The Echoes Outside

In the weeks immediately following my recent protracted visit to India, and with my time being my own until the boss returned, I was able to do what I had not done in a long, long while: simply watch the rain clouds gather and unburden their load. The spring has been unusually verdant this year, here in the northeast, and I often found myself walking long distances, sometimes as much as five miles at a time, wearing out my sneakers and my poor aching soles, returning home only to start again after a few hours this time by car, watching the rain sprinkles scampering up and down the windshield as the air currents led them a merry dance...

And there was a documentary way back, whose name I do not now remember, in which the camera catches the main protagonist standing at a window watching the rain outside, and tracing the course of the raindrops as they splattered on the pane. His attention seems to focus on one drop which in his mind's eye gradually evolves into a ballerina and the sequence explodes into a colourful ballet performance. I did not focus on any particular raindrop on the windshield as I drove along one day (that would have been hazardous) and the ballerina disappeared from the imagination after a while and was replaced by sounds of the lashing wind and raindrops from films past seen and songs listened to many times over with an increasing fondness as the years slip by.

I have often wondered how our music directors were able to project a song sung and recorded within the confines of a small studio, into the great outdoors (indeed, recording studios were tiny during the time which haunts my blogstream!), and almost convince us that what one saw lighting up the screen and our emotions was not indeed seeded in the claustrophobia of four walls! True, the sound engineer and his team played their role but ultimately it remained to the singers and the composers to give a song the ultimate nuance that would retain it in the mind of the listener. 

Happily there has been a plethora of rain oriented songs that has lingered in our collective subconscious. They lie just under the surface and all it needs is a prod for remembrance to do the rest. For, the Indian breast is overwhelmed by the advent of the raincloud of the monsoon. There is a poet in everyone of us struggling to shake off the sluggish heat of May and dance to the rhythm of June, be it in the gullies of Bombay or Calcutta, or the rurals anywhere in India. And our film makers have been quick to seize upon this vulnerability. From Raj Kapoor to Bimal Roy to Vijay Anand to Guru Dutt, a film those days was considered incomplete by the masses without at least one rain sequence projecting the moods of the protagonists. Not all these stalwarts are represented here.

The rain meant various things in various films. In Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1953), based on Gurudev Tagore's ultra short story (2 1/2 pages) and which ushered in the new wave  in our films, the sudden onset of the monsoons brings joy to the poor peasant-farmer whose patch of land lies parched and whose cattle are dying. And yet, this joy is not without its tinge of apprehension for he knows that the rains might not be so plentiful the next time around! It's all in the black and white camerawork, people, and the warm lyric penned by Shailendra set to music by Salil Chaudhary, in his first-ever foray into film musicdom. Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey lead a fine chorus.... the sound is a bit frayed attesting to the passage of time.

Fast forward a decade to 1962 and Salilda and Bimal Roy weave a different kind of magic with rain and cloud in Prem Patra. Here, a blind Shashi Kapoor is lamenting his lost love, unaware that it is indeed she standing right by him in the role of a nurse, as he muses upon what the rains do to him. Once again it is Lata Mangeshkar crooning, this time with the never-never Talat Mehmood one of the sweetest duets ever, written by Gulzar early in his illustrious career. To watch the entire sequence from before the song actually comes on (missing in this clip) and listening to Shashi Kapoor's soliloquy is to be transported into a different poetic realm altogether.

A short burst of rain and song accompanied by the crashing of the waves and the wind at Bombay's Marine Drive helped us muse upon the quandary that Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman found themselves in, in Nav Ketan's Kala Bazar (1960). Each was voicing the other's thoughts, going back and forth in time, penned by Shailendra and set to music by Sachin Dev Burman. Director Vijay Anand  lent his own poetic touch by having the sound engineer give a fadeout to the song, after the second antara. The full duet rendered beautifully by Geeta Dutt and Mohammad Rafi however, was released on 78rpm and is still heard today. This clip, however, suffers from overexposure on the DVD.



