Of distance and longing: Inside Coke Studio Bangla’s ‘Long Distance Love’
"Snape's patronus was a doe,' said Harry, 'the same as my mother's because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children."
― J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. What is it with love, especially when it is unrequited -- that it dares to drown you in a depth of silence -- all the more made poignant due to the long distance? It is the sweetest yet the most torturous form of longing that leaves one exhausted with passion -- long distant love indeed.
When "Long Distance Love" (LDL) dropped on Coke Studio Bangla this season, it felt like more than just another release. It sounded like a confession between souls, aching across distance and silence, bound by betrayal, longing, and the fragile possibility of love. At once tender and unsettling, the track caught listeners off guard – not only for its music, but for the intimacy of its words.
At the centre of LDL stands Ankan Kumar—lyricist, composer, and singer. For him, the song grew out of an obsession with three entwined themes: loneliness, solitude, and love. "I think these three are kind of inseparable," he explained. "Each one pushes or pulls the other. When you are alone, you start searching for meaning, for connection. Love is born in that search, but it also reminds you of solitude when it's not around. Maybe I'm just drawn to the tension between them, how fragile but powerful they are."
That tension became the foundation of the song. Ankan's verses are delivered from the perspective of someone who has exhausted every option, only to find the flames of hope dying out. "When I sang those lines," he said, "I wanted people to feel the weight of someone who's tried everything, only to watch the light fade bit by bit. It wasn't about melodrama—it was about resignation." His writing process was what he calls "messy but honest." Sometimes it begins with a single word or phrase that lodges itself in his head until he builds a world around it. Other times, it's a flood of raw emotion, later shaped into coherence. "It's rarely planned," he admitted. "But it always comes from a place of raw feeling."
Yet, a song like this needed a second voice, someone to respond to Ankan's character, to carry the dialogue further. Enter Pragata Naoha, co-creator of the track, who joined the project from halfway across the world in Winnipeg, Canada. When Coke Studio reached out to her, they already had a skeleton in place: a chorus, a verse, and a base instrumental. Ankan had written lines that captured the exhaustion of betrayal. The task before her was to answer them, and the words she created were eventually brought to life on stage by Mumtahina Mehzabin, whose voice carried Pragata's lines with aching sincerity.
"The only form of longing and yearning I've felt that relates to long-distance love is my distance with my home country," Pragata confessed. "I miss everything about Dhaka—the streets, the culture, the nights I've spent, how there's music around every corner. So, when I was asked to write about long-distance relationships and love and yearning, I tapped into how much I missed Bangladesh as an emotional soil for the lyrics to grow in."
What emerged was not consolation, but confrontation. While many might have responded to Ankan's despair with reassurance, Pragata chose another route. "Most people would reply with something solemn, like 'don't worry, I'm still thinking of you.' But what came naturally to me was: I hear you, I see you, and I feel the same. That honesty mattered more than sugarcoating."
She describes herself as a "cynical romantic"—someone who finds beauty in heartbreak, who romanticises pain without disguising it. "The lyrics didn't come instantly. What came easy was saying, 'I understand that you feel betrayed, but so do I.' That back-and-forth is what makes the song real." For Pragata, solitude is not emptiness but a chosen pocket of space. "I love writing about that little world you create when you're in solitude. People don't always see the possibilities in it. For me, it's fertile."
If Ankan and Pragata gave LDL its voice, Adnan Al Rajeev gave it its face. The celebrated director, known for his distinctive Coke Studio Bangla visuals, approached this project differently. "Every song carries its own theme," he reflected, "and for this one, the core feeling was yearning." He imagined a "lost museum," a place where emotions are preserved like artifacts, where musicians appeared almost as life-size portraits inside frames, their music bridging the distance between the two singers. "I wanted to acknowledge that some 'loves' remain unresolved," he said. "That bittersweet 'impossibility' is what gives the song its timeless weight."
The shoot itself came with challenges. It was Adnan's first Coke Studio Bangla project, and the ambition was immense: every frame had to feel like a Renaissance painting. "The challenge was the sheer ambition versus the constraint," he admitted. "It was a single-day shoot. At one point, I felt myself unraveling. So I took a break, sat down with Mamun, one of the DPs, and we re-planned calmly. After that reset, everything aligned beautifully."
Then came a bold post-production decision. Initially, Adnan followed the familiar Coke Studio colour palette. But something about the song resisted. "I felt an instinct to lean into black-and-white, to give the video a timeless look. It wasn't in the plan, and there was back-and-forth with the agency and client. But they trusted the vision. In the end, it became the first black-and-white Coke Studio song ever." For him, the absence of colour gave the emotions their true form. "Colours should always reflect emotion. Here, the emotions demanded black-and-white."
Together, Ankan's weary verses, Pragata's mirrored emotions, Mumtahina's earnest vocals and Adnan's stark visuals turned LDL into something unforgettable. It is both a song and a conversation, a reminder of how love, distance, and solitude shape one another in ways we rarely articulate.
The author is a singer and journalist. Her Instagram handle is elitaalive.
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