While most of us would love to make life simpler, music composer and singer Shekhar Ravjiani, one half of the talented composing duo Vishal-Shekhar, is bent on doing anything that makes his life more difficult right now. Which means, the man with a good command over Hindi and English, has gone ahead and belted out a Marathi single! “I wanted to make life a little difficult so I thought I should sing in a language I have absolutely no hold over! The pronunciation gave me sleepless nights. But my friend, director and lyricist for the song Ravi Jadhav, helped me a great deal,” he says. His ‘Saavli,’ a nostalgic song about one’s first love, well supported by a touching video featuring his friends Shah Rukh Khan and Sunidhi Chauhan and stills from Ravi’s Marathi film Balak Palak , is all the rage currently. >The video has generated a huge buzz on social media circuits.
“I enjoy making music. But composing to a director’s brief is different from creating something out of nothing, without a pre-defined target. It is euphoric,” he says, sitting at his Bandra studio. “I had last worked like that for the song ‘Dil Se Mere Duur Na Jaana.’ We just composed it and then Raj Kaushal picked it up for his Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi (1999). It brought back those memories.”
Last year, Shekhar released his first single, titled ‘Saazni,’ also in Marathi. If there was anything pre-decided in this endeavour, it was that the proceeds from the audio would go to an NGO. “Ravi introduced me to Ma Niketan, an NGO that looks after the needs of around 350 girls aged between 3 and 23, right from their education to their marriage. I was encouraged by the response to ‘Saazni’ and hence, ‘Saavli’ now.”
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The composer-singer says that when his Sunidhi heard the song, she wanted to be part of it. As for Shah Rukh, the actor also expressed his desire to be part of it during a random music sitting for their forthcoming