Food at airport - 10 dollars
Flight from NY to SFO - 300 dollars
Pleasure of attending RMIM meet - Priceless
I was lucky to experince this pleasure for the 10th time, thanks to the following individuals.
Pradeep, Madhuri, Ankit and Niharika; Neha, Vivek, Akshay and Abhishek; Ravindra, Richa and Rohan; Vish Krishnan for organising the meet Nimish and Rricha for hosting me till tuesday
All the meet attendees
Prologue: My plans for the meet were thrown topsy-turvy because of a last minute call saying that my flight was cancelled. I was able to catch an earlier flight though and landed into SFO by 1:00 pm instead of 5:00 pm. This threw the original plan of meeting Animesh near the airport and
getting a ride from Vandana into disarray. Neha kindly offerred to pick me up from caltrain station nearest to her office and then dropped me off at Pradeep's house. Enroute we picked up a huge crate of Samosas and I then realised that this meet was going to have record attendance.
Arrival: I was the first one to arrive at the Dubey residence, and got an opportunity to talk to Pradeep's son Ankit. He talked about his classical music training, cricket practice among other things. Ankit is a chip of the old block ( we are not talking about intel chips here !!) and share's a lot of music interests with Pradeep. We were enjoying tortillas with salsa when my cell phone rang. It was
Nimish. He informed me that he is unable to ftp the sd burman AV clip from Aashish Thakker's site. Thankfully Aashish also set up web access and the problem was solved. (More about the SDB AV in part 2). Pradeep then arrived with a huge crate of Samosa's and as we sat down to eat my cell rang again. This time it was Vandana informing that she hasn't heard back from Animesh. There was no way we could contact him. Animesh belongs to PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students) category and
can be forgiven for not having a cell :) Finally I got the word that Animesh missed his scheduled train. As the next train wasn't going to stop at Sunnyvale, Vandana had gone to Mountain View to pick him up. The randomness thrown in by my flight cancellation has been nullfied and order has been restored. Soon Animesh and Vandana arrived. Pradeep's daughter Niharika was amused
when we greeted Animesh. She mistook his name to be Himesh ! Shows how popular Himesh Reshamiya is among kids.
Attendees started trickling in. We were sitting in the backyard of Pradeep's house enjoying the cool breeze and exchanging greetings with who's who of RMIM. Special mention has to made of ppl. who came from other continents. Dr.Shekhar (with his mother) came from Dubai and Gautam Chowdhury came from Holland. Pradeep's friend from Bangalore who was on an offical trip to US was also present. News came in that Chetan Vinchhi (also from Bagalore) worked around his US trip to ensure his presence and will come on Saturday.
Since most of the regualars were present, attention was diverted those who were't coming. Balaji-Malini and Ritu, figured in the conversations. Attempts were made to add a mystic touch to Guri's
abscene. Gautamda finally updated us by saying that Guri won't be able to make it as he is extremely busy.
Marathi takeover:
Guri's abscence meant that there were no "jo bole so nihaal" conversations.I was wondering, "No takeovers this time ?" My train of thought was disturbed by a loud voice" tuu kasa aahes ? "It then dawned upon me that we were surrounded by Marathis. In fact a stong Kobra contingent made it to the meet; Kale, Modak, Vidwans and probably Sabnis.
We feasted on the scrumptious food and moved indoors.
Introductions:
A question popped up. Which meet was this ?
West Coast Meet
Best Coast Meet
Saroj Kalra Pitched in
Best Host Meet
Some other suggestions were drowned in the ensuing laughter. Attendees were asked to name their favorite composers. Whenever SDB got a vote, Vish started announcing the number of votes. My hunch that we will be having an SDB commemorative was converted into a certainity. Under normal circumstances I would have mentioned my favorites as Anilda, Roshan and Sachinda; (like the Suffolk meet) but the atmosphere was far from ordinary. Air was rife with acquisitions of booth
capturing with Neha leading the efforts in rigging the poll in favor of Anil Biswas :) So I stuck with "Zindagi Aur Hum" Roshan and Sachin Dev Burman.
Everyone in Nachketa's family mentioned RDB among their favorites prompting the response "family doctor..composer". Anil Biswas, Roshan and Salil also got a number of votes. SDB probably got the most. Pradeep's son Ankit made his dad proud by mentioning Kishore, Salil and Gulzar
as his favorite artists; only to retract later by saying his favorite singer was his Guru, Nachiketa. Attention then turned to least-favorite composers and Himesh Rehamiya's name came up. Preetam chipped in by saying that Bappi Lahiri is a better singer than a composer. L-P's name was also taken.
Interestingly none of the attendees mentioned CR as their favorite. The large Marathi presence didn't help either, as CR worked in very few Marathi films.Sudhir Phadke, Vasant Prabhu and Hridaynath Mangeshkar were mentioned among the favorites.
