Anuv Jain performing in Toronto

meghan katti

It is a few hours before showtime somewhere in California, and Anuv Jain is horizontal.

At least, I’m guessing he is. I can’t tell for sure; he hasn’t received my pre-meeting request for cameras to be on.

On show days, he tells me, he tries to stay in bed as long as possible. It’s the only reliable way to protect what happens on stage soon, especially because, “the show can get like really intense sometimes.”

The 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 alum appears grateful and not entirely surprised to be here; here being the first North American leg of his Dastakhat World Tour. The third act of a live trilogy that began with Dastakein in 2021 and Guldasta in 2023, it’s expanded this year to sold-out venues across six American cities, with audiences drawn from countries he had not imagined were listening. "A lot of people from Pakistan, a lot of people from Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, somebody was there from Cambodia," he recounts rather matter of factly. “I did not know that my music was being heard in these places.”

“It’s the best thing ever.”

ForbesAnuv Jain

Anuv Jain is 31 years old and from Ludhiana, Punjab. He has been releasing music since 2012, though his current legion of fans largely caught up in 2018 with "Baarishein," the spare, rainy-day guitar song that became the quiet anthem of a generation of South Asian millennials in their feelings. "Husn," released in 2023, crossed 300 million streams across platforms in its first three months and finished as the second most streamed song on Spotify India in 2024, ahead of almost every Bollywood production released that year, without a film or major label.

It is exceptionally difficult for an indie artist to make it in India’s fragmented music scene, historically dominated by playback singers and movie soundtracks. Most start out doing covers of existing songs to build up an audience for their eventual original music.

Forbes“I Still Get Stage Fright”: Shreya Ghoshal On First Live Album, Tour, And Planning Her Debut EP

Jain thought differently.

"From the get go, I knew that I’m not going to do covers," he says. "I'm here to make my own music because I didn't want to dilute my image in anybody's head. I wanted them to know that the day they are coming to my show or if they're listening to my music, they are only listening to my music." Everybody told him this was the wrong strategy. Covers were how you kept an audience engaged between original releases. "When I was starting out, everybody was doing covers and everybody was telling me to do covers as well. Now nobody says that." He grins.

He could have been a very different kind of guy entirely. His father built a business over thirty years and the plan, from before Jain was old enough to have his own, was that he would inherit it. "I was told that I was going to be sitting in his chair," he says.

He walked away just before the lockdown, when his music started generating more recognition than his actual job. The decision meant stepping away from a family structure that depended on him, watching the finances get genuinely difficult, and fielding calls from labels who wanted to buy his songs at the exact moment he could have used the money most. He said no.

"I knew, I trusted myself. I was like, no, this is not okay with me. I do not want to give up my songs right now because I know that they are worth something." He still owns 100% of his music. "It's insane how that worked out for me."

This is the Anuv Jain that isn’t immediately obvious from the soft-boy-with-guitar narrative that follows him around. I mention that I’ve heard him called ‘paavam’ many times — a South Indian word somewhere between “sweet summer child” and “soft boy”. He accepts the second half of the characterisation and declines the first. "I am not here because I was gullible. I’m here because I knew what I was doing." There are two versions of him in his head, he says: the one that goes into very deep thoughts alone and the one that understands marketing. The songs come from the first one, and the survival from the second.

On hearing I was due to interview Jain, a couple of my friends were visibly unexcited. “But he’s just so…mid.”

It’s not an entirely new verdict for Jain, who has heard it all before in all degrees of politeness (or lack thereof). He also has a theory about it all. "Any time somebody wants to go out of their comfort zone and really try to achieve and excel in life, there are going to be a lot of people for no reason who are going to pull them back," he tells me. "How easy is it to just not engage with somebody’s stuff? If you don't like what you're hearing, don't do it." He pauses, then adds, "But nobody's going to understand that. I know for a fact that it's never going to change."

He’s certainly had plenty of practice making peace with this reality. Last year, Jain got the coveted opportunity to open for multi-Grammy winner Jacob Collier on his India stops. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not go the way he'd hoped.

Clips from the show circulated with ferocious velocity, accompanied by comments across the spectrum about his tone, his pitch, his stage presence, his appropriateness as a support act for Collier. Even veteran Bollywood composer Vishal Dadlani weighed in, commenting under a concert clip, “Is it necessary to keep doing embarrassing s**t like this? Is it part of some corporate mandate somewhere?”

Jain has since never spoken of the incident to the press.

“I have done probably 100 shows and they’ve all gone really well. But when you’re doing so many shows, there’s always going to be that one show that might not hit well,” reflects Jain.

“On social media today, people can literally define your entire life by just looking at a clip for five seconds. ”

What made it genuinely difficult, he says, was not just the commentary. "It was because somebody put their trust in me and I couldn’t really deliver. And I'm somebody who always likes to deliver on commitments that I've made." He has been taking vocal training since — not because the internet told him to, but because he wants to. "It's something I want to do for myself. I want to be a better artist."

Although the incident was a low point, his numbers have kept growing. Jain currently has a staggering 17.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 3.6 million followers on Instagram.

“I would rather be on this side,” says Jain. “It’s fine. I’ve gone through so much in my life, this is absolutely nothing bad. I would rather take all of this — at least I get to do something that I love.”

Beyond doing it for himself, Jain has also sat in government offices with officials who are, he says, finally beginning to understand soft power the way countries like South Korea have understood it for decades — the idea that music and fashion and food and cinema can travel further than any diplomatic mission. "I just want to play my tiny part in that as well," he says.

Jain tells me he’s been feeling the tide shift a little. Bits of his new and improved tour set are going viral, and to him, it feels like people are finally seeing that “I’m not a bad artist. I know what I’m doing.”

“At least it feels like that to me,” he clarifies. “Or maybe I’m just surrounded by those kind of people now, I don't know.”

I can tell by the hedging that he’s wondering if he’s being a tad delusional. And what of it? Some of the most successful people I’ve met are all a little delusional. One simply has to be, to bulldoze through the naysayers with blinders on.

“And I hope that I can keep proving people wrong, because that's what I've done my entire life. First it was my family, before that it was my peers in school, now it is just the world. And I'm going to make sure that I prove them wrong and show them that I am here to stay and I'm the best thing that's going to happen to them.”

And when will he feel like he’s made it? I hear laughter. “Probably on my deathbed.”

By the end of it, despite my expectations, we are both smiling. Or at least I am. Anuv Jain has a soundcheck to get to, and his video is still off.

Anuv Jain’s Dastakhat World Tour continues through Australia, Europe, the Middle East and beyond in 2026 and 2027.