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I’ll admit it: I’ve been guilty of looking down on Bollywood nights. For years, my weekends were spent chasing touring artists within electronic music — techno, bass, dub, reggae, psytrance, even underground raves. And while I'd belt out yearnful Hindi ballads at home or bust out moves at weddings to Punjabi hits, I believed that a club wasn't a place for it. Unless maybe for a Hindi sample slipped cleverly into an electronic set for some zhuzh.
But in the last few years, I've been delighted to be proven wrong by a new wave of artists turning that idea on its head. With exciting new flips, remixes and mash-ups, these classics that we've loved all our lives are emerging in a new light. And somewhere in this shift lies 'Besharam', a series by DJ Boh!b (real name Siddharth Negi), which has become both a community ritual and a refined re-imagination of the infamous 'Bollywood night'.
That ethos found its natural home at EXT, The Moonshine Project in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, where Boh!b and his crew first tested the waters with a Diwali party in 2022. He remembers the night clearly: the entire community showed up in quirky desi fits, singing and dancing to nostalgic songs together. The response convinced him that this was more than just a one-off. Hyderabad’s audience, he says, played the biggest role in shaping Besharam, embracing it without judgment and turning it into one of the city’s defining nights.
While Besharam has given Boh!b a distinct reputation, his relationship with Hindi music is more layered. He points out that Hindi isn’t his 'main palette'. An open-format DJ with a decade of experience, his early inspirations came from rap, scratching, and hip-hop culture. In fact, he’s only played three full-fledged desi club sets in his career — all under the Besharam banner. The Hindi blends seen on his Instagram are largely an archive of his experiments on Traktor, the DJ software he tinkers with endlessly. For him, desi music has always been part of intimate settings, something he connects with naturally. And he never doubted that these tracks could hold their own in a club environment — as long as they were presented tastefully.
Part of what makes his sets distinctive is his reluctance to lean heavily on remixes. While he does play edits, he finds many attempts to make Bollywood 'club-ready' feel forced. Instead, his approach is about preserving the raw essence of the songs, respecting their composition, and finding combinations that make sense musically. That means paying attention to arrangement, key, and mood rather than trying to reinvent them from scratch.
Preparation, for him, is also rooted in curiosity. “I’ve been ‘playing with music’ since my college days — even before I was a professional DJ," he notes. "I spend a lot of my free time messing around on my DJing software. I don’t go into a session with the goal of creating something specific; I just genuinely enjoy the process. It’s my favorite way to pass the time, and I think that’s what you see as content.”
Besharam has occasionally expanded beyond the decks, with live percussion or an MC joining in. Those moments, though, were spontaneous jams with friends rather than rehearsed formats. "I think doing sets like these live takes real dedication, intention and practice and I wouldn’t want to force it for the heck of it," he shares. "Most of our sets have been and will be a DJ-led format.”
What Boh!b has achieved with Besharam speaks to a long overdue reconnection with our cultural identity. After keeping our love for the quintessentially Indian in the closet and subscribing to a more globalised persona, it's a homecoming and a reminder that the music we once dismissed as 'guilty pleasures' carries its own power — especially when handled with care, skill, and the joy of being shamelessly desi.
