Tag Archives: Parasmani

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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Ten of my favourite songs featuring colours

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Happy Holi!


I don’t celebrate Holi—ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had a horror of being wet and dirty, and come Holi, I used to insist on locking myself in. I was in good company; though my father was obliged to go and play Holi with his colleagues, Mummy and my sister were as intent on staying clean as I was. Come Holi, we’d happily feast on gujiyas and whatever other goodies came our way, but pichkaris, gulaal, and the rest? No, thank you.

Not so with Hindi cinema, where Holi has been a big thing all along: the perfect situation for displays of affection, camaraderie, general love towards one and all. And I don’t think I have ever seen Holi depicted in a film without there being an accompanying song. That was what I’d first thought I’d do to mark Holi on this blog: a post of Holi songs. Then, looking back at the number of non-Holi songs that are about colours, I thought, Let’s give it a twist. Let’s talk about blue and pink and green and yellow. Let’s talk sky and trees and eyes and whatnot. Neeli aankhein, peeli sarson. Hariyali aur raasta.

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Ten of my favourite ‘Who’s that lip-synching?’ songs

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If the title of this post stumps you, let me explain.

Anybody who’s seen Hindi films (especially from the 1940s onward, when playback singing became widespread) knows that most actors and actresses onscreen weren’t singing for themselves. Occasionally, as in the case of artistes like Suraiya, KL Saigal, Noorjehan or Kishore Kumar, they did sing for themselves, but more often than not, the recording was done off-screen, and the actor lip-synched to the song onscreen. So we have all our favourite actors, warbling blithely (or not, as the case may be) in the voices of our greatest singers.

And just now and then, while the song may reach the heights of popularity, the person on whom it is filmed may be, to most people, a non-entity. Sidharth Bhatia, author of Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story (as well as a book on Amar Akbar Anthony, which I’m looking forward to reading) pointed this out to me the other day, with a couple of examples in support of his point. Jaan-pehchaan ho, and Tum apna ranj-o-gham. Sidharth made a request: would I compile a list of songs of this type? Famous songs, but lip-synched by not so famous faces?

So here it. And, Sidharth: thank you. This was challenging, and fun.

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