Singing session:
Vish sang "aaye kucch abr kucch sharaab aaye", and the regular "nimbuaa tale dolaa rakh do"; Vivek sang "ranjish hi sahi" and some new songs including "mitwa" from Kabhi Alvida.. The Marathi takeover reached its logical conclusion when Shrikhand (prepared by Vandana Vidwans) was served.
Immediately there was farmaish for Ravi and "ye raaten". For a moment I thought, since when did Ravi's "ye raaten ye mausam" become such a favorite. (Ok, I am allowed to have my non-hardcore rmim'er moments) But when Ravindra / UVR took over, I realsied that he was the *Ravi* in
question. The song was now a no-brainer; the cult-song of RMIM meets if ever there was one, "ye raaten ye mausam ye haNsaanaa haNsaana" by Pankaj Mullick. Nitin Sharma and his wife; Vijay and Pragya then arrived. Immediately Pragya was asked to sing. Like any hard-core RMIMers, Vijay and Pragya are hooked to commemoratives. One farmaish came in the form of song 3
from cd 4 :) True to the expectations she began with a song from a commemorative, composed by Zindagi Aur Hum Roshan ! I am referring to "jaa re jaa re merii chhod chunariyaa". She also sang
another Roshan compostion, "o aasmaan ke vaasi" from Aagosh.
The venue for the meet on Saturday was Neha's house in Cupertino and the scheduled time was 11:00 am. I was staying at Nimish's place in Fremont and we were running late. When we reached the venue by 12:00 noon, Nimish had to answer a few questions "Late kyuun aaye ? tumhaari
biwi kyuun nahiin aaii ? :) " Most of the people had arrived by then and the house was bustling with
activity.Everyone was waiting for Ashok and Satish Kalra. While music was the main theme, the hidden theme was musical chairs. Whoever went to pickup / trash the food lost their seats :)
Music personalities: Dr.Shekhar had the good fortune of meeting several stalwarts and he
shared some anecdotes with us. He began with a story on Barsaat, and narrated the events that forced
Raj Kapoor to give pink slip to Ram Ganguly and choose Shankar and Jaikishan. Apparently Lata was called for a recording, and she entered the wrong side of the studio. There she found Ram Ganguly recording the Barsaat song with a different team and alerted Raj Kapoor. His visit to a remote village in Goa to meet Dattaram was quite captivating. Finding the village was an adventure as Shekhar had to cross a river on a stormy day. With some difficutly, he was able to locate Dattaram's house. Dattaram was quite hospitable and talked in length about his career. His breakthrough into the big league was quite incidental. One of the regular tabla players in S-J orchestra wasn't available and that was Dattaram's chance. That catapulted Dattaram from
a song dubbing artist into a full pledged musician. (Satish Kalra chipped in by pointing an analogy of actor Raj Kumar). Dr.Shekhar also talked about his meeting with Basu Manohari. As soon as
Dr.Shekhar took SDB's name among Basu Manohari's favorite composers, Vish's had went up. The vote counter had just been incremented.Basu considers "waqt ne kiyaa kyaa hasiin sitam" among his favorite songs. While we were on Dattaram, the possibility of Gulzar's first song coming from Shriman Satyawadi was also discussed. A parallel topic of some artists not knowing which songs they contributed to also came up. This was more ture for up and coming artists as the only information they get is something like "movie x, song y, take 2". They never know if the song was finally okayed. It is only later when they listen to the song, the realization dawns that their version
was finalised.
Soon discussion drifted to the Parsi community and the Bombay symphony orchestra. Vish mentioned that that famous strech of land in Bombay where western classical music thrived in the yore. Vish posed a question on the composer of the AIR signature tune in Raag Shivaranjani.
Pat came the reply from Arun Simha, Mehli Mehta. Mehli Mehta was the founder of Bombay Symphony orchetrsa and his son is Zubin Mehta.
Sweep Stakes: A bunch of people had gathered in the living room and I realised that everyone were trying to grab LP's that Deepak Sabnis wanted to give away. It included many movie tracks including "The Graduate". Kamlesh Kapoor asked what were the famous songs from the movie, and
Vish started listing the songs one by one, "Mrs. Robinson", " Bridge over troubled waters", " Scarborough Fair". Kamlesh was expecting hindi songs and was quite amused to hear all these Simon Garfunkel tracks. Later we realised that she confused "Graduate" to the Shammi Kapoor movie "Professor". For a true poly glot like Vish, changing gears comes so naturally ! Then it was Surjit singh's turn to give VHS tapes. He distributed one VHS per individual and the remaining ones were distributed at the rate of one per family. People were busy trading the VHS tapes and the venue resembled a true mafia den with "maal" being exchanged :) Some of the video tapes had names thatcudn't be easily deciphered. So we tried to associate them with popular acronymns.
