'The Busking Man' Debojyoti Nath is a musician who travels to various places in India and sings songs for peace and love.

There are not a lot of people in the world who would take up an art as a profession if it doesn't provide any income. This is what makes busking a unique and unconventional practice. Busking is street performance, wherein artists perform at a public place like a street for free and accept whatever the audience chooses to give them in reward.

Busking is all the more rare to find in a developing country like India, where the lack of a stable income very often becomes the reason for not taking art professionally. However, this fact is not what makes Debojyoti Nath, or 'The Busking Man', special.

What makes The Busking Man special is that he sings and plays the guitar at public places for free to spread the message of 'peace and love'. At a time when a Bollywood masala film’s success is decided by whether the film made it into the Rs 100 crore club or not, who would’ve thought there exists a man who goes around places in India just to sing songs about peace and love?

Thirty-year-old Nath’s current tour includes travelling to and performing in all the 29 states in India. And he’s already done with seven states. His performances include singing at the Radio City Mumbai studios to jamming with an accordion-player on the streets. In one of his videos of him jamming with a disabled person, Nath wrote on Facebook, “Mr. Charles suffers from a disease that slows down his motor functions, hence his inability to move his fingers quick or coordinate and keeps him awake at nights. Music is a medication which heals him and keeps him ticking. A jolly good fellow with so much smiles and laughter and so much music.”

On why he loves busking so much, Nath told Firstpost, “The only reason was music. It’s the passion I always had…Eventually I reached a stage in my life when I felt I needed to do something meaningful, something that makes sense.”

He also admitted there were a lot of challenges with what he did and that even though it was a financially risky option, he had planned to carry on busking throughout India for at least seven more months. “A lot of things inspired me to do something risky. You just need to be sure that you’re not doing anything superficially,” he said.

Nath also described how he faced the challenge of playing Hindi songs when he started busking north India because he mainly sang English songs. “I started out in Chandigarh. Hindi songs are very popular in north India. For a long time, I was trying to grasp the essence of Hindi and Hindi songs,” he said. He also said that during a visit to Jaipur, he wrote and sang his first Hindi song.

Another risk which Nath said came along with busking was that sometimes, the audience did not react positively to the public performance. “While performing in front of the Bara Imambara and Chhota Imambara in Lucknow, I was surrounded by some Muslim students who apprehensively asked me what I was doing,” Nath told Firstpost. “But I was able to convince them I was there only to play music, after which I had an amazing talk with them, in which they told me they were apprehensive because of the way they were usually stereotyped by people,” he said.

Nath also said that a lot of his friends called him immature for pursuing busking this seriously. But he also said, “So far, it’s been amazing. The music has always been there. And this also lets me follow my passion for travelling and meeting new people.”