Indian musician Prateek Kuhad's hit song cold/mess has made its way into former US president Barack Obama's music tracks of the year.
The singer-songwriter tweeted: "This just happened and I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight. Totally flipping out. I have no idea how cold/mess even reached him but thank you @barackobama, thank you universe. I didn’t think 2019 could’ve gotten better, but damn was I wrong. What an honour."
Since his breakout album, In Tokens & Charms (2015), a generation of millennials in the country has swooned and wailed to the narcotic fascination of his music. One of his most popular records, cold/mess landed mid-2018. In Tokens & Charms snagged an MTV Europe Music Award and indie album of the year from iTunes. In 2016, he was one of NPR Music’s 100 artists to watch at SXSW.
Obama had earlier released a list of favourite books that made his 2019 "a little brighter". The list comprises 19 fiction and non-fiction titles on subjects ranging from surveillance capitalism and the attention economy to feminism and race in Britain, and has two volumes specifically tagged for sports fans. Obama's eclectic list includes: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff; The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple; Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep; this year's Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli among other interesting titles.