And here is Waheeda Rehman in a sequence from Kohraa (1964), a bad adaptation of  Daphne Du Maurrier's Rebecca, sporting that pet cliche of Hindi films: a happy face masking a broken heart. As directed by Biren Nag she might as well have been Thomas Hardy's Tess in the bosom of nature but as the film unfolds she is neither, except her own beautiful self. Perhaps the producers, Gitanjali Pictures, had sought to cash in on the success of that absurd adaptation of The Hound of The Baskervilles, Bees Saal Baad (1962), a runaway success thanks to the great tracks (Hemant Kumar) and lyrics (Shakeel Badayuni) and last but not least Waheeda Rehman herself. In this song sequence from Kohraa, lots of rolling, fleecy clouds shroud Kaifi Azmi's great lyric set to music once again by the immortal Hemant Kumar Mukherjee and Waheeda mirrors each changing, varied mood of the song in that mobile face that made her a rage for so many years.



I know, I know my predilection for the Bengali composers comes through in what I have written above. There were other immortals: Naushad Ali and Shankar-Jaikishan and Anil Biswas (here I go again!) and C. Ramchandra and others too numerous to mention whose compositions will always haunt us, but the Bengali composers knew best how to incorporate the Hardian concept of man-against-nature in their artistry and I could go on and on with what they did but these are the songs that came to mind while I was coasting that afternoon along the back roads and by lanes of Edison and Metuchen.

I would like my readers to write to me, via the Comments box above if only to speak to me of their favourite baadal-o-baarish songs. I am aware that each age brings along with it its own brand of film and music themes but I do believe that the industry is now at the nadir of its creativity in film music. Perhaps it's the fault of the movies themselves, which despite branching off into new territories have left precious little scope for melody to retrieve its place in our hearts!

What else can one say of a generation which, as Raju Bharatan has rightly lamented in his latest, is snug within its parameters set by Rahul Dev Burman and A.R. Rehman?  

YSZ.....

People, profanity sounds more repulsive in one's mother tongue, I firmly believe, especially if said mother tongue is Hindi or any of the regional languages of India, in which case I will probably never buy an exorbitantly priced ticket to a movie house in Bombay, to watch a run-of-the-mill Hindi film.

Let me tell you why we went to see the much touted Yeh Saali Zindagi. I chanced upon a slickly written critique of this film in the TOI. Film reviews have come a long way since when I was growing up, I will grant you that. Barring a few big names like Firoze Rangoonwala (Screen), Bikram Singh (Filmfare) and the formidable Baburao Patel (Motherindia) most reviewers in those days, in Bombay at least, were content to issue brief, staid notices of new releases. But while reviews today are more breezily written they lack depth and hint only at a verisimilitude in perception. It's probably because they have to deal with characters crudely drawn, representing the brute in man and the devil in penmanship! It's okay to be choosy in one's roles and Irfan Khan, a fine performer otherwise (The Warrior, Mumbai Meri Jaan), certainly needs to do so. We have precious few good actors working today and as cine goers we do deserve an occasional well drawn, mature characterization. I was squirming in my seat watching him mouth this defilement of language. I do not remember the other names that throng the credits of YSZ....honestly, I do not care.

I have been in and out of movie houses for most of my life and have lost count of the number of movies I have simply walked out of--never though, for the filth and violence that this screenplay of YSZ portrays. The language in its crudeness leaves nothing to the imagination: it goes beyond the usual allusions. These were the most disgusting 40 minutes I have spent in a movie house in Bombay, or anywhere else for that matter! This film was not going anywhere even if we had stayed to its end.

From back in the early 60s I remember a review of Ajanta Arts' Mujhe Jeene Do, a tale of banditry, ransom and mayhem, that Sunil Dutt had the courage to shoot in the robber-infested ravines of the state of Bihar. One line from that review has stayed with me over the years: "....this is not a film that we want our women and children to see...."  I wonder what that reviewer would have had to say about the writing in YSZ!

