The 2014 meet as it unfolded, augurs to be a watershed moment in
history of RMIM meets. Here's a look back into the magical and mystical
journey capturing some of those moments.
There were the US meets that began in 1994 and the Indian version followed in 2006. While a few friends have been part of both the events, the distances and logistics never made it possible for both the sets to meet. This dream of a grand meet finally turned into reality thanks to telepresence.20 years into our meet history, a new chapter has unfolded. On a personal note it perhaps shredded the biggest challenge that was presented to me in terms of chronicling "An imaginary account of what would transpire if RMIMers from across the oceans came face to face".
The hangout concept sent out ripples and by Friday evening (PST), there was a buzz around the event. As Vijay Kumar (Pragyapati) started posting updates, pictures and a video of the proceedins, the million dollar question on everyone’s mind was “When would the hangout begin?”. Meanwhile, I opened a hangout with the remote attendees and Sudarshana wittily termed it as (g)Anti-meet hangout.
Eventually I called Balaji to find out the hangout times. And that call turned to be a hangout in itself as I was put on speaker phone and everyone took turns to speak. All sorts of questions popped up and here are a few.
"Was Rajinder Krishan a Sardar"?
"Which part of the world do you live in"?
"That was the first company I ever worked for".
"Can we have an RMIM meet in Delhi"?
"Do they do home delivery in India"?
"How many songs have Gulzar and SD Burman have collaborated on"?
"You are visiting all of my addas in Delhi".
It is left to the readers imagination to match the statements / questions with the people; Ashok, Balaji, Malini, Guri, Vish, Pradeep, Deepak and Vijay.
The hangout times were tentatively fixed as 12 noon and 7 Pm PST on Saturday. I absolutely had no idea that once the hangout began it would stay that way. Perhaps it was dictated by the number of remote participants. The noon hangout was initially joined by Neha, Sudarshana and yours truly. We could only hear Sudarshana and only see Neha. Sudarshana was able to fix the problem later by swapping his laptop and Neha who joined while driving had to deal with echo and had to be muted. She had to reach home and connect through another device.
Meanwhile Pavan joined and on Guri’s request sang the lesser known verison of “raahi tu mat ruk jaana” that goes “hote hain mausam ke phere” followed by “ruk jaana nahiin tuu kahiin haar ke”. Gajendra, Kalyan and UVR soon joined. As soon as Gajendra joined, pat came the question “Is Rajinder Krishan a sardaar ?”. The theory from Guri was that since he was from Duggal family and a Khatri, he was likely to be a sardaar. Vish added “His son was named Bobby” which increased the likelihood.
Gajendra did a quiz by playing a song from the 40’s and the audience was asked to guess the singer. We then figured out that since Gajendra was playing from the same device as the hangout, the song was getting muted. So he had to play the song from another device and the audience had to guess the singers. “main to lehanga nahiin pehanungi”, “vo nazron men samaate jaa rahe hain” and “dil pehluu men uchaltaa jaaye, samajh nahiin aaye haay kya”. The audience were not able to guess and the answers are Zeenat and SD Batish; GM Durrani and Jyoti. By now it was already 1 am IST and India folks said good night.
I rejoined at 5:30 am IST and noticed that Archana Gupta, Ketan and Shalini, Neha, Vandana Vidwans are on the hangout. Apart from the gang of 8 RMIM regulars who came on Friday, there were a few locals; Murali, Raksha, Mani. Balaji’s mother was also present.
A few events including Neha’s chitrahaar quiz and introductions finished by this time. The introductions should also include the first song liked by the audience they can recall. UVR’s pick was “chaudavi ka chand ho”, Balaji recalled “tum gar saath dene ka vaada karo”, to name a few. While a wide set of replies came from the audience, there were a lot of Talat songs and some popular Salil Chowdhury numbers among the picks. Someone fill in regarding the details of Neha’s quiz.
By the time I joined, Vijay Kumar‘s (ISB Wallah) quiz was about to end. Google docs, talk of team work and scrambling at the left over task make me feel like I was at work till I noticed a message on the hangout by Kalyan , “Hema the kiddo is here”. For a minute, I got transported into the past. We all have added a bit of grey hair, a few ounces of flesh and a little bit of pragmatism that we cannot do night-outs any more but even after all these years we probably are the same from inside.
