Tag Archives: Na tum humein jaano na hum tumhe jaanein

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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Ten of my favourite ‘not-quite-duet’ songs

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Sometime back, blog reader Anup remarked that some songs had a major singer not really doing much singing. Duets, he pointed out, where one singer does almost all the singing, while the other one just does a supportive ‘la-la-la-la’, or something along those lines. Anup suggested I compile a song list of duets like that. Of what I call ‘technically duets’: not songs in which both singers play an equal part in making the song what it is, but in which the ratio is somewhat skewed.

Then, only about a week after Anup made this suggestion, yet another blog reader, Bhagwan Thavrani, sent me an e-mail with pretty much the same suggestion. He was rather more precise: songs in which one singer only hummed, while the other did the singing.

Two readers, both requesting songs of the same basic type? I decided I had to take up the challenge. Especially as, offhand, I couldn’t think of many songs that would fit the bill. This would require a good deal of research, and a lot of listening to songs. I decided, however, to make this a little more wide-ranging: not necessarily one singer humming, but definitely one singer dominating the song.

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Ten of my favourite Waheeda Rehman songs

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What made Bees Saal Baad such a good watch was its music, its fairly good suspense – and its lovely heroine.
Waheeda Rehman had it all: an immense amount of talent, a rare beauty, a grace and dignity that few possess – and she was a superb dancer. What’s more, as I discovered in a TV interview a couple of years back, she’s also very modest. “When I was a girl, my siblings would call me the ‘ugly duckling’”, she said. A flash of that trademark smile, and she added, “The camera was very kind to me.” As fellow blogger Sabrina Mathew remarked when I recounted that on her post, “I want that camera!”

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Ten of my favourite Hemant songs

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My maternal grandfather used to work in the Gramophone Company of India. Mummy grew up in a house full of LPs, and a lot of those—including dozens of albums from Hindi films of the 50’s and 60’s—ended up in our house. I grew up listening to music; but for a long time, I couldn’t tell one singer from another. The first singer whose voice I learnt to identify (I must have been about 11 or 12 at the time, I think) was Hemant.
Hemant Kumar Mukherjee was born on June 16, 1920, and went on to become one of Hindi cinema’s great music directors—and a singer with a very distinctive voice, rich and deep and sonorous.

So, as a birthday anniversary tribute: my ten favourite Hemant songs. These are all from the 50’s and 60’s, from films that I’ve seen, and in no particular order. Frankly, each song is a masterpiece in itself.

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