There is something about the 2018 Coke Studio rendition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem, popularly known as ‘Hum Dekhenge’, that is alarming. We’ve all heard or at least caught snatches of Iqbal Bano’s incredibly famous 1986 version, and realize that this is meant to be a rousing anthem. We did hear it a lot back in 2007, as lawyers and journalists swarmed roads and streets and courthouses. Never before have we heard ‘Hum Dekhenge’ the way we heard it on Coke Studio. It sounds good, looks good, but it’s too sweet. The calories may just be empty ones, the bite almost nonexistent.

It’s alarming how pretty and sanitized it seems. Bottled for TV. Served on ice. Are we losing our revolutionary edge? There is nothing that hasn’t been said and written and analyzed about ‘Hum Dekhenge’ over the almost-40-year period since Faiz wrote it. It has a special place in the hearts and minds of every progressive thinker, doer, and catalyst. While in 1982 Faiz’s context was for one – or several, if we are to get very academic about it – situations, the words have resonated across time and space.

The most poignant part of the poem is its actual title: Wa yabaqaa waj-hu rabbik. Because we are so used to the colloquial title, we tend to forget what Faiz is telling us – God is all that will remain. So by proxy, God is all there is, setting up the stage and viewing it and judging it, and ultimate autonomy rests with Him.

Some – or most – of us, have listened to the poem sung by Iqbal Bano enough times to actually be desensitized to its essence. When we hear the audience at the Alhamra Stadium in Lahore chanting ‘inquilab zindabaad’, perhaps we are by turns frustrated and unmoved. Unmoved because we cannot – sitting in the 21^st century, with its own culture – understand what those people are so worked up about. Frustrated, because we have our own struggles, but they seem too first-world to even compare to the trials and tribulations of a 35-year-old Pakistan. So how can we own an anthem that just speaks to a time rife with tangible troubles that people were willing to die or be incarcerated for?

2018’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ seemed very much like Season 11 showrunners Ali Hamza and Zohaib Kazi’s attempt at bringing the spirit into the new millennium. The music – though composed through a variety of eastern and western instruments – is too modern. The poem has been reduced to a singalong rather than the chant. And why is everyone so happy?

“You know that Iqbal Bano version – the one we celebrate – is actually a bootleg,” says Zohaib Kazi. “It was smuggled out by an individual on a cigarette break, and that one little thing, that intelligent rebellion, it gave us the version we know and love.”

Kazi’s anecdote is a good in, into the method to his Ali Hamza’s approach to ‘Hum Dekhenge’, and what they attempted to achieve with Coke Studio S11.

“I found a lack of [local] references for myself – this was my identity crisis,” says Kazi – who aimed to give kids a local superhero to look up to in his graphic novel/conceptual album Ismail Ka Urdu Sheher in 2015.

“Things had taken a very Bollywood turn, a very filmi one, and that’s just not authentic; we are not filmi people, because we don’t have a film industry! But what we do have – and my generation has grown up on Vital Signs and Junoon – is music. And Sunehray Din.”

‘Hum Dekhenge’ may just leave younger audiences frustrated and unmoved. Unmoved because we cannot understand what those people are so worked up about. Frustrated, because we have our own struggles, but they seem too first-world to even compare to the trials and tribulations of a 35-year-old Pakistan. 2018’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’, as imagined by the Kazi-Hamza team, may not have tinkered so much with the iconic melody, and may have excluded what is deemed to be an important verse, but it pulls no punches about what it is.

What Ali Hamza and Zohaib Kazi wanted to give and receive with ‘Hum Dekhenge’ was perhaps, a moment to take a breath. To take stock.

In the years since 1982 when Faiz first wrote Wa yabaqaa waj-hu rabbik, and 1986 when Iqbal Bano gave that memorable performance, Pakistan has come a long way.

We have seen a female Prime Minister. We have attended rock concerts and watched movies in theatres. We have moved on from fashion being an exotic hobby to establishing fashion weeks and having access to fashion. We have seen one ‘cooler’ channel competing with PTV, and then a boom of more licensed channels than a centipede could count, if centipedes counted.

