Raghu Dixit - Troubadour In Tinseltown

How India’s most successful indie musician is making inroads into Bollywood and winning at it

- Nirmika Singh

OUR COVER SHOOT WITH RAGHU DIXIT IS scheduled for noon, so around 9 a.m. we drop a text asking the musician if his flight from Bengaluru to Mumbai is on schedule. Pat comes the reply that he’s already landed in the city and is waiting it out at the airport—he wasn’t sure if the shoot venue would be open that early in the morning and didn’t want to inconvenience us with a special request either. Who knew India’s biggest cultural export in recent t imes would also be it s humblest! For a man who owns every stage he steps on and makes sure everyone has a great big party—he has been at it for over a decade now and admits to employing a fair bit of bullying to get the crowd to dance—Dixit the folk-rock icon is an unfussy South Indian chap offstage. He is thrifty, books his own flight tickets, and turns into an excitable teen at the prospect of anything new and thrilling. Like the shoot today. Barely 20 minutes on the set and Dixit knows the entire crew by name. The stylists can’t get enough of his self-deprecating jokes about his body and the makeup artist cackles every time the musician pesters his selfie-clicking publicist. Dixit has also picked his favorite person— our resident videographer. “Because she is the quietest of them all,” he says.

It is the eve of the release of Chef, Dixit’s Bollywood comeback as a composer, and we’re at the cast-and-crew premiere at a plush Mumbai multiplex. A couple of songs from the film’s soundtrack have been doing well on social media lately, especially the boisterous “Shugal Laga Le,” but Dixit can’t wait to ‘see’ them on the big screen.