From retracing his mother’s cartoon outlines, to hosting music events in India, the United Arab Emirates, and Prague, 20-year-old Veer Manghnani is bringing his own touch to a family tradition.
Veer Manghnani grew up in a large joint family home in Dubai, a second generation non-residential Indian, his grandparents moved from India to the United Arab Emirates in the 1980s not long after the country’s birth, and that is where his parents grew up and stayed.
“He was very inquisitive and he loved to look at how things were made,” said Veer’s mother, Prachi Manghnani. “He was very expressive, very talkative and he was closest to me.”
Veer was interested in art and drawing from a young age. His mother, an artist herself, would draw superhero characters for him to trace. His love for art continued to grow as he did.
“My mother has always been my biggest supporter,” said Veer, smiling through his dark beard, he wore custom overalls and a Kerwin Frost for Yakuza Kiwami hoodie.
In high school Veer designed the logo for his school’s blazer, and helped paint a mural on the side of his alma mater, Sheffield Private School Dubai.
Veer started to feature his art in galleries and pop-ups around Dubai, focusing on paintings, sculptures, and physical installations. As time went on, physical art alone was no longer enough for him.
Veer combined his interests in event planning, fashion, DJing, social media, marketing, and music for his first event in Mumbai, India that he referred to as his “first brainchild.”
Mumbai Andarground was inspired by a Berlin collective that he had been doing visuals and his first DJ sets for. He said his first event was perfect and stimulated all the parts of his brain that he loves.
“Music production started with the necessity to make something that was a full product… It needed purpose,” he said. “I never ever had a style, a lot of my work is very referential. Visuals were not satiating that need, so I zoomed out a bit and saw that visual art is a segment of something that I could be working on, which is music.”
Although the event was Veer’s first experience managing every aspect–from booking artists, to organizing the space, and promoting on social media–he grew up in the event and music industry.
When Veer was 4-years- old his family opened Seven Star Events and Productions, an event production company working across the Middle East. The company, established in 2008, has managed events at the Dubai Opera, Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena, and was hired for the ICI World Congress UNESCO summit in 2023.
At 16-years-old he began producing using tools like FL studio to apply music theory and his drum set beats to create curated music so he could DJ at friends’ events and parties.
“I feel ingenuine when I’m doing something that doesn’t have a connection to my past… I started music and then I was slowly reminded that it’s been there my whole life… my family would always be into events and I would just always be around music” he said before pointing out the 7 star tattoo on the inside of his right wrist.
Growing up, he never saw event planning as an artistic outlet. Recently, however, he realized that with a personal touch, event organizing is his outlet to fuse all of his favorite artistic aspects together.1
- This article was produced for AAU’s Feature Writing seminar. The author met the interviewee in Altenburg, Germany in 2024. For those interested in attending Veer’s next DJ gig in Prague, your best shot of catching him is by checking his social media. ↩︎
