The answer, then the songs

The honest answer to what plays in an Indian bar is: whatever gets a reaction from a room that is not really listening. That produces a very specific rotation. Roughly half Bollywood party songs from the last fifteen years, a quarter Punjabi, a handful of English tracks that survive because everybody recognises the chorus, and then a tail of older Hindi songs that come out late. City makes less difference than people assume. A place in Indiranagar and a place in Andheri are playing the same forty records with the running order shuffled.

The shape of the evening is more consistent than the selection. Before nine it is background - melodic, mid-tempo, quiet enough to order over. Between nine and eleven the tempo climbs and the room decides what kind of night it is going to be. After eleven the Punjabi block takes over almost everywhere, because it does the most work for the least effort. And in the last hour, if it is a smaller place, somebody usually puts on something twenty years too old for the crowd and the whole bar sings it.

The cheaper the place, the more honest the music gets. In a proper theka - the country liquor shop, where nobody is sitting down - what plays is one radio or one phone: Haryanvi DJ tracks, Bhojpuri, old Kishore Kumar, Punjabi. There is no thought about what the customers want, because the man who owns the shop is playing what he likes and the customers are not staying. That is a much better playlist than the curated one upstairs, and it is what this site was built out of.

So this room plays the mixture rather than the polished version: Ganpat next to a ghazal next to Brown Munde next to Ek Do Teen. If you are trying to get a bar sound at home, that mixture is the thing to copy - not any individual song, but the refusal to stay in one decade for more than ten minutes.