Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Some songs are made for a moment. Others somehow manage to outlive the moment they were written for. Vaaroon, the soulful track from Mirzapur, is now getting another shot at life with Vaaroon Forever, the new version created for Mirzapur: The Movie. And for lyricist Ginny Diwan, there is something particularly satisfying about watching a song she wrote years ago find a whole new audience. In an exclusive chat with India Today, she said, “I feel all my hard work is finally paying off. When that resonates, your feelings resonate. It just encourages you to do better work.”
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The original Vaaroon was released in 2020 as part of Mirzapur and was composed by Anand Bhaskar, with Diwan writing the lyrics. The new rendition, Vaaroon Forever, brings back Bhaskar and original singer Romy, with Shreya Ghoshal joining them. The film was released last week and has since been doing well at the box office.
What makes Vaaroon stand out, even within the wildly popular Mirzapur soundtrack, is its softness. The world of Mirzapur is hardly known for gentle romance. It is guns, blood, revenge and, well, bhaukaal. And then there is this tender love song sitting right in the middle of it. Interestingly, Vaaroon wasn’t where Diwan’s Mirzapur journey began. Her first song for the franchise was Sajanwa Juganwa, a Bhojpuri item song playing on the radio. At the time, Diwan didn’t even know how big Mirzapur would become.
The team liked what she came up with, and that opened the door for more songs. One of the most interesting, she said, was Tittar Bittar, because of what she was trying to do with the female character in the scene. The woman is performing at a club when Munna arrives. He wants her to continue singing because he needs her to act as a decoy and ensure his presence isn’t noticed. For Diwan, the challenge was to write an item number without reducing the woman to an object.
“Being a woman writer, it has always been with me that I don’t want to disempower her in any way. She should always be empowered. You can do an item number also, but you can change the perspective. If you are looking at her from the people who are looking at her, versus if she is talking to them, when she becomes the centre, and she has the power to engage with them the way she wants to, your item number remains the same but your language’s perspective changes,” she added.
Diwan also sees the current moment as an encouraging one for female lyricists. As a member of the executive committee of the Screenwriters Association and part of its lyric committee, she said the need for more women writers is something that has been discussed within the industry. “Because the sentiment is not like the old days, ki ek aadmi ko hi ladki ka role bhi karna hai. Jo humare emotions hain, woh hum achhe se express kar sakte hain (that one man has to play the role of a woman as well. We can express our emotions better ourselves).”
She further discussed how reels have fundamentally changed the way songs find listeners — sometimes long after they were first released. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have heard Vaaroon originally. This song has come forward because people have liked it, not because of marketing. No money was put in for pushing Vaaroon as such. It is only and only because people have liked it.”
She also remains hopeful that the kind of songs she grew up listening to, songs where the words mattered as much as the tune, can soon return. “There was a sukoon in the songs earlier, and that time is coming back. If only we get the directors who want to have these songs. After all, it’s a collective effort. If my music composer doesn’t understand that thing, my director doesn’t give me the recovery, my producer doesn’t like that soul, then it will remain limited only to me,” Ginny Diwan concluded.
Apart from Vaaroon, the rendition of Sanson Ki Mala from Mirzapur: The Movie has also been garnering love.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
