Let's take a walk into the future. Imagine you've arrived at a point when Indian indie music isn't a tiny soap bubble anymore in front of Bollywood, which is more like a giant hot air balloon in comparison. Nightclubs aren't blaring songs like DJ Waale Babu. Instead, they are playing a techno banger by an artiste like Delhi-based producer BLOT. Venues aren't treating live bands like use-and-throw commodities. The audience isn't restricted to the self-important elite. Labels are thinking twice about extracting their pound of flesh. And indie artistes populate the most-heard lists on streaming services.

It isn't wholly inconceivable, this future. But if and when it does happen, a large part of the credit would have to go to those chroniclers who have painstakingly looked for rough-cut diamonds in a musical coal mine at a time when you can count such platforms on your fingers. There is no history without documentation, after all. And if, say, someone 40 years down the line looks back for bands that created a ripple in the tiny pool that Indian indie is today, one place they could go to is The Indian Music Diaries (TIMD), a social media page doing a stellar job of bringing obscure artistes out of the shadows.