How does one take the weight of the whole world on one’s shoulders? For Delhi-born and Berlinbased independent artiste Ditty aka Aditi Veena, as long as she’s “sensitive” to what’s happening around her, she will keep writing songs on environmental consciousness (‘Azadi’), unity in womanhood (Mamma), and will keep questioning material wealth, capitalism and social inequality (‘Money’). But this time, on Valentine’s Day, she wants to talk about love with her new song ‘So Real’. It’s like a sweet break from the bothersome issues that occupy her mind. “When you fall in love with someone, you are full of hormones. You feel spirited and elevated in energy. You give yourself another chance to be someone you want to be as you start a new chapter of life,” she says.
‘So Real’ speaks of that initial spark of falling in love when we let our guards down and open our hearts with spirits up as the lyrics say: ‘This love is so real, surreal, I am hypnotised.’ Sung in the mellifluous voice of Ditty paired with a mouth organ, acoustic guitar, and percussion instruments, it lets one’s heart flutter over the idea of knowing someone as she writes ‘I walk a little closer to know what he smells like’.
While seemingly a romantic ballad, it is not dedicated to one person but to many kinds of love — platonic, romantic, familial, and even the fleeting moments spent with strangers who make you feel accepted, which Ditty felt during her stay in Sri Lanka in 2017.
Falling in and out
Ditty wrote the song several years ago in Sri Lanka when she was working there as an architect from 2013-17. “My time there was magical because I met beautiful people from the arts and poetry community. They motivated me to follow my heart and express myself through music and poetry. I became part of a poetry group called the Spoken Word Poet’s Group. ‘So Real’ is inspired by my encounters in this group. I was falling in and out of love with many people at that time. It was a kind of love which may not stay with you life-long, but you want those people around, not necessarily in a romantic way,” she says, adding that she’s still in touch with many from the community who are now scattered in the US, Portugal, and Australia. “Those people taught me to accept myself. I also had a lot of anger and sadness within me but rather than being subdued, I felt seen through these emotions in their company.”
Album on the cards
Their love set her to discover a new version of herself through music. She released her debut album Poetry Ceylon in 2019. Later, she strived for climate advocacy with her first carbonneutral tour, Make Forest Not War in 2020 and also co-founded an artist collective Faraway Friends to address key topics around the ecological crisis. She is now set for her first solo tour across Germany in March where she will present her upcoming album Kali featuring songs including ‘So Real.’ “I have come a long way as a self-trained musician. Going ahead, I hope that big companies like Facebook, and Instagram, do not live off of the creativity of small artistes who put their work on these platforms. Such platforms want us to keep creating without getting paid. I hope independent artistes get more creative freedom and fair pay. These days AI, metrics, virality and trends are also big challenges for small artistes. I hope I am able to make art without worrying about them and get to a place where I can live off this.”