A wall in Asim Azhar’s home immediately catches the eye. It is covered completely with framed images of milestones in his life. They go all the way back to the kindergarten play in which he played a starring role before moving on to the concerts, fashion show appearances and Coke Studio (CS) trysts that have defined his short but successful career.
Inevitably, it is this wall that starts off my conversation with Asim. “My mother made this wall for me. All I did was WhatsApp her images that I felt could be framed. I was going through a low phase when I was wondering what I had managed to achieve in life. My mother thought that I needed these images on my wall to serve as a reminder.”
For someone so young — Asim just turned 22 — he has a lot to be proud of. “Coke Studio, of course, is a great opportunity for any Pakistani musician,” he points at the images of that all-too-familiar red and black podium, “and singing on the Bridal Couture Week catwalk was always on my bucket list. It’s as close as we can get in Pakistan to a Victoria’s Secret show format!” he laughs. There are pictures of him with family and with Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Bushra Ansari and Junaid Jamshed. There’s one of him at an awards show with Syra Shehroz. “She was my childhood crush and it was great to share the stage with her.” Considering that Syra’s hardly old, this is just a testament to how young Asim is!
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There are also plenty of images of him in concerts, his hand outstretched, leaning from the stage to touch fingers with a sea of fans. It’s very rock star-like — in fact, in the initial years of his career, Asim was infamously often referred to as Pakistan’s Justin Bieber. His career has grown since then and shedding off Bieber’s shadow, he is now simply Asim Azhar, one amongst the small motley crew of Pakistan’s rock stars.
What’s impressive is that he’s paved his way all on his own. When he was 16, Asim jump-started his career via YouTube. He then slowly proceeded to build his portfolio, singing covers of popular Western songs, creating his own videos and simply floating them out on social media. His official Facebook page initially only had about 2,000 followers. This fan-following has magnified over time and, in 2015, Asim got a call from Strings, inviting him to CS’s lofty platform. “I was, until this year, the youngest singer to be featured on Coke Studio,” Asim tells me. His duet with Momina Mustehsan in the ninth season of CS, Tera Woh Pyar, crossed 100 million views on YouTube. “Also, I am the fourth Pakistani to hit this record,” he continues.
It almost seems too easy, I tell him, like a fairytale where he just swooped in via the internet and attained instant stardom. “It wasn’t easy,” he corrects me. “I sometimes hear the rumour that my career has benefitted from nepotism. It baffles me because both my parents are simple, hardworking people. My father’s been a musician for the past 50 years and is the most low-profile man, while my mother has only recently become established as a TV artist. They are no channel owners or people with massive political connections. I have put in a lot of hard work into my career. For about three years, I was just spending money on music that I would put out on the net and earn nothing back from it. And yes, I managed to get popular with a niche, mostly female, crowd but there were many more people who hated me and they were very vocal about it.”