OS - Operating System ( Probably " old songs" or "other songs" )
NSF - National Science Foundation
and so on.
Surjit Singh also distributed a cd containing Kurshid Anwar's works.
Lunch Break: While music is food for the soul, we need food for the body too. The mouth watering dishes served at the meets are stuff of the legend. We feasted on the Puris and Aalu Sabji among other things:) The dessert was Rasgullah !
Surjit Singh's quiz:
We were divided into two teams. Neha tried to draw imgainary lines of seperation to get Vish into her team :)
In true professor style he began "write numbers 1 to 24" We asked " in descending order" ?
After that he played songs from Vol 1, and we had to identify the singers. After 4 songs he realised that the exam is too difficult and converted it into take home. Naniwadekar's presence might have made a difference !
After the quiz Surjit ji gave us a cd of the songs.
"man panchhi albelaa" - Commmorative on Sachin Dev Burman:
The time for the most awaited moment of the meet came up. I was ecstatic when my prediction turned into a reality. Vish said a few words about Burmanda, played the piano prelude of the song "yaad aa gaii vo nashiili nigaahen" and a Lata masterpiece from Mad Bhare Nain. Was it "mose saanchi kaho baNvari" ?
Shekhar's quiz: This was badalte saathi based on song picturizations. A portion of the song was played and the pair on which the song was picturised and most clues were from Vol IV and V with a few from vol III.
A snapshot of the answers would look like this.
gun gunaa rahe hain banvare - Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore - Aradhana
gorii gorii gaanv ki gorii re - Dev Anand, Sharmila Tagore - Ye
Gulistaan Hamara uff kitni thandi hai ye rut - Dev Anand, Simi - Teen Deviyaan
Each clue had 9 points, 3 for each actor on which song was picturised and 3 for the movie name.
Ashok, Chetan, Neha, Satish Kalra, and Vish were the captains for the teams.
Our team had just 5 people and Ashok expected that I would know most of the songs and made me the captain :) Quite a few songs spanned from mid 60's to mid 70's period, an era which is not my forte. There were a bunch of songs by "Charan Das" including that one from Gopi, "gentleman gentleman gentleman". Honestly I don't find anything gentle or gentlemanly about the song !
Vadana took a break and went out. Suddenly Neha got a phone call from Vandana and there were acquistions that she was reading answers from geet kosh. All hell broke loose when her answer paper was snatched :)
There was one song where Rafi goes something like "ui aama" and I was literally laughing.
2 of the teams came very close to answering all the questions and We didn't even bother to count our points.
Match the pairs: Then it was my turn. I divided teams into two, one with Satish Kalra and
the other with Vish.
I played antaras of 20 songs. First part was to guess the mukhda and and movie name.
Second part was to find pairs, given that movie name of one song is contained in mukhda of the other.
There were 8 pairs and 4 dummy clues (indicated with *). One twist was
that one of the pairs wasn't unique.Song number 1 matches with 8 as
well as 20. However of 1 is paired with 8,then 20 cannot be paired. So
teams will be able to make only 7 pairs.
1)khoii khoii akhiyaan niind binaa (Chand) (1)
2)unkaa ishaara jaan se pyaara(Pehli Nazar) *
3)main pyaar ka RAAHI huun (2)
4)armaan bhare dil kii LAGAN tere liye hai (3)
5)rasiyaa re man basiyaa re (Pardesi) (4)
6)suno More Nainaa (Daaera) *
7)ab gam to banaalenge jiine ka sahaara (Nirmohi) (5)
8)chaand so gayaa taare so gaye (Raahi) (2)
9)hat gaii lo kaalii ghaTaa (Lagan) (3)
10)ik PARDESI meraa dil le gayaa (4)
11)nain dwaar se man men vo aake (6)
12)daakiyaa, daak laaya (Palkon Ki Chaaon Men) (7)
13)ehsaan teraa hogaa mujhpar(Junglee) (7)
14)vo aaye hain dil ko qaraar aa gayaa * - Malkia Salomi
15)baandhi re kaahe priit (Sankoch) *
16)umangen dil kii machali muskuraayi ZINDAGI apani (Jugnu) (8)
17)rim jhim ke giit saawan gaaye (Anjaana) (6)
18)man re tuu kaahe na dhiir dhare, o NIRMOHI moh na jaan (5)
19)abhii to sajii hai muradon ki duniyaa (Zindagii) (8)
20)na ye CHAAND hogaa, na taaren rahenge (Shart) (1)
Then came the bonus clue. I asked the teams to look at the beginning portion of the songs and find something hidden. The first letter of each song adds up to "Kumar Sachin dev Burman". This was purely to check errors and Vish's team realised that they got no.7 wrong. They identified it as "phir chhedne aaii vo kaali badariyaa" from Rasiyaa.
