Type "musical instrument manufacturing company" into YouTube, host Barun says at the top of this episode, and you find almost nothing, not in Bangla and barely in Hindi. That gap is why he sat down with Pallab Ghosh, co-founder of Gappu, the Kolkata percussion brand Pallab calls the biggest musical instrument brand in Eastern India. Until this episode the company was Gappu Cajon; here, on camera for the first time, Pallab announces it is dropping the "Cajon" and moving into guitars and ukuleles to chase a bigger market.
Recorded at venue partner Kaffee Am Salzsee in Salt Lake, the conversation runs well past an hour. Barun opens with AI: a Dunki song recreated in Mohammed Rafi's voice, A.R. Rahman experimenting with AI. Does a cajon maker have a future? From there the two friends work through the size of India's instrument market, why Kolkata manufacturers copy Western brand names, why Bengali engineers start businesses but Bengali artists do not, the GST mistake and spoiled raw material that nearly bankrupted Gappu, a Shark Tank audition in Delhi, and finally love, reels culture and whether Bangla content can compete with English. Barun insists it is an adda, not an interview, and it plays like one; underneath the banter is a rare, detailed account of running a small manufacturing business in Bengal.
From a father's workshop to a percussion brand
Gappu started in 2017, founded by Pallab's partner Anirban Bhattacharya. Anirban's father has roughly 30 years of experience in instrument manufacturing and, in Pallab's words, vast knowledge of how an instrument is actually built. Pallab adds that the father is well educated, pushing back on what he calls a Bengali assumption that a man does carpentry only because nothing else worked out.
Anirban had gone to learn drums. Where most students stay players, he saw a commercial angle in the instrument itself. Pallab, who says he never sang or played himself (his pishi once bought him a tabla and tried hard to make him learn), joined as co-founder. The company has run professionally for three years, and the two founders routinely work 12 to 15 hours a day. The factory is in Bengal; Pallab admits Uttar Pradesh might have offered a better location, but a Bangla emotion kept it here.
Will AI take over musical instruments?
এআই টা টেক ওভার করবে না ফর সিওর, কারণ এআই সফটওয়্যার বেসড, আর আমাদের হার্ডওয়্যার বেসড।
Pallab Ghosh
AI will not take over, Pallab says, because AI is software-based and Gappu is hardware-based. What worries him is something he and Anirban have discussed for a long time: the metaverse Mark Zuckerberg launched a couple of years earlier. Imagine a virtual store inside a console where you pay in crypto, buy a cajon and play it with auto-tune doing the work. That, not AI singing, could replace a physical product.
If physical instruments really fade in ten years, Gappu will have to shift to a virtual product to survive. Pallab has researched it, but the salaries software engineers command make it impossible for a company of Gappu's size right now. "Hopefully in the future we will hire and build it," he says. What he can picture sooner is some software being integrated into the instrument itself to enhance its sound.
Original name, not a copy
Barun had heard from Anirban that Kolkata has no instrument manufacturing of its own. Pallab corrects him: there are many manufacturers in Kolkata and West Bengal. The problem is what they make. Most produce instruments under duplicate names of big US and Western brands. The products may be very good, but no branding of their own gets built, and buyers carry the perception that "that company's instruments are made in Kolkata".
গাপ্পু নামটা কিন্তু কোন কোম্পানির কোন নকল নয়।
Pallab Ghosh
The name Gappu is no imitation of any company; the founders coined it and built the branding around it. Today, Pallab says, India's top percussionists know the name Gappu, even if they do not know Anirban or Pallab. Barun's conclusion: in this sense, at least in name, Gappu comes first.
How big is India's instrument market?
Barun could find only a projection that the Indian musical instrument market would cross 100 million dollars by 2028. Pallab is dismissive: it is already far bigger. He quotes a Statista figure of 7 billion dollars for India, adding that statistics are not always right, and gives Gappu's own estimate of ₹15,000 to 20,000 crore, growing at 8 to 9 per cent CAGR. Barun does the arithmetic on air: 7 billion dollars at 80 rupees is ₹56,000 crore, while 100 million dollars is only about ₹800 crore.
Gappu has pan-India distribution, so Pallab does not think of Kolkata as a separate market, but he offers one striking local number: guitar manufacturers in West Bengal alone produce around 50,000 guitars a month, sold to Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Uttar Pradesh and beyond. Guitar is by far the most popular instrument in Kolkata.
