this may seem like a scene straight out of a film inspired by hip hop but look closer and you will meet a group of punes it engineers who get together for cypher sessions on most weekends quiz them on this and they say it is their form of poetry a way to express themselves paras mehta an it engineer and one of the key members of the group reveals we usually jam on weekends between 3 pm and 7 pm sometimes we decide to spend the night at ravet bridge at akurdi and jam the night away we have boombox and mic to help us with the beat and cypher our inhouse beat producers often do live beat cyphers paras who moved to pune a couple of years ago adds some of my friends got together and we took to social media to connect with other likeminded artistes the community that first started with just two members now has more than 30 artistesthe community which has engineers it professionals and students have christened themselves as pune hip hop renaissance they get together and rap about current affairs social and cultural issues what sets these city based rappers apart is their pursuit for originality and an eagerness to create a clean slangfree identity rap is all about consciousness and selfexpression its about bringing out the rebel in you its a misconceived notion that rapping is about slang and racism says ajay ghone a founding member of the group and a rapperthe play of wordsthe members are cautious and ensure they do not use cuss words they believe that rapping is about aggression but by using witty lyrics a year ago i did not have a job so my lyrics were about my struggles with life now i write about the glory making the best of my life and the consequences of repression i use a lot of metaphors and similes in my lyrics to keep them flowing we want people to respect our art and try to come up with interesting subjects so that people can relate to it says ajay according to ajay the perfect battle is when you can defeat the opponents with clever lyrics i mostly use words that have multiple meanings he addsparas who raps in hindi english and gujarati says he jots down verses whenever they come to his mind i was once sitting in an exam hall and all i could think of was composing a song the urge was so strong that i started writing down the lyrics behind the question paper he recalls the group which is active and wants to create ripples in the city says hip hop allows us to speak our mind and describe what we see around us this is something that neither indie nor bollywood has managed to dothe movementbattle rap remains a relatively new term for the commercial audience mumbai is the capital of hip hop and pune is still warming up to the idea