Both the teams got A grade on the quiz.
Number of Lyrcists:
Next Vish posed some questions.
Which composer worked all of the following lyricists.
Sahir, Sailendra, Shakeel, Majrooh, Hasrat, Narendra Sharma,Rajinder
Kirshan, Pradeep, Prem Dhawan.
Ashok guessed SDB. I wasn't 100 % sure if SDB worked with Prem Dhawan but since no other composer matched, seconded that.
Which composer worked with maximum number of lyricists ?
Based on Ketan's post on RMIM long back I would Say Roshan. He worked
with 50 + lyricists.
Who worked with minimum ? Answer is trivial if we don't impose any restrictions. I mean if we can
pick with composers who did 1 or 2 movies or for that matter one song like Sudha Malhotra.
Surjit Singh's idea was to write a perl script to parse the geet kosh
:)
Desert Island Soundtracks: Since Ashok / Chetan's analysis will cover all the team's I will just
focus on the our team's choices.
Nimish was the captain and our team included ML Kapoor, Kamlesh Kapoor, Dr.Shekhar, Dr. Shekhar's mother and Nachiketa's mother. Given Nimish's picks our team didn't have too much debate on the era from which tracks need to be chosen. All our final choices were pre 70's. We did discuss about RD Burman and soundtracks, Amar Prem and Aandhi. However they didn't make
the cut. We began by choosing everyone's favorites and removing those where there were objections. Ater a first pass we ended up with Basant Bahar,Hum Dono, CID and Sahib Biwi Aur Gulam.
We then realised that not a single track of Roshan and Madan Mohan were present and no track had songs of Talat. As Baiju Bawra was already picked, we decided to drop Basant Bahaar to add more variety. Nimish and myself wanted Tarana but consensus was towards Qismat. We picked up
Mahal over Tansen though.
Guide
Madhumati
Mahal
Taj Mahal
Baiju Bawra
Wo Kaun Thi
Qismat
Barsaat
Anarkali
Sangdil
After I presented our selections to the audience I realised that we had no Saigal and Kursheed:( I am sure I would have got support from the team and we may have included Bhakta Surdas among our picks. Over all the three quizzes covered VOL I to V and the desert island track disucssion went beyond that, right upto Bunty Aur Babli. In a nut shell songs from practically every decade of HFM got their share of focus.
SDB's BIO AV :
Recently sdburman.net did a centenary tribute to the composer in Delhi. That included an audio visual on the life of the composer and it was played at the meet. Lot of effort went in not only to make the AV for the SDB centenary show but to get it in a presentable format for the RMIM meet.
Pavan was awake for most part of two consecutive nights to redo the audio visual at high fidelity and remove glitches. Pavan, Ritu and your's truly were on conference chat to deicide on the
logistics. We needed information of the equipment avaliable at the venue in real time. Vivek Gaurd immediately responded to my instant messages. Aashish Thakker (who was busy with a forthcoming
international trip) promptly set up an account for me on his server and also set up web access.
Because of the flight change I didn't get around to make the VCD and had to deligate it to Nimish.
Thank you Aashish, Nimish, Pavan, Ritu, Vivek and everyone mentioned blow.
credits ( from the AV clip)
VOICE OVER
Saajid Hussain
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
Ramesh Kumar
RESEARCH ASSISTANCE
Sonu
LIFE STORY SKETCHES
Usha Sudhir
PORTRAIT SKETCH
Sameer Mahalookar
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Asad Kidwai - Script
Mohan Siddharth - AV Concept
RARE FOOTAGE COURTESY
Kaustubh Pingle
Pavan Jha
Bheemsinh Rahangdale
Aniruddha Bhattacharjee
&
Mrs Basanti Datta (SD Burman's grand-niece)
SOURCES
Filmfare Archives
All India Radio
The book Bhati Gang Baiya
www.SDBurman.Net Archives
POST PRODUCTION
JIMS Studio
Kalkaji, New Delhi
SPECIAL ASSISTANCE
Pavan Jha
PRODUCTION & EDITING
Imran Ali
SCRIPT & DIRECTION
Ritu Chandra
Chetan's presentation: Chetan Vinchhi is planning an event in Bangalore to commemorate 75
years of sound and solicited the opinions of the audience.
Singing session: Chronologically this came in before SDB's AV. As Nachiketa was leaving,
he was requested to sing a few songs. All I can recall now is that he sang 3 songs. Someone pls. fill
in here.
Gautamda then enthralled with his mouth organ. He played Sachinda's "ye dil na hotaa bechaara",
"ik ladki bhiigi bhaagi si" and one Salilda number. Was it " Rajanigandha phuul tumhaare" ?
Deepak Sabnis rendered "hai apna dil to aawara".
