Exclusive! Mukhbir: The Story of a Spy: Ankit Tiwari and Abhishek Nailwal on creating soulful tracks for the espionage drama

Mukhbir: The Story of a Spy starring Zain Khan Durrani was released a couple of weeks ago and gathered praise from all over the country. Not only the performances of the ace actors but the story, screenplay as well as songs of the show have also been applauded by the audience. 

In a recent chat with OTTplay, writer-producer Vaibhav Modi spoke about his vision to create the espionage show along with the whole team. Famous singer-composer Ankit Tiwari and music composer Abhishek Nailwal also shared their thought process and inspiration behind creating shooting tracks and soulful background scores. Excerpts:

Ankit has sung and composed one of the most soothing tracks named Vatana Ve for the show. When asked about his thought process behind the song, the singer shared, "All credit goes to the team for their narration. I tried to create the song as they wanted. It is patriotic and at the same time, it's the beat that makes it beautiful. Anurag (Bhumiya) has written it. So we discussed a lot among the team and went with the correct vision."

When asked the same to Abhishek on creatic such encapsulating background sounds and emotional tracks for the series, the music composer said, "It was a great journey for me. All the members of the team from the musicians to the writer and director are invested in the project as well as easygoing with each other. They gave me an open playground and told me to go for it. They told me to create the background music for the show according to my feelings about it. So, it's a great feeling for any composer and musician."

"If we talk about the songs then we as a team tried to capture the era of the 1960s. The type of Gazals, songs and way of singing used to be at that time, we kept our focus on that. It's very rare to have an opportunity to create music like this. So, I had a lot of fun," he added.

Meanwhile, talking about the show and his vision about it, Vaibhav shared, "I have done the additional screenplay, story and lyrics in the show. Before me, there have been a few writers, who developed the show. As the base material was a book (The 2011 book Mission to Kashmir: An Intelligent Agent in Pakistan by Maloy Krishna Dhar) and there have been a lot of adaptations done on it. Our story has also been inspired by that."

"The important thing was that an espionage drama, with taking India-Pakistan on the canvas was our aim. My most contribution to the project has been towards the end of the show. I gave a little bit of prompt objective. I had to give words to those times and moments as a lyricist and dialogue writer and as one of the producers I had to execute them as well. So there's when the fun as well as the challenge began. And that's how it all came together," the writer-producer added.

Mukhbir: The Story of a Spy, which also stars Prakash Raj and Adil Hussain in pivotal roles, is available to stream on ZEE5.