Ai Mon Jabe Madina: Three Cities, One Ramadan, and a Song I Almost Didn't Sing

Ai Mon Jabe Madina is one of those projects I still call a dream project, even now. We shot it across three different locations — Cox's Bazar, Gazipur, and Rangpur — which is more traveling than I'd done for any single release before or since.

What made it harder was the timing: we shot during Ramadan, while fasting. Standing under the sun for hours between takes, with no water in reach, tests you in a way a normal shoot never does. Ismail bhai, who directed the video, pushed through all of it with us and made sure every location actually looked the way it needed to.

Tanjim Reza handled the music direction, and by that point we'd already built enough trust in each other's instincts that the process felt less like a negotiation and more like two people finishing each other's sentences.

The part of this story people don't know: the song wasn't written for me. Omar Bin Yasin wrote it with the intention of singing it himself. At some point he decided to hand it over to me instead. I still think about that — being trusted with something someone else had written for their own voice. It's part of why this one means more to me than most.