Coming back to the quiz, it’s a sequence of songs for which the music director, lyricist and singer information is provided. The song and the movie have to be guessed. The relation between successive songs is that a word from the mukhda of the first song is the movie of the second song. The members attending in person were split into 2 teams and the hangout folks formed the third team. By the time I joined there were only 3 clues that were still to be answered. Hafiz Khan, Shevan Rizvi and Talat combo caught my attention and I immediately thought of “zindagi ke dhadkan pe gaa” and UVR corrected it to “dil ki dhadkan ke gaa”..Although the song did match with Hafiz, Shevan and Talat, we cudn’t fit it with the predecessor. The clues for that were K-A, Qamar and Lata which had to be matched with its own predecessor; with Hansraj Behl, Prem Dhawan and Rafi-Shamshad being the anchors. This Hansraj Behl number was guessed as “bheega bheega pyar ka samaa” which supposedly had the word Chhalia although folks said it was Baliya. There was a lot of debate after our “answers” were turned over but it didn’t matter since the “remote folks” cracked all the other questions to emerge winners.
A singing session followed with Barun Saha on Guitar. Barun sang several popular Kishore and Rafi numbers including “musafir yuun yaaron” and “suhani raat dhal chuki”. Hema commented that some of the Rafi’s songs being sung are in the “kuchh kuchh hota hai” category for her.
The next event was Guri's video quiz that he had done back in 2011 in Bangalore. This had song clips and their corresponding audio’s mismatched. You have to identify the songs in the order of the video clips. Again the remote attendees formed one group. While we were able to crack most of the songs, 2 numbers featuring Dilip Kumar eluded us. Based on “ call to join Indian army poster” we identified the first Dilip kumar number to be from Arzoo and after much back and forth nailed it to be “kahan tak ham uThaayen Gam”. The next one had Dilip Kumar in a coat sitting in a chair and a heroine doing a “face palm”. We all agreed that heroine was “Nalini Jaywant” and the movie must be Anokha Pyaar. The song aluded us and we guessed it as “jeevan sapna TuuT gaya” although “yaad rakhna chaand taro” was the right one. Vish’s team got all the songs correct.
It was getting late for East Coasters and Hema, Ketan and Shalini signed off. But India folks started joined in ensuring that there were enough remote participants in all the events. Nishant joined briefly from Ahmedabad and left for his Sarangi class. Pavan also made a short entry. Kalyan’s appearance or rather lack was quite amusing.. We could see Kalyan’s son playing, Kalyan’s wife calling their son, and even Kalyan’s maid sweeping but no Kalyan expect for partial glimpses of his eyes, ears and earphones hanging out of them “naam gum jaayega, chehra ye badal jaayega, meri *harkat* hi meri pehchaan hai” ! Gajendra also soon joined and it was now time for discussion on commemorative.
Commemorative:
Guri and Vish were in their usual form especially during the analysis on the meet commemorative. Referring to Beher and other technicalities of a Ghazal he went on to add that he initially enjoyed some of those songs in a different way but revisiting the song knowing the finer nuances gave an added dimension. He compared it to a meeting with a old friend and discovering a new aspect of your friends personality that enhances the relationship. Vijay commented that Guri is the new UVR and UVR has to find a new niche. Vish said that there is no commemorative CD this time and the theme is a blog about a blog on Ghazals in films.
After finishing the intro, Vish asked the audience a few questions. Who is the lyricst who wrote the most number of Ghazals. We all took turns to answer, and when Vish turned to Vandana there was no response and he said “she has turned her San Franscisco screen saver and gone somewhere” .My guess was Sahir and UVR said the same. Gajendra said Pandit Indra and Guri interjected “us duniya se niklo”! Surprisingly the correct answer was Shakeel. The guesses for composer who scored most Ghazals also wrong with Anil Biswas, Naushad, Roshan and Mandan Mohan occupying the top slots. I am surprised that no one guessed CR and wonder where he stood. The lyrcist-Md combo had Shakeel-Naushad at the top. Several of us guessed the top combo to be Sahir- Roshan.
The very definition of Ghazal was debated with answers ranging from “conversation with the beloved” to Deepak quoting his friend that all Ghazal Lovers belong to “Heart Break hotel”. Vish asked Gajendra to take the Ghazal research into 30’s and 40’s and when Gajendra pointed out a few singers to start with. Vish reasoned that since the RMIM brain has been tuned to composers since the beginning that would be the best “key word” to start the query with.
Vish mentioned a few songs which are not tuned like Ghazals and added a few like; “tadbiir se bigDi hui”, “hum aap ki aaNkhon men” and went on to add that his favorite in this category is “vo dekhen to unki inayat”. The Ghazal output of SDB and Majrooh was discussed and Guri started reading a list of Ghazals from a compilation and when a CR song came up, paused and said “Written by Rajinder Krishan Sardaar”! While there was no commemorative CD, the fascinating discussion more than made up for it.
