Baba Sehgal Reborn

As he walks across the lobby of a suburban hotel in Mumbai, discussions come to abrupt stops, curious heads turn in faint recollection, and at least one middle-aged woman tells her companion in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think it’s him.” Yes, it is him. A little older now, a shiny bald pate atop a body that is now slightly heavier on the midriff, the once famous Indipop star Baba Sehgal avoids the attention by fixing his gaze on his cell phone.

He walks through the lobby, finds himself a quiet corner in a coffee shop, and begins to tell the waiter what coffee he wants. The waiter has recognised the musician. But even as he takes the order, you can’t help but notice the disappointed look on his face. I overhear him talking to his co-worker.

“What did he order?” his friend asks.
“Black coffee,” he replies.
“So what happened to you?”
“I thought he would at least rap the order.”

In the early 1990s, with the spread of cable TV in India, especially the advent of MTV, a new type of music began to emerge. It followed neither the aesthetics of classical Indian music nor the conventions of Hindi film songs. Its sensibilities were more international, more contemporary pop. There were boy and girl bands, more peppy beats, and a lot more experimentation. But even within the ambit of the unusual, of what came to be recognised as Indipop, there was one who stood out. With unabashed vigour and a touch of desi loutishness, a bristly short haircut sans sideburns, Baba Sehgal did not just sing his songs, he belted them out at a rapid pace. Sehgal was India’s first rap musician. His songs were often nonsensical, unsubtle and bereft of depth, but it wasn’t anything anyone had ever heard in Hindi before.

Sehgal made several hit songs, sang for a few films, starred in at least one Hindi movie, and also hosted a popular music show for Doordarshan. As the genre of Indipop declined, so too did Sehgal. He tried to prolong his career by releasing a few more albums, acting in a TV kitchen drama, and even tried out a reality TV show, but his time was over. He moved to the US for a few years, where he sang and played himself in a Broadway musical. During this period he also began to frequent hip-hop clubs, and, as he claims, began to jam with other rappers for impromptu gigs. Upon his return, he found space as a musician in Telugu and Tamil films. Sehgal even relocated to Hyderabad, where he established the Baba Academy of Hip Hop which offers students classes in rapping and disc jockeying.

“I didn’t know a word of Tamil or Telugu. And here I was trying to rap entire songs in those languages,” Sehgal says. “But I had to do it. Had to survive.” Over the past six years, Sehgal claims to have sung over 100 songs for around 50 south Indian films. “People know me in the south. But I thought everyone over here [in Mumbai] had forgotten me.”

Baba Sehgal was born in a Punjabi household in Lucknow as Harjeet Singh Sehgal. The son of a civil engineer and a homemaker, with two elder sisters, his only distinctive trait was that he spoke very quickly. “People would not be able to follow me. They would tell me to slow down. But I continued to speak fast, and before long, I was singing fast,” he recounts. Growing up in a small household in the 1970s, he had no access to international music, let alone rap, but he began to listen to Kishore Kumar, also a favourite of his mother. “Kishore Kumar also sang very quickly. And I began to emulate him, to sing faster than him,” he says. “To me, rap was all about singing quickly, very fast.”

Even as his father forced him to pursue a civil engineering degree, and later a career as an engineer in Allahabad, followed by the job of an inspector in the Delhi Electricity Supply Undertaking (DESU), which is now known as the Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB), Sehgal began to write and rap songs. Everything, from a small episode in his life to an imaginary encounter, was extra fodder for his music. He says he began to view life itself in rhyme compositions. By the time he moved to Delhi, he was certain he would try to become a professional singer.

“My job was to go around parts of Delhi to inspect if power thefts were going on. Every one of my colleagues wanted that job because there was a lot of money to be made in bribes. But all I wanted was a desk job, where I could write and practise songs while at work,” he says. During his six months with DESU, he released an album, Dilruba, which failed. “Everyone told me I should go to Mumbai.”

So, with a Maruti 800 that his father had recently purchased for him and savings of about Rs 10,000, Sehgal decided to drive to Mumbai along with a friend with connections in the city. His dream was to become, as he calls it, ‘India’s first rap artist’. He called his mother to inform her of his plan. “And you know what she said, ‘Bubu, what about your government job?’” By the time they reached Indore, the friend, discomfited by the long journey, backed out and got off to take a train back to Delhi. Sehgal went on to reach Mumbai, where he slept at the house of an acquaintance for two nights, and once he had overstayed his welcome, began sleeping in his car. “In the mornings, I would park my car near Centaur Hotel in Juhu, and sneak into the hotel to wash up. I had no friends or a place to stay. And this went on for a few days before I found an affordable paying guest accommodation,” he says.

