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‘Pop-culture wrote rapture and devastation; vast middle of love left for poets’: Lyricist Vaibhav Modi
On the sidelines of newly released three ghazals of ‘Sar-e-Shaam’ under Havells Mehfilz with Papon, Modi, who also wrote Coke Studio India classics ‘Khumaar’ and ‘Tauba’, shares what might be leading the youth to the ghazals, and mehfils.
Molshree22 Sep 2026
15:59IST
New Update
“There is an appetite for the unmediated voice,” says writer, producer and lyricist Vaibhav Modi, while talking about the inclination of youngsters in Ghazals, mehfils and mushairas lately. As the ongoing pop-culture preference among the youth has become a mandatory discourse for both artists and culture commentators, Modi, with his experience of twenty-five years of work across film, television and streaming, along with poetry, untangles the nuances.
On the sidelines of newly released three ghazals of ‘Sar-e-Shaam’ under Havells Mehfilz with Papon, Modi, who also wrote Coke Studio India classics ‘Khumaar’ and ‘Tauba’, shares what might be leading to the inclination.
Having spent around 25 years writing for film, television and streaming, how did getting back to ghazals happen?
The honest answer is that I never left…Through all of it, the ghazal sat in a notebook, not in a drawer. I wrote two of them, ‘Humse Toh Woh Behtar’ and ‘Dil Behel Jaaye’, for Mukhbir: The Story of a Spy, a series I wrote and produced. So the form was always inside the work, just not in front of it.
What changed was Papon. We have known each other since 2012, and I wrote ‘Khumaar’ and ‘Tauba’ for his Coke Studio episode the following year. Somewhere in the years of jamming that followed, the idea of a set of ghazals took shape, and he wanted it badly enough to make it real. Sar-e-Shaam is the result: three ghazals, written and refined across six or seven years of evenings, released this year under Havells Mehfilz with Papon. It was not a return. It was a producer finally green-lighting the one project he had been sitting on the longest.
Before this, what do you recount of your earlier life with only ghazals?
A life of reading more than writing, which I think is the correct proportion for anyone under twenty. I grew up in small towns with a house full of records and books, taught myself the bamboo flute, and music led me to poetry rather than the other way round. I read ghazals the way other boys read cricket scores, obsessively and without any sense that it would ever be useful. The writing came later and privately.
We can see how the youngsters are once again being inclined towards ghazals; what do you consider to be the factors?
I would resist the word again, because it suggests the young once had ghazals and lost them. Most of this audience is meeting the form for the first time, and that is more interesting.
Three things are happening. The first is fatigue. A generation raised on loudness is finding that loudness has a ceiling, and the ghazal offers the opposite: space, restraint, a line you have to lean towards. The second is the fragment. A couplet is a complete emotional unit in two lines, which makes it the only classical form that was built for a thirty-second clip centuries before the clip existed. The reel does not shrink a ghazal; it carries one whole thought to a stranger, and the full evening waits behind it. The third is voice. Singers like Papon are not performing ghazals as museum pieces; they are inhabiting them, in contemporary arrangements, in rooms that look like the listener’s own living room. When the form stops looking like your grandparents’ evening and starts sounding like your own night, the age barrier simply goes.
Was this consciousness about the newfound love for ghazals among the youth also what motivated you to get back?
No, and I think it matters to say so plainly. If you write towards a trend, the trend can hear it. ‘Sar-e-Shaam’ was six or seven years in the making, well before anyone was writing about a ghazal revival. It came out of friendship and stubbornness, not a reading of the market.
What the young audience did was change what I expected once the work was out. As a producer, I have launched shows with real budgets and watched them struggle to find their people. Here, a clip of two friends in a living room travelled further than some of those launches, to listeners who were not born when the cassette era ended. I did not plan for that, but I have thought about it a great deal since. It has taught me more about where audiences are actually going than most of the research decks I have sat through.
Even the mehfil culture seems to be getting back…
It is, and I think it is coming back for a reason that has little to do with nostalgia. We spend our days in front of screens that respond to us instantly and know us not at all. The mehfil is the reverse. It is a room where the response is slow and human, where the ‘wah’ after a couplet is part of the performance, where the singer changes what he does next because of what he sees on your face. That is not a quaint tradition. It is the one form of entertainment that cannot be scrolled past.
Sar e Shaam was staged exactly that way, as a gathering of friends in a living room, and I introduced each ghazal in my own voice before a note was played. That is closer to a mushaira than a mehfil, strictly speaking, since one belonged to the singer and the other to the poet. We let the two rooms meet. What surprised me was how many people, some of whom had only ever heard my poems through performers, came up afterwards and asked me to do that more often. There is an appetite for the unmediated voice. Everything in our industry has been trying to remove the middle layer for a decade. The ‘mehfil’ got there first.
What is your idea of writing a ghazal? The ‘radif’ and ‘qaafiya’, a thought, or any emotion: what comes first to the mind?
A line, almost always. Not the emotion in the abstract and never the ‘radif’ in isolation. A line arrives with its own temperature, and it usually arrives carrying its ‘qaafiya’ already, which is how I know it is a ghazal and not a nazm trying to be one. ‘Itna karna ki thaamna mat mujhko’ came to me whole, and ‘Apni Uljhan’ was built around that single request. ‘Teri Adaa’ was the rare exception: it began with a rough melody Papon had, and the words came to meet a mood that already existed.
The Hindi music industry has often been criticised for the same ideas and notions of love; even the screen depictions are often criticised for the same. How do you see this? Where does this redundancy come from?
It is a consequence of how the work gets commissioned. When a song or a scene has to be approved by six people whose only shared reference is what worked last time, you get what worked last time. Nobody in that room is untalented. The system simply rewards the familiar, because the familiar is easier to defend.
The other cause is that love in our popular culture has been written almost entirely in two volumes: rapture and devastation. The vast middle, where most of actual love lives, has been left for the poets. The correction, I think, will not come from the top. It will come from independent work that proves the audience wants the middle register, and then the system, which is nothing if not responsive to evidence, will follow. That is how every shift in this business has happened. Someone does the unfashionable thing at small scale; it travels, and a year later it is in the brief.
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