The cajon itself came from Peru. India adapts foreign instruments (Pallab rejects the word "copy"), so why does the world not adopt Indian ones? It does, he says: sitar, flute and violin are exported from West Bengal, though the violin is not Indian. The deeper issue is manufacturing. A sitar carries so much ornamental craft that a plant costing crores makes no sense; a manufacturer has to reach the sales volume that justifies the plant within about five years, and neither sitar nor harmonium sells at that level.
Why the guitar beat the harmonium
The rest is a marketing game. In their parents' generation, nobody knew anything beyond harmonium and tabla; when Manna Dey or Hemanta performed on Doordarshan, they sat behind a harmonium, and every aspiring musician wanted the same. Now Arijit Singh and the other big singers stand on stage with a guitar, and the next generation learns what it sees. Harmonium and guitar are both melody instruments; the difference is fascination. Pallab stops to add that he is a huge Arijit Singh fan and is only explaining why Indian instruments are less in use. Gappu does plan an Indian instrument, the flute, if it can find a craftsman good enough.
Bengali engineers do business; Bengali artists don't
Barun raises a pattern: a Bengali engineer can imagine building a business around engineering, as Barun can with software, yet every Bengali home encourages music and almost nobody thinks of turning that art into a business the way Gappu has.
Pallab's first explanation is contentment: a musician who does four shows has his needs met. The second is that business culture is missing at home. The previous generation said study well, become a doctor or engineer, get a software job abroad. That is changing, he says, with Shark Tank so popular and Kolkata startup founders such as "Ranadeep da" and "Shamik da" becoming inspirations. Barun, who is from Durgapur, recalls from an interview that Ranadeep started out renting space at Durgapur's Junction Mall and, before that, with stalls in bookshops. The show has put the same question to Subhashis Dutt; compare his answer in Why Bengalis don't do business.
GST, a spoiled batch and near-bankruptcy
Asked about challenges, Pallab says listing them would take from morning to night. Two stand out. The first is GST, which the founders did not understand at the start; the result was a huge loss and heavy fines. The second came at peak season. Every business has a calendar with bad, medium and peak periods, and during Gappu's peak a batch of raw material arrived spoiled. For a company still small, the loss ran to ₹5 or 6 lakh, and recovering it was, in his words, a huge matter. He and Anirban were under crushing mental stress.
সেই সময় যে অবস্থা হয়েছিল, আমরা পুরোটাই বন্ধ হয়ে যেতাম, পুরো ব্যাংকরাপ্ট হয়ে যেতাম।
Pallab Ghosh
They would have shut down completely and gone bankrupt, he says, less than a year before this recording. The recovery came partly from a bank loan and partly from something he says most young founders in Bengal lack: mentors. He names Meghdut Roychowdhury of Techno India and Arun Kumar Mukherjee, a Kolkata businessman with several ventures, who told them to keep going and above all not to kill the business. Arun, from a middle-class family, told them at their first meeting that if he could get where he is, so could they. Ranadeep da, he adds, supports them too.
Barun notes that Pallab spent his answer on mentorship rather than money, and asks whether mental support really brings a company back. Pallab's answer is unambiguous: when the money is gone, mental support is all that is left, but you have to go out and find good mentors rather than sit at home complaining. If someone gives you time, value it; if they give advice, right or wrong, try it. Family support is equally essential; without the backing both founders get at home, they could not have continued. He passes on the rule his mentors gave him: once you have been helped up, look below you and help whoever is struggling. Let the cycle go on.
Zero marketing budget: artists sell the cajon
Gappu's marketing strategy has been the same since day one, and it costs nothing. Pallab calls it artist marketing: whatever artists praise, everyone buys, and the guitar boom is proof. Gappu puts its instruments in the hands of leading percussionists and lets them play on camera. He lists Kolkata's Gourav Chatterjee, brand ambassador Sambit Chatterjee, son of Pandit Subhen Chatterjee, Mumbai drummers Darshan Doshi and Gino Banks, and Chennai's Steven Samuel Devassy, whose cajon video Barun had seen on Gappu's channel. Their followers see the instrument, hear the sound and buy. With a musical instrument, Pallab says, everyone listens first and then purchases; the market cannot be pushed, demand has to be pulled.
The next step is performance marketing, where a marketer pushes the brand for a commission. Pallab cites a Shark Tank company whose sales jumped from about ₹80 lakh to ₹6 crore in a year after hiring one.
