Indian lyricist Varun Grover, whose Bollywood career spans five years, is overwhelmed by the public’s response to his latest song, Jabra Fan.
The song, for Shah Rukh Khan’s upcoming film, Fan, was recently launched.
Grover’s portfolio includes the lyrics for tunes that feature in last year’s hits Masaan and Dum Laga Ke Haisha.
“This is the first time a song of mine has got this big a release. For Masaan, we were waiting for the song to cross one lakh [100,000] views on YouTube, and it did after five-seven days. This one, within 24 hours, had crossed 15 lakh [1.5 million] views. The reaction I’ve been getting is overwhelming. For the first time I felt the power of a star,” he said.
Grover is not new to using unusual, catchy words and phrases — think the word “Womaniya”, used in a song for Gangs of Wasseypur, and Dard Karara, used in Dum Laga Ke Haisha.
For Fan, Grover coined the word “jabra” and used it for the line- “fan ho gaya”.
“What I am seeing today are songs with phrases like ‘Chittiyaan Kalaiyaan’ and ‘Baby Doll’. These words are something new and not cliched. So to use a line like ‘sabse bada fan hogaya’ [he became the biggest fan] wouldn’t have been fresh. We had to either coin a new word or use a lesser known word,” he said.
“In Uttar Pradesh we say ‘jabrat’ [tremendous], in other parts of the state we say ‘jabbar’ and ‘jabardast’ in north India. So I coined the word ‘jabra’.”
“Another option we had was ‘tagda fan ho gaya’ [he’s a solid fan]. So we tried one line with ‘jabra’ and one with ‘tagda’. But Maneesh [Sharma, director] didn’t like it [tagda] that much and he asked to retain only ‘jabra’, and we went ahead with it,” he said.
The song has been composed by Vishal-Shekhar.
Grover wrote the song in three-four days, and it took the team two weeks to finish the track.
The lyricist said the initial draft of the song was different from the end result. “Initially, I was writing it from the perspective of a Shah Rukh fan. So the initial draft had names of his popular movies in the lyrics, such as Baazigar, Karan Arjun, Ram Jaane. Then Maneesh said he wanted a song, which is not restricted to Shah Rukh fans, but cuts across to a wider audience.”
“Not only a Shah Rukh fan, but any fan should be able to sing for his idol, be it another superstar, a cricketer, girlfriend or boyfriend. The song is about a person you can’t live without,” he added.
“The brief was simple. It is not Shah Rukh singing. It is a fan singing. So I had to write in a way the fans will connect with, show their world. And yet, it had to be ambitious,” he said.
Fan releases on April 15 in India.
