EPR Iyer: Rapper, activist, Robert Frost fan

I discovered the music of Linkin Park and Rage Against The Machine. They've inspired me as much as Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Wilfred Owen. Indian hip hop has a rich history going back about 15 years. There were text battles on Orkut; rappers like Raftaar and Brodha V struggled to get out their message. Then suddenly Gully Boy comes out and these two rappers are being called the origin of Indian hip hop. The film gave a boost to the culture, but Indian hip hop has deeper roots. The north-east has the first huge hip hop culture; there's no mention of that. So we at Adiacot decided to shout out to the real originals. And we wanted to challenge this idea that to generate a million views you need a huge budget, women, big cars. So we made our video in one take, without a budget. It has more than a million views on YouTube. Rap has a very niche audience in the country. So when MTV announced the show, I really wanted to be a part of it. I needed to reach a wider audience with my songs. It was a tough contest. We had to create and perform a new song every week for 10 weeks. My genre is socio-political writing. I wrote on [slain journalist] Gauri Lankesh, Neha Shoree, the drug inspector in Punjab who got killed, on farmer suicides and their march in Maharashtra. Neha Shoree's father, Arun Shoree, texted me saying that thank you for remembering his daughter's sacrifice to the country. That was really touching. I want to push myself, push my art and show people that you can put important messages in your music. It's working for me. A lot of people reach out with their stories of social injustice and ask me to write songs about them. I've become almost a reporter on the streets. 'And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep' by Robert Frost. DailyhuntDisclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by Dailyhunt. Publisher: Hindustan Timeshttps://www.sbnation.com/users/meekumarks