Advocate Nikhel Kallingal sweats it out in court after a night of turning up the heat in the studio. His rap career as Dasa gives us an authentic glimpse of life as a friendly neighbourhood Coimbatore boy, pro bono.
Dasa's two-track EP, Throw It/'Thooki Veesu', made with rap partner Shaq-T, is now an anthem for growing up in Coimbatore.
Back in 2011, Chance the Rapper sat halfway around the world in Chicago, confusedly wielding a 10-day suspension letter he got from his high school.
Not knowing what to do with the sudden free time on his hands, he began recording his first album titled 10 Day.
At the time, he was not aware of the impact that he would make in the world of hip-hop, let alone in the life of another high school kid like him sitting in Coimbatore, realising that inside every average Joe was an artiste.
“I love how Chance started; he’s also a nobody,” Dasa tells South First about one of his biggest influences.
“He showed me that anybody could get into it; that the greatest of the greats also just start one day. So, I thought why not just give it a shot?”
Nikhel Kallingal took that chance and adopted his music moniker – Dasa.
His two-track EP, Throw It/Thooki Veesu, made with rap partner Shaq-T, is now an anthem for growing up in Coimbatore.
“I had no musical knowledge whatsoever,” Dasa humorously admits.
“It was mostly hip-hop influences that made me feel like I could also rap,” he shares, looking back at his school days that played out to the sounds of 90s and 2000s hip-hop.
Dasa grooved to this genre that brought home iconic tracks from both the East and West. While proudly declaring an appreciation for Yogi B’s Tamil rap, he also attributes his major influences to American artists like Eminem.
Like many teenagers at the time, his TV was tuned to the sounds of MTV.
A still from ‘Thooki Veesu’. (Supplied)
Inspired, he took to the internet, downloaded beats from YouTube, and uploaded them onto GarageBand. Using the same software, he’d then record the vocals he penned down.
“I thought famous musicians were all doing this,” he admits. “I didn’t know you had to go to a studio and that there were so many pieces of equipment involved.”
It soon became routine for Dasa to upload homemade tracks on SoundCloud and share them with his friends on WhatsApp.
“One day, a friend of mine from school who I’d gotten out of touch with when we’d moved to college, reached out,” he shares. “He randomly hit me up, saying he’s working on music and that he’d like to collaborate.”
Since no one reached out to him with such a request, Dasa happily took on Shakthi Karthik’s offer. It wasn’t long before Shaq-T and Dasa became a duo.
“Shakthi knew production and everything. He used to produce the beats, and I did the lyrics and delivery. That’s how we got together and since then, we’ve been refining our process,” the rapper reveals, emphasising the continuous craftsmanship with which both artistes approach their work.
“Once Shaq was in the picture, it started getting a little more professional.”
Born and raised in Coimbatore, Dasa’s music became a reflection of the life and times he lived.
“I figured it would be pointless to write about guns and drugs because that wasn’t the hardship I was facing,” he reveals.
Like the majority of urban teenagers living in Coimbatore at the time, Dasa’s youth was a template for relatability that his music embraced.
“I used to talk about girls and how they would turn me down. Super corny stuff,” he laughs, “but it was relatable to most people.”
Dasa. (Supplied)
It is this spirit of urban upper-middle-class frolic that is carried on to his and Shaq-T’s latest EP – Throw It/’Thooki Veesu’.
“The entire project was in-house,” he reveals, “from the conceptualisation to the music video shoot. All the actors were our friends, so it was like a weekend-long party which we were just shooting.”
The duo’s recent focus towards playing around with concepts has been trialled out in the two-track EP.
The album’s two-part structure is based on the comedy duo Goundamani-Senthil ‘s iconic scenes from Karakattakkaran (1989), specifically the Vazha Pazham scene.
“Those scenes are extremely popular. They make the whole of Tamil Nadu lose it!” Dasa explains. To complete this homage, the duo even sampled Goundamani’s iconic lines in their tracks.
While the tracks pledge loyalty to a Tamil pop culture icon, the music video is Coimbatore through and through.
“If you noticed, there’s a heavy car influence in our music video. The protagonist itself is a car and the narrative is built around fixing up a wrecked car,” Dasa shares, attributing the motif to the Coimbatore car and car-racing scene.
“We had a race track before most places in India,” he proudly reveals. As a result, the city’s love for cars and its obsession with fixing and tuning them up was infectious to the youth growing up at the time.
“I got into it at a very young age. Our video is the story of most regular kids who would spend their entire savings on fixing up their cars and racing them,” Dasa says.
Shaq and Dasa. (Supplied)
Although he admits that life wasn’t as glamorous as the Fast & Furious franchise, the city’s youngsters would still close off roads and have street races.
“Between my friends and I, we were obsessed with tuning up our cars. Every car in the video is either a friend’s car or my car,” Dasa reveals, promising that Thooki Veesu’s music video will blow the socks off of car nerds.
The two-track EP, released through Maajja, featuring DHP and King Sinister, is a testament to the authenticity of Indian hip-hop, where artists confidently spit bars about the things that they know and the lives that they’ve led.
Unlike artistes who separate their regular life from their artistic persona, Dasa has found a way to draw a parallel between his full-time career as a lawyer and sidebar as a musician.
“Both law and hip-hop come down to articulating things and presenting yourself in a certain way,” he reveals. “If you want people to take you seriously in both environments, you have to show that you’re the sh*t.”
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He recalls moments when the tenacity taught by hip-hop has helped him through his legal career.
“There’d be senior lawyers who would consider you a child, but they see you pull through and then you earn their respect because they know you mean business,” he shares.
While it is Nikhel who adorns the black robe, Dasa is often summoned to the court by his colleagues who support his music career.
“They love this side of me. They often ask me to use this energy in court!” he shares in delight.
“Initially I had a lot of crazy, generic names, but my sister suggested I should have an Indian name since I do multilingual music,” he shares.
With her help, he came to realise that the suffix “das”, honours all the great Indian poets.
“I thought that was kind of cool and decided to go with ‘Dasa’ because, at the end of the day, we’re still poets.”
Coimbatore’s Dasa is now working on a few singles after his EP with Shaq-T made loud rounds across the internet.
“Whenever I get free time, I’m sitting and conceptualising, working on songs,” he shares.
“In the beginning, I wasn’t very confident rapping in Tamil. But, I’m trying to develop that more at my own pace,” he reveals as his music begins to incorporate more Tamil verses alongside English.
With characters like Big Chakra and Turbo Thangachi making an appearance in the Thooki Veesu music video, Dasa and Shaq-T are building a world that mirrors the exciting life they live in their hometown.
The artistes continue to collaborate and work on projects that are putting Coimbatore on the map of Indian hip-hop.
Instagram @dasa_rap @joinmaajja @shaq.t.music
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