Tag Archives: Cha Cha Cha

Ten of my favourite ‘record player’ songs

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Many years ago, a blog reader with whom I had some differences, and who never seemed to be in agreement with me, parted ways with my blog. As she departed, it was with the scathing comment that I chose the most outlandish and weird of themes for my song lists. Unfortunately (or fortunately? I cannot decide) comments like that only serve to make me want to prove how unwarranted the remark is. In this case, by showing the reader that she “ain’t seen nothin’ yet”, as they say. If you thought I chose weird themes, you don’t known what a weird theme is. The weirdest is yet to come.

… and this is it. The germ of this idea was planted in my mind when I was doing research for another weirdly-themed list: my recording studio songs list. Several of the songs that feature people singing in recording studios also show the other side: people listening in, an audience tuned in to a radio or a television. As I’d watched song after song on my longlist and then my shortlist, I’d noticed that several songs weren’t just played on radios, but on record players, on gramophones. That had to be a separate list, I decided.

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Neither Here nor There: Rafi Sings for the In-Betweens

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When, to celebrate the birth centenary (on December 24, 2024) of the one and only Mohammad Rafi, I compiled this list of my favourite Rafi songs for the top leading men of the 1950s and 60s, I was uncomfortably aware that I wasn’t doing justice to Rafi’s oeuvre. Even though I had tried my best to bung in mentions (and links) to many other songs Rafi had sung for these men. Because there were many other Rafi songs I could think of, which he had sung for actors absolutely opposite to these: extras, or actors who had woefully short-lived careers—in many cases men whose entire career might be said to hinge around one fantastic song that Rafi sang for them. A second Rafi list, arranged actor-wise, was therefore in order.

But in between the stars and the entities were a host of other actors who had the honour to lip-sync to Rafi’s voice. These were often character actors, or men who acted as villains. Even, in cases like Sanjay Khan, Premnath and Ajit, men who did appear in a fair number of films in leading roles, but cannot be said to have ever reached the heights of popularity or success of, say, a Dilip Kumar or Dev Anand, or even a Biswajit. They were the in betweens: not at all obscure, but not the Jubilee Kumar types.

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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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Ten of my favourite songs from films I haven’t watched

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… and which I am not likely to get around to watching, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Because today is the tenth birthday of my blog, and this is my way of wishing my blog a happy birthday.

Ten years ago, when I launched Dustedoff (with this post), I had imagined it to mostly be a collection of reviews—Hindi and Hollywood films—and some song lists. Dustedoff evolved down the line. A cousin who commented on one of my earliest posts asked if I would review foreign language films, and when blog reader Bawa, visiting Delhi, she gifted me a DVD of a Spanish film, which became the first non-Hindi, non-English film I reviewed on this blog. Still later, a friend suggested I combine my website (which was all about my fiction writing—my books, articles, and short stories) with my blog, so that happened, expanding the scope of Dustedoff. What you see today is still primarily a blog about old cinema (the period of cinema I focus on is one thing that’s remained consistent), but it’s now also about travel and food and history and other things that interest me.

Of all that I write about on this blog, the most popular posts—by a very, very great margin—are the ones that feature song lists. When I compiled my first song list, one restriction I imposed on myself (and how controversial that has turned out to be!) was that I would feature songs only from pre-70s films I’d already watched. People asked me why this was so; some urged me to rethink that decision; some thought I was dumb to limit myself so. But I took that decision (partly because there are some songs, I realize, that need to be understood in context, partly because it helps make compiling lists more challenging for me, and partly because it encourages me to watch more cinema, including obscure stuff). And that is a decision I’ve stayed with.

But. Today is Dustedoff’s 10th birthday. A celebration is in order, I think. And my way of celebrating is to let my hair down a bit—with ten songs I really like but which I’m unlikely to ever get to post, because it’s equally unlikely that I’ll ever get to watch these films. In most cases, the films seem to have completely disappeared off the radar; I have spent years looking for them, both in DVD/VCD format, and on the Internet, but they seem to have vanished. Rare films, or lost films. Perhaps some of these will emerge someday and I’ll be able to watch them, but for now, that seems like a remote possibility. (Note: These are not songs that were originally part of a film but were later deleted—so CID’s Jaata kahaan hai deewaane, or Shikast’s Chaand madham hai don’t qualify, since I have seen the film in question; it was just that the song was missing).

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