From Mumbai To The World's Biggest Screens: Sparsh Verma's Global Symphony

In an era when Indian musicians are no longer content to be heard only within the subcontinent, composer and orchestrator Sparsh Verma has quietly become one of the most internationally active figures in the country's film-music community, building a body of work that stretches from Bollywood's biggest blockbusters to record-breaking Chinese animation and award-laden Hong Kong drama. His credits read like a tour of global cinema's most ambitious recent productions, and his rise offers a compelling portrait of how an Indian composer is shaping scores heard by hundreds of millions of viewers across continents.

Verma's most visible international credit comes on Ne Zha 2 (Nezha: Mo tong nao hai), the 2025 animated epic that redrew the map of global box office records. As orchestrator on the film, Verma was responsible for translating the composer's ideas into the full orchestral arrangements that power the picture's emotional and action sequences, helping shape its instrumentation and harmonic voicing at feature-film scale. The film went on to gross more than 2.2 billion dollars worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time, the highest-grossing film of 2025, and the first animated film ever to cross the two-billion-dollar mark at the global box office. Backed by Beijing Enlight Pictures and distributed internationally with support from A24, CMC Pictures and Trinity CineAsia, Ne Zha 2 also earned 24 wins and 11 nominations, and received coverage from The Atlantic, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, Forbes, Deadline and CBC. For an Indian composer to sit inside the orchestration team of a production of that magnitude is itself a mark of the level at which Verma now operates.

His work on In Broad Daylight (Bak yat ji ha), the 2023 Hong Kong drama on which he served as orchestrator alongside composer Wan Pin Chu, further underscores that standing. The film was selected by the New York Asian Film Festival produced in collaboration with Film at Lincoln Center, the FIAPF-accredited Shanghai International Film Festival, the Tokyo International Film Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Festival, along with screenings at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona, the Zurich Film Festival, the Festival Nits de Cinema Oriental de Vic, and the Festival du Film Hongkongais de Paris. It led the 42nd Hong Kong Film Awards with 16 nominations and drew recognition from the Hong Kong Directors' Guild Awards, the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, the Asian Film Awards, the Golden Horse Awards, the Golden Kite Awards and others, with coverage from Variety, ScreenDaily, Deadline, The Guardian and South China Morning Post. Verma's orchestration shaped the score of a film that became one of the most decorated Asian dramas of its year.

That same year he served as orchestrator on Oh My School! (Cha a er zhong), the animated comedy distributed by Beijing Enlight Pictures that grossed approximately 52.6 million dollars globally, opened at number five in China and number ten worldwide, won the Golden Deer for Best Directorial Debut at the Changchun Film Festival, and earned a nomination for the Golden Monkey King Award at the China International Cartoon and Animation Festival, described as the highest honour in Chinese animation. Taken together with Ne Zha 2 and In Broad Daylight, this Chinese-language trio establishes Verma as a trusted orchestral voice within one of the world's most competitive film-music markets.

Indian audiences, however, will recognise his name from Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva, the Ayan Mukerji-directed epic on which Verma served as music producer and arranger. Working within a music department led by Tushar Lall and Pritam Chakraborty, one of Hindi cinema's most decorated composers, Verma contributed to a production that won Best Music Direction (Songs) and Best Film at the 70th National Film Awards, swept major Filmfare categories including Best Music Album, dominated the Zee Cine Awards across music, direction and popular categories, and took multiple top honours at the Mirchi Music Awards for "Kesariya" and its background score. With a cast featuring Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Amitabh Bachchan, a worldwide gross of more than 50 million dollars, and coverage from NDTV, The Statesman, Firstpost, Variety, Vogue and IndieWire, Brahmāstra placed Verma's arranging and production work at the centre of one of the most scrutinised Indian soundtracks of the decade.

His composing identity is equally distinct. On Me and You (2024), directed by Shreyansh Pratihar and distributed through Prime Video, Tubi, Plex and Zee5, Verma served as main composer, crafting the original score for a character-driven drama that was presented in the NFDC Film Bazaar Viewing Room, won at the Indo Dubai International Film Festival 2025, and earned recognition at the Mumbai Independent Film Festival, the Jaipur International Film Festival and the New Delhi Film Festival, where it stood as a Top 10 Feature Fiction Film nominee. His earlier short Pav Bhaji, on which he was composer and sound designer, accumulated a remarkable festival haul, winning top short-film or Indian-short honours at the Mumbai Indie-Film Festival along with selections at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival, the DC South Asian Film Festival and the International South Asian Film Festival in Vancouver, while drawing 1.2 million views on YouTube. On Orange Candy, a short drama-thriller, he composed a score that helped carry the film to selections at the Milan Shorts Film Festival, the Goa Short Film Festival and the Pune Short Film Festival. On Morchang, a fantasy short, his work as additional music and music producer supported a film that won Best Cinematography at the Korea International Short Film Festival 2023, Best India Director at the Goa Short Film Festival, and a runner-up placement at the Oscar-Academy-qualifying Bengaluru International Short Film Festival, alongside selections at the Tasveer South Asian Film Festival and the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Beyond cinema, Verma has left a significant imprint on Indian television and advertising. As additional music on Undekhi Season 2, the Applause Entertainment crime-thriller streamed on Sony LIV, he contributed to a series that has accumulated recognition at the Indian Television Academy Awards, the Times of India Film Awards (OTT), the Filmfare OTT Awards, the Indian Telly Streaming Awards, the SCREENXX Summit & Awards, the e4m Play Streaming Media Awards and the SPOTT Awards. As main composer and sound designer of the NTPC National Commercial, he shaped the sonic identity of a campaign for India's largest integrated power utility, a Maharatna Public Sector Undertaking that generates roughly a quarter of the country's electricity, in an advertisement that has drawn more than 11 million views on NTPC's official channel and forms part of a nationally deployed campaign covered by The Economic Times, Business Standard, The Times of India and The Statesman.

Perhaps the most striking indicator of Verma's reach with everyday listeners, however, is his long association with The Indian Jam Project, the contemporary collective active started in 2014 that reimagined iconic global film, television and rock themes through an Indian classical lens. As orchestrator on the project, he shaped the ensemble arrangements behind Indian-classical reinterpretations of Pirates of the Caribbean, Interstellar, Harry Potter, the BBC Sherlock theme, Game of Thrones, Skyfall, Inception, Star Wars, The Dark Knight, Mission Impossible, the Titanic score, Coldplay's catalogue, The Beatles' Hey Jude, John Lennon's Imagine and Pink Floyd's music, among others. The videos on which he served as orchestrator have collectively drawn 29.28 million views on YouTube, with the Pirates of the Caribbean arrangement alone crossing 8.9 million and the Interstellar theme 3.5 million. The project has been profiled by The Indian Express, Classic FM, BuzzFeed, Hindustan Times and The Telegraph, and remains one of the most prominent examples of Indian classical fusion reaching a global online audience.

What emerges from this sweep of credits is not the portrait of a specialist confined to one idiom, but of an established composer, orchestrator and arranger operating comfortably across Bollywood tent-poles, premium Indian streaming drama, Chinese-language blockbusters, Hong Kong auteur cinema, festival-circuit shorts, national-branding campaigns and viral cross-cultural fusion. In a film and music ecosystem that increasingly rewards versatility and cross-border fluency, Sparsh Verma has already built a career that speaks in several languages at once, and the scale of the productions now seeking out his work suggests that India's global musical signature in the years ahead will, in no small part, be written in his hand.