Pradeep Dubey then took center stage with the Salil-Mukesh masterpiece "nain haamre saanjh sakaare" and the Soorat Aur Seerat number "bahut diyaa dene waale ne". He also tried to sing the Rajanigandha number in Rehsmiyaa style " ra ra ra ra rajaniganda" :) RMIM's first couple Richa and Ravindra rendered "chupa lo yuun dil men pyaar meraa". Ravindra also sang the Sajni number "qismat ka nahiin dosh baanvare". Neha then asked Vivek to sing an Anil Biswas song and he obliged with "beimaan tore nainwaa" and quipped that he has to compensate by singing an ARR number. He promtly changed gears with "luka chupi" from Rang De Basanti. It was time for the cult song "kajraa re" from Bunty Aur Bubli and everyone sang along.
It was past 1:00 pm by then and Ravindra & Richa dropped me at Nimish's
place. It was another memorable weekend I am looking forward to the
next meet
chalta rahe ye carvaan
umr-e-ravaan ka carva
Flight from NY to SFO - 300 dollars
Pleasure of attending RMIM meet - Priceless
I was lucky to experince this pleasure for the 10th time, thanks to the following individuals.
Pradeep, Madhuri, Ankit and Niharika; Neha, Vivek, Akshay and Abhishek; Ravindra, Richa and Rohan; Vish Krishnan for organising the meet Nimish and Rricha for hosting me till tuesday
All the meet attendees
Prologue: My plans for the meet were thrown topsy-turvy because of a last minute call saying that my flight was cancelled. I was able to catch an earlier flight though and landed into SFO by 1:00 pm instead of 5:00 pm. This threw the original plan of meeting Animesh near the airport and
getting a ride from Vandana into disarray. Neha kindly offerred to pick me up from caltrain station nearest to her office and then dropped me off at Pradeep's house. Enroute we picked up a huge crate of Samosas and I then realised that this meet was going to have record attendance.
Arrival: I was the first one to arrive at the Dubey residence, and got an opportunity to talk to Pradeep's son Ankit. He talked about his classical music training, cricket practice among other things. Ankit is a chip of the old block ( we are not talking about intel chips here !!) and share's a lot of music interests with Pradeep. We were enjoying tortillas with salsa when my cell phone rang. It was
Nimish. He informed me that he is unable to ftp the sd burman AV clip from Aashish Thakker's site. Thankfully Aashish also set up web access and the problem was solved. (More about the SDB AV in part 2). Pradeep then arrived with a huge crate of Samosa's and as we sat down to eat my cell rang again. This time it was Vandana informing that she hasn't heard back from Animesh. There was no way we could contact him. Animesh belongs to PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students) category and
can be forgiven for not having a cell :) Finally I got the word that Animesh missed his scheduled train. As the next train wasn't going to stop at Sunnyvale, Vandana had gone to Mountain View to pick him up. The randomness thrown in by my flight cancellation has been nullfied and order has been restored. Soon Animesh and Vandana arrived. Pradeep's daughter Niharika was amused
when we greeted Animesh. She mistook his name to be Himesh ! Shows how popular Himesh Reshamiya is among kids.
Attendees started trickling in. We were sitting in the backyard of Pradeep's house enjoying the cool breeze and exchanging greetings with who's who of RMIM. Special mention has to made of ppl. who came from other continents. Dr.Shekhar (with his mother) came from Dubai and Gautam Chowdhury came from Holland. Pradeep's friend from Bangalore who was on an offical trip to US was also present. News came in that Chetan Vinchhi (also from Bagalore) worked around his US trip to ensure his presence and will come on Saturday.
Since most of the regualars were present, attention was diverted those who were't coming. Balaji-Malini and Ritu, figured in the conversations. Attempts were made to add a mystic touch to Guri's
abscene. Gautamda finally updated us by saying that Guri won't be able to make it as he is extremely busy.
Marathi takeover:
Guri's abscence meant that there were no "jo bole so nihaal" conversations.I was wondering, "No takeovers this time ?" My train of thought was disturbed by a loud voice" tuu kasa aahes ? "It then dawned upon me that we were surrounded by Marathis. In fact a stong Kobra contingent made it to the meet; Kale, Modak, Vidwans and probably Sabnis.
We feasted on the scrumptious food and moved indoors.
Introductions:
A question popped up. Which meet was this ?
West Coast Meet
Best Coast Meet
Saroj Kalra Pitched in
Best Host Meet
Some other suggestions were drowned in the ensuing laughter. Attendees were asked to name their favorite composers. Whenever SDB got a vote, Vish started announcing the number of votes. My hunch that we will be having an SDB commemorative was converted into a certainity. Under normal circumstances I would have mentioned my favorites as Anilda, Roshan and Sachinda; (like the Suffolk meet) but the atmosphere was far from ordinary. Air was rife with acquisitions of booth
capturing with Neha leading the efforts in rigging the poll in favor of Anil Biswas :) So I stuck with "Zindagi Aur Hum" Roshan and Sachin Dev Burman.
