Prateek Kuhad's Quiet Rise to the Top

The once-reluctant Indian singer-songwriter on opening up, loving his haters and the road to global recognition

- Anurag Tagat

“IT WAS LITERALLY one of the happiest moments of my life.” It ’s not easy to get anything remotely hyperbolic out of Prateek Kuhad. And yet, there it is. A couple of years ago, the New Delhi/Jaipur singer-songwriter might have underplayed a lot of his achievements, but since the release of his EP cold/mess in mid-2018, things have changed. Well, slightly.

In fact, the release of the soul-burrowing, despairing yet moody EP is exactly what Kuhad is talking about. “Even before it got any recognition or before anything happened, just the fact that it was finally out made me feel so great,” he says as he sits down to lunch in his room at a five-star hotel in Mumbai. Later on, in our 90-minute chat, he’s talking about his voice and how he never thinks about how he sings. He feels that people ended up liking his voice because of his often crestfallen, emo songwriting. “I think the songs are good and I don’t do a terrible job of executing it,” Kuhad says, showing a glimpse of how he can still be quite self-critical for someone who’s headlining festivals in India (Vh1 Supersonic in Pune on February 7th), selling out shows in India, the U.S. and Europe and ended up on former U.S. President Barack Obama’s annual favorite music of 2019.

He says, “I’m generally a very wary and cynical person.” We’re talking about his recent Supermoon tour that reportedly sold over 30,000 tickets across 11 cities and how he eventually began enjoying being on stage for the first time. “It almost scared me for a while, like, ‘why am I liking this? Am I changing too much?’”

Introduce anything new to Kuhad’s live set – like the fact that he asked everyone to put their phone torches up when he performed the gentle “Kho Gaye Hum Kahan” (off the soundtrack for Bollywood film