The times, they have changed and in their eagerness to keep up with contemporary world cinema our producers and screenplay and dialogue writers have lost track of perspective. Call me dated but brazenness is not everything that one looks for in a movie, especially when one recalls the great writing that emanated from the likes of Rajinder Singh Bedi, Inder Raj Anand, Wajahat Mirza and Ramanand Sagar to name a few~writers who made us think and encouraged us to change the way we interpreted life, to muse upon it! True, a lot of the films were mediocre but they were not ever repulsive. It is since the late 70s that films have donned a crude mantle. Permissiveness has reached its nadir in recent years and needs to be muzzled.

....And Hum Dono

I have finally watched this fine Nav Ketan production on the big screen: not a patch on the black and white which I followed up with at home, despite the colour and the cinemascope. This is one of the few Dev Anand starrers from which, thankfully, his gangly silliness is missing. It was good to see the young faces of Sadhana and Nanda and Dev himself, from fifty years ago this year, not to speak of the mature performances of the then already-aged character artistes Lalita Pawar and Gajanand Jagirdar and Leela Chitnis. The latter is especially forceful as Dev's mother: mesmerizing in her initial confrontation with Sadhana, simply brilliant in her metamorphosis in the scene that immediately follows. Sadhana's controlled turbulence is the perfect foil, to that senior thespian's outburst. To cap it all, the perfect chiaroscuro helps to carry the symbolic situation: all this, however, is lost on colour. 

And like the colour, so the sound. Jaidev's fine soundtrack has been 'improved' upon, Dev-saab would have us believe. Where the mere plucking of a string was enough to indicate a nuance, we are now subjected to drawn out computer-backed wails. Even the strains of the famous Nav Ketan logo have been altered! Our films, unfortunately, have trained us to seek depth where none exists, and often our songs reek of bathos more than emotion. This is one film where the songs are well placed. Sahir Ludhianvi's fine lyrics have depth and meaning actually adding to the story's anti-war message, and thankfully, where digitization does not intrude Jaidev-ji's fine background music still makes its presence felt.   

I am convinced that the classics need to be left alone. Once the DVD of the current coloured version of Hum Dono is released, the black and white will fade from memory and with it, the significance and charm of the pre-colour 60s era (B. R. Chopra's Naya Daur and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam have met the same fate). Those of us who still have the original DVD of this fine film need to hang on to it at least until our generation has run its course. The film is a happy experience of the black and the white of life. We need not have sullied it with the colours of the rainbow.

In The Concert Hall

A long time ago someone close asked me why I have always loved to listen to a song more in an auditorium during a movie re-run, than on the radio. While not quite accurate, listening to Radio Ceylon in the dead of night had its own charm (the silence of the night helped hold the song deep inside you forever!), but playing hookie from school to enjoy the glory that was the classic Shankar-Jaikishan soundtrack in the Maratha Mandir or Naaz or Liberty with a thousand other voices of a packed audience was an experience which, I thought, was gone with my high school years...

....until this last Saturday, at the Shanmukhananda Hall in Bombay at a revival of the legendary Manna Dey's songs under the auspices of Keep Alive and its very eloquent founder, Manohar Iyer.

People, I have been away for the better part of forty years and what I have missed in the interim was driven home to me forcefully, time and time again, during the just-under-four-hour programme that a very able troupe belted out to the delight of an appreciative crowd. For long I have lived in muted despair bemoaning the current state of our film music, missing the singers, composers and poets (if not most of the movies) of our time but this quintet of wonderful voices convinced me that all is not yet lost and that nostalgia will remain alive and well for a few years more.

That era of the 30s thru the 60s (yes, I am convinced there was a lot of good even in the declining 60s) will always remain with us as the era of definitive music and eloquent poetry and great, great singing. True, there was change and evolving every step of the way but the Muse was never lost sight of and each new genius added to our experience of the art.

While Manna Dey's forte was raga-based compositions, he excelled in folk renderings as also the occasional risque trivial compositions, as later film situations demanded.

All this came to the fore thanks to Rana and Gaurav and Sagar and Radhika and Shruti as they led us down memory lane and brought to life the years that we will always remember. Think of the poets whose songs Manna Dey rendered and the music directors who Manna Dey sang for, and we had a very colourful and composite musical tribute to a legend that is probably in the final years of his life.

