पहला इश्क़

Pehla Ishq (पहला इश्क़) is the soulful romantic ballad from the action thriller Ruslaan (2024), sung by Arunachal Pradesh-born singer Rito Riba, composed by Rajat Nagpal, and written by Rana Sotal. Released by Saregama on 1 April 2024 as the film's first single — a few weeks ahead of Ruslaan's 26 April theatrical release — the track leans entirely on the tenderness of Rito Riba's voice to carry a lyric about the disorienting, life-altering feeling of falling in love for the very first time. Picturized on Aayush Sharma and Sushrii Shreya Mishraa, whose romance forms the emotional counterweight to the film's action, the song became one of Ruslaan's most-watched pieces of promotion, with its official video crossing well past 8 million YouTube views.

Rajat Nagpal builds Pehla Ishq as a voice-forward romantic ballad — a soft, mid-tempo bed of acoustic guitar, piano and strings kept deliberately spare so that Rito Riba's vocal never has to compete for space. Riba, who rose to notice through his emotive covers and a stint on Indian Idol before turning to Bollywood playback, sings with the slightly grainy, ache-tinged timbre that has become his signature, letting phrases hang and swell rather than showing off range. It is the sound of the contemporary Hindi love ballad: uncluttered production, an unhurried melody, and a single voice doing the emotional heavy lifting.

Rana Sotal's lyric frames first love not as flirtation but as revelation — the beloved arriving as a reason to live, a destination reached, a stray life suddenly given meaning. The opening couplet, 'Pehli dafa aisa kyu laga / Jaise mil gayi jeene ki wajah' ('Why did it feel, for the first time, as if I'd found a reason to live'), sets the register for the whole song: awe rather than desire. The vocabulary stays in the familiar Hindustani romantic lexicon — 'ishq', 'wajah', 'fasaane' — but the emphasis is on discovery and gratitude, the specific vertigo of a first love that reorganizes everything around it.

Ruslaan (2024) is a Hindi-language action thriller directed by Karan Lalit Butani and produced by K. K. Radhamohan and Rudrapati Ramana Rao, starring Aayush Sharma in the title role alongside Sushrii Shreya Mishraa, Jagapathi Babu and Vidya Malvade. Against the film's action-heavy plot, Pehla Ishq is the romantic centre — picturized on Aayush Sharma and Sushrii Mishraa and used to establish the couple's bond. Saregama released it as the film's first single on 1 April 2024, roughly three weeks before the 26 April 2024 theatrical release, positioning the tender ballad as the softer, shareable face of an otherwise hard-edged action film. The song exists in several official variants — a full video song, a lyrical version and an audio release — all from the Saregama Music channel.

Though Ruslaan itself opened to mixed reviews and modest box-office returns, Pehla Ishq travelled further than the film — its official video crossed well past 8 million YouTube views and it remained a steady presence on streaming through JioSaavn, Spotify and Apple Music, spawning the usual afterlife of lofi and club remixes. For Rito Riba, the track is one of his most visible mainstream Bollywood playback outings, extending a career that began with YouTube covers and an Indian Idol appearance into film music. In an era when a single often outlives the movie it was made for, Pehla Ishq is a clear example: a first-love ballad that quietly became the most durable thing to come out of Ruslaan.