It was now time to distribute some goodies and DVD’s of past film fare magazines compiled by Surjit Singh and Shekhar were distributed. It was time for some casual conversations and Vish talked about his Dilraj Kaur moment. It was October 3, 1976 and Vish was in the organizing committee of a musical event at IIT. Vish went on add that he had to ask one of the performers to sing next due to a change in schedule and she introduced herself as Dilraj and sang a lovely number. She later became famous as Dilraj Kaur and Vish says that the only other time he met the singer was in a hotel in Bombay.
Gajendra’s quiz was the next item on the agenda. RPM versions of songs were played and we had to guess the singer. The first song “kisi ne apna banaake mujhko” had several wrong guesses and I correctly picked it as “Madhubala Jhaveri”. This actually reminded me of my own “Jai Santoshi Maa” moment from a meet in the 90’s Vish guessed “kabhi aar kabhi paar” to be by Suman and when Pavan Jha joined we realized that he had several of the songs and didn’t have to listen to the vocals to guess the singer. Aankhon men kya ji by Ambar Kumar and Suman Kalyanpur; Ye raat bheegi bheegi by Bhushan and Geeta; Babuji Dheere Chalna by Sudha Malhotra; Ye hansta hua caravan by Mukesh were some of the other songs played.
Finally it was time for singing session. Vish sang “mujh se pehli si muhabbat” , ‘ aaye kuchh abr” and there were a few background discussions going on. There was some talk aout singing a bhairavi and I could see our very own Sardaar, came into form. I always love Guri’s interjections his singing goes like “chup hai dharti chup hai chand sitaare”…taara rara rarara with humming replacing the actual words . By now the video feed was shutoff but I could imagine some carefree gyrations accompanying the singing.
Finally I said goodbye to everyone round 1 am PST but the hangover of the hangout remained. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think of this meet as a reunion. There hasn’t been one for the last 3 years and it’s been even longer since we had an East Coast meet. But that strong sense of belonging to the group was very much evident as several moments of the past meets in deep freeze became warmer and fresher while a few more bytes got added to the memory bank. Thanks a bunch to Balaji and Malini and the attendees for making the meet and the hangout so enjoyable. It’s now time to put the magical moments in freeze mode and wait till the flood gates open again next year.
There were the US meets that began in 1994 and the Indian version followed in 2006. While a few friends have been part of both the events, the distances and logistics never made it possible for both the sets to meet. This dream of a grand meet finally turned into reality thanks to telepresence.20 years into our meet history, a new chapter has unfolded. On a personal note it perhaps shredded the biggest challenge that was presented to me in terms of chronicling "An imaginary account of what would transpire if RMIMers from across the oceans came face to face".
The hangout concept sent out ripples and by Friday evening (PST), there was a buzz around the event. As Vijay Kumar (Pragyapati) started posting updates, pictures and a video of the proceedins, the million dollar question on everyone’s mind was “When would the hangout begin?”. Meanwhile, I opened a hangout with the remote attendees and Sudarshana wittily termed it as (g)Anti-meet hangout.
Eventually I called Balaji to find out the hangout times. And that call turned to be a hangout in itself as I was put on speaker phone and everyone took turns to speak. All sorts of questions popped up and here are a few.
"Was Rajinder Krishan a Sardar"?
"Which part of the world do you live in"?
"That was the first company I ever worked for".
"Can we have an RMIM meet in Delhi"?
"Do they do home delivery in India"?
"How many songs have Gulzar and SD Burman have collaborated on"?
"You are visiting all of my addas in Delhi".
It is left to the readers imagination to match the statements / questions with the people; Ashok, Balaji, Malini, Guri, Vish, Pradeep, Deepak and Vijay.
The hangout times were tentatively fixed as 12 noon and 7 Pm PST on Saturday. I absolutely had no idea that once the hangout began it would stay that way. Perhaps it was dictated by the number of remote participants. The noon hangout was initially joined by Neha, Sudarshana and yours truly. We could only hear Sudarshana and only see Neha. Sudarshana was able to fix the problem later by swapping his laptop and Neha who joined while driving had to deal with echo and had to be muted. She had to reach home and connect through another device.
Meanwhile Pavan joined and on Guri’s request sang the lesser known verison of “raahi tu mat ruk jaana” that goes “hote hain mausam ke phere” followed by “ruk jaana nahiin tuu kahiin haar ke”. Gajendra, Kalyan and UVR soon joined. As soon as Gajendra joined, pat came the question “Is Rajinder Krishan a sardaar ?”. The theory from Guri was that since he was from Duggal family and a Khatri, he was likely to be a sardaar. Vish added “His son was named Bobby” which increased the likelihood.
