At the Tripathi household in Delhi, dinner table conversation is often an exchange of ballads, sonnets and couplets. Chinmayi Tripathi, a Delhi-based songwriter, says with her father being a Sanskrit scholar and mother a Hindi professor at Delhi University, she grew up devouring the works of Sumitranandan Pant, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Dharmaveer Bharti and  Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’. "But, when I would interact with millennials, I realised they have no idea about these writers or their work. Worse, they weren’t even interested in reading it," says 27-year-old Tripathi, a trained Hindustani singer and the lead singer of the Delhi-based fusion band Spice Route.

Chinmayi Tripathi