Nostalgia is always sweet, said Proust. Nowhere is this more evident than in music. Yet to recreate the right emotion without it feeling superficial is a rare skill. With his song, Enlightened, which was released last month, Rounak Maiti marks a sparkling return to the country.

Having spent seven years in Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter, formerly from Mumbai, turns to a refreshing ’80s-pop-synth style to express his nostalgic theme of romance. “It is one of the first tracks that I wrote when I moved back to India from the US, in 2019. It marked the time of adjustment while shifting to India,” he tells us.