Tag Archives: Rukh se zara naqaab utha do

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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Ten of my favourite romantic serenades

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This blog has been in existence ten years, and I suppose you can tell how important (or not) Valentine’s Day is over here by the fact that in all these years, I’ve dedicated a post to this day only twice—once, with a list of love songs in ten different moods, and (more recently) with a list of romantic duets.

So here we are, jumping on to the bandwagon yet again. This time, it’s a list of romantic serenades, of people singing in praise of the person they’re in love with (or, as in the case of a couple of fraudulent characters in this list, pretending to be in love with). There are serenades to others (Hindi cinema is full of serenades): to mothers and their near-divine maternalism; to the motherland and to the bond between siblings. None of these, I think, are as ubiquitous and as common as the serenade to a loved one. The praise in honour of his/her beauty, charm, sweetness, simplicity, virtues: going by the way Hindi songs serenade a love interest, you’d think the realm of Hindi cinema was crammed with utter paragons.

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Ten of my favourite train songs

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Continuing with my plan to link every post to the previous one… well, what next? (Harvey: you were close when it came to guessing!)
My last post, North-West Frontier, was set mostly in a train – and that too a train in the Indian subcontinent. So it seemed appropriate to do a list of my favourite songs set in what seems to have been one of Hindi cinema’s much-loved settings. From this lovely old song by Pankaj Mullick (thank you, AK, for introducing me to that), to newer songs – from Teri hai zameen teri aasmaan, to the much later Chhaiya chhaiya.

But: I’m restricting myself to pre-70s songs, and those too from films I’ve seen. What’s more, these are songs where the person on whom the song is picturised is on the train throughout the song. That’s why, no Mere sapnon ki raani kab aayegi tu (for me, that’s a jeep song; I’ll do it in another post) and no Jab pyaar kisi se hota hai.

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