Gajendra did a quiz by playing a song from the 40’s and the audience was asked to guess the singer. We then figured out that since Gajendra was playing from the same device as the hangout, the song was getting muted. So he had to play the song from another device and the audience had to guess the singers. “main to lehanga nahiin pehanungi”, “vo nazron men samaate jaa rahe hain” and “dil pehluu men uchaltaa jaaye, samajh nahiin aaye haay kya”. The audience were not able to guess and the answers are Zeenat and SD Batish; GM Durrani and Jyoti. By now it was already 1 am IST and India folks said good night.
I rejoined at 5:30 am IST and noticed that Archana Gupta, Ketan and Shalini, Neha, Vandana Vidwans are on the hangout. Apart from the gang of 8 RMIM regulars who came on Friday, there were a few locals; Murali, Raksha, Mani. Balaji’s mother was also present.
A few events including Neha’s chitrahaar quiz and introductions finished by this time. The introductions should also include the first song liked by the audience they can recall. UVR’s pick was “chaudavi ka chand ho”, Balaji recalled “tum gar saath dene ka vaada karo”, to name a few. While a wide set of replies came from the audience, there were a lot of Talat songs and some popular Salil Chowdhury numbers among the picks. Someone fill in regarding the details of Neha’s quiz.
By the time I joined, Vijay Kumar‘s (ISB Wallah) quiz was about to end. Google docs, talk of team work and scrambling at the left over task make me feel like I was at work till I noticed a message on the hangout by Kalyan , “Hema the kiddo is here”. For a minute, I got transported into the past. We all have added a bit of grey hair, a few ounces of flesh and a little bit of pragmatism that we cannot do night-outs any more but even after all these years we probably are the same from inside.
Coming back to the quiz, it’s a sequence of songs for which the music director, lyricist and singer information is provided. The song and the movie have to be guessed. The relation between successive songs is that a word from the mukhda of the first song is the movie of the second song. The members attending in person were split into 2 teams and the hangout folks formed the third team. By the time I joined there were only 3 clues that were still to be answered. Hafiz Khan, Shevan Rizvi and Talat combo caught my attention and I immediately thought of “zindagi ke dhadkan pe gaa” and UVR corrected it to “dil ki dhadkan ke gaa”..Although the song did match with Hafiz, Shevan and Talat, we cudn’t fit it with the predecessor. The clues for that were K-A, Qamar and Lata which had to be matched with its own predecessor; with Hansraj Behl, Prem Dhawan and Rafi-Shamshad being the anchors. This Hansraj Behl number was guessed as “bheega bheega pyar ka samaa” which supposedly had the word Chhalia although folks said it was Baliya. There was a lot of debate after our “answers” were turned over but it didn’t matter since the “remote folks” cracked all the other questions to emerge winners.
A singing session followed with Barun Saha on Guitar. Barun sang several popular Kishore and Rafi numbers including “musafir yuun yaaron” and “suhani raat dhal chuki”. Hema commented that some of the Rafi’s songs being sung are in the “kuchh kuchh hota hai” category for her.
The next event was Guri's video quiz that he had done back in 2011 in Bangalore. This had song clips and their corresponding audio’s mismatched. You have to identify the songs in the order of the video clips. Again the remote attendees formed one group. While we were able to crack most of the songs, 2 numbers featuring Dilip Kumar eluded us. Based on “ call to join Indian army poster” we identified the first Dilip kumar number to be from Arzoo and after much back and forth nailed it to be “kahan tak ham uThaayen Gam”. The next one had Dilip Kumar in a coat sitting in a chair and a heroine doing a “face palm”. We all agreed that heroine was “Nalini Jaywant” and the movie must be Anokha Pyaar. The song aluded us and we guessed it as “jeevan sapna TuuT gaya” although “yaad rakhna chaand taro” was the right one. Vish’s team got all the songs correct.
It was getting late for East Coasters and Hema, Ketan and Shalini signed off. But India folks started joined in ensuring that there were enough remote participants in all the events. Nishant joined briefly from Ahmedabad and left for his Sarangi class. Pavan also made a short entry. Kalyan’s appearance or rather lack was quite amusing.. We could see Kalyan’s son playing, Kalyan’s wife calling their son, and even Kalyan’s maid sweeping but no Kalyan expect for partial glimpses of his eyes, ears and earphones hanging out of them “naam gum jaayega, chehra ye badal jaayega, meri *harkat* hi meri pehchaan hai” ! Gajendra also soon joined and it was now time for discussion on commemorative.
