बर्बाद

'Barbaad' (Ruined) is the second song from Saiyaara (YRF Music, 2025) and the emotional counterpart to the title track — a 5:57-minute heartbreak ballad composed and written by debutant The Rish (Rishabh Kant) and sung by Jubin Nautiyal. Released June 10, 2025, it was Rolling Stone India's #2 Bollywood song of 2025: 'raw emotional collapse — vocals that sound like screaming into a pillow, delivering unfiltered vulnerability.' The Rish's acoustic foundation contrasts with the emotional devastation of the lyrics, using traditional saaz and sarangi interludes to ground the contemporary production in Indian classical tradition.

The Rish builds 'Barbaad' on a breezy acoustic guitar figure that is deceptively light — the musical equivalent of the eye of a hurricane. Jubin Nautiyal's performance is among his most committed, with the raw edges in his voice (usually smoothed out in production) deliberately left in, amplifying the sense of a man not performing grief but genuinely experiencing it. The saaz and sarangi interludes — instruments associated with Kashmiri classical music — connect the song to the film's world while providing moments of classical respite within a contemporary pop structure. At 5:57, the song demands patience and rewards it.

The Rish's lyric is compressed and imagistic — each verse a single image of loss, never explaining, only showing. The title word 'barbaad' (ruined, destroyed) appears in the classical Urdu-Hindi tradition as the condition that love creates rather than destroys: to be ruined for anyone else, by the perfection of the one who left.

The Rish (Rishabh Kant) had no prior Bollywood credits before Saiyaara — 'Barbaad' was his introduction to mainstream Hindi cinema. Mohit Suri heard The Rish's independent work through YRF Music's A&R process and offered him both the composition and lyric credit, an unusual arrangement that reflects the new YRF approach to sourcing talent. The saaz and sarangi interludes were added after initial recording, when Suri felt the song needed a specifically Kashmiri sonic anchor.

'Barbaad' established The Rish as one of 2025's most significant new songwriter-composer voices in Bollywood. Its chart performance — consistently near the top of Indian streaming rankings alongside the title track for weeks — demonstrated that even the 'non-title' songs from Saiyaara had crossover potential.