Bipul Chettri: Flow, friends, and the songs that stay

There's a moment in every friendship where you realise time has done something strange...stretched it, bent it, maybe even broken it a little. But the people remain. Bipul Chettri knows this feeling intimately, and his new single Eh Saathi is what happens when that realisation gets set to music.

The song, released in August 2025, is the first taste of his forthcoming album Pravah, and it arrives like a letter from an old friend you forgot you were waiting to hear from. Warm, unhurried, and achingly specific in its emotional geography, Eh Saathi does what Chettri's music has always done best: it makes the personal feel universal, even when you don't understand the language it's sung in.

"The idea came about thinking about the people who've walked alongside you at different points in life—childhood friends, the ones who were there in certain moments of your life," Chettri tells India Today NE. "It wasn't one single memory but like long walks home after school, evenings of laughter and long night jams around campfires. The song grew out of that feeling that even as time and distance shift things, those friendships remain stitched into who you are."

When songs arrive unannounced

For someone whose career was built on a song that went viral by accident in 2013, Chettri has developed a peculiar relationship with the creative process. Some songs take years to finish. Others show up fully formed, demanding to be recorded immediately. Eh Saathi was the latter.

"It was one of the last couple of songs from this album to get recorded," he reveals. "I wanted to portray a sense of longing, not necessarily nostalgia, but almost like a conversation piece, even though there is just a singular voice in the song. The music, words and arrangement almost came about together and were rehearsed for about three sessions, and next thing we know, we were at the studio recording it."

He laughs when he contrasts this with other tracks that have occupied his mind for years. "There are some songs which we have laboured upon for three or more years and still have not ended recording them. So, it is great when a tune ends up in the studio in such a quick time."

It's that quality, the unforced arrival of a complete thought, that makes Eh Saathi feel less like a composition and more like an overheard conversation, something you weren't meant to hear but are grateful you did. The song doesn't announce itself with grand gestures or sweeping production. It simply begins, like someone starting to tell you a story they've been holding onto for a while.

The art of not overdoing it

The music video for Eh Saathi, directed by Dishant Pradhan and Vashistha Pradhan, mirrors this restraint. There are no MTV-style quick cuts, no overwrought symbolism, no desperate attempts to "make it meaningful." Instead, the visual narrative unfolds with the same quiet confidence as the song itself.

Chettri gave the filmmaking team almost complete autonomy after agreeing on a basic storyline. "We were presented with a storyline which we agreed upon and gave them absolute creative freedom thereafter to do whatever they wanted," he explains. "Our only hope was that someone watching it would walk away with a sense of warmth, or maybe even a quiet ache, like remembering a moment that still lingers with you. And I think they managed to justify the music with their own interpretations, which is how it should be."

That last bit, "which is how it should be", is telling. Chettri isn't precious about interpretation. He makes the thing, puts it out there, and trusts that whatever needs to happen will happen. It's the approach of someone who stumbled into this career rather than calculated his way into it, and who's managed to maintain that sense of stumbling even as the venues got bigger and the audiences multiplied.

The Kalimpong constant

To understand Eh Saathi, you have to understand where Chettri comes from, not just geographically but emotionally. Kalimpong isn't just his hometown; it's the wellspring of everything he makes. "Kalimpong will always be home," he says. "And along with it, family, school, friends, the Kanchenjunga that used to follow us all the way to school, the rains in the monsoons, the chill of the winter, the bustle of the haat bazaar, the school bell, amongst many others."

Music was everywhere in his childhood, woven into the fabric of daily life. "Inside the house, someone reading, my father playing an instrument, conversations drifting in and out. Basically, a very simple way of life."

That simplicity—both real and remembered—informs every song he's written. But simplicity isn't the same as lack of complexity. Chettri was formally trained in Western classical guitar, a discipline that requires precision, repetition, and thousands of hours making your fingers do things they don't naturally want to do. Yet somewhere in that training, something else was percolating.

"Western classical guitar gave me discipline, technique, and structure, but the stories and songs from the hills were always quietly present in me like an undercurrent waiting to surface, I feel," he explains. "At some point, it just felt more honest to give voice to that world I grew up in. Maybe it was inevitable. The music I carry inside will always find its way out, no matter the instrument or form."

The accidental career

When Wildfire exploded online in 2013, Chettri wasn't ready for what followed. "I had written and shared it almost as a personal piece, not really with the thought of it going out into the world," he remembers. "When people started listening, sharing, and responding to it in such a big way, I was overwhelmed—grateful, but also a little stunned."

The idea of being a full-time musician took even longer to settle. "For a while, I was still half-wondering if it was just a fleeting moment. But as I kept writing, and as people continued connecting with the songs, I began to realise that maybe this wasn't an accident."

More than a decade later, he's still not entirely comfortable with the infrastructure of being a professional musician. He teaches music to children every morning, maintains a routine that most touring artists would find impossible to sustain. "I am still a music teacher and attend school every morning and teach young children every single day," he says. "I make and release music whenever I feel the need to, with no one pushing or expecting me to do so."

