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 ...

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...