On weekends, members of Wits End take a break from their corporate lives to make music

It was sometime in 2007, when 39-year-old Anuj Bhatia, a corporate lawyer, met Rajesh Samson, 35, from Ernst & Young, on account of business, and they struck up a conversation about their shared passion—the guitar. A few months later, attending a Parikrama concert with a group of friends, Bhatia and Samson had a realisation. “That show showed us what we were missing. We could play so well and yet we weren’t playing,” says Bhatia, setting up his guitar at the basement of Soundgarden—a jamming pad for bands in GK 1.

Every weekend Bhatia and Samson take a break from their corporate lifestyle to pick up their guitar and bass along with friends and band members Nikhilesh Singh, Rahul Harit and Aditya Dasgupta. Wits End, as the classic rock band is called, was born in November 2008 and has already done three shows.

Having given up music for a decade, they were nervous about their first performance at Vasant Vihar’s Turquoise Cottage last month but loved every bit of it. Bhatia and Samson alternate between lead guitar and bass as Singh and Dasgupta do the vocals. Dasgupta is the youngest—just 19—and the only non-corporate member of the band.

Back at their practice session, between renditions of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water and The Doors’ LA Woman, Samson says, “We wanted to call ourselves Twangling Jacks, a la Shakespeare, but then decided against it. Finally, when we were at our wit’s end to finalise a name, we became Wits End.”