We have also seen since then, the rise of not one, but three generations who have worked incessantly towards achieving what we can loosely dub as the Pakistani Dream.

For Gen X – kids growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s – Pakistan was a wholly different place. To be super-cliched about it, this was the generation that wanted to do better materially. All the jokes about desis being engineers and doctors trace back to this generation. Then came the influx of MBAs. Then the IT professionals. Then the creatives. And now, we have circled all the way back to kids who want to do nothing but be instrumental in bringing about a revolution.

In this way, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ becomes more poignant than ever.

You see, while we spent decades churning out individuals who displayed academic and professional brilliance, we may just have forced them to grow up with values that could have stifled their own voice. These are the generations, including millennials on the older side of the spectrum, who did not dare to question what was ‘done’ or ‘not done’.

So we do have a couple of generations in here who have had to compromise on their physical or mental vulnerabilities, their gender or sexual identities, or at the very least, their social and religious proclivities.

2018’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’, as imagined by the Kazi-Hamza team, may not have tinkered so much with the iconic melody, and may have excluded what is deemed to be an important verse, but it pulls no punches about what it is. In Zohaib Kazi’s words, “that entire season, beginning with ‘Hum Dekhenge’ is remembering a moment we could not speak, and here we are, hacking into a corporate system, and raising our voice.”

“Hamari rebellion tu bilkul khuli saamne thi,” says Kazi. “We included a lot of Urdu titles, to celebrate our language, which is ever-evolving. We did all these little things, like the titling, or the Kashmiri song we did with Altaf Mir, which is a whole other story – but we did what we did, never caving into pressures of what we should do, whom we should include.”

While some messages the duo wanted to put across are stark: the placement of the artists who sing the lines, “jo mein bhi hoon aur tum bhi ho”, some are more subtle.

For instance, the song is opened by Shamu Bai, a bhajan singer from Sindh, and Ariana and Armina from the Kalash region of Pakistan. It ends with Mangal, Darahaan and Shayaan from Balochistan.

“You will notice they don’t sing,” says Kazi. “We did not style them, nor did we ask them to sit in any specific way. But that’s the note we wanted to close on.”

When Kazi speaks of being subversive, he simply means he is just nudging people, songs, and cultures into a mainstream where they have never been before. And this is why ‘Hum Dekhenge’ is indeed the anthem of the current decade we are witnessing in Pakistan.

We are no longer a nation struggling to achieve democracy. We are no longer trying to find scraps of entertainment on television. We have the internet and the (relative) freedom to use it. Yes, we may still be facing basic infrastructural failures, and hunger, poverty and employment are still massive issues. We still struggle with how women and religious, ethnic or gender and sexual minorities are perceived. But just the fact that the video for this one song, created for a popular mass-media platform represented talents from marginalized or underserved communities, is gut-wrenchingly heartwarming.

Kazi explains it as trying to establish a basepoint of neutrality. He describes the track as, “not anti-establishment or anti-Imran-Khan, but anti-neutral order.”

And as with any other rendition of Wa yabaqaa waj-hu rabbik, this version places the people above the power too. If you give the video a watch again, you will notice how unlike its season-opening predecessors, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ features its artists standing above the camera, looking straight into it.

“We just wanted to say,” Kazi explains, “‘we are the people; we will always look for and know when someone tries to control us. The people will always be looking at you and watching you’.”

For Zohaib Kazi, or indeed for most of Pakistan’s younger population, since some of our struggles are somewhat resolved, we can pay attention to establishing guidelines for a neutral, inclusive, healthy mindset.

“I told Hamza a day before the season launched,” Kazi recalls, “‘If we pull this off, if we do this right, hit the right chords, we may just be able to reignite the spirit of the normal Pakistani person.”

‘Hum Dekhenge’ may have been Faiz’s reaction to the various political dramas playing out globally in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but the power of its words is undeniable, as is the relevance that has echoed across the decades and generations, embracing along the way every new concern and struggle of every time.