This happened so far back that this writer doesn’t even remember what year it was, though it was definitely before 2009. Karsh Kale and Midival Punditz were playing a gig at a Kolkata club. The venue was packed to the brim, because accessing such top-quality musicians who delve in electronica was as rare in India back then as finding an oasis in a desert is. And the crowd wasn’t disappointed, because the artistes played such a memorable set that it is still fresh in our ears, with especially one track — Banao banao — standing out for its Shiva-inspired lyrics and transcendental beats.

But Kale’s association with Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj — the two Midival Punditz members — goes back to around a decade even before that Kolkata concert, he tells us ahead of a gig that the trio will play in Mumbai this evening. They first met in London in 1999, which set the ball rolling for a relationship that would have been fit for a romantic novel had it involved lovers. “We became the best of friends from the moment we met. Back then, we were all young with lots to prove, and we started working together since we were on the same musical mission — taking the best parts of Indian classical and bringing it together with electronic music,” the tabla maestro says, adding that they were eventually signed to the same record label, playing hundreds of festivals together and DJing all over the place.