Everyone in Nachketa's family mentioned RDB among their favorites prompting the response "family doctor..composer". Anil Biswas, Roshan and Salil also got a number of votes. SDB probably got the most. Pradeep's son Ankit made his dad proud by mentioning Kishore, Salil and Gulzar
as his favorite artists; only to retract later by saying his favorite singer was his Guru, Nachiketa. Attention then turned to least-favorite composers and Himesh Rehamiya's name came up. Preetam chipped in by saying that Bappi Lahiri is a better singer than a composer. L-P's name was also taken.
Interestingly none of the attendees mentioned CR as their favorite. The large Marathi presence didn't help either, as CR worked in very few Marathi films.Sudhir Phadke, Vasant Prabhu and Hridaynath Mangeshkar were mentioned among the favorites.
Singing session:
Vish sang "aaye kucch abr kucch sharaab aaye", and the regular "nimbuaa tale dolaa rakh do"; Vivek sang "ranjish hi sahi" and some new songs including "mitwa" from Kabhi Alvida.. The Marathi takeover reached its logical conclusion when Shrikhand (prepared by Vandana Vidwans) was served.
Immediately there was farmaish for Ravi and "ye raaten". For a moment I thought, since when did Ravi's "ye raaten ye mausam" become such a favorite. (Ok, I am allowed to have my non-hardcore rmim'er moments) But when Ravindra / UVR took over, I realsied that he was the *Ravi* in
question. The song was now a no-brainer; the cult-song of RMIM meets if ever there was one, "ye raaten ye mausam ye haNsaanaa haNsaana" by Pankaj Mullick. Nitin Sharma and his wife; Vijay and Pragya then arrived. Immediately Pragya was asked to sing. Like any hard-core RMIMers, Vijay and Pragya are hooked to commemoratives. One farmaish came in the form of song 3
from cd 4 :) True to the expectations she began with a song from a commemorative, composed by Zindagi Aur Hum Roshan ! I am referring to "jaa re jaa re merii chhod chunariyaa". She also sang
another Roshan compostion, "o aasmaan ke vaasi" from Aagosh.
The venue for the meet on Saturday was Neha's house in Cupertino and the scheduled time was 11:00 am. I was staying at Nimish's place in Fremont and we were running late. When we reached the venue by 12:00 noon, Nimish had to answer a few questions "Late kyuun aaye ? tumhaari
biwi kyuun nahiin aaii ? :) " Most of the people had arrived by then and the house was bustling with
activity.Everyone was waiting for Ashok and Satish Kalra. While music was the main theme, the hidden theme was musical chairs. Whoever went to pickup / trash the food lost their seats :)
Music personalities: Dr.Shekhar had the good fortune of meeting several stalwarts and he
shared some anecdotes with us. He began with a story on Barsaat, and narrated the events that forced
Raj Kapoor to give pink slip to Ram Ganguly and choose Shankar and Jaikishan. Apparently Lata was called for a recording, and she entered the wrong side of the studio. There she found Ram Ganguly recording the Barsaat song with a different team and alerted Raj Kapoor. His visit to a remote village in Goa to meet Dattaram was quite captivating. Finding the village was an adventure as Shekhar had to cross a river on a stormy day. With some difficutly, he was able to locate Dattaram's house. Dattaram was quite hospitable and talked in length about his career. His breakthrough into the big league was quite incidental. One of the regular tabla players in S-J orchestra wasn't available and that was Dattaram's chance. That catapulted Dattaram from
a song dubbing artist into a full pledged musician. (Satish Kalra chipped in by pointing an analogy of actor Raj Kumar). Dr.Shekhar also talked about his meeting with Basu Manohari. As soon as
Dr.Shekhar took SDB's name among Basu Manohari's favorite composers, Vish's had went up. The vote counter had just been incremented.Basu considers "waqt ne kiyaa kyaa hasiin sitam" among his favorite songs. While we were on Dattaram, the possibility of Gulzar's first song coming from Shriman Satyawadi was also discussed. A parallel topic of some artists not knowing which songs they contributed to also came up. This was more ture for up and coming artists as the only information they get is something like "movie x, song y, take 2". They never know if the song was finally okayed. It is only later when they listen to the song, the realization dawns that their version
was finalised.
Soon discussion drifted to the Parsi community and the Bombay symphony orchestra. Vish mentioned that that famous strech of land in Bombay where western classical music thrived in the yore. Vish posed a question on the composer of the AIR signature tune in Raag Shivaranjani.
Pat came the reply from Arun Simha, Mehli Mehta. Mehli Mehta was the founder of Bombay Symphony orchetrsa and his son is Zubin Mehta.
