Category Archives: Ten of my favourite…

Ten of my Favourite ‘Multiple Version’ Songs: Duets

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By which I mean two versions of the same duet.

This is part of an admittedly sporadic series of posts that focus on multiple versions of songs in old Hindi cinema. Composers and film directors have, again and again, homed in on songs that have staying power: songs that audiences wouldn’t mind listening to repeatedly in a film. Multiple version songs, as I’ve shown in previous posts of this type, take various forms. The type, for instance, where both a woman and a man sing the same song, but as solos. Or where a song is sung both as a duet and as a solo. Or, even, where the same singer (male or female) sings the same at two different points, but usually in two different moods.

And then there’s this: where a duet is repeated. Invariably, in two distinct moods. Given that the overwhelming number of duets in Hindi cinema tend to be romantic ones, there’s a certain predictability to the tones of these songs. One version is, more often than not, a happy version: two lovers celebrating their love and vowing eternal fidelity. The other version, just as often, is the complete opposite in tone. Things have fallen apart, fate (or disapproving parents, nasty relatives, lecherous villains, etc) have intervened and either sown the seed of suspicion, or used emotional blackmail to force one of the couple into giving up the other. There are also sorts of possibilities—and they lead, as below, to the old duet being again sung (often as an impossible duet, the estranged lovers physically too far apart to be really singing together).

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Ten of my favourite ‘multiple version’ songs: solo/duet (or more)

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Many years back, I’d begun doing a series of posts on multiple version songs in old Hindi cinema. Songs that seem to have struck their composers/film directors as so impactful that they needed to be repeated, in different scenarios, sometimes in different moods and even with different singers, singing differing lyrics. I did two of those posts, then something cropped up (I don’t remember what) and the project got abandoned.

But I’ve got back to this now, and here’s a third post on multiple version songs. My earlier posts focused on solos: two-version songs sung by a male singer and a female singer; and the same song, sung by the same singer but in two versions.

This time, I’m focusing on songs that appear at least twice in a film, but at least once in the form of a solo and the other time as a duet (or more: one of the songs in this list has three singers).

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Ten of my Favourite Bathroom Singers

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If ‘bathroom singer’ refers to ‘a mediocre or amateur singer’, then Hindi cinema belies that definition: because old Hindi films have plenty of instances of songs sung by people in bathrooms, while bathing, shaving, washing up, whatever—and all perfectly in tune. These bathroom singers are no bathroom singers at all.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s my list: ten songs that illustrate the point. Barring one song, all are from pre-1970s Hindi films that I’ve seen; the exception is a song from the cusp (1972), but I’ve included it because the film in question (Dil Daulat Duniya) always strikes me more—in tone, look, fashions, actors, etc—as a late 60s one.

The only other criterion I’ve kept in mind is that at least one verse is sung inside the bathroom.

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Ten of my favourite songs that became film titles

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This song list had its genesis in an earlier song list, my ten favourite title songs. In my introduction to that list, I had listed the criteria I had set for that post, and one of them was that I wouldn’t include songs for which the lyrics gave rise to film titles for a completely different film. As examples, I mentioned Yeh raat phir na aayegi (Mahal, 1949) and Dekh tere sansaar ki haalat (Nastik, 1954), both of which led to films with those lyrics as title.

That attracted the attention of several blog readers, and Harvey even suggested that it might be an interesting idea to try doing a list of such songs: songs which had lyrics that were turned into film titles. Harvey suggested a couple of songs that would fit, and so did a couple of other blog readers as well.

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Ten of my favourite title songs

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Given that I’ve done so many song lists, it surprises me, too, that I’ve so far never done a list of my favourite title songs. Blog reader Naghma (who has suggested some great themes for song lists over the years) suggested this one too, and I was a little taken aback to realize that—though I’d done a credits songs list, and had another noted down for climax songs or songs that end a film—I’d never even thought of doing a title songs list.