The Shark Tank audition
Gappu filled in the form for Shark Tank India Season 1 and auditioned in Delhi. The interview went well, Pallab says, but the panel probably felt the company was not yet mature, and the promised call to Mumbai never came. He wants to try again, perhaps next year, and both agree the prize is marketing rather than money. Barun estimates Shark Tank is worth ten times more as marketing than as funding, citing a food company that asked for funding at a ₹100 crore valuation, was rejected on the show, and raised at ₹134 crore after the episode aired.
Why buy a Gappu: the Tilt cajon
Barun plays the sceptical customer. Bengalis buy the cheapest Dharmatala brand to start and save up for a foreign name; a local brand is ghar ka murgi, dal barabar. Where does Gappu fit?
In the middle, Pallab replies: an expensive feel at a mid-range price. A cajon from a big international brand can cost ₹25,000 to 30,000; Gappu's B02, C03 or Tilt cajon costs ₹7,000 to 8,000 with, he claims, the same feel and sound. The Tilt cajon is slanted so a seated player does not get back pain; nobody else had that model, though several brands are now copying it.
Answering DOP Rickta's question about cigar box guitars, Pallab describes a complete manufacturing unit: raw material, workers, a colour section and a fitting section. Custom builds are possible once guitars begin in about three months, but the customer must bring the concept and the measurements, because sound depends on dimensions. A beginner will not hear the difference; a working musician will.
Five years, one relationship: what is love?
Pallab is 26 or 27, and his family has started talking about marriage. He confesses to a girlfriend of five, or maybe six, years, joking that she will scold him whichever number is wrong. The secret of the relationship, he says, is entirely her: she taught him to keep his head cool and to think about how his words might offend others. Her shop in Kestopur, selling ladies' tailoring materials, gets a plug on air.
Barun asks the question he has started putting to every guest: what is love?
ঝগড়া যদি না হয় তাহলে সেটা রিলেশনই নেই।
Pallab Ghosh
Love starts with respect, understanding what the other person wants, and standing beside their dreams; she motivates his business, he promotes hers. But if there are no fights, there is no relationship. A couple that never disagrees is living in a bubble, each waiting to leave once their work is done. Then the line Barun promises to remember: seeing a girl at a wedding and seeing her when she wakes up in the morning are worlds apart, and you must be able to accept both.
Barun pushes back: he believes today's divorces come from a refusal to adjust. Pallab clarifies that adjustment is necessary for the long term, as long as it does not start to look fishy. The real culprit, he argues, is reels culture, which trains people to hook attention in three seconds and leaves no patience to understand another person.
Reels culture and the return of long-form
Pallab has seen toddlers who cannot talk yet but can operate a phone, and says whatever kind of parent he turns out to be, he will not let his children's childhood be spent on reels. He calls 2015 to 2025 a lost decade for a generation. TikTok is banned in India, but in the US and China, he says, the platform is cutting the reach of short clips and pushing 15 and 25 minute videos to rebuild concentration. He himself watches Nikhil Kamath's two-and-a-half-hour podcasts.
Barun has noticed YouTubers who once raced to finish in five minutes now stretching to twenty or thirty. Pallab explains the economics: brands pay for retention, and a creator who keeps viewers for twenty minutes can sell a 15-second brand plug at the start and a minute at the end, and charge more. His example is Think School, Ganesh Prasad's business case-study channel, which began with short Instagram clips and now makes English videos over twenty minutes long.
Bangla content versus English content
People keep telling Barun to switch to Hindi or English. Pallab answers with two hats. As a businessman, he will promote his product wherever conversion is highest, quoting Ranveer Allahbadia's line that English content is made for money and brand endorsements while Hindi content is made for reach; Ranveer's later Hindi channel now has more subscribers than his English one.
ইমোশন দিয়ে বিজনেস হয় না, সেন্টিমেন্ট দিয়ে বিজনেস হয় না।
Pallab Ghosh
Business does not run on emotion or sentiment; profit, the household and employees' families come before personal wishes. As a viewer, though, he wants Bangla content to flourish. Bengal has no shortage of businessmen, yet no Bangla channel does what Think School does, partly because Bengalis watch Hindi and English first. He has followed Technical Guruji, with over 25 million subscribers in India, since 2015, while personally preferring Marques Brownlee, with about 17 million worldwide, because nobody in India makes videos at that level.
