboards at 11 and joined a band three years later. "She didn't like that I was hanging out with adults and getting exposed to alcohol and all that stuff."

With his bookish looks and polite demeanor, Mehboob hardly fits the rock 'n' roll image. Even in photos in his band's CD, he's the one without the dark sunglasses and tough-guy look.

He insists that music was merely a hobby, but his band -- Ordishsho, which translates to "invisible" in English -- got a taste of celebrity after the release of its first CD and music video last fall.

The album's eight songs are sung in Bangla, but the melodies and percussion are influenced by Western rock. Several tracks have a Latin flavor, which Mehboob attributes to the lead guitarist's admiration for Carlos Santana.

Two weeks after the CD hit sales racks in Bangladesh, it was No. 2 in a weekly poll conducted by the now defunct television channel ETV. Because piracy runs rampant and the Bangladeshi music industry has no system for tracking record sales, it is impossible to know exactly how many copies have been sold, says Shafquat Rabbee, who writes about music and politics for the Bangladesh Nationalist Press.

But sales were pegged at about 3,000 copies, which "would definitely be considered a lot of sales within that span of time in the market," Rabbee says.

Mehboob never had a chance to bask in his fame. The day after the disc's release, he boarded a plane back to Iowa.

"The day before I left for the States, we went around the city and saw posters for the band and CD all around," he says. "It was all very festive and great to see, and there is nothing to compare it to here in the United States."

But Bangladesh has no laws to ensure royalties, popular tastes change often, and artists have a hard time getting by.

"Just like the scene in India, there is an overload of product in many southeast Asian countries, and that makes it tough for anyone to establish a following," says Nyay Bhushan, a freelance writer in India who writes about the music and film industry for Billboard Magazine.

Mehboob agrees: "The rise in popularity is fleeting. If I was back home right now, we'd have to be working on something else already just to sustain it. It's hard to keep pace."

His uncle, Javed Ahmed, 42, is Ordishsho's guitarist and played in some of the nation's top rock bands, including a stint in the 1970s with a group led by Azam Khan, considered the pioneer of Bangladeshi rock.

"When I was younger, I used to go over to his house after school and he would teach me to play the keyboard by ear," says Mehboob, who prefers Western groups like Pink Floyd, Dire Straits and the Scorpions.

"There are plans of course for us to do more records," he says.

"But it's just hard given the circumstances now and with everything else going in my life."