Shayad

The Beauty of Not Knowing

In the Hindi and Urdu languages, "shayad" is a small word carrying enormous emotional weight. It means "maybe," "perhaps," or "possibly." It is the word you reach for when certainty would be too much to bear, when naming a feeling outright would either demand too much or destroy the fragile thing it is trying to protect. As the title of a love song, it is a quiet act of genius. It tells you everything about what you are about to hear before a single note plays.

A Song From Bollywood's Most Romantic Corner

"Shayad" was released on January 22, 2020, as the lead single from the Love Aaj Kal soundtrack, composed by Pritam Chakraborty and written by lyricist Irshad Kamil.^[2] The song arrived nearly three weeks before the film hit theaters on Valentine's Day, serving as a kind of emotional overture: setting the mood before audiences had any narrative context for it.

The creative team behind "Shayad" has worked together across more than a decade of Hindi cinema. Irshad Kamil has written lyrics for every Imtiaz Ali film since Socha Na Thaa (2005^[5]), a collaborative relationship spanning two decades. Pritam, one of Bollywood's most celebrated composers, has translated Ali's romantic visions into melody with consistent results.^[4] Their partnership with Arijit Singh gives "Shayad" the quality of work produced by people who trust each other completely.

Kamil approaches lyric-writing as a form of poetry that grows through revision rather than a single inspired moment. He maintains notebooks filled with earlier versions of poems, treating them as raw material that evolves slowly into final lyrics.^[6] His philosophy values emotional directness and multiple meanings within single lines, drawing on the trilingual tradition of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi folk literature rather than ornate classical forms. His strength is clarity, and "Shayad" is among his most clearly-voiced compositions.

Loving at the Threshold

"Shayad" does not describe a love that has been declared, celebrated, or reciprocated. It inhabits the stage before any of that: the period when you have realized something profound is happening inside you but are not yet certain enough, or brave enough, or sure enough of the other person's feelings, to say so out loud.

The narrator moves through the world governed by this unnamed feeling. Small, irrational gestures signal the depth of what he cannot yet say: wandering without purpose past places connected to the beloved, filling quiet moments with thoughts of a face and a presence, performing the rituals of infatuation that the infatuated have always performed and that only make sense from inside the experience.^[8][10]

The word "shayad" as a repeated refrain functions not as a hedge but as an honest accounting of the emotional situation. The narrator is not withholding certainty he already possesses. He genuinely does not know. The beloved's feelings have not been declared. His own feelings are so large and unfamiliar that he is not entirely sure how to name them or whether they qualify as "love" in any durable, committed sense. The song's emotional honesty is that it refuses to tell a cleaner story than the one actually being lived.

This is a song about standing on the threshold between "this might be nothing" and "this could be everything," and finding that threshold to be one of the most vivid places a human being can inhabit.

A Film That Could Not Contain the Song

Love Aaj Kal (2020) tells two parallel love stories. The modern thread follows Zoe (Sara Ali Khan), a career-driven young woman who resists commitment, and Veer (Kartik Aaryan), an idealistic romantic. The historical thread follows Raghu (Randeep Hooda), a man reflecting on a love he abandoned for ambition decades earlier. The film moves between the 1990s and the present, arguing that while the social context of romance shifts across generations, the fundamental emotional experience remains constant.^[1]

The film received a harsh critical reception. Reviewers found the execution disjointed and the dual-narrative structure difficult to follow. Some critics at outlets including Brown Girl Magazine read the film's treatment of its modern female lead as paternalistic toward millennial attitudes about love and independence.^[9] Imtiaz Ali himself later acknowledged that he had incorporated too many elements and that the story's essence was not communicated effectively to audiences.^[7]

What is striking is how thoroughly the film's struggles left its music untouched. "Shayad" was praised separately from the film at practically every point of critical and audience engagement. The 2021 Filmfare Awards, the IIFA Awards, and the Mirchi Music Awards all nominated the soundtrack for their top prizes, treating the music as having exceeded the project that generated it.^[2]

This is not uncommon in Bollywood, where music and film have always maintained a partial independence from each other. But "Shayad" represents an extreme case: a song so emotionally self-sufficient that it required no narrative scaffolding to reach listeners.

