Explained : Obama’s Playlist, Pasayadan and India’s Moral Crisis and Its Impact

As 2025 drew to a close, news reports listing former United States President Barack Obama’s favourite books, films, and music of the year caught my attention.

Such lists typically play to galleries packed with supporters or fans while offering an insight into the celebrity’s predilections. For most readers, they seldom linger in the mind after a first hurried glance.

What caught my eye, however, was a song in his scroll of 30 favourites—both its title and the singer’s name are mononyms: Pasayadan and Ganavya. I confess that both words were unfamiliar to me until I read on.

The report described the rendering as a 13th-century Marathi prayer for universal brotherhood by a singer of Indian origin. One report intriguingly termed her “New York-born Tamil Nadu-raised”—is not the sequence usually in the reverse?—and noted that her songs were available on YouTube.

Curiosity, that trait journalists claim as their own, led me to open another tab. Soon YouTube had the singer crooning in a language I do not understand. The music, however, was riveting.

Her white robe stood in stark contrast to the video’s dark themes: visuals of a shadowy stream flowing past swaying reeds and deep forest trees, the camera lingering on sedentary creatures in water bodies.

Despite its sombre setting and timbre, the song was unmistakably devotional, bordering on the spiritual. I found it odd that despite being an agnostic when it comes to ethereal beings towards whom most turn in moments of crisis, the song held me captive.

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As it played in the background, I learnt that this was a modern rendering of the Pasayadan, the nine concluding verses of the Dnyaneshwari, composed by Sant Dnyaneshwar in 1290 CE. He was a 13th-century Marathi saint, poet and philosopher of the Nath tradition who wrote the Dnyaneshwari—a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita—at the age of 15 and entered samadhi at 21. The Pasayadan, which translates as “gift of divine grace”, is a prayer for the well-being of all humankind and for universal harmony. The context was fairly well known to innumerable people. I was, sadly, not among them.

Scholars quoted in a report written after Obama included the Pasayadan in his playlist, responded diversely. One contended that the prayer goes beyond notions of dharma, creed, and time, and surpasses even the Upanishadic concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—the Sanskrit phrase from the Maha Upanishad meaning “the world is one family”—an idea now deployed ad nauseam and projected as the primary tenet of today’s custodians of the state, a ploy, some argue, to veil their majoritarian inclination.

This piece, however, is not about the gaping void in my knowledge or about what Pasayadan conveys. What drew me to share this information is the notion of a prayer for universal welfare, happiness, security, and concord in a world consumed by collective selfishness.

With the greater part of the world trapped in strife and war, with people pursuing solely their personal interests or those of their community or nation, a hymn for universal peace is remarkable. It should become a collective aspiration.

India, and several other countries in the subcontinent, seldom witness more than rare examples of anyone speaking of collective well-being—except, of course, when it serves as political rhetoric. What we see instead at every forum and in every sector is a daily battle between “us” and “them”, literally and figuratively.

India’s current regime—not limited to the government alone—promotes the notion of “otherness”, casting Muslims and Christians as a “problem”, either preventing them from celebrating their festivals or resorting to majoritarian violence, or both.

Across India’s eastern frontier, a similar chapter of Bangladesh’s collective history is being written. It is no different in nations across the Western border. Victims and perpetrators are mirrored across national fences with only their robes interchanged.

Grief and revenge

Obama’s list set off a train of thought. Before long, I found myself searching for an exemplary Indian of 2025—not a hero in the traditional sense but someone who strove not just for oneself but for all.

I was looking for an Indian who followed Sant Dnyaneshwar’s poetry in life, consciously or unknowingly. Someone who did not seek anything for themselves, did not drown in self-pity, and instead understood the agony of others, even while being a victim of the circle of ceaseless retribution.

I eventually settled on Himanshi Narwal as the Indian of the Year—a woman who emerged as the voice of sanity after she lost her husband to bullets in a violent incident where none of the dead had any reason to die.

When the call for “revenge” was resonating from the highest pedestals of the country, this young woman did not once use the word. She said: “We don’t want people going against Muslims or Kashmiris. We want peace and only peace. Of course, we want justice.” She placed the larger collective and their need for security over her personal tragedy. She conveyed that justice cannot be found in the spilled blood of a random person who shares the same faith that the perpetrators claim to follow.

The responses that emerged after Narwal’s call for peace underscored how sharply the nation was divided. In an era when majoritarian sectarianism dominates collective thinking, it was heartening to see others, albeit in smaller numbers, cheering her for putting collective security over self, for her ability to understand that killing another person following a different holy book would not bring her husband back.

Conflict and violence on the basis of religious identity is not new to India, nor to Pakistan and Bangladesh, born as a result of hatred for the “other”.

Narwal may not have heard “Pasayadan”, but without using its words, she did pray “for the sun to rise in all cold hearts”.

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Obama grew up in a country where people were, and often still are, targeted on the basis of their skin colour, in a country where discrimination on the basis of identity was and is as common as in India. By endorsing lines written by a medieval saint-poet who lived in what is paradoxically dubbed part of a millennium of “slavery”, Obama has eternalised Sant Dnyaneshwar’s message: life must be about “doing what we need to do, to keep carrying on”.

At possibly the bleakest moment of her life, Narwal, echoing the poet’s sentiments, used words that were a plea for cruelty to fade and for wisdom to rise. Instead of rousing passions, her words conveyed the need to fight the ghosts together and cohabit in harmony, within our own frontiers and beyond.

The year 2025 will fade into history, as will Narwal, at least in the avatar of a bereaved young woman. But her words will stay. It is a choice for others to take the path to which she pointed.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is an author and journalist based in Delhi-NCR. His latest book is The Demolition, The Verdict and The Temple: The Definitive Book on the Ram Mandir Project. He is also the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.