Irshad Kamil on ‘Saiyaara' Track's Unexpected Success and Why it Still Scares Him

Irshad Kamil, one of the greatest lyricists of modern times, says success has never felt easy to him. “It always scares me,” admits Kamil, who has penned some of the most memorable albums, including Rockstar, Laila Majnu, Amar Singh Chamkila and Tamasha, among others.

“When something works out of the blue, you feel nervous. You start thinking—will this happen again?” he says at THR India's musicians' roundtable.

That feeling returned with Saiyaara, the title track featuring Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, which broke records. It was a song he didn’t expect to take off the way it did. “Sometimes you make something without any big expectation and suddenly it becomes something much bigger,” he says. Instead of relief, the first response is anxiety. “We all get scared of good things.”

He’s felt this before. After Jab We Met became a huge success, he remembers sitting with music director Pritam Chakraborty and director Imtiaz Ali, feeling confident and ready to begin again.

“We said, okay, let’s do another movie,” he recalls. They went to Khandala to work on music, convinced that something would come together quickly. It didn’t. “Three or four days, we were just sitting there. Kuch aaya hi nahi [Nothing came to us].” That phase stayed with him. “You realise then that great music or hit music is not in your control,” he says. 

The process behind Saiyaara wasn’t very different—same people, same conversations, same chai. At first, it felt ordinary. “You think, okay, this is just another song,” he says. Then suddenly, something shifts. “You look back and think— what just happened? Now you again think—will I be there next time? Will I be chosen again for something like this?” he says.

Kamil believes that every new project begins from scratch. “You top the class and then you take admission in the same class again,” he says.