My mother tongue is not Hindi. I am from Tamil Nadu. I studied in Chennai. For political reasons, the children of my generation in the state were prevented from learning a beautiful musical language. In our house we loved Hindi songs. The voices of Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh and Mahendra Kapoor, and Asha Bhosle captivated us.
When we hear those melodious Hindi songs, they gently take us back to the good old days of the late sixties and seventies. Even today, every favourite song reminds me of a particular event, incident or a person.
When I happen to hear the song Zindagi Ek Safar of Andaz the faces of my college mates with whom I saw the Rajesh Khanna movie float before my eyes. The songs from Mera Naam Joker which I used to hear in the Sanatorium where my brother underwent treatment in vain for lung fibrosis kindle old pains in my heart. They arouse in my mind the memory of TB patients and their deaths. Songs of Aradhana occupy a special place in my life. The heart-tickling song Mere Sapno Ki Rani Kab Aayegi Tu makes me remember the short-lived romance between my elder brother and the fair girl Usha from the opposite house.
In the early seventies I used to travel often from Madras to Puducherry to see a very close friend of mine who was studying in a college there. The bus journey, lasting four or five hours, was made easy by Hindi and Tamil movie songs played in the music system of the bus. Whenever I hear songs sung by Kishore Kumar from Rajesh Khanna’s movie Kati Patang, I think of the conductor of the bus I usually travelled by, a handsome jovial Muslim who was crazy about songs sung by Kumar.
In the late seventies I joined Punjab & Sind Bank. A Sikh boy who worked as a cashier there could sing very well. Sitting in his cash cabin, counting cash, he was always singing songs from Hindi movies. He possessed such an elastic voice with depth and sweetness that often I reminded him that he was a cuckoo and his place was not a bank cashier’s cage but a recording studio in Bombay.
Nowadays who can tell one film song from another? Few years from now you won’t be able to remember them. Where is the question of these songs—that scream, yell, moan and whine—reminding you of wonderful, emotional, landmark happenings in your life?
M R Anand
Email: mr.m.r.anand@gmail.com