The first time I painted my face for a gig, it was for Motherjane, and I remember thinking halfway through the set that I'd never felt more at home in a room full of strangers. I was in my first year of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn't care, because the guitars were loud and everyone around me was screaming the same words.

That was 2012. I've been going to gigs ever since.

Bangalore had, and still has, one of the best independent music scenes in the country, and I was lucky enough to fall into it at exactly the age where it could rewire you. I sang Hey Jude with Thermal and a Quarter along with everyone else in the room, which sounds like a small thing and wasn't. I was there for Parvaaz's first album launch, watching a band I'd been following in small venues suddenly have a real record to hold. Later I made it all the way to a festival in Shillong, which, if you've never been, is its own kind of pilgrimage - a whole town that seems to run on music. Swarathma, Raghu Dixit, Avial, Skyharbor, Blackstratblues, the Down Troddence, Thaikkudam Bridge - I'm not a quiet person at the best of times, so none of those were quiet nights for me.

Over the years the list kept growing, and it runs into the hundreds now. Some of the names on it still make me grin like a kid - Tool, Opeth, Dream Theater, King Crimson with Gavin Harrison on drums, Paul McCartney. Artists I'd listened to alone for years, finally in the same room as me.

And here's the thing I didn't expect. As incredible as those nights were, they didn't mean more to me than the small Bangalore gigs did. They meant something different. In a stadium you're a witness. In a small room in Bangalore, you're part of it.

I've been trying to put words to why independent scenes matter so much to me, and I think it comes down to this. A scene is a positive-sum game in its purest form. Nobody's getting rich. The bands play for whoever shows up, the people who show up bring their friends next time, the sound guy is also somebody's bandmate, and the person standing next to you at the barricade might be on stage in two years. Everyone who shows up makes it a little better for everyone else. When one band gets bigger, the whole scene gets more attention, not less. There's no version of it where you win by someone else losing.

It's also where I learned what it looks like to do something for the love of it. The musicians I grew up watching had day jobs, most of them. They rehearsed late, they carried their own gear, they played to fifty people with the same intensity they'd give five thousand. I didn't have the language for it back then, but that's the thing I've tried to bring into everything I've built since - giving it my all whether the room's full or not, because the room isn't really the point.

When I moved back to Bangalore in 2021 after five years away, one of the first things that made the city feel like home again was walking into a gig and recognising faces. Some of the same people, a little older, still showing up. That's what a scene is, really. It's the people who keep coming back.

These days most of my listening happens at home, and I've gotten a little obsessive about records. Pink Floyd's Animals. Porcupine Tree's In Absentia. Radiohead's Kid A. There's something about the whole ritual that slows me down in a way screens never do - pulling the sleeve out, cleaning the record, lowering the needle, sitting through a whole side because skipping is too much effort. My work right now is all AI and pipelines and GPUs, and I love it, but I need something analog to come back to at the end of the day. A record gives you twenty minutes where nobody's optimising anything.

I worry sometimes about small scenes. Rents go up, venues close, streaming numbers decide who gets booked, and the rooms where a new band can play badly for a while and get better slowly start to disappear. Every big act you love started in one of those rooms, in front of a handful of people who happened to be there. If the rooms go, the pipeline goes with them (yes, I just called art a pipeline, the day job is leaking).

I don't have a grand plan for any of this. I just know I owe that scene a lot, and I'd like to give some of it back one day.

For now, I'll keep showing up. Front row, face paint optional.