When Chai Met Toast was initially a two-piece project consisting only of Achyuth and Ashwin. The duo met in 2014 at a music café in Fort Kochi when Achyuth was doing an internship. He asked Ashwin to do the vocals for some music he was recording. That’s when the two realized that they worked well as a team.

They came up with the name When Chai Met Toast which represented the coming together of Indian (chai) and Western (toast) influences in their music. “Ashwin was the chai and I was the toast,” laughs Achyuth.
They were soon joined by a common friend Richy who played the keyboard. However, when he left for Australia to study and Ashwin moved to the US, the band disbanded temporarily. Meanwhile, Achyuth joined the Raghu Dixit Project and toured with Dixit from May 2015 to August 2016.

Once Achyuth returned to Kochi, he and Ashwin decided to get together again and expand the band. They were joined by Palee and Sailesh through mutual friends – and that’s how When Chai Met Toast as we know it, began.
The Kochi-based band is a four-piece project with Ashwin Gopakumar on vocals and guitar, Palee Francis on the keyboard, and Sailesh G Pai on drums, apart from Achyuth. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.