Sweep Stakes: A bunch of people had gathered in the living room and I realised that everyone were trying to grab LP's that Deepak Sabnis wanted to give away. It included many movie tracks including "The Graduate". Kamlesh Kapoor asked what were the famous songs from the movie, and
Vish started listing the songs one by one, "Mrs. Robinson", " Bridge over troubled waters", " Scarborough Fair". Kamlesh was expecting hindi songs and was quite amused to hear all these Simon Garfunkel tracks. Later we realised that she confused "Graduate" to the Shammi Kapoor movie "Professor". For a true poly glot like Vish, changing gears comes so naturally ! Then it was Surjit singh's turn to give VHS tapes. He distributed one VHS per individual and the remaining ones were distributed at the rate of one per family. People were busy trading the VHS tapes and the venue resembled a true mafia den with "maal" being exchanged :) Some of the video tapes had names thatcudn't be easily deciphered. So we tried to associate them with popular acronymns.
OS - Operating System ( Probably " old songs" or "other songs" )
NSF - National Science Foundation
and so on.
Surjit Singh also distributed a cd containing Kurshid Anwar's works.
Lunch Break: While music is food for the soul, we need food for the body too. The mouth watering dishes served at the meets are stuff of the legend. We feasted on the Puris and Aalu Sabji among other things:) The dessert was Rasgullah !
Surjit Singh's quiz:
We were divided into two teams. Neha tried to draw imgainary lines of seperation to get Vish into her team :)
In true professor style he began "write numbers 1 to 24" We asked " in descending order" ?
After that he played songs from Vol 1, and we had to identify the singers. After 4 songs he realised that the exam is too difficult and converted it into take home. Naniwadekar's presence might have made a difference !
After the quiz Surjit ji gave us a cd of the songs.
"man panchhi albelaa" - Commmorative on Sachin Dev Burman:
The time for the most awaited moment of the meet came up. I was ecstatic when my prediction turned into a reality. Vish said a few words about Burmanda, played the piano prelude of the song "yaad aa gaii vo nashiili nigaahen" and a Lata masterpiece from Mad Bhare Nain. Was it "mose saanchi kaho baNvari" ?
Shekhar's quiz: This was badalte saathi based on song picturizations. A portion of the song was played and the pair on which the song was picturised and most clues were from Vol IV and V with a few from vol III.
A snapshot of the answers would look like this.
gun gunaa rahe hain banvare - Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore - Aradhana
gorii gorii gaanv ki gorii re - Dev Anand, Sharmila Tagore - Ye
Gulistaan Hamara uff kitni thandi hai ye rut - Dev Anand, Simi - Teen Deviyaan
Each clue had 9 points, 3 for each actor on which song was picturised and 3 for the movie name.
Ashok, Chetan, Neha, Satish Kalra, and Vish were the captains for the teams.
Our team had just 5 people and Ashok expected that I would know most of the songs and made me the captain :) Quite a few songs spanned from mid 60's to mid 70's period, an era which is not my forte. There were a bunch of songs by "Charan Das" including that one from Gopi, "gentleman gentleman gentleman". Honestly I don't find anything gentle or gentlemanly about the song !
Vadana took a break and went out. Suddenly Neha got a phone call from Vandana and there were acquistions that she was reading answers from geet kosh. All hell broke loose when her answer paper was snatched :)
There was one song where Rafi goes something like "ui aama" and I was literally laughing.
2 of the teams came very close to answering all the questions and We didn't even bother to count our points.
Match the pairs: Then it was my turn. I divided teams into two, one with Satish Kalra and
the other with Vish.
I played antaras of 20 songs. First part was to guess the mukhda and and movie name.
Second part was to find pairs, given that movie name of one song is contained in mukhda of the other.
There were 8 pairs and 4 dummy clues (indicated with *). One twist was
that one of the pairs wasn't unique.Song number 1 matches with 8 as
well as 20. However of 1 is paired with 8,then 20 cannot be paired. So
teams will be able to make only 7 pairs.
