Golden Age of Hindi Film Music...In Ten Episodes

My Top Ten list does not start till the next chapter (sorry for the bait and switch). I wanted to kick off proceedings with a song  composed by legendary singer and composer Hemant Kumar Mukherjee, popularly known as Hemant Kumar.  I did that for two reasons. One, music lovers in India and across the world celebrated the centenary of this gifted musician, earlier this year. Two, much to my regret, my top 10 does not feature a Hemant Kumar number either as a singer or as a composer. One of my all-time favorite songs from ' Pyaasa' narrowly missed making this list. (Three, I wanted to keep my Bengali friends in good humor). Hemantda was a very prolific and accomplished singer: by the end of his career, he had recorded over two-thousands songs in various languages, notably in Bengali and Hindi, and won numerous awards, including two national awards and the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi award, for his seminal work on Rabindra Sangeet. He was no flash in the pan as a music dire...

I don’t know if there is anyway to be objective about music. It is not like string theory or the tuning fork experiment that you can postulate things through a well-established procedure. Music is one of those disciplines where you are afforded the right to be openly prejudiced about your preferences, and allowed to get away with phrases such as “personal taste”, “can’t relate to that music”, et al, and shut out the counter-opinion without sounding chauvinistic or downright stupid. I am starting there because this series will have a bunch of opinions. Opinions that you will perhaps vehemently disagree with.  Opinions that will shake the very foundations of your thought process.  Opinions that will make you pose the existential question, Who Am I ? No, no. I am not going that far. Just know that my music tastes were largely conditioned by my family of delightful bigots. That includes my mom that bursts with South Indian pride quite inopportunely; my rabid SPB-S Janaki loving ...