Return of rockstar Geetu Hinduja

She is silver chic, with big brown eyes and a gentle, thoughtful manner. Acoustic folk art singer Geetu Hinduja spent all day yesterday watching some really bad Hindi music videos flow across MTV, VH1 and some other music channel because no one told her when exactly her first music video was hitting airwaves. She's keenly curious about the impact. After all, after viewing online music channelling that sells songs for two rupees a track, she knows she needs to sell like Madonna or put out a monster album like Adele to even dream of recovering the costs. She likes the idea of putting it out on television, because, she says, television gives you the impression that the music doesn't matter, that the right to be on television has been earned. So she invested the most in the audio, which she needed just so, but she had fun with the video. Also, in the new age of everything can go viral, nobody really knows what will work.

The album will re-release the title track of her 2012 album "Hope, Faith, Time and Me" - a song penned by her late sister for a cancer benefit, and clearly music that has held her through good times and bad. The album in itself traces three tracks - the story of a patient suffering from cancer in itself, the tale of her sister, and the visual element, a past-present-future sketch, each separate from the other. When it first came out, it announced Geetu's return to music after a near two decades. Her previous album, "Dancing Free", emerged when she was 22. She had just had two children. And was an influence of music that was the result of her conservative marriage in which working, or stepping out pretty much, wasn't an option. She would go down to lessons with Bismarck Rodrigues, Mumbai's most famous guitar teacher, and gradually allowed herself to be wrapped up in it. A guitar grew into a music room. A music room into a full time obsession, until she realised it had to be set aside.

It took 20 years and the persistent pestering of close friend Michelle, at the other end of divorce and three children, to go get her voice back. She still recalls her first performance. It was at Celebrations in Bandra. "I was in the habit of giving myself a birthday present every year, and this year (2009), I decided to give myself a performance," she says. She gleaned courage from smaller performances over the years, one at Prithvi, one at a friend's place, over the years, and just went for it. It was to be her turning point performance.

Since then she's performed at Jaipur Lit Fest and The Museum of Memories, at Kala Ghoda Arts fest and at Jadhavgarh Music Festival and at the 18 Degrees Festival in Shillong, among others. The idea that she might be of a different generation than several amongst whom she performs hasn't struck her yet, nor does she find dissonance in her music bearing the influence of a Joan Baez, or more acoustic folk performers against the menu of EDM, funk and rock that her contemporaries on stage are performing. "I didn't grow up hearing of music. I grew up in a business family, listening to words about industry and family with my ear stuck to a Bush radio now and then" she says. She had to trace her own influences, from Baez to Suzanne Vega and Leonard Cohen. It's important to her to connect with her influences spiritually as well. "So many people you idolise stop being so when you meet them and know how lacking in depth they truly are. It then becomes impossible to listen to them" she says. It keeps her true to the stories she needs to tell as well.

Ageism strikes now and then more than sexism does. Like that one time a corporate gig was looking around for a female singer act and when her manager sent her photograph they replied to say "no, no, we want a woman.. A woman...". By which of course they meant a hyper-glamourised skimpily-clad feminine form, more than an actual woman... She's worn shorts to a meeting and been asked if she could dress like that on stage (she could, but she wouldn't). And so, Geetu has found the grace to shake such reactions off. "Out of the box" is another label, she says, that people have started tagging her with. It comes from an industry that does not know quite how to react to a woman who won't run screaming the other way from her age. But she doesn't let it bother her. She's collaborated with an EDM DJ for a corporate gig, and jammed before and after punk bands on stage. It's important, she says, to be open and to keep doing your own thing. As friend designer Narendra Kumar Ahmed put it, to "Stay relevant". "I love technology," she says.

More than just that, Geetu has Hope. And Faith. And Time. What more is there, really?