'Azaadi' makes a musical debut in Valley

Azaadi has come alive in the strife-torn Valley, at least musically!
Saim Bhat, the Kashmiri Bollywood singer of Murder 2 fame, has created a sensation by his Azaadi live... song which has been released on a music portal to test the waters before its formal release in August.

Written in Urdu by young Kashmiri poet Shahid Gaus Mir, the Azaadi song has come at a time when separatists in Kashmir are trying to regain its foothold in the valley. The song has been timed with the completion of the first peaceful year after three consecutive years of unrest and stone pelting.

Saim, however, is trying to skid safe of the controversy calling the song “as a concept of breaking the hurdles and obstacles that stop a person living in one part of the globe, to call his brother living in another part”.

“Azaadi is love; a love of freedom. In order to understand what azaadi actually stands for, one has to have that extreme emotion where he dreams of a world, totally azaad (free) from the clutches of poverty, hunger, social, political and economic limitations”, Saim said.

Saim noted that azaadi is a phenomenon transcending all boundaries of class, caste and creed.

“Why do we have to keep ourselves limited to the boundaries of classes, creeds, groups, colours and nationalities, when we are all human beings having the same heart and brain full of emotions and thoughts? After all we are all humans”, he said.

A resident of Srinagar, Saim became a instant celebrity last year when he lent voice to two of the songs in Emran Hashmi starrer Murder 2. However his success was marred by threats and hate-mails by unknown people who warned him against performing in the fund-raising concert for a Kashmiri orphanage.

“I was born and brought up in the Valley, a beautiful land but suffocated. Where people are crying, where there is emptiness in the eyes of the widows and orphans, where old fathers are burying their young sons.

However music made its way to me with a sense of consciousness, feeling of pain and despair. So I am humming like a bird, flowing with the tunes of humanity”, he said.

Music has always been first love for Saim who started playing guitar and piano when he was in kindergarten. He is credited of started one of the first music bands in Kashmir in the hay days of militancy.

Later he shifted to Mumbai to realise his Bollywood dream.
The big break came in Jai Veeru when Bappa Lahri made him to sing a Sufi song Teri Pyar Main… for the film. Then Mithun Sharma made him to sing for Lamha. He later sang two songs for Murder 2 which became chart busters last year.