It was a bright sunny morning in April. We had just landed in that city and for a person who had hardly moved out of his hometown (home city!), things seemed exciting though a little alien. After a long train journey, I was a little tired too. Suddenly, a song started playing from a distance. It was from a loudspeaker. It said ‘Chura liya hai tumne jo dil ko’. Only the previous year did I start learning Hindi as part of my second language and therefore, I was able to understand the rough meaning. But what struck me the most was the different sound and also the voices.
Having grown up in Madras,
my exposure to film music started and stopped with Tamizh films, and the
only names I was familiar with were ‘M S Viswanathan’, ‘KaNNadasan’, ‘T M
Soundararajan’ and ‘P Suseela’. During the Vinayakar Chaturthi
festival, the temple close to our quarters in Madras would play MGR
songs and Hindi songs. One of the songs that was played often was ‘Dum
maaro dum’ (look at the irony!). Little did I know the names of the
singers then, though the song would give a very different feel.
Going back to that sunny
morning, I was attracted to that song instantly. After joining the school there
(the only school in that city that offered Tamizh as a language), I was
slowly getting into Hindi songs. Peer influence! There used to be a
programme called ‘Binaca Geetmala’ on Sri Lankan Broadcasting Service
every Wednesday between 8 pm and 9 pm and I started listening
to that just to keep up with the trend. Over a period of time, it became a habit
which would not leave me at least for the next 3-4 years.
My first attraction was the
male voice in a majority of the songs. Bowled over by the magneticity in that
voice, the person became my childhood hero. Then it was the female voice which
was part of many duets with that male singer. In fact, her name was very
popular even in Madras those days. I became a huge fan of both the singers
– Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. None of the other voices
appealed to me as much as the voices of those two, until something happened.
There was a devastating
cyclone that year in that state causing very severe damage in the coastal
region and the Government sent a directive to the schools to collect Relief
fund from residents in the city. The school in turn divided us into
different teams and we had to go door-to-door to collect the fund. We took to
the task with glee (no classes, you see!). Even as we were walking, a song
floated in the air and it said ‘Mil gaya hum ko saathi mil gaya’.
The male voice of course my most favourite voice. The female voice was different.
It is not that I had not heard that voice before. In fact, I had heard the
voice many times before in that Geetmala. Yet, it moved me for the first
time.
That was the beginning.
Though comparisons are odious,
I must say that the voice of Asha Bhosle is unique in terms of the
sweetness, versatility, ductility, and expressiveness. Most importantly, though
it sounds effortless to a lay listener, the hard work is apparent to a trained
ear. Disco, romance, sad, classical or for that matter any genre was handled by
her with equal felicity.
The mutual admiration between ILaiyaraaja
and Asha Bhosle is well-known to many. She has praised his genius on
many occasions, one of them being an interview in Marathi in which she
said how he changed a part of the CharaNam in a jiffy, in her first ever
recorded tamizh song for him. Raaja sir in one of the interviews last
year mentioned as to how pleasurable it was to work with her.
The song I have taken up is
from the first Hindi film of ILaiyaraaja and probably the first
ever song both worked together.
When the Hindi remake
of Sadma was announced, my happiness knew no bounds when I came to know
that Balu Mahendra managed to convince his dear friend to score in Hindi
as well. Not many know that until then ILaiyaraaja had kept away from Hindi
films in spite of many offers. The audio launch happened in a 5-star hotel
in Madras with Amitabh as the chief guest. A Tamizh
magazine while writing about this event mentioned that the songs were a ‘carbon
copy’ of the ones in Tamizh! Later, when I listened to the songs in the
cinema hall, I wondered if the person who wrote that piece was auditorily
challenged. Except for two songs, the tunes of the other three were totally
different and even those two songs had some subtle variations.
This song – Yeh Hawaa-
in particular sounds so different from Vaanengum Thanga ViNmeengaL
and it will be hard for people to believe that the situation in the movie was
the same.
It starts with the strumming
of the guitar. Well, this itself is an understatement. The guitar
caresses, cajoles, canoodles, dandles and fondles for 20 seconds. This does
not mean that it does nothing after that. The brass flute joins after 20
seconds and the romance continues for the next 20 seconds.
The humming of Asha ji
starts after this and goes on for a while, with the bass guitar and the rhythm
guitar backing the vocals. The chorus takes over and continues the
humming. Suddenly, there is a change. The melody which until now was soft,
changes colour. With the trumpets in full flow, it gets peppy and
ebullient. The subtle variation in Asha ji’s humming just before the
chorus takes over cannot be missed by a trained ear.
After a very subtle guitar
piece, the Pallavi starts in Asha ji’s voice. The way the Pallavi
unfolds gathering momentum in a matter of seconds, shows the genius of both as
also the trust the composer has on the singer.
After a pause, the bass
guitar plays in its inimitable style and the trumpets take over with
the percussion backing them. A very different sound follows. But what is
amazing is the akaaram in the voice of Suresh Wadkar, which appears
after that very special sound. To start with, the akaaram has the
backing of the western instruments. The latter withdraw after a while.
With the drone of the tanpoora in the background, the akaaram in
pure Chandrakauns stirs one’s soul. Definition of Meditation!
Contrasts again in the CharaNam
with the tune turning peppy with both the singers vying with each other.
Filled with joie de vivre,
the second interlude is a treat to a connoisseur. For starters, there is
that tribal percussion sounding in ‘3’s. The composition is set
in ‘4’ and yet the percussion goes in ‘3’s (Gati Bhedam).
Yet another percussion sounds only the fourth beat -if one takes the
count as 1 2 3 4 in medium tempo. Note that the tribal percussion sounds
in the next tempo. The small flute plays a melody and the trumpets
respond like how a group of elephants would sound. The elephant army continues
its march until the humming of Suresh Wadkar and Asha ji with the
latter in particular showing her prowess in oscillation.
Some people do not leave this
world. After all, does the wind ever stop blowing?
