As ‘Pasoori’ tops YouTube charts, creators say global journey ‘only beginning’ for Pakistani music

This screengrab, taken on December 27, 2022 from the music video of popular song Pasoori, released by Coke Studio Pakistan on February 7, 2022, shows Pakistani singers Ali Sethi and Shae Gill. (Photo courtesy: Coke Studio)
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Updated 27 December 2022
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As ‘Pasoori’ tops YouTube charts, creators say global journey ‘only beginning’ for Pakistani music

  • Punjabi-language song sung by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill was featured on Coke Studio Pakistan’s Season 14 this year
  • Since its release, track has crossed 475 million views on YouTube, coming 53rd on “global top music videos” list

KARACHI: The creators of the globally acclaimed Pakistani song ‘Pasoori,’ which made it to YouTube’s global music video charts last week, said on Tuesday the song’s success had proved that Pakistani music and content was "world class" and its journey to global success was "only beginning."

The Punjabi-language pop-folk song sung by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill was featured on Coke Studio Pakistan’s Season 14 this year. Since its release, the track has crossed 475 million views on YouTube and made it to 53rd spot on the “global top music videos” list on the website.

The song also topped Google's list of songs most hummed to search in 2022 and became the first Pakistani song to rank third on the Spotify’s Global Viral 50 list.

“I am sure everyone will have their own stories knitted from Pasoori’s ideology and narrative of love, liberation, transcending boundaries and communal oneness,” Coke Studio Season 14 producer Zulfiqar Jabbar Khan told Arab News on Tuesday, saying the song had “something that makes people feel ‘together’.”

“That unified emotion is very powerful. Songs that succeed on that level, they all achieve that power,” he said. "A song’s timelessness is in its ability to talk authentically to people. To not just a few people, but to communities, to ideologies, to individual sensitivities. To give people emotional threads of relatability.”

Coke Studio Pakistan manager, Zeeshan Sikandar, said the response to Pasoori had solidified the belief that Pakistani music and content was “world-class.”

“Pasoori’s narrative of transcending borders and boundaries has made it resonate with so many fans across the globe. The Coke Studio community is present in over 180 countries, and we believe it is this community that has helped us create this level of impact.”

“[With Coke Studio Season 14,] we aimed to showcase Pakistani music that is world-class,” Sikandar said, “and the response we received has made us realize we are onto something and that the journey is only beginning.”


‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

Updated 24 January 2026
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‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.

In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.

The film is by directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. (Supplied)

There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.

"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.

"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."

The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.

It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.

Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."

And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.

"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."