Convincing music label honchos to produce a rap album proved even more difficult. “Weeks turned to months. But whenever I would tell anyone about the song I had written, Thanda Thanda Pani [whose tune was lifted from the popular Vanilla Ice song, Ice Ice Baby, itself taken partly from Queen’s Under Pressure], people refused me and called me names. They said, ‘You asshole, are you out of your mind?’” One could maybe forgive the producers, given that it has lyrics that go, ‘Main 5-Star hotel pehli baar gaya/ Maine dekha paani se bhara swimming pool/ Aaya manager, bola baithiye please sir sir sir/ Aapki sewa mein haazir hoon/ Kuch farmaiye, boliye kya aapko chahiye?’

When the song was eventually produced, it became one of the defining moments of the Indipop genre, but it did not have a music video. All Baba Sehgal had as recognition was a small photograph affixed to the cover of the audio cassette. “Nobody recognised me. So the next time, for my song Dil Dhadke, I got the producers to get me a model—Pooja Bedi—and put in Rs 50,000 for a music video,” he says. He got himself a haircut, with shaven sideburns to better suit his persona as a rap artist, worked on his physique, and tweaked his nickname Bubu to call himself Baba Sehgal. The video went on to become another major hit. But Sehgal had no way to know. He did not own a TV set. One day, he claims, he was smoking a cigarette at a paan shop, when a car with several youngsters passed by. One of them apparently pointed out Sehgal to his friends and said aloud, ‘Woh dekh, Baba (Look, it’s Baba).’ “And I knew that day,” he says, “that I had arrived.”

The fall came some years later, as sudden as his fame.

A couple of months ago, some professionals from YouTube called up Sehgal. Never quite able to discontinue writing and rapping Hindi songs, Sehgal, apart from his work in the Telugu and Tamil film industry, had begun to put up new solo compositions on the online distribution platform SoundCloud. As Sehgal tells it, these professionals thought his new Hindi songs could make for great YouTube videos. “I thought they were out of their minds. ‘Why would young people be interested in listening to me now, on some online forum?’” he recalls thinking. “But then I gave in. What harm could it do me, anyway?” Shooting with minimal costs and effort—a camera from his institute, a friend who posed as a model, and his iPhone to edit it—a music video of the song Going to the Gym was ready within two hours.

“I put it up on YouTube and sent a tweet about it. By the next day, there were thousands of retweets and video views,” he says. “I was like, ‘Hang on, there’s something going on here.’”

By this phase, Sehgal was also using Twitter more actively. He joined the micro-blogging website two years ago—because somebody else was posing as him there. He would tweet occasionally and very few ever responded. But during an IPL match, when the cricketer Chris Gayle was batting well, Sehgal succumbed to an old habit. He tweeted, compulsively, ‘Gayle is like a whale.’

“I got some 100 retweets and replies for that,” the rapper says. “One line of ‘Gayle is like a whale’ and I get a 100 retweets?’ I got to do more.”

Sehgal began to tweet more. He began to rhyme each tweet, whether or not the lines made much sense. It was just like old times, he says. He began to write limericks like, ‘Omelette, idli ya khao dosa, mat todo kisi ka bharosa’, ‘Mumbai se baarish aisey gayab ho gayi jaisey dukanon se maggie’, ‘Moon ke baad sun rise hota hai, jab realize hota hai tab aadmi wise hota hai’, ‘Good night @ rihanna, wahan sab ko batana, yahan general store is kirana.’ People began to follow him, old friends began to retweet him, and before long he had over 36,000 followers.

Since Going to the Gym, Sehgal also began to put up more music videos online with titles like Chicken Fried Rice, Mere Karan Arjun Aayenngge, Mere Pass Hai Mutual Fund. Each of them—modest productions shot on limited budgets mostly at home in the company of friends, although later superimposed on exotic locations— returns to an earlier Sehgal, with music that is playful, silly and unassuming. Each number has been shared and viewed widely. Sehgal is now invited to Twitter conventions to talk about his revival online, has several Hindi cinema and advertising honchos who want to collaborate with him, and he is also regularly writing and producing rap songs for online consumption, even spending several weeks in Mumbai every month.

“It was crazy,” he says, “I didn’t know how to make sense of it.” A long-forgotten rapper, out in the cold, considered way too silly and juvenile for a modern market, was now back—reinvented as an internet star.

Baba SehgalDil DhadkeDilrubaInternet starMTVmusicPunjabi songsThanda Thanda Pani