NAIN Is A Homegrown Music Video That Asks, 'What Is Grief, If Not Love Persevering?'

An entire human life — its intricate web of hopes, dreams, memories, affections, fears, and anxieties — often converges in only a few decisive moments. These decisive moments may arrive with great commotion or profound silence, but they become the fulcrum upon which generations of personal and family histories, memories, and myths rest. A stolen glance, an unsaid confession, a door opened or a window closed — in hindsight, each seemingly ordinary moment takes on new meaning as it becomes the hinge of an entire life, perhaps many lives. The paradox of human life lies in its profound contradictions: entire years culminate in a few seconds. This dichotomy highlights both the fragility and grandeur of being human — our lives are long, but we are made and unmade in these short, finite moments.

For Ramsha Khan, one such moment took place the night her grandfather died. "As the last guests fell silent, my grandmother dragged a charpai beside him and said, 'Main aaj aakhri baar inke barabar mein sona chahti hoon.' (I just want to sleep beside him one last time)," Khan recalls. "She slept next to him one last time, like she had on countless nights before. Two lives, once intertwined, now divided by breath."

This is also the moment 'NAIN' was conceived. A music video unlike any I have seen recently, NAIN is a cinematic and lyrical tour de force that takes you on a journey through a couple's life, inspired by Ramsha's grandparents and their life-long love for each other. NAIN was shot over three days on-location in Malihabad — a small town near Lucknow in UP — and involved a cast of non-actors and amateurs, which gives the music video a sense of intimacy and urgency often absent in strictly professional productions.

While Ramsha wrote the deeply personal story and the screenplay of the music video, the lyrics of the song came from writer-poet-lyricist Ajaypal Singh aka Likhari — a serendipitous connection made by filmmaker Kush Patel. Patel, better known by his Instagram handle @thebombaywalla, both directed NAIN and served as the connective tissue between the different creatives whose contributions made the music video possible.

"I wanted to explore death and loss in this music video because that’s not something we see often in music videos," Kush says. A filmmaker par excellence, Patel collaborated with DoP Arbab Kamal Khan to give life to Ramsha's script, but it was not a linear or straightforward adaptation. "The screenplay to screen is very different," Arbab says. "We were able to execute, not in the order, but the moments we wanted to create."

"I had this story for 2 years. I've written and rewritten it again and again, in different formats and for different mediums but nothing felt right until Nain came to me," Ramsha says. "When Kush introduced me to the song, I could see the story playing before my eyes. Nain is really special to me because through it not only I got to immortalize my grandparents' life, we could also represent a group of people who have long been stereotyped as anything but lovers."

By centring older protagonists and their life-long bond, the team behind NAIN both challenge popular culture's fixation on youthful romance and offer an alternative, poignant portrait of love enduring until its final breath.

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