Fittingly, the evening opened with the Kavi Pradeep-SD Burman tandem and Manna Dey's takeoff number from 1950s Mashal,'Upar Gagan Vishaal'. Whatever skepticism my ignorant mind had harboured until then about these kids taking on the songs of the ages, was dispelled by the time the solo stepped aside after the 'mukhda' and the full-throated chorus stepped in and took over. Let me mention here that the film version of this classic does not sound half as good to my heart as does the re-recorded 78r.p.m. track which was, thankfully, adhered to by Sagar.

After that it was a roller-coaster ride of emotion and memories surging and goose-pimples and musical portraits of departed music directors and poets and fellow singers of Manna Da's era. And as we coasted down the three-odd hours and more, we remembered poets and wordcrafters ranging from Kavi Pradeep and Bharat Vyas, to Sahir Ludhianvi to Kaifi Azmi to Shailendra-Hasrat to Majrooh and Gulzar and music directors from Sachin Dev Burman, all the way down to his scion, Rahul Dev Burman and beyond. In this context, one does not understand why Naushad-saab never found use for Manna Dey's vocals, barring two of his tracks in Shabab and Mother India: the two could have done a lot together!

In between, thanks to Manohar Iyer's effusive commentary we learned how Manna Dey was often short-changed (barring Lata, which singer was not?!)over the years and finally relegated to sing for a horror comic like Mehmood, so much like Mukesh-ji. And we learned why the very gentle Mukesh himself lost so much of his value and market as a singer in the mid-50s thanks to a bungled film compromise.

There is no audience like an audience at a concert of vintage Indian film music. I have noticed and shared the deep love and veneration we have for our film music, at movie halls right from my school days in Bombay. Not for us the deep sigh and then silence as the conductor waves his baton at concerts, elsewhere (not that there is anything wrong with that)but we never hesitate to punctuate a song at the right moment, with a disciplined, subdued applause that passes as soon as the singer moves on. I loved this feeling once again on Saturday. True, most of us gathered there were a fraternity and each of us knew what we were looking for in the songs that we heard. But the joy shared, thus, was multiple and varied. I will never forget, though, the moment of rapt silence as Rana brought Anil Biswas-ji's resounding 'Buddham Saranam Gacchhami' to an end, before the applause broke. Gaurav excelled at and moved us with his renderings of the Prem Dhawan-Salil Chaudhury creation 'Ai Mere Pyare Watan' from Kabuliwala and the Makhdoom Mohiuddin-Salil Chaudhury classic 'Janewale Sipahise Pucchho' from Bimal Roy's Usne Kaha Tha.

What I did miss was listening live to that folk song of all folk song compositions 'Dharti Kahe Pukarke' from Do Bigha Zamin. These voices would have done more than justice to Salil-da's great chorus.

I could go on and on about this fine programme, but let me point out an incorrect factoid that has been rankling me for many years ever since I first came across it. It is a common misconception that the film Begunah (fine rendering of the Manna Dey-Lata duet on stage, by the way) was based on the Hollywood
film Knock On Wood, starring Danny Kaye. This actor's name itself would be a dead giveaway, for the film was a comedy of the mid-50s and had no crime in it. What we need to remember as the base for 'Begunah' was Highway 301, a noir crime caper made in 1950, which was released at the Eros theatre in Bombay and which subsequently spawned 'Begunah', which was later withdrawn due to copyright reasons. An interesting aside to this mess was the assault on the Bombay branch of a prominent British bank, patterned exactly as the bank holdup was in the Hollywood film. This is just by the way and in no way has taken away from the glory that was last weekend's programme. These kids actually made me perceive melody in eminently forgettable songs like Chitragupta-ji's Jodi Hamari Jamega Kaise from Aulad and in the Laxmi-Pyare duet from Pyar Kiye Ja. Kudos! The female vocals were delirious!

Many thanks, Mr. Iyer: to you and your gallant singers one and all and the rest of the troupe. The song embedded here is for all of you.

