Plagiarizing music is not uncommon in Bollywood. Many Bollywood music composers have earlier been accused of using the original creations of other talented composers.
Recently famous Pakistani singer and music composer Shuja Haider lashed out at an Indian music director for ripping off his creation. Shuja claimed that the Indian song “Piya re Piya” is a copied version of his song “Baaghi”.
The music composer, Shuja Haider, called out the Indian music directors Yasser Desai and Rashid Khan on his microblogging site to vent it out, he wrote, “Indian Music directors Yasser Desai and Rashid Khan copied my original song Baghi.” The composer also expressed, “and I am not proud of it. Absolutely not,” before anybody asks him to take in his stride.
Earlier in an interview to a leading daily, the Shuja Haider stated about the incident, “They’ve definitely copied the song,” and continued, “They’ve copied the entire verse. I’m going to look into how to pursue this further because these people have started copying [Pakistani content] a lot. They not only copy melodies, they copy lyrics as well. Look at Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s work. They’ve gone too far; they are copying our content whenever they please and there’s no one to say anything to them. I definitely feel something should be done about this.”
Shuja Haider also hinted about taking a legal step, “I am going to talk to my lawyer. I am going to talk to people who can help me with this. I don’t think I should take it lightly. If you look at the credits, the composer of the song is written as Rashid Khan. This is a criminal act. They don’t even give due credit. If you’d framed the song as a cover and given credit, it would still be okay.”
Piya re Piya is sung by Desai and it was released on YouTube on February 12. In the video description, the composition credit has been given to Rashid Khan. On the other hand, Shuja’s song Baaghi from 2017 sounded strikingly similar to Piya Re Piya.
Listen to them here.
