Girl rapper going beyond gender issues

From singing the rap portion along with Justin Bieber's baby in 2011 to writing rap verses, Pratishtha has come a long way. Through her raps she tries to convey her thoughts in a male-dominated world. She started rapping a year back in 2019. She always related to Nicki Minaj, CardiB and many others, and was connected more to female singers and rappers than the male ones. Later, she started doing covers by Nicki Minaj as somewhere in she wanted a female representation. She was not very much interested in the sexual analogies. Though Nicki Minaj and CardiB have many such lyrics, she listened to the rest of them.

Sharing about the same, Pratishtha says, "I learned the raps and posted them on my Instagram and used hashtags like #girlrapper #hyderabadigirl. From there a well known 'Deccan gang' contacted her as they were looking for a girl rapper for their crew and wanted to include her. Through them she met many other rappers and attended many events. It has been around 10 months, yet I still don't feel that I belonged there or do not feel connected, even though, I connect with people very easily. But here, I could not with them excluding a very few as people here are not even 20 years."

Helping people

Pratishtha, a psychology student graduated in 2018, has been working as a self-help coach through her 'Growth Coaching Sessions'. She created a workshop, 'blueracoon', where she tries to make mental health conversations common, easier and comfortable. "My mission is to make psychology accessible so that awareness, love and esteem for self get better and create a space for discussing freely at ease the topics which are considered difficult and taboo," she adds.

Hip-hop music workshop

The main intention was to make people aware of the rapping culture for what it really was. Rapping is usually seen as freedom of expression with no set of rules. As there was a lot of scope of things going wrong, she felt a need for a resource which people could depend on.

Gender non-conformity project

The project was established to put out a word that not everything comes with a 'gender' label. There are activities that equally affect both genders and shouldn't be associated with a specific gender. A girl isn't good enough if she is not pretty is one such issue. While a woman who has sex with random strangers is seen as a 'slut', there is no such issue for men. This is something that could equally become an issue for both men and women and should be looked as such. Similarly, a man who is considered 'gentle' is seen differently.

The whole intention behind this was to normalise non-conformi "My journey was extremely difficult and experienced a lot of roadblocks in form of people and prejudices which I had to overcome to get to where I am. There were people who have helped me in my journey but there are also people who have acted as hindrances," concludes Pratishtha.