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It’s what you wear: Ten songs about attire

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Every now and then a blog reader makes a request for a song list. Some I find interesting enough (and challenging enough) to decide to take up.

This is one such: songs that make a mention of a particular garment. A blog reader, an avid participant in antakshari, made this request, having first told me that he found my blog a very good resource for coming up with songs to fit just about any theme. Would I do a song list on items of attire, please? I had already published a list on dupattas/chunaris/odhnis, but beyond that, offhand, I could think of only a handful of other pieces of clothing that had been celebrated in song. It took a good bit of time, effort, and research to dredge up others.

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Talat Mahmood: Ten Solos, Ten Composers

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Today is the birth centenary of the ‘King of the Ghazal’, the inimitable Talat Mahmood. Talat was born on February 24, 1924 in Lucknow, and it was in Lucknow itself that he obtained his initial training in music: at the Marris College of Music, where he learnt classical Hindustani music from Pandit SCR Bhatt. By the age of sixteen, Talat was singing the ghazals of Urdu’s foremost poets for All India Radio Lucknow, and was soon taken on by HMV as well. His first introduction to cinema came through the film industry in Calcutta, where he not only sang songs (under the name ‘Tapan Kumar’), but also acted in several films. In 1949, at the age of twenty-five, Talat moved to Bombay, and the rest, of course, is history: he went on to become one of Hindi cinema’s most distinctive voices, and his songs—romantic, filled with pathos, tender, soulful—still live on.

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Ten of my favourite flower songs

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Over the years, I’ve done several songs that focus on my love—and, it would seem, the love of some film-makers and lyricists, too—for nature. I have done lists of nature songs; tree songs; and bird songs. Over the years, too, I’ve several times been told I should do a list on flower songs. I’ve always ducked that one, because Harvey, years ago, did a superb post on flower songs, and how I could I possibly hope to even match, let alone excel, a botanist writing about flower songs?!

But over the past couple of years, my interest in flowers has grown exponentially, and while I may not know a hundredth of what Harvey knows, at least I can depend upon my enthusiasm to steer me through. So here goes.

Flowers are, to put it bluntly, the sexual part of a plant. Contained in them are the female and male reproductive organs, plus (often) nectar, to entice pollinators such as bees, butterflies, bats, other insects, small birds, and so on.

Flowers are beautiful, flowers are useful (there would be no fruit without flowers), and human beings have admired and used flowers in a myriad ways since time immemorial. We’ve decorated with them, we’ve used their designs to fashion everything from jewellery to embroidery. We’ve painted and carved them, we’ve celebrated them in literature and in song.

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Helen and another Actress: Ten Dance Songs

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As part of the birthday celebrations of Helen (she turned 85 on November 21st, 2023), another post of Helen songs.

While Helen has shimmied to umpteen songs by herself (or with a band of male dancers in attendance), there are also a fair number of songs where Helen isn’t the only woman dancing. To celebrate my favourite dancer’s 85th birthday, I thought, it would be fun to come up with a list of song-and-dance sequences featuring Helen with another actress.

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Ten of my favourite Helen songs

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And, of course, that pretty much implies: Ten of my favourite Helen dances.

The ‘Queen of the Nautch Girls’ (as a 1973 documentary about her dubbed Helen) turns 85 today: she was born on November 21, 1938, in Yangon. The story of the long journey from Myanmar to Mumbai is not something Helen talks about (she seems to be amazingly reticent; Jerry Pinto, writing about her in The Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb, says that he wasn’t able to get hold of her for even a short interview). But that she entered cinema, courtesy dancing mentor Cuckoo, as a teenager, is well-known. And that she burst upon the firmament of the Hindi silver screen and made it her own is there for everybody to see. From the mid-1950s onward, Helen was to be seen increasingly in Hindi cinema, and with the foot-tapping Mera naam Chin Chin Choo, she rocketed to the top: by the 60s, no commercial film worth its salt could be without a Helen number.

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