Singing to the tune

The Hindi film music has been a genuine confluence of different religions. In its golden years, that is, when songs were songs and not gut-wrenching item numbers, the songs were written by mostly Muslin lyricists, they were composed by mostly Hindu musicians and the instruments were played by mostly Goan Christians. Here is a collection of some profound thoughts on Hindi film music.

I have grown up listening to Hindi film songs. One of my aunts (my father’s youngest sister) used to play the radio so much that once my grandfather, in shear boredom and annoyance, was about to smash the set. Those days I used to stay with my grandparents. I think that was the time when I began to assimilate those songs. I could hum them without understanding what they meant. People in the neighbourhood specially used to ask me to sing certain songs and I used to sing them readily.

Good songs were still being composed in the mid-seventies. It’s appalling to see the prevalent mediocrity one sees these days. I’ve begun to appreciate the old songs even more after having started taking classical music lessons. My guruji sometimes very diligently explains individual compositions. I can now see how much work, how much dedication went into them. It was a wild passion, not pursuit of money that produced those songs. These days, most of the songs are written and composed by forty-year-old teenagers (no, I don’t mean to say teenagers are stupid) who are too dumb to be creative. They are given a template by the music companies and they compose within those peripheries. Even reputed writers like Jave Akhtar these days write churlish songs because may be there are no takers for good, literate lyrics.

This needs to be changed. There is still a huge market for good, classy music. There are still people who understand and appreciate musical poetry. This segment needs to be found and re-established. But who can take the initiative? I think the producers, the directors, the film-financers, the people who matter in the film industry, and of course, the audience.