Hey Rockstars,
The following post is about Mohit Suri’s 2025 film Saiyaara. If you’ve seen it, or any of his other films (like Aashiqui 2, oof.), you already know the emotional gravity his stories can carry. This post gets into some of the movie’s most important scenes, so: spoilers ahead!
For those of you who haven’t seen this movie, it’s a 2025 film about Krish Kapoor, an ambitious, volatile musician, and Vaani Batra, a gifted writer recovering from heartbreak. The two meet at a music studio and unexpectedly fall in love just as Krish’s career begins to take off. But their life together is upended when Vaani is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and begins losing her memory. Krish and Vaani write the song Saiyaara together, and she tells him that whenever he sings it, she’ll remember him and their love for each other. Eventually, believing that her illness will hold Krish back from the success and life he has dreamed of, Vaani runs away. Krish searches desperately for her and, when he cannot find her, begins performing Saiyaara at every concert on his tour, hoping that wherever she is, she will hear it and remember him. The movie becomes as much about memory and absence as romance: what it means to love someone you cannot reach, to keep searching without knowing whether they are still searching for you, and to hold onto someone even when memory, distance, and time are pulling you apart.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the way Krish Kapoor looks for Vaani Batra in Saiyaara.
When Vaani disappears, he searches for her in all the places he expects her to be: with her parents, in the places where they created memories together, in her safe places… and of course has no luck. He goes looking for some trace of her, some clue that might tell him where she is. But eventually there are no more obvious places to look, and Vaani is still gone.
Yet, Krish doesn’t stop looking; the search just changes shape.
Before Vaani leaves, she and Krish write a song together. They call it Saiyaara. It is a song steeped in longing: for someone who feels impossibly far away and somehow still close enough to live inside you; for the person whose name you keep calling even when they cannot answer. It is about distance without detachment, about circumstances changing while love stubbornly does not. And Vaani, whose early-onset Alzheimer’s has already begun making her own memories unreliable, tells Krish that whenever he sings it, she will remember him.
Then she disappears.
The first time we see Krish preparing to perform Saiyaara after Vaani is gone, he is making his way through a crowd outside the venue when he hears someone call his name. The voice sounds exactly like Vaani and he pauses to look at the woman.
For a moment, he thinks it is her… It isn’t.
He keeps walking in slow motion towards the stadium as the music crescendos past thousands of screaming fans as he gets on the stage – a single mic in the front waiting for him.
The music stops. The stadium is quiet in anticipation. He takes a breath.
And he sings. Saiyaara.
The second he begins, the fans start cheering for him, and he’s unphased, just singing the song of his love while tears fill his eyes.
He pauses to look at the audience and sees Vaani. Without a moment’s hesitation, he jumps off the stage towards her because for one breathless moment, the person he has been searching for is standing right there.
There is something almost primal about that kind of recognition. When you have missed someone for long enough, the possibility of seeing them again doesn’t always arrive first as a thought. Your body gets there before you do. Your eyes find them. Something inside you moves toward them.
There you are.
Except he makes his way into the crowd and realizes it isn’t her.
The movie then flashes through different cities where Krish is singing Saiyaara on stage all while he remembers moments with Vaani in the height of their bliss.
The names of cities flash across the screen: Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi, Kolkata. Each a different place, a different stage, a different crowd, the same song, Krish carrying the same longing into every one.
Another night of sending the same song out into the world, hoping it might somehow find the one person it was written with.
The movie does not let his hope exist as one grand romantic gesture. It makes us watch him repeat it. Again and again, Krish reaches the end of Saiyaara without Vaani appearing. Again and again, he goes somewhere else and sings it anyway.
All Krish has is longing, and the small possibility that somewhere, somehow, Vaani is still in the world. So he leaves room for her. Again.
At one of those concerts, something changes.
Krish is singing Saiyaara when the crowd begins singing with him. Eventually, he stops.
They don’t. He watches thousands of people keep going, carrying the song back to the person who has spent all this time sending it out into the world. Krish stands onstage and listens.
The song he wrote with Vaani has become bigger than either of them. It has traveled through cities they never visited together and found its way into the mouths of people they will never know. The rockstar who once wanted everyone to know his name is now standing in front of thousands of people who do.
Everyone in the stadium is looking at him. He is still looking for her.
There is something almost unbearable about watching a song meant to reach one person become known by everyone else. The whole world seems to have heard him calling for her. He still doesn’t know if she has.
There is a particular kind of love in continuing to hold someone’s place when they aren’t there.
Not because you know they are coming back. You don’t. And not because you stop living until they do. Life is strangely capable of continuing around heartbreak.