A Page

  Here I am walking the streets of Bombay once again, after a lapse of two years. This will be my longest trip home in the 33 years and more that I have lived abroad. I am looking forward to the seven weeks I still have ahead of me.  My earlier visits were hectic and rather unfulfilled: two-week sojourns to my city of  birth that left no time for surging memories to run their course: the long flight home was often moody and disgruntled.

This time, I have promised myself, I will relive a part of my growing days visiting old haunts and meeting faces I had known.

I almost wish I hadn't: I go up to casual associates of the past who struggle in vain to remember but are polite enough to say "hello" (some of them do pause, think back and remember. Like Jimmy Vajifdar, just yesterday, eyes lighting up at a memory) and the old haunts are bustling with newer energies and face lifts. In short, the Bombay I knew is fast disappearing.

The essence, however, remains and if anything, the city is more vibrant.....A newer generation of young 'mumbaikars'  (please, can we go back to being Bombayites? 'Mumbaikars' sounds so parochial!) shows no qualm in walking hand-in-hand and is more eloquent than we were in exhibiting mutual affection, "gay pride" is much in evidence and the upstarts in the city's film industry (I refuse to use the 'B' word!) make showbiz brazen like it has never been before.

Today, my eyes fall upon a paanshop at the corner where Bora Bazar meets Gunbow Street, in South Bombay, now bearing a newer, longer name. I pause for a moment taking in the new look of this small landmark-of-the-mind, missing the old-world quaintness of the earlier shop. I stare at it from a short distance away and remember that late-evening hour in 1971 when I became friends with the paunched paanwallah without uttering a word: a fated moment in time, mine and his.....

My way home from the newspaper in what was then known as Ballard Estate lay along Gunbow Street and it being a bustling area with traditional old Parsee and Gujarati homes that spoke of where they came from (and still holding change at bay, as only they can) and mithaiwallahs and speakeasies and the fire brigade just off, there was always music afoot in the area: in Bombay, there is always music in the air. I paused as the strains of a Madan Mohan composition fell upon my ears: I had not heard this one in a long while. I sidled closer to the shop after a quick glance at my wristwatch: sure, I would miss the 10:40 local but there was always the 10:55!

It is not difficult to get lost in a Madan Mohan composition and the next three minutes or so were spent in eloquent silence. The paaanwallah himself was rapt, going about his business, as we listened to Lata  croon Rajendra Krishan's fine lyric, चैन नहीं आये, from 'Samunder'. In between, we exchanged looks appreciative of the song and as it neared its end he was still building a 'paan'. As the last groove worked itself out I paused long enough to thank him for allowing me to stand by, before heading to Churchgate and my train. But it was he who thanked me....by holding out that last 'paan' he had built. I could not deny him that and walked to the station and my local savouring my first ever 'paan'.






                                                                            * * *

I am in two minds whether or not to visit the local Metro for a showing of the coloured,  cinemascope re-release of Nav Ketan's 'Hum Dono'. I have never seen it on the big screen: not that I care much for the colourisation of the classics, even those initiated by their own producers (in this case Dev Anand). However, watching Sahir Ludhianvi's great lyrics unfold on the big screen to Jaidev-ji's "cerebral eloquence" in music, should make for interesting cinema viewing. Lata and Rafi and Asha are superb in their rendering of the songs in this film (1962). I have wondered why Jaidev-ji, lost Filmfare's Best Music Director Award to Ravi for Gharana in that year. Tell me people, should I?

Signing off....

Embers

In the 64th year of his passing, memories of Kundan Lal Saigal (or Sehgal, if you'll have it that way) remain just below the surface of  one's consciousness. He died when I was barely two years old but his songs and his singing were already being drummed into me repeatedly by dad (God bless his musical soul!) and his records. Saigal's death on January 17, 1947 was the first cultural trauma that music lovers experienced in post-independence India and all through time his memory has been kept alive, albeit in decreasing decibels of intensity, by various cultural associations formed by a generation that is clearly on its way out.

