Bhrigu Sahni's Acoustic Soliloquy

The fingerstyle guitarist takes his debut album ‘What Is Now’ on tour in India and America with the aim of making you look up from your cellphone.

- Urvija Banerji

FINGERSTYLE GUITARIST BHRIGU Sahni is giggling over an avocado bowl as he talks about the first job he had in New York City as a server at Manhattan Inn, a now-closed restaurant and music venue in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. While he worked in Greenpoint, a historically Polish area, Sahni remembers people coming into the restaurant and being confused by his Indian identity. “They’re all looking at you like, ‘Why you in my ’hood, what the fuck?’” recalls Sahni with a laugh. “It was heavy shit, but it was good.”

Sahni made the decision to move to New York while he was still a student at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. He would go back a nd forth between New York and Boston to play shows in the big city, and his decision to move came down to one particular moment while he was on the subway in Manhattan and the doors opened on some buskers at Union Square. “The doors opened at Union Square--thak!--and I heard music, buskers. They’re fucking playing the best shit you ever heard, and [only] for a dollar bill,” says Sahni. “I heard the music and I was like ‘Wow, there’s some electricity in this city.’”