Commemorative:
Guri and Vish were in their usual form especially during the analysis on the meet commemorative. Referring to Beher and other technicalities of a Ghazal he went on to add that he initially enjoyed some of those songs in a different way but revisiting the song knowing the finer nuances gave an added dimension. He compared it to a meeting with a old friend and discovering a new aspect of your friends personality that enhances the relationship. Vijay commented that Guri is the new UVR and UVR has to find a new niche. Vish said that there is no commemorative CD this time and the theme is a blog about a blog on Ghazals in films.
After finishing the intro, Vish asked the audience a few questions. Who is the lyricst who wrote the most number of Ghazals. We all took turns to answer, and when Vish turned to Vandana there was no response and he said “she has turned her San Franscisco screen saver and gone somewhere” .My guess was Sahir and UVR said the same. Gajendra said Pandit Indra and Guri interjected “us duniya se niklo”! Surprisingly the correct answer was Shakeel. The guesses for composer who scored most Ghazals also wrong with Anil Biswas, Naushad, Roshan and Mandan Mohan occupying the top slots. I am surprised that no one guessed CR and wonder where he stood. The lyrcist-Md combo had Shakeel-Naushad at the top. Several of us guessed the top combo to be Sahir- Roshan.
The very definition of Ghazal was debated with answers ranging from “conversation with the beloved” to Deepak quoting his friend that all Ghazal Lovers belong to “Heart Break hotel”. Vish asked Gajendra to take the Ghazal research into 30’s and 40’s and when Gajendra pointed out a few singers to start with. Vish reasoned that since the RMIM brain has been tuned to composers since the beginning that would be the best “key word” to start the query with.
Vish mentioned a few songs which are not tuned like Ghazals and added a few like; “tadbiir se bigDi hui”, “hum aap ki aaNkhon men” and went on to add that his favorite in this category is “vo dekhen to unki inayat”. The Ghazal output of SDB and Majrooh was discussed and Guri started reading a list of Ghazals from a compilation and when a CR song came up, paused and said “Written by Rajinder Krishan Sardaar”! While there was no commemorative CD, the fascinating discussion more than made up for it.
It was now time to distribute some goodies and DVD’s of past film fare magazines compiled by Surjit Singh and Shekhar were distributed. It was time for some casual conversations and Vish talked about his Dilraj Kaur moment. It was October 3, 1976 and Vish was in the organizing committee of a musical event at IIT. Vish went on add that he had to ask one of the performers to sing next due to a change in schedule and she introduced herself as Dilraj and sang a lovely number. She later became famous as Dilraj Kaur and Vish says that the only other time he met the singer was in a hotel in Bombay.
Gajendra’s quiz was the next item on the agenda. RPM versions of songs were played and we had to guess the singer. The first song “kisi ne apna banaake mujhko” had several wrong guesses and I correctly picked it as “Madhubala Jhaveri”. This actually reminded me of my own “Jai Santoshi Maa” moment from a meet in the 90’s Vish guessed “kabhi aar kabhi paar” to be by Suman and when Pavan Jha joined we realized that he had several of the songs and didn’t have to listen to the vocals to guess the singer. Aankhon men kya ji by Ambar Kumar and Suman Kalyanpur; Ye raat bheegi bheegi by Bhushan and Geeta; Babuji Dheere Chalna by Sudha Malhotra; Ye hansta hua caravan by Mukesh were some of the other songs played.
Finally it was time for singing session. Vish sang “mujh se pehli si muhabbat” , ‘ aaye kuchh abr” and there were a few background discussions going on. There was some talk aout singing a bhairavi and I could see our very own Sardaar, came into form. I always love Guri’s interjections his singing goes like “chup hai dharti chup hai chand sitaare”…taara rara rarara with humming replacing the actual words . By now the video feed was shutoff but I could imagine some carefree gyrations accompanying the singing.
Finally I said goodbye to everyone round 1 am PST but the hangover of the hangout remained. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think of this meet as a reunion. There hasn’t been one for the last 3 years and it’s been even longer since we had an East Coast meet. But that strong sense of belonging to the group was very much evident as several moments of the past meets in deep freeze became warmer and fresher while a few more bytes got added to the memory bank. Thanks a bunch to Balaji and Malini and the attendees for making the meet and the hangout so enjoyable. It’s now time to put the magical moments in freeze mode and wait till the flood gates open again next year.
