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

Prithviraj Kapoor, the progenitor of the Kapoor khandaan, was a pioneering film actor and a passionate dramatist. He had this habit of being associated to greatness, like Forrest Gump. 'Alam Ara' the first Indian talkie, 'Awara' the movie that set the entire Eastern Bloc on fire, and 'Mughal-e-Azam', K. Asif's obsession and arguably the biggest Indian movie ever made (yeah, bigger than 'Bahubali', factoring for inflation), all had Prithviraj Kapoor playing pivotal roles. It was his passion for acting that brought the Kapoors from Peshawar to Bombay, and enabled them to eventually acquire the mantle of the First Family of tinsel town. But Prithviraj's actual calling was elsewhere. He was a sucker for theater. To a point where he literally bankrolled his fervor for it with his movie earnings. In 1944, he founded Prithvi Theater, a hundred-plus-strong, traveling troupe that went all around the country and staged Hindi plays. Over time, they complete...

The songs that I will feature in this series are in chronological order, except for the first one. I will start with the year 1959. Nehru was still the premier of India. His rose-tinted 'Hindi Chini bhai bhai' vision would continue on for another three years, till it received a severe jolt with the Chinese invasion. The Dalai Lama had fled to India and Fidel Castro was anointed the Prime Minister of Cuba early that year. Nepal's women voted for the very first time in election, while Swiss women were denied suffrage in a referendum vote (they would finally get the right to vote in 1971). The first song in the series is from the movie, 'Dil Deke Dekho' starring Shammi Kapoor and Asha Parekh (her debut), with Nasir Husain helming the direction department - it was just his second movie. There is the eponymously titled number sung by Rafi that is perhaps more famous than the one I am going to play. I have a reason why I featured this song first.  In the quarter century t...