The Instrument and the Brand

By January 2020, Arijit Singh had spent seven years as Bollywood's most dominant male playback singer. His 2013 breakthrough with "Tum Hi Ho" from Aashiqui 2 established a template that audiences never tired of: a tenor voice with a naturally husky quality, capable of conveying vulnerability without melodrama, capable of sustaining a phrase across a long breath in ways that make feeling palpable rather than merely described.^[3]

Singh is famously private. He rarely gives detailed interviews about specific songs and almost never offers public explanations of his artistic choices. His reputation is built entirely on what the recordings convey. In this sense he is well-matched to a song that is itself about what cannot quite be said directly.

His delivery of "shayad" as a repeated syllable across the song is a technical achievement worth noting. The word could become monotonous with repetition. Instead, Singh finds slight variations in emphasis and breath that make each recurrence feel like a new moment of reckoning rather than a settled emotional position. The uncertainty in the lyric is matched by a vocal delivery that remains open rather than resolved.

Spotify named Singh India's most-streamed artist from 2019 onward, and by early 2026 he had become the most-followed artist globally on the platform with over 174 million followers, a remarkable milestone for a performer working primarily in a non-English language.^[3] "Shayad" is among the songs that contributed to building that global reach, its emotional accessibility transcending language barriers even for listeners who cannot parse its Hindi and Urdu words.

The Pandemic and the Particular

"Shayad" was released into a world on the verge of enormous disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic reached India in March 2020, just weeks after the film's Valentine's Day premiere.^[1] The lockdowns that followed created conditions that made songs about longing, separation, and uncertain feeling unusually resonant. Listeners sat with the song in circumstances that amplified its themes. In this sense, timing contributed to its cultural footprint in ways no marketing campaign could have engineered.

But the song's staying power cannot be attributed to circumstance alone. It speaks to an experience that does not require a pandemic to feel urgent: the pre-confession phase of a romantic attachment, the period before anything has been settled or named. This is one of the most universal stages of emotional life, and one of the least honestly represented in popular music. Most love songs choose a position. "Shayad" chooses not to, and that choice feels true to the experience it describes.

There is also the matter of accumulated cultural trust. The Pritam-Ali-Kamil creative lineage stretches back to Jab We Met (2007) and carries with it a shared emotional authority. When audiences encounter a song from this trio, they bring a prior understanding of what the creative team values: emotional directness, folk-influenced melody, and romantic philosophy treated as a form of serious inquiry into human experience. "Shayad" draws on that accumulated trust.

Love, or Longing?

One could argue that "Shayad" is not straightforwardly a love song but a meditation on the limits of self-knowledge. The repeated "perhaps" is not only about the beloved's feelings. It is also about the narrator's own. He is uncertain not just whether she loves him but whether what he feels qualifies as love in any durable sense.

This reading makes the song something richer than simple romantic yearning. It becomes a study of the gap between feeling and understanding, the moment before emotional experience has been processed into narrative and meaning. That gap is exactly where art lives, and it is where the best of Irshad Kamil's lyrics locate themselves.^[6]

A second reading, informed by the film's explicit concern with its female lead's interiority, suggests that the song reflects the experience of uncertainty regardless of the gender of the person feeling it. The threshold before commitment is no less ambiguous for Zoe than for Veer, and the film's parallel structure implies that every generation faces this crossroads in its own way.^[1]

A Single Word's Sufficient Power

There is something instructive about the fact that a song titled with a word meaning "perhaps" has itself become a certain thing: a definitive expression of early romantic uncertainty in contemporary Hindi film music. Its success is a rebuke to the idea that popular songs require confident declarations and resolved emotions.

"Shayad" demonstrates what skilled collaborators know: that an honest representation of uncertainty can be more compelling than a triumphant declaration of certainty. The territory it occupies is narrow and specific, but it maps that territory with precision and grace.

For listeners who have ever stood at the threshold of a feeling too large to name yet, not knowing if it will grow into something lasting or dissolve into embarrassment, "shayad" turns out to be exactly the right word.