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Leading Indian guitarist, poet and singer Kabir Suman, who is married to popular Bangladeshi singer Sabina Yasmin, has been hospitalised in the eastern city of Kolkata with symptoms of Covid.
The 72-year-old former lawmaker of West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress party was rushed to the premier government-run SSKM Hospital in Kolkata late Sunday night after he complained of breathlessness.
"Kabir Suman was admitted to the hospital late last night with fever and shortness of breath. At the time of admission, his oxygen level was 90," Dr Soumitra Ghosh of SSKM Hospital, told the local media.
"We are waiting for his Covid test report," said Dr Ghosh, the head of the hospital's medicine department.
Originally a Hindu, the musician changed his name from Suman Chattopadhyay to Kabir Suman when he converted to Islam in protest against the killing of a Christian missionary by a Hindu fundamentalist in the eastern state of Odisha some 22 years ago.
A pioneer of alternative Bengali music, Kabir Suman shot to fame in the 1990s with popular albums such as Tomake Chai (I Want You) and Boshe Anko (Sit-and-Draw). All the songs in his albums were written, composed and sung by him.
Suman, who worked as a journalist in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution, also served as a Trinamool Congress MP from 2009 to 2014. Currently, he shares his political views via his own website.