When award-winning Bollywood music composer Shantanu Moitra began his journey from Gomukh to Gangasagar on a bicycle — documented in the new travel web-series Songs of the River on Disney+Hotstar — he was nursing grief. Two years before Covid’s deadly Delta wave took his father’s life, Shantanu had planned a trip to Varanasi with him. “I needed closure. In Varanasi, my mother and I performed his last rites, during the 60-day road trip. The bodies of Covid patients weren’t handed over to their near and dear ones, so I never saw my father’s body,” he says.
Immediately after the ceremony Shantanu was struck by the idea of ‘Ananth Yatra’, an ode to the collective pathos of people who had lost their loved ones during the pandemic. While cycling along the banks of river Ganges, he carried along photographs of some 800 people who succumbed to the virus.
