Anurag Mishra had expected to record a finished song. When he, co-lyricist Alok and producer Aditya went to meet Shreya Ghoshal, they walked in as “typical fanboys,” carrying printed copies of the lyrics. She hugged everyone, put them at ease, and then said she wanted a new antara.
Mishra asked how long they had. “Ma’am placed her hand over my shoulder and said, ‘Anurag, I don’t have the whole day. Let’s do it in two or three hours,’” he recalls. Alok went off to write; by Mishra’s account, he couldn’t take the pressure. He worked out melodies on his guitar while she watched. “We didn’t compose one antara, we composed four antaras in the next three hours,” he says. He says he enjoyed every minute of it.
The song that came out of that room, “Bairi Piya,” was released on 25 September. Shreya Ghoshal has been singing it on tour and promoting it through press visits, and Mishra, who composed it and co-wrote the lyrics, says his phone has been hot ever since. “I didn’t expect that my phone would be hot,” he tells Rest in Beats. “I have to take notifications out of the window.” Fan pages dedicated to her, a hundred or more by his guess, repost his posts about the song, and he no longer has to engage for them to spread. In our conversation, almost every answer, whatever I ask, finds its way back to her, including the ones about his parents and about cricket.
He says he is the same artist as before. “It’s not like the song released on 25th September and I changed overnight,” he says. “I’m the same artist. But suddenly it got exposed to a lot of people.” What has changed is who calls. More singers have approached him with projects since the release, and a credit beside her name has added credibility. Before the release of “Bairi Piya,” his one worry was that Shreya Ghoshal’s name “can easily eat other artists’ identity.” What he cares about is that the people behind the song are visible next to her. He wants people to know, he says, “who are the people behind the song rather than it’s just Shreya Ghoshal.”
None of it was planned for her. In July 2025, a production house asked Mishra for five demos, and he wrote them in a week. “Bairi Piya” was one of them. For a month he heard nothing, and when he followed up, he learned all five had been turned down. “You have to be very thick or open to rejections,” he says, “because you self-reject yourself while making a song.”
He pitched the songs to female singers he knew next, for independent release, and each had a reason to pass: prior commitments, or no agreement on some aspect of the deal. “For any random reason, these songs were not working out,” he says. He tells this part without bitterness, as a list of ordinary scheduling and budget problems.
So he took a bet and sent “Bairi Piya” to Soumyadeep, a musician he had known for three or four years, who also happens to be Shreya Ghoshal’s brother. The two had once talked about working together, but it never happened after Soumyadeep moved to the US. Soumyadeep’s reply was short. He asked Mishra to mail it so he could forward it. Two weeks later an unfamiliar number rang him, and he cut the call, not knowing it was Shreya Ghoshal’s manager.
The title had been a casual choice. Alok pointed out that “Bairi Piya” was already a song, and neither of them expected Shreya Ghoshal to sing this one. She later told them the original was the first song she ever recorded. For Mishra, Devdas was the first film he ever saw in a theatre. Now, he has her autograph. “That’s why you can’t plan your breakthroughs, I feel,” he says. “This was meant for her and this landed.”
Mishra knows she could have had her pick of composers. “Shreya Ghoshal has exposure to the biggest composers, A.R. Rahman, Pritam, Vishal-Shekhar, Salim-Sulaiman,” he says. “For her to select ‘Bairi Piya’ as probably one of her biggest indie releases, I think that is the win for the song.”
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
Partway through our conversation, I ask Mishra if he can play me an initial version of “Bairi Piya” and he does. It was a version almost nobody has heard. It’s a December 2025 demo, a drum and bass track with a pop pulse, sung by his friend Hansika Pareek. When the first few seconds play, he stops to point out that the “bai bai bairi” is still her voice in the version that is out on streaming platforms.
The finished track sounds like a different song. Sitar and tabla carry it, the first half builds slowly, and the end opens to a big orchestral outro. Keshav Tyohar joined later as an additional producer at Shreya Ghoshal’s suggestion, and the outro was her idea. She told Mishra, half joking, that it takes a year to make a song. “I’m like, please, I’m making one song in one year with you,” he says. “I can live with that.”
She dubbed the song in forty to forty-five minutes, and Mishra says sixty to seventy percent of the final vocals come from that first session. With the lyrics rewritten, she asked him to WhatsApp her the new ones, and he admitted he didn’t have her number. She told him she already did, saved from the email signature on the message he sent Soumyadeep. “I’m just thinking, ma’am typed ‘Anurag Mishra’ and saved my number,” he says. In every story he tells about her, the detail he lingers on is something she didn’t have to do.
