Actor Lisa Ray confesses she ‘inwardly cringes’ every time Afreen Afreen plays: ‘I’m just walking around in the desert after all’

“Today, as great troubadours I listened to in my youth are passing into the light, I recognise the power of a song to evoke an emotional response in the audience that is tied to who you once were – to a moment in time that is often defined by hope, wonder and the optimism of youth. So of course hearing this song today is no longer about a personal association but represents a universal rite of passage – in the same timbre of falling in love for the first time, writing your first poem, reflexively planning your future- a pitch, a note, a video that reminds us of a world of beauty and possibility and innocence that once was. But truly, what would be a revelation today is others also comprehending this truth and freeing me from an association with the song, for the reasons and more above 🙏 (I’m just walking around in the desert after all 😂), she added.

Released during the IndiPop and fusion music wave of the mid-1990s as a non-film music video, Afreen Afreen was later covered in 2016 by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (Nusrat’s nephew) and Momina Mustehsan during Season 9 of the Pakistani musical TV show Coke Studio. The video of the Rahat-Momina version of the song has so far garnered 416 million views on YouTube, making it one of the most viewed YouTube videos of Pakistani origin.

Born in Toronto to a Bengali father and a Polish mother, Lisa Ray made her movie debut in 1996 with the Tamil film Nethaji, starring Sarath Kumar. She made her Bollywood debut in 2001 with the psychological suspense thriller film Kasoor (Dir. Vikram Bhatt). Her last on-screen appearance was in the Amazon Prime Video series Four More Shots Please!, created by Rangita Pritish Nandy.

In a recent conversation with indianexpress.com, Ray spoke about her deep-rooted interest in the many art forms, how she plans to promote them on a global scale, along with her experience with motherhood, fitness, fashion.