Believing in Karma

A rapper’s debut album reveals his journey thus far as an artiste

There is a refreshing level of candour that Vivek Arora aka KARMA displays when he tells us that before becoming an artiste, he once had a job as a guard for an ATM booth. That’s not the sort of detail that musicians normally let out, he says, adding, “These things are considered to be weak points that people want to keep secret. But I want to show my fans that if you don’t give up, anything is possible — you can go from being an ATM guard to a call centre employee to an artiste. I wanted to talk about the changes that music has brought about in my journey.”

That journey is now the subject matter for his debut album, Made You Proud, which is dedicated to his father, who passed away in 2017. “It’s about a full chapter in my life, from having depression to earning good cash and attending parties,” he says of the 13 tracks that feature collaborators including Raftaar, Encore ABJ and Shah Rule. The Delhi-based artiste gave each of these artistes the freedom to bring their own flavour to the compositions, acting as equal partners with them while working on a track. That lends the album an eclectic quality, which Arora says only helped him evolve as an artiste since he was able to step out of his own boundaries.

All in all, the record is thus a deeply personal exploration where the the 25-year-old talks about the futility of diss tracks within the hip-hop genre, and how shoes and clothes don’t quite maketh a man when it comes to rap music. Arora allows the listener to walk freely into the different rooms in his mind, showing how self-assured he is not just as an artiste, but also as a human being. To put it in a nutshell, he’s clearly the sort of person who’d rather guard an ATM booth than guard his own secrets. And for that, more power to him.

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