You continue going to work, you see your friends, you make plans for the next weekend, you go to dinner and laugh until your stomach hurts, and you visit beautiful places and are genuinely grateful to be there. There are good days. There can even be very happy ones. But moving forward and forgetting are not the same thing. Sometimes life simply grows around an absence.
And somewhere underneath all that living, there remains a quiet orientation toward the person who isn’t there, wishing they were.
Maybe that is what yearning is. Not merely missing someone, but remaining turned toward them. Your eyes still search; some part of you still listens. The possibility of them remains alive enough that a familiar silhouette can rearrange your whole body before you have time to remind yourself that it probably isn’t them.
There is vulnerability in loving someone who is absent because you know exactly what their absence has done to you and almost nothing about what yours has done to them.
You know that you still think about them, but you don’t know if they think about you.
You know that you look for them, but you don’t know if they ever look for you.
You know that, despite everything, some part of you is still holding their place, but you have no way of knowing whether they are holding yours.
And I think that uncertainty may be heavier than the missing itself.
Because beneath I miss you is another, much more frightening question: Do you miss me too?
The movie continues and Krish is sitting on a plane while a news report is going on in the background about his stardom, how Krish is a fan favorite, and how he is soon going to be performing at Wembley stadium.
After all those cities, all those crowds, all those wrong faces, the world finally gives Krish something back.
Krish is sitting in the bleachers at Wembley stadium as his manager and the AV crew are down by the stage, preparing for another concert. To promote Saiyaara, people all around the world have submitted videos of themselves singing the song, for the opportunity to sing Saiyaara with Krish on stage (and have their own stardom). The videos are playing on the enormous screen behind the stage.
One of them comes from Himachal. A woman is singing.
And somewhere in the background, almost incidental to the frame, is someone else.
Krish’s manager notices her. He tells the AV man to pause the video and zoom in.
The woman in the background is sitting with her head resting against her folded arms. Most of her face is hidden and all you can really see are her eyes.
Krish is sitting in the bleachers when he sees them, but he immediately knows.
Before he even knows what he’s doing, he stands and starts running.
Down the bleachers, toward the stage, toward the enormous screen where the eyes he has been searching for in crowd after crowd are suddenly looking back at him.
Vaani.
Alive; Listening to Saiyaara; Crying.
And suddenly, after all this time, Krish knows something he could not have known from any stage in any city.
He wasn’t carrying this alone.
And yet, she still stayed away.
Not because she had forgotten what they were to each other or because the distance had made loving him easier. Vaani had left because she believed loving Krish meant releasing him from the life she feared her illness would give him. While he has been sending their song out into the world trying to find her, she has been somewhere in that same world loving him enough, in her mind, to remain hidden.
They have both been hurting, but all this time, they have been doing it apart and alone.
Krish reaches the stage.
On the screen above him, Vaani’s eyes fill an entire stadium.
He looks up at them.
And his knees give out.
There are of course more scenes in the movie that occur after this. But these 10 minutes have altered my brain chemistry. This is the scene I keep returning to.
I keep returning to the empty stadium; to Krish, small beneath that enormous screen; to Vaani’s eyes.
To the moment when a year of uncertainty finally gives way to relief.
Maybe that is why Saiyaara has stayed with me. It understands that longing is not simply the pain of someone being gone. It is the strange gravity of continuing to be pulled toward them in their absence. It is loving without access to the other person’s heart, carrying only your half of the story and wondering what, if anything, is happening in theirs.
There is a particular kind of love in continuing to hold someone’s place when they aren’t there.
And maybe there is another kind of tenderness in discovering that while you were holding theirs, they never really let go of yours.
For all those months, Krish had been asking the same question in a hundred different ways. In every place he searched. Every crowd he scanned. Every stranger he mistook for her. Every city he traveled to. Every time he stood on another stage and sang the same song again.
Are you still out there?
And then, one day, the whole stadium fills with her eyes.
There you are.
You’re probably thinking, “Sandhya, what the hell was that? Why was that so emotional?”
Sorry rockstars. So this past weekend I went to the Shreya Ghoshal concert and before she sang Saiyaara, she asked the entire audience to sing with her. And as all 7,000 attendees of her concert were singing Saiyaara with her, it reminded me of Krish. I have a tendency to overidentify with movies. My bad. Regardless, I’ve been enveloped by this emotion and I didn’t think I’d be able to move past it until I blogged about it.
So for that, thank you for indulging me, listen to the full song here, and I hope your life is filled with love, hope, relief, and comfort.
Until next time!
xo
Sandhya
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