Sameer, the lyricist behind decades of Hindi film hits, has a blunt diagnosis for what's wrong with film music today: nobody pitches a story anymore, they just ask for a hit song.

Talking to trade analyst Komal Nahta, Sameer said that when he wrote for Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998, Karan Johar sat him down for six and a half hours and walked him through everything, down to the colour of Kajol's saree and Shah Rukh Khan's suit. That kind of granular narration, he said, is what let a song find its exact place inside a story. Now, according to Sameer, producers skip the story altogether and simply ask him to hand over "koi hit gaana", as if lyricists carry ready-made hits and flops around in their pocket.

His larger complaint runs wider than nostalgia for one film. Sameer told Nahta that Hindi film songs have lost their thehrav, their stillness and weight, because society itself has lost emotional depth and cinema only mirrors what it sees. He brought OTT into it too, accusing digital platforms of leaning on sex and violence over everything else, and questioned how long audiences would keep watching that.

Then there's the money side. Sameer traced the shift to the point when corporate studios entered production and, in his telling, started chasing proposals instead of chasing films. Once that happened, he said, music became an afterthought, a blank to be filled rather than a scene to be scored. "Yahaan kuch nahin hai toh gaana aise hi daal do," is how he put it, more or less accusing producers of stuffing songs in wherever a script runs dry.

He also flagged something structural. Films now credit as many as 12 music directors and 18 songwriters on a single soundtrack, Sameer said, which guarantees chaos rather than craft. Nobody is coordinating who has written what, in his view, and the result is music with no spine. He was careful to add that he doesn't think today's lyricists lack talent. He just thinks nobody is handing them the freedom, or the narration, to do the job.

It isn't a new complaint from the industry's older guard, but Sameer's version comes with specifics: a six-and-a-half-hour Karan Johar briefing as the old benchmark, and a producer's shrug as its modern replacement. Whether any director sits a lyricist down for that long again is, going by Sameer's account, not something Bollywood seems in any hurry to find out.