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Success in entertainment is often romanticised as a straight climb upward, but for Paresh Pahuja , the reality has been far more uncertain, emotional and deeply internal. Before the music tours, before audiences began rediscovering his songs online, and before projects like Bandish Bandits expanded his visibility, there was a long period where the actor quietly questioned whether anything was truly moving forward.

Opening up during his recent interaction in Pune, Pahuja admitted that 2024 became a particularly difficult phase emotionally. Nearly a decade into acting, he found himself trapped between ambition and stagnation. “I’ve always questioned everything,” he says. “There’s a part of me that has tremendous trust in the universe, but when things don’t move for a very long time professionally, you start questioning a lot of things.”

At the time, music had not yet fully entered his life in the way it has today. He had not started performing live seriously and was still struggling with the frustration of playing smaller parts despite years in the industry. “I kept thinking — what am I doing?” he recalls. “It had been ten years and I was still getting tiny little parts. Everybody wants to be a hero, a leading man.”

What followed next almost feels cinematic in hindsight. During one of his regular “guided walks” — slow walks without a phone where he simply observes his surroundings — Pahuja stumbled across a graffiti wall carrying a giant illustration around the word “MUSIC.”

“I was desperately looking for guidance that day,” he says. “And then suddenly I saw this massive painting with music signs and the word ‘MUSIC’ written in bold capital letters. Something shifted inside me.”

That seemingly small moment triggered an entirely new direction creatively. He returned home, called a few friends and impulsively suggested jamming together. That eventually became the first Love Notes concert — a turning point that quietly transformed his career trajectory. “It felt like a sign,” he says simply.