True, Radio Ceylon spearheaded the movement of keeping him alive not only daily when it played a Saigal chant at about 7:55a.m., marking the end of its 'पुरानी फिल्मों के संगीत का कार्यक्रम', but also by devoting an entire commercial-free hour on the singer's death anniversary: that was a lot in those days, for a shortwave radio station that ran for only three hours each a.m. and p.m. For those of you who remember, the great Gopal Sharma at first and later the more eloquent Manohar Mahajan after Sharmaji retired, fueled our growing love for KLS with their ad libs, as they played the songs! In later years, however, it has remained the lot of private musical bodies to keep memories alive. The halcyon days of Radio Ceylon have long since ended.

Although by now everyone from my generation is familiar with the man and his legends, I have always wanted to write something about KLS: never got a chance to do so during my days at the newspaper at home and much less after having settled abroad: except, during a short stint at a local radio station trying my best to jump-start a flagging interest in the vintage film music of India.

 And one fine summer's afternoon the spark caught fire, or so I thought. In an amusing manner the experience drove home to me the point that the generation had changed once more and that I was flogging a dead horse! The radio station was beamed, and is still being beamed although I am not a part of it, from the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J. and most of my listeners were of my own age whose eyes moistened  at the mere mention of a song. What I played gave them a chance to call me up off-the-mike and give vent to nostalgia.

My yen to impart a bit of history with each track that I spun kindled a bit of curiosity among the students who tuned in to WRSU and sometimes I was pleasantly surprised by a young voice asking me the meaning of a word or complimenting my style. On this particular afternoon....
"Kersi Mistry.....?" asks the voice trailing off....decidedly Indian
"Yes, who's this....?"
"I'm calling from the dorm...."
"Okay, what can I do for you...."
"Could you play a song by Sehgal....?"
I hold my breath~this is a personal compliment!
"Sure thing, what do you want to listen to...."
"Anything, I just love his singing". This, clearly, was a kid whose dad was probably like mine!
"OK, next week: I am not carrying anything by him today."
"Thanks" says he, as he signs off.

The following Sunday I play the immortal and ever-reverberating "जब दिल ही टूट गया, हम जीके क्या करेंगे"from 'Shahjahan' (the last-but-one film in which Saigal-saab starred) in honour of the previous week's conversation, and wait in vain for a call acknowledging it! Another Sunday comes around and I pick up the phone....
"Kersi....."
"Yes"
"When are you going to play my song....?
"What do you mean.....I played a Saigal track just for you....last week"
"I know, I heard it....but that was not the Sehgal I had in mind...."
"Then, who...."
"I wanted to listen to something by Baba Sehgal......but you know what, this fellow wasn't too bad!"


I wanted to kick myself for not keeping up with the times....almost did.


I guess I would like to commemorate that encounter and my decades of listening to KL Saigal by playing the same song....one more time. Please tell me this is the one you were waiting for....

Ek Aur Yaad....

Some thoughts on the passing of Nalini Jaywant who moved on last week. I do not know how old she was but I am sure the newspapers in India carried the usual cliched headlines: "The End of an Era" or "Another Great Luminary is Doused".

Truth to tell, the era has continued to end a little down the years with the passing of each cine-personality who has left, but has remained alive and well in the songs that we listen to and in the memories that we still share. I, for one, am convinced that as long our generation lasts we will remember those who created nostalgia in us! Even now during a visit to the city of one's birth one automatically looks for (and sees in the mind's eye) some billboard that used to hang at some spot in Opera House or Lamington Road. For that was, what I would like to call, the age of 'persona', when a face peering down from the billboard drew the throngs to the movie house.

Nalini Jaywant was one such face that conjures up that beautifully emotive era. It is, however, unfortunate that her name does not always come up in discussions of the actresses we have known. Not her fault: look at the films she acted in: apart from Meena Kumari I know of no other actress of that period who was given such short shrift, as was Nalini Jaywant.

