Mumbai: For thirteen years, Ricky Kej made music that was designed to be forgotten the moment it did its job. A jingle for a soap brand, a hook for a soft drink, a melodic sting for a car commercial — write it, sell it, move on to the next one. By his own count, he composed somewhere around 3,500 of these pieces across his career, working with nearly every major brand an Indian household would recognise. It was steady work, and by most measures, a successful career. And yet, somewhere in the middle of those thirteen years, a question started forming in his head that he couldn’t quite shake.
“I spent the first part of my career creating music for television and radio commercials, working with almost every major brand you can imagine,” Kej recalled, speaking at a session on “India 2035: Building a Self-Reliant & Sustainable Future” at the Times Network Sustainability Conclave. “During those years, I realised that companies understood something very important — the extraordinary power of music. A melody doesn’t just communicate a message; it stays with you.”
He reached for an example that needed no explaining. Think about a national anthem, he said — just a few notes, and a wave of pride arrives before you’ve even registered why. Every religion has its own devotional music, songs that can summon a feeling of reverence almost involuntarily. If a jingle could do that for a bar of soap, Kej found himself wondering, what else could it do?
“If music is powerful enough to sell products and services, I kept asking myself, why couldn’t it be just as powerful in inspiring people to care about the environment, sustainability and positive social change?” he said. “That question completely changed the direction of my life.”
It’s a simple enough question in hindsight, but it’s rare that a working musician actually acts on it — especially one who has built a comfortable career on being reliably good at exactly what he was already doing. Kej did. He began stepping away from brand work and steering his compositions toward the subjects that had been quietly nagging at him: nature, climate change, the planet’s unraveling systems. It wasn’t an overnight reinvention, but it was the beginning of one.
The second push came a few years later, in 2015, when Kej won his first Grammy for Winds of Samsara. Awards like that tend to open doors, and one of the doors that opened for Kej led, rather unexpectedly, to a conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“After winning my first Grammy, I had the opportunity to meet the Honourable Prime Minister,” Kej said. “We spoke at length about the environment, climate change and sustainability. Seeing how passionate I was, he encouraged me to stop chasing everything else and focus entirely on creating music around the issues I truly believed in.”
It’s one thing to feel pulled toward a cause. It’s another to actually walk away from a proven career to chase it full-time. Kej says that conversation was what tipped him over the edge. “That conversation gave me the confidence to take the plunge,” he said. “Since then, every piece of music I create has been driven by purpose, and that purpose has almost always been the environment.”
The decade since has been, by any measure, a remarkable second act. Kej is now a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, has performed his work at the United Nations itself, and has gone on to win two more Grammys, cementing his place as one of the most recognisable voices linking music with climate advocacy on a global stage. His compositions have soundtracked conversations on biodiversity, land restoration and sustainability in rooms where policy, not just melody, gets made.
But when Kej looks back at his own journey, he’s careful about what he says actually changed. It wasn’t really the music itself — he was, and still is, a composer working in orchestral, ambient, and world-music textures, chasing a feeling with sound. What changed was the reason behind it. For over a decade, his job had been to write music that lodged itself in people’s memory long enough to make them reach for a product. Now, the goal is something that outlasts the moment entirely — music that stays with people not to sell them something, but to remind them, long after the final note fades, that there’s a planet worth taking care of.
