Name: Nitin Chaturvedi (picture left by Bishwarup Dutta)

Age: 19

Claim to fame: Singing Hindi songs and speaking Hindi backwards. In a white T-shirt, denims and funky glares, the Class XII student of Shree Jain Vidyalaya looks like just another hip teenager.

He is one too: He listens to Hindi music and the odd Enrique “soft number”, has a girlfriend whom he met while taking guitar lessons, plays football as a goalie (he is too lazy to run around the whole field, he jokes) and harbours ambition of becoming a chartered accountant.

Except that he introduces himself as: “Rame manaa natini”. And when you stare in bafflement he says: “That’s mera naam Nitin spelt backwards, in Hindi.”He can sing any song backwards. “And if I don’t know the song then I just need to hear it once to sing it backwards,” he says. Nitin won the Three Minutes To Fame contest in The Great TTIS Challenge in 2007 and was a guest performer at the finale of the 2008 fest.

Backward: “My mother and my mamaji often speak the same way. And I picked it up slowly,” he says. But none of them can sing. It becomes difficult to sing backwards as one has to maintain the rhythm too. “Telach telach reme ye tagee, dayaa nakhar,” he hums, his version of the Kishore Kumar song Chalte chalte, to explain. There are intricacies, like the change in the number of syllables to be taken into account while singing. For example the word “geet” has one syllable, but when spelt backwards in Hindi it becomes “tagee” as the letter “ta” is stressed on and becomes a two-syllable word. And there are one-letter words like de and ye, which cannot be split in Hindi, and so cannot be pronounced backwards.

Secret code: It began as a code language. His businessman father and six-year-old brother are often left out of the conversation while mother and son talk in their own language. “My father is quite fed up with us. And my friends don’t understand it, but are very supportive,” he says. What about the girlfriend? “She doesn’t understand it either, but still likes listening.”

There have been funny incidents, too. While travelling on the train the mother and son had slipped into their “backward language” unconsciously. A co-passenger asked them if they were speaking Kannada. “We said that it was a different language altogether.”

Does he picture the words backwards in his mind every time he sings them? “I don’t really know,” he smiles. “Besides most Hindi songs use very common words.”