Goapu Da Groove

Goapu Da Groove has been DJing in Bengaluru since 1999 — before the laptops, before streaming, before you could find any song ever recorded in four seconds. He has played the clubs you grew up in, half of which don't exist anymore, and he has done it freelance the whole time: no agency, no manager, no crew, no club with his name on the door. This isn't an episode about how somebody made it. It's about what it takes to still be standing after 27 years — and what that actually costs.

He grew up in Kolkata and came back to Bengaluru with the music bug already in him. First came a college rock band called Rust — Floyd and Purple covers, him on vocals, a Best Vocalist trophy — while he held down a corporate job on the side. When Bengaluru banned live bands, rock acts got swept up with everyone else, and rather than go back to the desk he moved to the next best thing that kept music around him: DJing. He started on CDs at 180 Proof playing rock and retro, hired equipment for two days to practise before his first paid gig, and learned to read a room the way only a former frontman can.

The name is its own story — Govardhan at birth, Gopu at home, and then a numerology tweak that slipped in an extra letter to make it Goapu; two days later a call from Goa turned into three years running the floor at On the Rocks. 'Goapu Da Groove' just means go to the groove. In the years since he's stayed stubbornly independent, collaborated live with percussionists, guitarists and violinists (G2 Live, Guitarism), and quietly built a catalogue of 36 of his own records — old film music by R.D. Burman, Bappi Lahiri and Dr. Rajkumar, taken apart and rebuilt — and he's still making them. A rare, honest conversation about longevity, craft, and the long game.