Barun's plan is a middle path. Deep Down Show released its first video in April 2021, when, he says, no Bangla talk-show podcast existed, and he wants that first-mover advantage in Bangla as his first milestone; Hindi and English channels may come later. He also explains why he will never charge guests: paid appearances create bias, and viewers can tell. Short clips from the episodes are on the DDS Clips Bangla channel.
Who is Pallab Ghosh
Pallab Ghosh is the co-founder of Gappu, a Kolkata musical instrument manufacturer founded in 2017 by his partner Anirban Bhattacharya and operating professionally for three years at the time of recording. He describes himself as over 25, though his mentors still call the founders "kids". Gappu makes cajons and other percussion instruments under its own original name, with pan-India distribution and a factory in Bengal, and in 2024 was rebranding from Gappu Cajon to Gappu ahead of a move into guitars and ukuleles. Pallab found Deep Down Show by watching an episode of over an hour, then messaged Barun on Instagram asking to appear; this was his first podcast.
Why this conversation matters
Search results for instrument manufacturing in Bengal are almost empty, and this episode fills the gap with real numbers: a ₹15,000–20,000 crore national market, 50,000 guitars a month from West Bengal, a ₹5–6 lakh loss that nearly ended a three-year-old company, cajon price points from ₹7,000 to ₹30,000. It also documents a rarely discussed weakness in Kolkata manufacturing, building good products under borrowed foreign names, and one company's decision to do the opposite. For anyone weighing a business built on a craft rather than a degree, the episode pairs well with the century-old family story in Shyamacharan Nursery and Deep Das's account in Rags to riches. And for anyone who has been told to switch from Bangla to Hindi, Pallab's split answer, business by conversion and heart by language, is worth the hour.
Frequently asked questions
What is Gappu and who started it?
Gappu is a Kolkata-based musical instrument brand that Pallab Ghosh describes as the largest in Eastern India. It was started in 2017 by his partner Anirban Bhattacharya, whose father has around 30 years of experience in instrument manufacturing. The company began as Gappu Cajon, making cajons and other percussion, and in 2024 was rebranding to plain Gappu as it moved into guitars and ukuleles.
Will AI replace musical instruments, according to Pallab Ghosh?
No. Pallab says AI is software-based while instruments are hardware-based, so AI cannot take over instrument making. What could disrupt the business, he says, is a metaverse-style virtual store where a player buys and plays a digital cajon. If physical products fade in ten years, Gappu would have to build a virtual product, but engineers' salaries make that impossible for now.
How big is the musical instrument market in India?
Barun could only find a projection of the Indian market crossing 100 million dollars by 2028. Pallab replies that it is already far bigger: a Statista report puts it at 7 billion dollars, and Gappu's own estimate is a market of ₹15,000–20,000 crore, growing at 8–9% CAGR. He adds that guitar makers in West Bengal alone produce about 50,000 guitars a month, sold across India and to Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
Did Gappu appear on Shark Tank India?
Not on screen. Gappu filled in the form for Season 1 and auditioned in Delhi. Pallab says the interview went well, but the team was probably judged not mature enough, and no call to Mumbai followed. He wants to try again, mainly for the marketing exposure; Barun argues Shark Tank is worth ten times more as marketing than as funding.
Why buy a Gappu cajon instead of an imported brand?
Pallab positions Gappu in the middle of the market: not the cheapest local product, not an expensive import. He says a branded cajon costing ₹25,000–30,000 gives the same feel and sound as Gappu's B02, C03 or Tilt models at ₹7,000–8,000. The Tilt cajon is slanted so seated players do not develop back pain, a design he says no other brand had when Gappu introduced it.
What did Pallab Ghosh say about love and relationships?
Pallab has been in a relationship for five to six years and gives his partner the credit for teaching him to keep calm and mind his words. He defines love as mutual respect and support for what each person wants in life, and insists that a relationship without disagreements is not a relationship at all but a bubble. Adjustment is necessary for the long term, he says, as long as it does not start to look fishy.
What does Pallab think about Bangla content versus English or Hindi content?
As a businessman he says he will promote his product wherever conversion is highest, quoting the idea that English content is made for money and brand deals while Hindi content is made for reach. As a viewer he wants Bangla content to flourish, but notes that Bengalis tend to watch Hindi and English first and that no Bangla channel does business case studies the way Think School does.
