'Pachtaoge' director reacts to comparisons with Beyonce's song

Director Rajit Dev of the "Pachtaoge" music video says that though they took inspiration from the Beyonce video, the lighting, framing and choreography of their video is original.

"While creating this with Nora we got inspirations from Beyonce, Zayn Malik, Madonna, Billie Eilish and many more. We wanted to emulate their work aesthetics and bring those visuals to life in our music videos too," claimed Rajit.

"The idea of creating a white outfit was to depict purity and divinity. We loved what Beyonce did with her dancers in one of her videos and we brought that together with our idea of white outfit. It helped us tell the story better. However, our DOP lighting, framing and choreography are original which is something to be celebrated," he added.

"Pachtaoge", the original track, had released last year and featured Vicky Kaushal and Nora in its video. However, the new video was solely filmed on Nora.

In the video, Nora dons two different outfits. First, a white gown, which depicts the innocence and purity with which a girl enters into a relationship, then a sheer black outfit, which portrays anger, hatred and disappointment after she faces betrayal.

Rajit, a choreographer by profession, admitted that the kind of work international artistes do is something to take inspiration from.

"Being a choreographer I'm always taking inspirations from hip-hop, contemporary and other dance forms which comes from the west. We learn it from them. Our goal was to bring something new into our industry and to our audience and the style and tone which we wanted our video to be like is exactly how all of their videos are. It helped us convey our concept better in the symbolic interpretation style," he said.

"The black outfit was inspired by 'Black Swan'. This iconic look was perfect for this particular sequence in the music video and it depicted the emotions perfectly. Paying homage is great and being able to spread these ideas and techniques into India is a positive thing, and I believe Nora is a great artist to embody this style and zone into the Indian music videos. She pulls it off well," Rajit said.

He added: "We as artistes look up to every artiste who inspire us in many ways. I want to take risk and explore and make more videos in that genre and will continue to do so. People need to change their attitude and stop spreading hate and negativity."

"Pachtaoge" female version has received over 14 million views on YouTube.