This singer-ecologist’s music is a love letter to the planet

As a little girl, Aditi Veena aka Ditty lived across a park in South Delhi that she often disappeared into, to “speak with the birds and the trees.”

Raised by a botanist mom, Ditty felt an inexplicable tenderness for the natural world growing up.

In 2014, the singer-songwriter lost her father to Interstitial Lung Disease, a condition that had intensified over the years due to his exposure to Delhi’s air pollution.

Cut to today, when Ditty walks up the stage, three decades of her navigating scathing ecological and personal losses have condensed into one gentle request - “let’s recognise the damage we’ve caused to the planet.”

The wistful, acoustic melodies around environmental causes dear to her heart - a garden for her cat to escape the smoke from cars or an earnest call for more sky, plants and fungi, are some features hallmark to the music of this 34-year-old urban ecologist and indie musician.

At times, it is a delicate reminder to just breathe, as in the single Alice and I performed with Mussoorie-based singer-songwriter Jordon Johnson, and released in June this year.

An emotional bond with music

Ditty had been affiliated with the arts since she was a child. “I went for art and craft classes, and learnt kathak. But I started writing my own songs only after my father’s passing in 2014,” she tells HerStory.

“My dad gave me a chance to connect deeply with my emotions through music. I found it grounding and restorative to process the events in my life by writing songs on them. It became my therapy,” she says.

Ditty’s music is a culmination of her mental and emotional journey witnessing the environmental deterioration in Delhi. She grew up in the city in the early 90s, before the satellite towns had emerged.

“I love to write alone, as much as I like working with others. Songs, for me, start with riyaz and solitude. I might start with an idea, a lyric or a melody. Then I like to play with it, explore it from different sides and go on building on it,” she says. “I involve other people - instrumentalists, producers, visual artists and filmmakers later.”

Over the years, Ditty has watched summers in Delhi come with extreme heat and little water to sustain; toxic froth covering the Yamuna; and heavy metals mixing up with the groundwater. She delved deeper into these issues when she quit design school and joined the School of Planning and Architecture Delhi.

“In university, when I was doing my research on Delhi’s nalas and storm water drains, I learnt that its sewage system was almost non-existent,” she says.

The angst that built up in her fueled Ditty to study further. She joined Delhi-based urban conservation company Aishwarya Tipnis Architects, and later, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust in Sri Lanka, before she started running a research lab called the Science in Public Interest Foundation at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2017.

Today, the singer shuttles between Goa and Berlin, and is reputed as a young artist who walks her talk.

A study by UK-based NGO Julie's Bicycle says music-related tours account for 85,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

Reducing the carbon footprint

Some ways Ditty and her crew cut down carbon emissions are by choosing to travel together, rather than take separate vehicles; opting for trains instead of flights, eating locally, reducing their meat/dairy intake, staying with friends instead of at hotels, and carrying rechargeable batteries.

During her 'Songs for Forests Tour' last year, she took trains to six cities across India, and joined hands with Greenlane - a Bengaluru company that helps companies track and improve their ESG metrics - to measure the carbon footprint of her tour.

She then followed it up by planting an indigenous food forest with the help of local environmentalists at the Yogi Art Centre, Goa, to offset the carbon emissions caused by the tour.

Tree offset calculation is based on a tree planted in the humid tropics absorbing, on average, 50 pounds (22 kg) of carbon dioxide annually over 40 years.

“Each tree will absorb 1 ton of CO2 over its lifetime; but as trees grow, they compete for resources and some may die or be destroyed. Not all will achieve their full carbon sequestration potential,” says Ditty.

This calculation assumes that five trees need to be planted to ensure that at least one lives to 40 years, or that their combined sequestration equals 1 tonne.

“As per our calculations, we would need to plant four trees to offset our carbon emissions over 40 years,” she adds.

After releasing the first single, Hold Me off her upcoming EP Skin (scheduled to be released in March 2024), Ditty will embark on a nine-city tour from December to January. While she previews her EP in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Puducherry, Goa, Ahmedabad, Indore, Jaipur and New Delhi, she will also be joined by songwriters Aditi Ramesh, Ranj, Meera Desai and others.

“I feel a lot of us are afraid to look at the damage we have caused to the earth and its biodiversity,” says Ditty. “I find in music the chance and the courage to evoke some difficult conversations about rectifying these mistakes,” says Ditty.

As is the ritual during her shows, this year too, she will collaborate with local environmentalists and artists to start important conversations around climate change, sacred ecology, communal regeneration and transformation. Most of her concerts are held outdoors at farms, gardens and cafes.

“The response has been absolutely delightful,” says Ditty. “I am always meeting people after the concerts who tell me our ideas and music moved them to tears.” So far, the singer-songwriter has completed close to 500 concerts.

Off stage, she and her partner have been on a quest to live a conscious and minimalist life. “We refrain from buying things, we recycle clothes, furniture and equipment we don’t need. We choose options like buses or trains over flights because of the lower carbon impact,” says Ditty, who for several years until the pandemic ran a design studio called Baag, which taught people how to live self-sustainably.

When she’s not touring, Ditty spends a few hours every week volunteering at a community garden.

“We are compositionally and energetically connected to the planet, and therefore inseparable from it. I am just nudging people to see this,” she says.

(Some parts of the story have been revised for better clarity.)