Lisa Ray reveals she cringes inwardly everytime Afreen Afreen plays: Felt uncomfortable sharing the video

Those who grew up in the 90s would remember the iconic song Afreen Afreen. Sung by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the music video featured Lisa Ray and Himanshu Malik. Ray was a well-known model when the music video came out and it had her walking around a desert with Khan's voice singing the famous song. The song made her an overnight star and many to date associate her with the song.

Now almost three decades later, Lisa Ray has opened up about working on the music video and admitted that she felt uncomfortable celebrating the video's success.

In a long post on Instagram, Ray wrote, "I have to confess I have felt uncomfortable sharing or celebrating the #AfreenAfreen breakthrough video of the 90s and iconic song by maestro #nusratfatehalikhan because I was so strongly identified with it. The song still often plays on cue for events where I am invited to speak of other aspects of my life experience and I inwardly cringe while offering a polite smile.

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.

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The song came out in the mid-1990s when IndiPop and fusion music wave was high in Indian and non-film music videos gained immense popularity. The song 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.

Lisa Ray was born in Toronto to a Bengali father and a Polish mother. She ruled the Indian advertisement and modelling world in the 1990s and 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 opposite Aftab Shivdasani. Her last on-screen appearance was in the Amazon Prime Video series Four More Shots Please!, created by Rangita Pritish Nandy.