That if I don’t work out as an independent singer-songwriter, I would do something in Bollywood then,” he says. “That time Bollywood was always plan B, kind of a thing, you know. One of them was ‘Mann Mera’, a soft-acoustic number, which established him as a singer-songwriter in the film industry, as well. In 2013, he wrote and sang two songs for the film ‘Table No. After the scratch with my voice went viral as ‘Emptiness’, I decided to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter in the world of independent music,” he says.īut despite the popularity, it wasn’t easy for Verma, since film music, and Bollywood, was dominating air play and all mediums which generated any sort of revenue for musicians. Before ‘Emptiness’, I always wanted to be a composer. So, a major change happened to me personally, then. “The good part from all that happened, and what I took away from that entire incident, was that people were loving my music and you know, after all, it was my voice at the end. Verma, in many ways, was one of the few musicians, who had unknowingly become, part of the rising new wave of independent music in India.
As a result, music which was independent, free from any interference of a record label or a corporate setup, started getting noticed and popular. ‘Emptiness’ was one of the many songs released in that time, when Internet was only still making its way into the upper-middle class households in Tier-1 cities in India, and youngsters, had only discovered the world of downloading content and, the fact that free music was literally just a click away.
I had no idea who cooked up the story or how it all happened,” he says. I was home, during holidays when I first got to know. “I didn’t know back then what story was going around, which is why people were listening to the song. The fictional story was that of Rohan Rathore, an IIT-Guwahati student, who wrote a final love song, 15 days before his death from cancer, for a girl who didn’t love him back. It was meant to be for an audio-visual project, which never took off, but some how leaked along with a story, which contributed immensly to the song’s virality, but, Verma claims, he had no part in it. The song, titled ‘Emptiness’ or 'Tune Mere Jaana Kabhi Na Jaana', was one of the first songs ever composed by Verma, while he was studying in college.