‘Aaro’, a Malayalam music video by AQiL, debuted recently to a stirring response across YouTube for its outlier narrative of the love song. ‘Aaro’ is a three-and-a-half-minute tribute to the millennials and their quest for love in the digital age. This complex quest now gets digitally recorded by social networks like Instagram.
It tells the turbulent story of a couple, played by real life Instagrammers Sona Maria and Rahul Suresh. The story could be set anywhere—but setting it in Kerala provides the video with its surreal dimension. Its broad swathe of musical drama sweeps through the urban expanse of Kochi and its waterways, all the way up to the verdant heights of Munnar in the Western Ghats. For all its breathtaking beauty, Kerala is only the backdrop for Aaro’s unfolding story—not its focal point, which again is a departure from music videos of this genre.
The thing that strikes you about Aaro is its ability to tell its story by flitting through landscapes of emotion. The video opens to the story of their love, told in two melodic verses sung by AQiL. Through quick cut shots, the viewer is swept through the lives of two people, experiencing their world as young adults. Life on the metro in the city soon moves to the green expanses of the mountains. Urban flat expanses by azure waters become tropical mountains, contoured by their ups and downs.
Somewhere in between this dizzying frame rate, the angst creeps in. And, the conflict arises in the relationship with the introduction of the proverbial third person. From this point on, the video erupts into an aggressive rap sequence that captures the turbulence that sweeps modern relationships. Soon, you sense the angst of the couple, yearning for a time when life was simpler, and relationships were built on a bedrock of shared values and togetherness. It is a feeling that is captured with depth in the eyes of the lead couple, as they deal with the unexpected unfolding of events in the final scene of Aaro.
So, what makes Aaro different from the other music videos that make their debut every single week?
“We decided early on that the story should come first,”says AQiL. “For us, the story teller is always the musician. For this reason, we moved away from the industry template of using celebrities to popularise the video.”
AQiL, also known as Akhil Kooliyatt, conceptualized, wrote, composed and performed the Aaro song. For a music video that speaks to the fleeting dreams of young couples in love, the Aaro team was an incredibly focused team of young people that worked obsessively over a year to create the video. Akhil himself had to balance his passion for making Aaro with his career as a globetrotting IT professional.
“Everyone that matters in Aaro,” he observes with a smile, “was picked for their work through Instagram!” The others in the cast are Abraham Vadakan, Rachna Tom and Yvonne Rachel. The whole Aaro team were made up of first timers. And so, the six-day shoot for the video was an intense experience, bringing out the best in the whole team.
At the helm of Aaro’s direction and editing was his friend and bandmate Vishnu Varma. Speaking on his experience of directing and editing the video, Vishnu of Upcraft Films says: “Aaro was my personal transformation from a musician to a director and editor. I wanted to see how far I can push this music video in terms of its narrative and flow. What brings the most happiness is the kudos that I got from across the Malayalam film industry. That means much more to me than anything else.”
Somewhere on the journey of watching Aaro, I came across a meme—the kind that makes you stop for a thoughtful minute on your social media sojourns. It said: “Not every friend request is a friend request. Some are just surveillance cameras.” That, for me, pretty much summed up the angst in the age of Instagram.
