No matter how much you resist it, if you’ve grown up in India, it is safe to assume that Bollywood has contributed in shaping your concepts about love. The films we’ve watched give us inspiration, and ideas, to indulge in the theatrics under the garb of romance. 

When composer and musician Sanket Sane and vocalist Poojan Kohli got together to record their latest song Mehermaan, they came up with a unique idea. It is touted to be India’s first Bollywood motion poster video. “When we first made the song, we took it to a famous music label. You need to have a good release and good promotion for an indie song, otherwise it gets lost in mass content. The guy who made the decisions there told us that the song is not ‘Bollywood enough’. He tried to sell us the idea that only Bollywood sells. So we came back, and thought of doing something different to get our song the attention it deserves,” says Sane. 

He feels that indie music tends to suffer a lot in India because of the obsession with Bollywood. Since the artists didn’t want to tweak the sound of their work, they decided to pump in some Bollywood visually in their video. 

With over two million views already, the video is pretty interesting. It features Kohli and Sane in  action within the posters of some iconic films. “It’s a romantic song made for the monsoon — the most romantic season of them all. We selected scenes from famous movies like Devdas, Maine Pyar Kiya, Mohabbatein, Veer-Zaara, Heer Ranjha, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Bobby, Deewana, Deewar, Ishq and so on,” says Sane. 

He shares that the video is sort of a sortie. “We thought we should use the feedback we got in a positive way, and use the video to show it. It’s like, you think our song is not Bollywood enough — here you go! The scenes in our video are not just Bollywood, they’re the most iconic scenes from blockbusters! This started off as a sarcastic approach, but we’ve made a statement with it,” says he.