The biggest banners that she acted for were Kardar Films and Filmistan Ltd. The first was a prolific banner that churned out one bad remake of western films after another. Think of 'Jadoo' and you think of 'The Loves of Carmen': thereby hangs a tale! What lifted Jadoo, however, was the Naushad Ali-Shakeel Badayuni tandem, and Nalini Jaywant's lipsynch of that master's impossibly difficult compositions for that film, vocalized by the great Shamshad Begum and Lata. And then there was Kardar's Naujawan, also in 1951 of which I know nothing but the great compositions of SD Burman.

Filmistan Ltd., that unabashedly lachrymose banner, gave her roles in films like Samadhi (1950) and a fine role in Nastik (1954) and Bombay Talkies cast her in its Sangram (1950). All three of these films also had fabulous music by the late C. Ramchandra. She came back to Filmistan in the mid-50s with two lighter but silly films like Munimji (1955) and Hum Sub Chor Hain (1956), both of which are remembered today for their frothy music: the one with SD Burman and the other with OP Nayyar.

Towards the late-50s she starred in a film called Miss Bombay, as a wife who could not forget her lover (Ajit) and would rather see him waste away before her eyes than betray her husband (Rehman). That was a good solid role in a movie that suffered from bad, nay, poor direction. There was also Ramesh Saigal's Railway Platform in 1955 (Sunil Dutt's debut) which is largely remembered for a couple of Sahir Ludhianvi's great lyrics set to music by Madan Mohan.

So, what am I going to remember her for? Well (and call me biased) for the roles that I have seen her in but most of all for what she did for director Raj Khosla as the nautch-girl in Nav Ketan's Kalapani (a fine foil there for Madhubala), and for Ramesh Saigal in Shikast in which she matched Dilip Kumar's virtuosity, breath for painful breath. An underrated classic, this film did not go much beyond the critical acclaim it received upon its release in 1953 and is remembered today mainly for its brilliant soundtrack by Shankar-Jaikishan. But then, isn't that what this blog is all about?

R.I.P.

Continuum

People, you never know who you will bump into on cyberspace. Just when I thought that the age of Kundanlal Saigal and Pankaj Mallik was done with (in the media, anyway), along comes Dr. Sangita Nerurkar to completely bowl me over. Making the YouTube your alter-बसेरा  throws you in league with a wealth of individuals who share your passion for vintage film music.

I plead guilty to stifling an occasional snigger when I listen to valiant attempts made by amateurs uploading their singing of the classics on the tube, but always immediately kick myself for not having the courage to do so myself. This is one way that admirers of an unique musical tradition show their passion and their love for it, and short of listening to the great Radio Ceylon in the days of yore, or singing along as a song unfolded during one of the numerous re-releases of a film in those days, I have known of no other greater public display of feeling for a five-minute track. But I digress......

....if only to drive home the point that a song recorded more than half a century ago and still loved, can be re-recorded today with exactly the same enunciation, the same feeling and, more importantly, have its beauty realized once again by someone from a newer generation.  Dr. Nerurkar's soprano might jar those who will not have anything but K L Saigal's deep baritone (Lata's much under-rated Shraddhanjali suffered in that way, all those years ago), and yet she reins in her resonance even as she plunges to the lower notes. It is here that she matches the timbre in her voice beautifully with that of the great Bengali female singers of the New Theaters era. The magic in her voice is undeniable: so is her fascination for an age in popular music that is long past her own. Thank you, Doctor: you just did me a random act of kindness.

When Lata Had The Last Laugh!

Anything can happen on a Thursday. All through my school days it was Thursday that I looked forward to because of the solitude that the day off from school gave me: pretty much on my own, reading my books and more importantly listening to the music that would eventually coalesce into a major part of the subconscious. Years later, Thursday would become a day of revival: like today. Memories surfacing.

I was out walking earlier this evening when a discussion I had with friend Sharad Saklecha months ago emerged. It involved Lata Mangeshkar and a chance remark she had made during an interview not too long go. The interviewer had asked her what, at this stage in her life, she missed the most. The subdued but stunning response was: "I wish I had learned to sing!"

