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 think this series has gotten way too intense. Time to lighten things up a bit. Seeing the rather morose settings and the long faces from previous songs, one may infer that the Bombay film industry did not possess a musical funny bone. That cannot be further from the truth. The stalwarts of the yore had enough musical sagacity to compose lighter numbers along the way, and keep the audience in raptures. And the audience of that era deserved every bit of rapture that one could give. Imagine India of that period, just around the time it became a republic and adopted the new constitution authored by Dr Ambedkar. The wounds from partition and Gandhi's assassination were still raw. Nehru and Patel were at the helm of a nascent, unstable democracy, whose survival was in doubt. The social indicators were pathetic. Literacy rate was eighteen percent, life expectancy was thirty-one years, and nearly half the country was below the poverty line. India seemed to be facing a perpetual grain sho...

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 ...