How a Video Game Led Ankur Tewari to Write the Breezy ‘Aainda’

Still fresh from his successful stint as music supervisor for the Bollywood film Gully Boy earlier this year, Mumbai-based singer-songwriter Ankur Tewari is back with new music in the shape of the honeyed, easy acoustic track “Aainda.”

Of all things, it was action-adventure survival horror video game The Last of Us that inspired Tewari to pen the new song. He says, “The situation around the world was kind of depressing me, then I was playing the game Last of Us and realized how the world is infected with hate and that’s how the first few lines of the song came to my head.” Soon after, Tewari added a chorus and second verse, “The idea of we can probably fix it [hate] with love came while playing the game,” he says.

Ask the singer-songwriter what he feels the root cause for abhorrence around us is and he says, “I blame all our politicians across the world for that because they’ve created an environment where the people are leading such hard lives that they can’t wait to kind of explode on each other.” He adds, “We see a lot of it online, a lot of cyber bullying, a lot of trolling and with no reason. If they don’t explode they are going to implode. They are venting at each other and are carefully manipulated by our politicians.”

Although lyrically “Aainda” has a serious tone, sonically the song is a breezy tune. Tewari tells us this is due to the fact that he didn’t want to write an aggressive song. The musician says, “I try and give it a more sing-along easy vibe because it comes from a place of love.”

The song was recorded at studios across the country such as The Village Studio, Purple Haze and Island City Studios and mixed and mastered by engineer Rohan Ramanna. The track’s accompanying music video – directed by New Delhi-based Archisman Misra and Sumit Roy – sees Tewari performing the track over black and red colors while the lyrics flash across the screen.

Tewari and his band Ankur & The Ghalat Family are currently on their mammoth Mohobbat Zindabad Tour. Having recently completed shows in Rajasthan, the group play Mumbai on October 17th at antiSOCIAL followed by gigs in Puducherry, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune and Gurugram. “The plan for the tour was let’s try and hit as many B-towns and tier two cities as we can because I wanted to reach out to that audience and it’s worked out well,” he says.

Watch the music video for “Aainda” below and click here to stream the song on all platforms.