I went into this conversation expecting a technical breakdown — key changes, instrument choices, the usual composer-talk. What I actually got was one word, repeated back to me so many times it started to feel less like an answer and more like a philosophy. Nuance. That was it. That was the whole method — and it's a method that belongs equally to two people, not one.

Ashish Chatterjee is the name most people will see first, but he was clear on this point before we'd even gotten into the scenes: his teammate Souvik built this score alongside him, start to finish, with equal creative weight on every decision that follows. So consider this less a profile of a composer and more a profile of a partnership — one that happens to answer every hard question the exact same way.

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that answer. You go into a conversation with a composer expecting the mechanics — key changes, instrument choices, the decisions that make a score work. But the longer I sat with the two scenes he walked me through, the more I understood that “nuance” wasn’t him avoiding the question. It was the actual, literal answer. He just made me go looking for it myself, buried inside the score.

The film they're scoring, directed by Aagnik Pandey, is about political identity crisis in youth — a subject that, on the surface, sounds like a panel discussion, not a movie. But that's the trick of it. The politics is never really the point. The point is a kid, somewhere between childhood and conviction, trying to figure out what he actually believes versus what he's been handed. And Ashish and Souvik's job was to make you feel that gap without a single word of dialogue doing the work for them.

SCENE ONE

The Temple, and the Kid Who Accidentally Has an Epiphany

The first scene we talked about is a kid in a temple — chants, mantras, a pooja in full swing — and somewhere in the middle of all that ritual noise, he has what can only be described as a psychedelic epiphany. Not a religious one, necessarily. Bigger than that. The kind where you suddenly feel like a very small, very connected part of something enormous.

Their approach was to start the scene almost monotonous — the actual, textured sound of a temple, chants and bells sitting exactly where you'd expect them. Nothing dramatic. And then, so gradually you can't point to the exact second it happens, it bends. The same chants and mantras start dissolving into a psychedelic trance, and by the time you notice the shift, you're already inside it. The transition is the emotion. They're not scoring the epiphany after it happens — they're making you have it in real time, alongside the kid.

"How do you find depth in an emotion where, on paper, there shouldn't be any room for it?" Their answer, every time, was the same word: nuance.

That's the part that confused us initially. Nuance felt like a non-answer to a very specific craft question. But watch the scene again with that word in mind and it clicks — the nuance isn't a single clever choice, it's the sheer number of tiny, deliberate ones stacked on top of each other. Which chant sits loudest. Which frequency of bell survives the transition and which one gets swallowed by the trance underneath it. It's not one trick. It's fifty small ones, none of which you're supposed to consciously clock — and getting all fifty right is exactly the kind of thing that takes two people fully invested, not one person delegating.

SCENE TWO

A Taxi, a Political Argument, and a Plucked String Doing All the Talking

The second scene is smaller in scale but, in some ways, harder to pull off — a boy in a taxi, getting into a political debate with the driver, getting more and more frustrated as it goes. There's no temple, no ritual, no obvious "big" moment to score around. Just two people talking and one of them slowly losing his patience.

Their instinct was to start with something almost embarrassingly simple: a single plucked string. And then they build — not louder, necessarily, but denser, layering the plucking until it stops sounding like an instrument and starts sounding like a nervous system. By the end of the scene, that one plucked line has become a genuinely detailed immersion into what frustration actually feels like from the inside — the kind of scoring choice that works precisely because it never announces itself.

It's also where you start hearing the score's bigger idea. Ashish and Souvik don't stay inside a single musical tradition to make their point — across the film, they combine Indian instrumentation with music from well outside the expected palette, harmonium sitting next to Ukrainian and Russian musical influences, Indian classical touching genuinely global textures. On a film about a kid caught between an inherited identity and a self-made one, that blend isn't decoration. It's the argument, played on instruments instead of said out loud.

THE ACTUAL TAKEAWAY

Nuance Isn't a Vibe. It's a Method — Built by Two People, Not One.

Nuance Isn't a Vibe. It's a Method. Here's the thing about a one-word answer repeated enough times: eventually you stop hearing it as evasive and start hearing it as a discipline. “Nuance” isn't Ashish being cagey about his process — it's the most honest description of it. Every emotional beat in this film that could have been played as one big, obvious swell instead gets built from a dozen small, contradictory, carefully unresolved choices. The chants that don't fully disappear. The pluck that never quite explodes. The harmonium that sits next to instruments it technically shouldn't. Which, if you think about it, is a genuinely fitting way to score a film about political identity crisis in youth — a subject that has never once been solved by a single loud, obvious answer, and never will be. It gets solved, if it gets solved at all, in the nuance. Ashish just happened to find a way to make you hear that, instead of simply making you live it. This is the first of two pieces on the people behind this film — next up, a conversation with director Aagnik Pandey on building a political identity crisis you can actually sit inside of.

This is the first of two pieces on the people behind this film — next up, a conversation with director Aagnik Pandey on building a political identity crisis you can actually sit inside of.