750 words: Day 3 – So why Fawad Khan

The short answer is that I saw Fawad Khan for the first time on TV when I came of age in a girls’ school – I did not know that’s not what regular boys looked like. My next two years in a co-ed highschool were a rude shock (olive branch to boys – we too had hoped we’d grow up to look like ethnically ambiguous Megan Fox. Such is life). The next 8 years were spent navigating IIT coaching class, engineering school and a core company – the least glamourous of campus placements comprising manufacturing jobs. Our youth, as a group, is no Kuch Kuch Hota Hai or Student of The Year. Every movie about life as an engineer has a minimum of one suicide. As B.Tech students, our collective priority in the 2010s was to get into Georgia Tech or Microsoft – whatever was closer to the resumes dotted with MUN stints and IEEE memberships (I was in SAE).

Back to Fawad Khan. In 2004, our military engineering campus cable operator “stole” a Pakistani TV channel called ‘The Musik’. It was also the year Strings released their third album Dhaani with a track that was featured in the Asian edition of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman 2 soundtrack. They ruled. Revisits to Duur and Sar Kiye worked as a vehicle for Jal and Jilawatan, Fakir and Fuzon, Call and Coke Studio to make it to the airwaves here. Ali Azmat was already a thing here and I am surprised that in spite of his relatively “extreme” (he rules) sound, he was a permanent fixture in Bollywood. And yet, Entity Paradigm (EP), who shared their guitars and vocals with the very popular Call did not make it here. I was thankful to ‘THE’ Musik for introducing me to them by playing Hamesha every single hour. I am not a music journalist so I will not dwell on the sound and vibe of EP, but I will have you know that their lead vocalist Fawad Khan insisted that you don’t call them “NU Metal”. This, I know, from the interviews and profiles my 14-year-old self pored over. All that it took to spur this curiosity was the red-filter goth music video that failed to do justice to every member of a band that was the size of half a nation. But you can see enough of Fawad Khan. India took 10 years more to wake up to him. 14-year-old me was ahead of her time. You people even missed this stunning man in the breakthrough Indo-Pak collaboration called Khuda Ke Liye too. You can’t blame me for laying claim to him now.

The details that a fandom has on its fingertips feel embarrassingly intimate. But then, we also insist we know God after one reading of an ancient text of dubious origin. So I’ll take the liberty to say that the Bollywood-ised Fawad Khan is different from the 2000s. The software engineering-grad metalhead seemed a lot more angsty than the soft-spoken version I’ve been seeing in the Film Companion-like interviews. I guess we all grow out of the rebellion. In my case, though, I grew into it. With 95% in my boards and on my way to engineering school, I found the path of least resistance when it came to family expectations. I stuck to that path for 8 years more. Listening to Strings and Jal, and loving Fawad Khan was the only rebellion I knew. Dad served for 23 years and he didn’t mind listening to Ghulam Ali, but I know me replacing Arjun Rampal with Fawad Khan made him a little mad. That was payback for subtly nudging me towards engineering, Government service and structure – none of which I commanded natural gifts for. My resistance and politics have been Fawad Khan, long before 2016 when the incel-panic led to chants of “Go back, Fawad.” I know it’s incel-panic because it’s never “Go back, Adnan Sami.” No disrespect but nobody is afraid their teen daughters will desecrate their scholastic softboards with pictures of the Lift Karade singer.

In July 2020, when the thing that happened happened, I took refuge in Fawad Khan. I came online everyday only to post his pictures. That my name is synonymous with his is no accident. I made it happen. Because I learnt from Mad Men (I learn everything from TV) that “if you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.” Fawad Khan is the leading theme of everything I broadcast and that’s fine with me. May he live long and prosper. In his own words, “Main rahunga hamesha.”