This artist went to Chandigarh for an engineering degree, came back seeped in Punjabi music; is worth Rs 124 crore today

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Even though his mother was a school teacher and his father worked for the state electricity board, the whole idea of a regular job didn’t sit right with Badshah. After joining PEC in 2002, he started exploring the possibility of doing music as a full-time job. During a 2015 interview with HT, he shared an anecdote about how he tried to convince his parents to let him become a rapper. He said, “When I first told my parents I want to be a rapper, they asked me, ‘Yeh rap hota kya hai?’ (What is rap?). To make them understand, I showed them a music video featuring rapper 50 Cent. That didn’t put things in my favour, because it was an obscene video.”

During the same interview, he admitted that it took him quite some time to convince his parents and that he had, in fact, started working after college as a civil engineer. The yellow hard hat and the vest had become his daily life now, but still he kept pushing for a career in music, and he got his foot in the door through Mafia Mundeer. While there has been much debate about what Badshah’s role was in the hip-hop group Mafia Mundeer, no one can deny that his name started floating around the system post their association.

After penning many songs for the group and Honey Singh in particular, Badshah parted ways with the group around 2012. He then began his solo journey, which started with the breakout single ‘Saturday Saturday’, which featured in the film Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, starring Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt. He also started releasing some independent tracks like, ‘Driving Slow’ and ‘Baatcheet’. Now the rapper had some work to his name that couldn’t be discredited or taken away from him, and he capitalised on that by releasing one hit after another.

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The quality of the artists he was working with also started impacting his reach. He featured on Diljit Dosanjh’s Proper Patola and Navv Inder’s Wakhra Swag, and both songs went viral. His Bollywood journey kept on going as he made songs for films like Kapoor and Sons, Khoobsurat, and Street Dancer 3D.

Now, several hit albums, EPs and singles later, Badshah has cemented himself as one of the OGs of Indian pop/hip-hop. Like Raftaar, he is seamlessly falling in line with the new world order of Indian music and is constantly collaborating with fresh and newer artists. According to a report by Jagran New Media, the kid from Pitampura is now worth over Rs 124 crore.