पुल

Pul is the emotional spine of Girish Kohli's 2025 indie thriller Crazxy (T-Series / Sony Music India), sung with restrained ache by Vishal Mishra. The combination of Gulzar's poetry and Vishal Bhardwaj's composition — their decades-long artistic partnership carried into 2025 — gives the song an authority and depth that towers over the rest of the soundtrack. Clocking at 4:23, it is a slow, piano-led meditation on absence and the invisible bridges memory builds between the living and what they have lost, mirroring the film's own psychological architecture perfectly.

Vishal Bhardwaj builds the arrangement around a sparse piano motif that enters like a heartbeat — unhurried, inevitable. Strings swell only in the final minute, keeping the emotional pressure interior. Vishal Mishra sings with deliberate restraint that makes every syllable feel weighted. There is no commercial hook; the song works like a slow tide. The production is clean, almost stark — trusting the strength of Gulzar's lyric and the melody itself.

Gulzar conjures the bridge not as structure but as yearning — a crossing that exists only in the act of remembering. His Urdu-inflected Hindi carries his signature habit of making the abstract physical and the physical transcendent. Each verse is a short parable of incompleteness — writing he has perfected across five decades.

Director Girish Kohli, making his debut on a shoestring ₹4 crore budget, pursued Vishal Bhardwaj specifically for the theme song of Crazxy. Bhardwaj brought Gulzar, his long-time collaborator — together they had scored Maachis (1996), Omkara (2006), Kaminey (2009) — and crafted Pul as a counterpoint to the thriller's surface tension, giving the low-budget production an unlikely grandeur.

Pul marks a rare 2025 instance of Gulzar writing for a small indie film, lending it instant cultural credibility. The Gulzar-Bhardwaj duo's continued relevance into the mid-2020s is itself remarkable. For Vishal Mishra, the song gave him a rare opportunity to sing something shorn of all commercial artifice.