Anurag grew up in Rourkela, Odisha, in what he calls a conservative middle-class family, and describes himself as a somewhat under-confident child who was good at studies and cricket. He went to NIT Rourkela, worked at Tata Steel for two years, then got into IIM Indore. On the second day there, he took a karaoke track to talent night. The track failed to play and the crowd threw tomatoes, shoes and eggs. The college music club rejected him twice, before he won a surprise contest that put him on stage at an alumni event, where he received a standing ovation. “If you ask me what the top three days that changed my life are, that was one day,” he says. In every story he tells about her, the detail he lingers on is something she didn’t have to do. It’s a pattern that comes back in the “Bairi Piya” story: a public failure, a couple of rejections, then a small opening he takes.
In 2015, when he moved to Mumbai for a job, he said he had the opportunity to decide whether cricket or music would be his second career. He chose music. He doesn’t run the job down: it's a graduate program that sent him to three countries in the span of two years. “I don’t curse my job, because I really liked it. It’s just that I had a different priority,” he says. For three years, he posted covers on YouTube, with a set schedule: five days of work, and two days of music. He put up about 50 covers, and they’re still on his channel, Anurag Mishra Music, which has around 13,000 subscribers. He doesn’t seem to be proud of a lot of it now. “I did what was best at that moment,” Mishra says. When people started recognising him as a cover artist, he decided that wasn’t the branding he wanted, and in 2018 he quit. His parents were worried and wanted proof, and so he showed them an Excel sheet. “Now obviously with Shreya Ghoshal, I think the coffin has been closed,” he says.
After quitting, he trained for two years under Ronkini Gupta, a classical musician who has since become, in his words, a guide, friend, sister and mother. Her advice, when the industry’s cruelty tempts you to turn cynical, was that “the best way to complain is to do.” He treats it as a rule: keep putting up a body of work, and your last work is your best work. Right now, by that rule, his best work is “Bairi Piya,” so the next one has to match it.
Photo: Credit name
His first album, Project Swa, started in 2019. “Swa means self,” he says, and the nine tracks, including “Chal Pada,” “Yaadon” and “Mumbai,” each take a different emotion of the self. He conceived it, but Mishra says, at that point, he was “just a singer,” so he hired a team, and sat in on their sessions to learn how a song gets made. Four albums followed: Rang, Behad, Lifafe and Naazuk. From the second album on, the biggest change was that he started writing and composing for himself. When he hires a lyricist now, he says, it’s because he likes the person’s work, not because he can’t write.
Being secure, Mishra says, is “a very important part of being an artist.” He put Alok’s contribution to “Bairi Piya” on record, having said Alok wrote about seventy percent of the song. “I wrote the first three lines, I think, and then Alok came in and took over and made it beautiful,” he says. It’s a long way from the artist who, by his own account, once wouldn’t let anyone else touch a song. He has watched artists not get credits on tracks, and has been on the receiving end of it.
He doesn’t separate his own album from client work and composes about a song every day or two. “It’s still my baby, my project,” Mishra says and admits that this is one of his weaknesses. He listens for work, too. When someone asks for a specific genre, he studies it first. When a label sends vague notes, he asks for references. One of them once asked for a baraat song. He made an uptempo track, because that’s what you usually think is required, but two months later was told it needed to be emotional. “Tell me in music language what you want,” he says.
Some of the industry’s attention has come in smaller ways. Salim of Salim-Sulaiman reached out through Instagram about the track “Shukria,” a song Anurag wrote for Merchant Records and sung by Abhay Jodhpurkar, praising him about his writing and offering to work more together. Mishra says he couldn’t believe Salim had even heard it.
Photo: Courtesy of Artist
Outside the studio, he plays turf cricket two or three times a week, and played for his district in Odisha during engineering. He treats it as therapy, three hours without his phone, and as a check on himself. “You’re not bigger than the moment, you are not bigger than your team,” he says.
Mishra is now working on the sixth and seventh album. The sixth is a female-only record that we will write and compose, sung by female artists, including Hansika Pareek and Vidya Gopal. He sang every song on his five independent albums, and this is the first time he will be handing vocals over to someone else. The seventh will be pop with a club groove, “proper bangers,” he says. Both were next on the list before “Bairi Piya” happened.
He says the part he enjoys the most came long before any of this. “My high is when the song is being made, not when the responses start coming in. I enter a room, there’s nothing. When I come out of a room, a song has been made. That is magic for me.”
If you want to know him, Anurag says, listen to his independent music before his film and web-show work. His five albums are Projects Swa, Rang, Behad, Lifafe and Naazuk.
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Anurag Mishra
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Shreya Ghoshal
