Arkin Pal was cutting other bands' music videos two years ago and is on the Lollapalooza India lineup as the country artist everyone said India would not want

There is no lane for an Indian country musician. No radio format, no festival slot, no scene to come up through, nobody to point at and say I want to do what they did. When Arkin Pal started, the reactions ran from polite dismissal to people telling him plainly that country would not work in India.

He is playing Lollapalooza India in January, at the Mahalaxmi Race Course in Mumbai, roughly two years after he first borrowed a guitar.

Why country, specifically

The obvious read is gimmick. Desi cowboy, funny hat, one viral moment. He knows exactly how it looks and says so: "The reaction I get everywhere is, what the fuck is this. That curiosity gets paid off."

The real answer is more interesting and it is about not having a home. He grew up across India, Malaysia and Canada, never anywhere long enough for the word to fit, and his father raised him on Joan Baez, John Denver, Simon and Garfunkel and Johnny Cash. "Country as a genre has this nostalgia and this sense of home that I'm really searching for." A genre invented by people singing about a place they had left, picked up by someone who never quite had one, is not a costume. It is the most obvious choice he could have made.

And the aesthetic collision he makes sound inevitable: "If you cut the kurta in half and add some frills, it doesn't look that far off from old-school Indian cowboy."

The years behind the camera are the reason it worked

Until recently he was the one editing, not the one being filmed, cutting music videos for his friends' bands out of a production house in Vancouver. That is usually told as the boring part before the story starts. It is the whole reason the story moved as fast as it did.

He spent years watching, frame by frame, how a song gets packaged into something a stranger stops scrolling for. Then he pointed it at his own work: one reel to 1.3 million views, more than nineteen thousand Instagram followers in a single week, close to three hundred thousand streams during the run, and Wait a Minute at number one on the iTunes India country chart. Plenty of musicians have the songs. Almost none of them have already done a thousand reps on the other side of the edit.

Brash and Broken is five songs, written over spans from a single night to six months, about people-watching and working people rather than the American furniture the genre usually drags along. The bit of advice he gives is the one that sounds like nothing and is actually the entire discipline: "Don't stop if the algorithm supports you. Don't stop if it isn't."

Two years from a borrowed guitar to a Lollapalooza billing, in a genre that had no room for him at all. Go and listen before January, when a great many more people will have heard of him.

The reaction I get everywhere is, what the fuck is this. That curiosity gets paid off.

Arkin Pal, on being the only person doing this