It's an unusual arrangement, but it keeps him anchored. "I have never had the problem of any industry pressure nor their expectations hindering me as a person or a musician."

What flows when you let it

Eh Saathi is the opening chapter of Pravah, an album whose title translates to "flow" in Nepali. For Chettri, at this stage of his life and career, flow means something specific: "moving with life rather than against it."

"I think at this stage, I'm less interested in controlling everything and more in noticing where the current takes me. The songs on Pravah carry that same feeling. They're not forced, they just came naturally, like conversations with myself and the world around me."

The album, he promises, will surprise longtime listeners. "Pravah feels like the most fluid thing I've made so far. There isn't one fixed mood or sound running through it. Some songs flow quietly, almost like discussions with myself, while others open up with bigger, more layered arrangements."

Then he drops something unexpected: two songs on the album were composed by his father, Nirendra Mohan Chettri, back in the 1970s. "There are a few songs in this album which will take everyone by surprise, two of which were composed by my father, which I think sums up the heart of the record. It's personal, but also about how we're all moving, changing, and carrying pieces of where we've been."

There's lightness here too, he insists, not just heavy reflection. "I think listeners might be surprised by how much lightness and playfulness sit alongside the reflective moments."

The waterfall effect

The album is being released gradually—a waterfall strategy, in industry terms—with songs dropping over time rather than all at once. It's a concession to how music gets consumed now, but also, maybe, a natural extension of the album's thematic concern with flow.

"Releasing music has changed in today's context," Chettri observes. "We come from a generation where new music mostly meant an album of 8 songs or more. A single in that context was just a trailer or a promo of things to expect. But in this day and age of swiping through songs, most young listeners don't have the time or patience to listen to a complete album. So, we thought the best way to give some space and time to each song to be heard was a waterfall release."

It's pragmatic, but there's something poetic about it too—letting songs arrive when they're ready, giving each one room to breathe before the next one shows up.

Memory, distance, and what remains

The beauty of Eh Saathi is how it captures something slippery: the way old friendships exist in multiple tenses at once. They're past, yes, but also present in how they've shaped you, and future in how they'll continue to matter long after the last time you actually see each other.

Chettri's never been interested in grand statements or sweeping declarations. His music operates on a smaller, more intimate scale—the scale of actual human experience, where things are messy and unresolved and beautiful precisely because they're incomplete.

His favourite performance to date isn't some massive festival or sold-out arena. It's the very first show he played after releasing Sketches of Darjeeling, when the band (The Travelling Band) was so new they barely had enough songs to fill an hour. "We went into this concert with just six songs from the EP and an acoustic version of Syndicate which I had just written," he recalls. "We ended the gig within an hour and had nothing to play after that, so we ended up playing each song twice to prolong the concert."

There's something perfect about that image, a band so green they have to repeat their entire setlist just to make it through the night. It's the kind of beginning you don't forget, the kind that keeps you honest even when things get easier.

Despite international tours and critical acclaim, Chettri remains allergic to anything resembling stardom. He's described himself as a "working-class hero," and the label fits, not because he's trying to be humble, but because it's actually true. He shows up, does the work, goes home. The music happens around the edges of a regular life, not instead of it.

As one of the most recognisable voices from the Himalayan folk tradition, Chettri is acutely aware of how far his corner of the country has come, and how far it still has to go. “I think we have made great strides in terms of our music being heard and accepted by a much wider audience, but we still lag far behind compared to others,” he says.

“Punjabi folk music has made great progress in amalgamating itself into the mainstream sounds. The challenge in India will always be Bollywood dominating the scene.”

 Still, he believes the tide is shifting. Indie sounds are finding their way into web series, films, and playlists. Flow, again, is the operative word.

When I ask about his dream performance venue, he doesn't reach for the obvious. No stadium fantasies or festival headlining aspirations. Instead, he talks about acoustics, about old churches and how sound moves through sacred spaces. "I think most old churches have great acoustics. A great example of it is the recording of Meeting by the River by Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. I think Nau Lakhey Tara being sung in such a place would sound wonderful."

It's the answer of someone who thinks about music as a physical phenomenon, vibrations moving through air and stone, rather than a career ladder to climb.

What endures

Eh Saathi is about friendship, sure, but it's also about what survives when everything else changes. Chettri's music has always occupied that strange territory: deeply rooted in a specific place and language, yet somehow accessible to people who have no connection to either. Listeners in Bangalore and Brisbane, who don't speak a word of Nepali, report feeling the same ache, the same recognition.

Maybe that's because the specifics like Kalimpong, the monsoons, the Kanchenjunga following you to school, are just the surface. Underneath is something more fundamental: the experience of time passing, of people growing and changing and, if you're lucky, staying connected despite it all.

As Eh Saathi makes its way into the world, it carries that inevitability with it, a song that sounds like it's always existed, just waiting for the right moment to arrive. And in Bipul Chettri's careful, unhurried hands, that moment feels exactly right.