Horse-riding, long walks and composing music in a hill-station retreat. Reewa Rathod’s passion and talent for music mirrors her love for the simpler things in life.

Text: Rachna Shetty & Reshma Jain
Photograph: Achal Sarawal

At 17, life for Reewa Rathod is incredibly simple. It’s full of making music, enjoying nature, and writing poetry. Other adolescent complications have not reared in her head so far and seem unlikely in the future.

Intent on fulfilling her destiny in music (born to singers Roop Kumarand Sonali Rathod), she displays one characteristic of prodigies: a maturity well beyond her years when she works with music. Her energies, currently, are focused on her debut music album, for which she has composed and written the songs, including one in Tamil.

“I had an idea in my head on how it would sound. My driver knows Tamil and I would read a line to him and ask him to translate it or check the grammar. Some of my friends know how to speak it as well, so they would help me rhyme it. I was quite happy with the effort,” she says, by far her longest answer in the interview.

Listening to snatches of her music, one is immediately struck by the versatility she brings to it. Whether it is a slow, jazz-based romantic number or a heavily classical song, she seems at ease with genres.

Classical training was something she just couldn’t overlook, with her parents training her in Hindustani classical and another teacher taking care of the Carnatic side. There would be times when the line between student-teacher and parent-child would blur a bit. Roopkumar recounts an incident.