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

When did Pancham's youthful exuberance start expressing itself through his music? Was it from his first movie or did he pick it up along the way? He had certainly shown glimpses of it before, but I think it was with the 1973 film, 'Yaadon Ki Baaraat', that he went totally "yahoo". The energy and the verve of his melodies, which is what his fans relish about him even to this day, reached another level after scoring for this Nasir Husain classic. It is not like he was a straight jacket before this. After all, he had made Shammi Kapoor reach ecstatic states with 'Aaja aaja' and 'O haseena zulfon wali' in 'Teesri Manzil'. That was in 1966. With  Asha Bhosle's crooning and Helen's hip-shaking (and men's heart skipping),  he started a new genre in Hindi film music, after the raunchy 'Piya tu ab tu aaja'. With 'Yeh diwani yeh jawani', ‘Chala jaata hoon’ and the like, he made Kishoreda go zanier than before (and that is

I am going to finish off this series with two lovely songs from Rahul Dev Burman or RD Burman or RDB; the shining star of the seventies, the scion of the Burmans, inheritor of musical riches, the original Rock Star of Indian music...Call him all the names you like.  Pancham  - another of his names that stuck to him from childhood, apparently because he cried precisely in the fifth note (Pa) or because he wept in five notes -  was born with the proverbial silver spoon (and audava raga swarams, if you get my drift) in his mouth. That is often, reason  enough  to bog one down for a lifetime of entitlement and perpetual submediocrity. People born to overachieving parents either lack the talent or the drive to bear the weight of public expectations. Or both. (Cough...Abhi...cough..shek..cough...Bach...cough...chan). Pancham not only rose against the onerous gravity of being SD Burman's son but went a step further and established himself as the undisputed trendsetter of Indian film music

I will take one giant leap forward from 1962 to 1971. Charles Manson and his death cult, the so-called 'Manson family', were sentenced to death  by the courts - it was  later commuted to life in prison in 1972 - for what were called the Tate-LaBianca murders, one of the most gruesome serial killings in the US at that time.  I had recently watched a Netflix series called 'The Mindhunter', about a breakthrough effort, in the 70s,  by the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI that revolutionized the methods used by law enforcement agencies to profile criminals. The interviews with the serial killers like Charles Manson and Edmund Kemper that helped device these methods were  at once fascinating and deeply disturbing. Fascinating for the insights into the psychology of serial killers that it provided and disturbing for how brutal and psychotic these seemingly intelligent and, at least in Kemper's case, affable people could be. The other big event of 1971 was the India-Paki

I am going to make my next pit stop in the year 1962. It was a traumatic year for India. After electing Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister for a third consecutive term (some would call that a traumatic event in itself), we got a nice whopping at the hands of our Chini bhais in the Indo-China War. Nehru never recovered from the deception from his favorite country, and passed away in the next couple of years, they say, an awfully sad man. Back to our song list, I had not intended for this series to shape up to be a Rafi-Lata love-fest but that's what it has become. They were the biggest talents of that era, no doubt, but I was expecting for Kishore, Mukesh, Asha, and even Manna Dey to be well represented in my list of favorites. But then, I had to be honest with myself and choose numbers that I best liked and those that best represented the era. All of this build-up is only  to exculpate myself for featuring Lata in the next two songs as well.  What can I say about Lata that has not