Zero played their last gig at I-Rock 2008, and it was a pretty emotional affair with the ender, ‘PSP’, being sung by the audience rather than the band. For a band that’s been around for a long time, to end it like that was fitting. Still, it’s disheartening to hear that the music meant less to the artist than it did to the fans.

In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Bobby (Girish Talwar, bass) said

Zero was always 10 per cent of our lives. Like you keep space for dessert after food, this 10 percent is the dessert of our lives and will be reserved for music.

In relative terms, Zero was one of the biggest Indian rock acts. Their music was original and recognised wherever they played. I remember watching them in Ahmedabad a few years ago and Gujjus went ballistic over ‘PSP’ and ‘Not My Kind Of Girl’. But with Zero, one always got the feeling that the music was a placeholder; a stop-gap of sorts till the ’scene’ became bigger or personal priorities came along.

Be it with their album releases, or their website, everything took its own time coming. And before we knew it, it came to an end. So justifying a statement like the one above, is probably easy. However, the question really is – can a band ever be bigger than the sum of its parts?

In Zero’s case, despite the many, many guitarists they’ve had, disappointingly no.