Spitfire (40)

He was 15 when he was bit by the hip hop bug. A sense of unease, restlessness, and angst, had begun to set in, but back then he was not aware that the “azaadi” he sought will eventually come from his own words. All he knew was that he had things to say. “I didn’t even have a phone back then but I became friends with someone at school who did.” Ayush Khare, who goes by the street name, “Wordsmith” was that cool kid in middle school who owned a phone with an internet connection. “He had studied the global hip hop movement, and literally schooled me on how to write. We were a group of eight boys, six of whom would give us a topic, hook or idea, and the two of us had to produce a rap around that in 30 minutes,” or about as long their class periods. Mishra’s hip-hop style is confessional. I had heard his songs, “Seedhe Midzone Se”,“Jee Le” and the hard-hitting “#Black” and a few minutes into the conversation, I could tell where they were coming from. Like the majority of Indians in small towns, Mishra lived a lower-middle-class existence in an environment that is slow to modernise. When millennials his age, in metropolitan cities are confidently subverting gender norms, he tells me that in his school, a girl and a boy can still not sit together in a classroom. In the world that the Mishras occupy, people “don’t understand any art”. The young Mishra too had to contend with the same rehashed views of “doctor ban jao, engineering kar lo”. Very early on, he knew if he were to dive into an unconventional career, he’d have to support himself.