I’m waiting for Ankit Tiwari in his modest Andheri office. It’s a muggy afternoon in Mumbai. The air-conditioner has been on full blast for quite some time. And I’m beginning to feel the chill. Ankit waltzes into the room with his brother Ankur Tiwari, who is also his manager and apologises for being late. He sits beside me as we have tea, which kind of warms me up. I notice he doesn’t take off his aviators and that’s a constant throughout the interview. It’s my first ‘bilingual’ chat session with a celeb. I throw questions at him in English; he answers them in chaste Hindi. He’s amused when I attempt to talk to him in my Bengali laced Hindi. ‘Ka’ becomes ‘ki’ and he laughs. In the middle of the conversation, he abruptly asks me whether I have seen his blockbuster music video Badtameez and chides me for not watching it. I don’t know whether he’s genuinely hurt or just taking my case, as I can’t see his eyes…

Hailing from Kanpur, Ankit grew up in a musically-inclined family. He got his basic training in dholak and tabla from his grandfather NK Tiwari, his mother is a devotional singer. His parents enrolled him for professional training when he was five. He learnt light singing from the late Dada Sen and Shankar Lal Bhatt. “If you learn classical, you can’t sing like Kishore Kumar, who emphasised on emoting accurately. I was taught to keep classical as my base and concentrate on getting the feelings right.” He reveals he had severe stage fright as a child, which is ironical, considering he’s known for his stage performances today. “I was part of a band where I played the keyboard, dholak or percussion,” he smiles.