Any good poet should be able to touch your heart – but Shiv Kumar Batalvi had the ability to rip it out of your chest, and then place it back there gently.

Dushyant Kumar’s poetry freed me from the cage of square cubicles and straight lives that the Gulzar School of poetry, dripping with flowery dew and the warmth of unreality, never could. My struggles were personal, and so it turned out was the language of my resistance, learned through his poetry, so irregular and unlike anything you’d have come across.

Sheetal Sathe and Sachin Mali were declared Naxalites in 2011 for giving voice to the Dalit community. They’ve paid a heavy price, but they continue to sing their songs of resistance.

Taylor Swift is the modern queen of yearning, offering up a folk fantasy for a new generation in “evermore”. Who better to come forward as the voice of 2020, a year that we have all lived in the subjunctive tense, thinking of what might have been?

Lata Mangeshkar’s voice defined my grandmother’s youth. I belong to a generation that often rejects new Hindi film chartbusters in favour of indie and international music. Yet, after the last shot is downed and the last EDM track played, it is Tai’s tender “Lag Jaa Gale” that can still make a millennial emotional at four in the morning.

Listen to the original soundtrack of Jai Bhim: The Beats of Dalit Resistance, a musical-documentary on singers Sheetal Sathe and Sachin Mali, who were declared Naxalites in 2011 for giving voice to the Dalit community.

#ArreEarworm: On #Dusshera, we meet Rashid Qureshi who has been singing in Mathura's Ram Lila for almost four decades.

Shuffling between LA and Mumbai, Zoya is a singer and storyteller in equal parts. Watch her perform exclusively for Earworm's maiden Arré Sessions.