Musician Sargam Vaish says Balaji Motion Pictures' team sat down with him within a day of his copyright claim, though nobody can yet explain how the recording landed in the trailer.
Three days before The Vvaan: Force Of The Forrest hits theatres, its makers have quietly cleared up a copyright headache that could have followed the film to release day. Balaji Motion Pictures has acquired the sync rights to a recording of 'Aigiri Nandini' after musician Sargam Vaish said his master version had turned up in the trailer without his sign-off.
Vaish went public on September 20, posting on Instagram that the track was his own creation, originally recorded for a Ram Gopal Varma film years ago. He says he still holds the master rights to it. So when he heard it playing under scenes of the Sidharth Malhotra-starrer's trailer, he wasn't pleased. "No one had approached me for an NOC or permission," he said.
What happened next moved fast, at least by Bollywood dispute standards. Within a day of the Instagram post, executives and lawyers from Ektaa R Kapoor's production house sat down with Vaish. That meeting happened on the evening of September 21, and the outcome was a straightforward one: Balaji took the sync rights for the recording rather than let the matter drag.
A quick fix, an open question
Vaish, for his part, sounds satisfied with how it went. "Balaji's executives and lawyers have been cooperative. We met them today. They were kind and apologetic, even though they didn't cause it," he told Mid-Day, adding that he's "grateful" the issue got sorted without much fuss.
But the bigger question, how his recording ended up with The Vvaan team in the first place, is still unanswered. Vaish says he and the production house are trying to trace the leak, and as of now, nobody's naming a source. That's the part worth watching. A rights deal closes the immediate problem. It doesn't tell you who pulled a master recording meant for an old Ram Gopal Varma project and handed it, or sold it, into a trailer for a film releasing more than a decade later.
The Vvaan: Force Of The Forrest is directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra and stars Sidharth Malhotra, with the film also carrying the recently released 'Thummak Thummak' track featuring Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia. The film opens September 25, and with the rights now settled, there's nothing on paper stopping that date.
What happens to the leak inquiry, and whether it turns up a name, is the loose thread here. For now, Balaji has bought its way out of a trailer-day mess with three days to spare. Whether that's the end of it depends on what Vaish and the makers find when they go looking for how the track actually got out.
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