I remember Sharad and myself laughing at the remark and dismissing it as sheer sanctimony.  After all, लताबाई has been and will always remain to millions of us the epitome of great singing. But something that I came across just the other day has left me musing upon her remark, assessing her own singing. It was her rendering of Narendra Sharma's Jyoti Kalash Chhalke from Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan (1961), composed by the late Sudhir Phadke. 

Sudhir Phadke seemed to have disappeared from the Hindi film scene no sooner than he had entered upon it. True, he had made Lata sing for him in films like Malti Madhav and a couple of others whose names now evade me, in the 50s, and Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan might as well have been his swan song (I, personally, never heard of him again). But what a swan song it was. He was denied the fame and glory reached by other contemporary Marathi music directors like Chitalkar Ramchandra and Vasant Desai. However, he did give Lata at least one of the 10 best of her career i.e. Jyoti Kalash Chhalke....a song that defies definition and as at least one admirer puts it, is divinity itself.

As it so often happened in those days, before music directors made the playback singers record their creations, they themselves sang the songs to show them the way. Quite a few of those tracks have survived: among them, Jyoti Kalash and to name another, C. Ramchandra singing Radha Na Bole, his own dainty from Azad (1954). To listen to Sudhirji singing Jyoti kalash chhalke before a live audience and to watch the expressions on his face as he invites his audience to share his feeling at the coming of a new morn, is ecstasy itself.

Perhaps I have read too much into this video: I leave you to judge for yourself. Perhaps, again, it was this rendering that Lataji used as a touchstone to make the kind of comment she made about herself: this, and other recordings she has made along with classical singers like DV Paluskar.

I have appended two video clips of this famed composition. This first one is the actual clip from the movie Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan beautifully emoted by the late Meena Kumari supported by fine chiaroscuro from the cameraman......

and the other, appearing below, is the same song sung by Sudhir Phadke for a live audience. 

While both leave their own impact, unfortunately, the ravages of time are undeniably visible.
The idea is simple.....they are ushering in a new day.

Salaams! 

Why Groove78?

Why, indeed. When time began for me, circa the mid-40s, film music had firmly established itself not as much via the radio, as by the gramophone disc turning around a spindle at the rate of 78 revolutions per minute. Recording companies like Columbia and New Theatres kept bakelite in business, churning out track after track of musical delight from studios in Bombay and Calcutta. The mighty HMV, though already established elsewhere in the western world, was yet to begin its forays into film music in India.

So what's all this leading to? Well, that's where we first heard our music and that's where our memories took root. In its day the '78' was no less a marvel of recording than the CD is today. There is one that still hangs framed on the wall of my living room, each groove a testimony to the hundreds of songs listened to, down the decades. Listening to the '78' recording of a song is not the same as listening to its fuller version on the CD~or even the '78' rpm version. The one was the original, the other a reproduction. Most of us from that generation, while listening to the CD hark back to the original scratch of stylus on bakelite.

Hence the name of this blog. It may not feature in future posts here, but will be the guiding force behind them all......Nor does this blog purport to reconstruct the history of music recording in cinema. The aim is to have people contribute their memories and relive their experiences of the music that has gone before today.....Once again, welcome.

In The Beginning...

When I first decided to scribble something in cyberspace I ran the idea by my very cheeky nephew. He asked me what I was aiming at. Read on: 
"Well", (that's me), "something on Hindi film music." 
The twinkle in his eyes raised his brows to the ceiling: "Why don't you write about something you know something about!!!" (that's him).
I could have smacked the fellow but the thought remained hanging in midair. Just because I could remember some song लताबाई sang in some film and the name of the संगीतकार, does not make me a ज्ञानी. 
Believe it or not, over the years that I have listened to film music I have been convinced that there is much more to it than the "vacuity" it has been stigmatized with. There is depth and there is an evocation of life....and the streets of Bombay of yesteryear that I roamed and grew up on, the people I have met, the first gramophone record I saw whirling on dad's HMV and everything else that has gone hand-in-hand with all that.
I know that there are people out there who know more than I do.....So, all of you, get aboard my bandwagon.