सैयारा

The title track of Mohit Suri's Saiyaara (YRF Music, 2025) is the year's most consequential Hindi song — a 6:09-minute heartbreak anthem by indie singer Faheem Abdullah (from Kashmir), composed by Tanishk Bagchi, Abdullah, and Arslan Nizami, with lyrics by Irshad Kamil. Released July 2025 via YRF Music, 'Saiyaara' became the first Hindi song to top Spotify's Global Viral 50 chart and entered the Spotify Global Top 10, accumulating 3.61 million streams on its peak day in India alone. Rolling Stone India ranked it #1 in their Top 25 Bollywood Songs of 2025: 'it crossed borders, topped charts, and lived on repeat for months.'

Tanishk Bagchi, Faheem Abdullah, and Arslan Nizami build 'Saiyaara' around a deceptively simple melodic idea — a three-note descending motif that carries the song's entire emotional architecture. The six-minute runtime is unusual for a 2025 Bollywood number; the extended length allows Abdullah's voice to move through grief's full emotional range without rushing. Bagchi's production layers subtle electronic textures under what is essentially an acoustic-vocal performance, adding enough sonic richness to work at scale (cinema, stadium) without losing the song's intimate core. Abdullah's voice — untrained in the Bollywood session singer mode, closer to the unschooled emotional directness of Sufi devotional tradition — gives the song its indefinable quality: it sounds like someone speaking, not performing.

Irshad Kamil's lyric is among his most distilled — each line carrying maximum weight with minimum words. 'Saiyaara' (wanderer/traveller, also the beloved who roams free) is held in the song as both the singer's name for his love and his name for his grief: the one who has left, and the act of leaving, are the same word. The lyric operates in the space where Kashmiri poetic tradition meets classical Urdu — where love is not domesticated but allowed to remain wild and unresolved.

Faheem Abdullah and Arslan Nizami are self-made musicians from Kashmir who had been working in the independent music scene before Tanishk Bagchi brought them to Mohit Suri's attention. Suri, whose career is defined by romantic films with transformative musical moments (Aashiqui 2, Hamari Adhuri Kahani, Ek Villain), recognized immediately that Faheem's voice — unpolished in the Bollywood sense but deeply emotionally alive — was exactly what the film's concept required: a musician protagonist, a love story about memory, a song that had to feel like it came from genuine grief rather than professional craft.

'Saiyaara' rewrote the possibilities for Hindi music on global streaming platforms. The song's achievement — Spotify Global Viral 50 number one, Global Top 10, Billboard Global 200 at #8, Billboard India #1 — established that Hindi songs could compete with English-language global pop not by imitating it but by being more deeply, specifically themselves. Faheem Abdullah's subsequent non-exclusive deal with T-Series for independent releases was a direct consequence. The song became a permanent reference point in any discussion of India's global music moment.