1)khoii khoii akhiyaan niind binaa (Chand) (1)
2)unkaa ishaara jaan se pyaara(Pehli Nazar) *
3)main pyaar ka RAAHI huun (2)
4)armaan bhare dil kii LAGAN tere liye hai (3)
5)rasiyaa re man basiyaa re (Pardesi) (4)
6)suno More Nainaa (Daaera) *
7)ab gam to banaalenge jiine ka sahaara (Nirmohi) (5)
8)chaand so gayaa taare so gaye (Raahi) (2)
9)hat gaii lo kaalii ghaTaa (Lagan) (3)
10)ik PARDESI meraa dil le gayaa (4)
11)nain dwaar se man men vo aake (6)
12)daakiyaa, daak laaya (Palkon Ki Chaaon Men) (7)
13)ehsaan teraa hogaa mujhpar(Junglee) (7)
14)vo aaye hain dil ko qaraar aa gayaa * - Malkia Salomi
15)baandhi re kaahe priit (Sankoch) *
16)umangen dil kii machali muskuraayi ZINDAGI apani (Jugnu) (8)
17)rim jhim ke giit saawan gaaye (Anjaana) (6)
18)man re tuu kaahe na dhiir dhare, o NIRMOHI moh na jaan (5)
19)abhii to sajii hai muradon ki duniyaa (Zindagii) (8)
20)na ye CHAAND hogaa, na taaren rahenge (Shart) (1)
Then came the bonus clue. I asked the teams to look at the beginning portion of the songs and find something hidden. The first letter of each song adds up to "Kumar Sachin dev Burman". This was purely to check errors and Vish's team realised that they got no.7 wrong. They identified it as "phir chhedne aaii vo kaali badariyaa" from Rasiyaa.
Both the teams got A grade on the quiz.
Number of Lyrcists:
Next Vish posed some questions.
Which composer worked all of the following lyricists.
Sahir, Sailendra, Shakeel, Majrooh, Hasrat, Narendra Sharma,Rajinder
Kirshan, Pradeep, Prem Dhawan.
Ashok guessed SDB. I wasn't 100 % sure if SDB worked with Prem Dhawan but since no other composer matched, seconded that.
Which composer worked with maximum number of lyricists ?
Based on Ketan's post on RMIM long back I would Say Roshan. He worked
with 50 + lyricists.
Who worked with minimum ? Answer is trivial if we don't impose any restrictions. I mean if we can
pick with composers who did 1 or 2 movies or for that matter one song like Sudha Malhotra.
Surjit Singh's idea was to write a perl script to parse the geet kosh
:)
Desert Island Soundtracks: Since Ashok / Chetan's analysis will cover all the team's I will just
focus on the our team's choices.
Nimish was the captain and our team included ML Kapoor, Kamlesh Kapoor, Dr.Shekhar, Dr. Shekhar's mother and Nachiketa's mother. Given Nimish's picks our team didn't have too much debate on the era from which tracks need to be chosen. All our final choices were pre 70's. We did discuss about RD Burman and soundtracks, Amar Prem and Aandhi. However they didn't make
the cut. We began by choosing everyone's favorites and removing those where there were objections. Ater a first pass we ended up with Basant Bahar,Hum Dono, CID and Sahib Biwi Aur Gulam.
We then realised that not a single track of Roshan and Madan Mohan were present and no track had songs of Talat. As Baiju Bawra was already picked, we decided to drop Basant Bahaar to add more variety. Nimish and myself wanted Tarana but consensus was towards Qismat. We picked up
Mahal over Tansen though.
Guide
Madhumati
Mahal
Taj Mahal
Baiju Bawra
Wo Kaun Thi
Qismat
Barsaat
Anarkali
Sangdil
After I presented our selections to the audience I realised that we had no Saigal and Kursheed:( I am sure I would have got support from the team and we may have included Bhakta Surdas among our picks. Over all the three quizzes covered VOL I to V and the desert island track disucssion went beyond that, right upto Bunty Aur Babli. In a nut shell songs from practically every decade of HFM got their share of focus.
SDB's BIO AV :
Recently sdburman.net did a centenary tribute to the composer in Delhi. That included an audio visual on the life of the composer and it was played at the meet. Lot of effort went in not only to make the AV for the SDB centenary show but to get it in a presentable format for the RMIM meet.
Pavan was awake for most part of two consecutive nights to redo the audio visual at high fidelity and remove glitches. Pavan, Ritu and your's truly were on conference chat to deicide on the
logistics. We needed information of the equipment avaliable at the venue in real time. Vivek Gaurd immediately responded to my instant messages. Aashish Thakker (who was busy with a forthcoming
international trip) promptly set up an account for me on his server and also set up web access.
Because of the flight change I didn't get around to make the VCD and had to deligate it to Nimish.
Thank you Aashish, Nimish, Pavan, Ritu, Vivek and everyone mentioned blow.
credits ( from the AV clip)
VOICE OVER
Saajid Hussain
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
Ramesh Kumar
RESEARCH ASSISTANCE
Sonu
LIFE STORY SKETCHES
Usha Sudhir
PORTRAIT SKETCH
Sameer Mahalookar
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Asad Kidwai - Script
Mohan Siddharth - AV Concept
RARE FOOTAGE COURTESY
Kaustubh Pingle
Pavan Jha
Bheemsinh Rahangdale
Aniruddha Bhattacharjee
&
Mrs Basanti Datta (SD Burman's grand-niece)
SOURCES
Filmfare Archives
All India Radio
The book Bhati Gang Baiya
www.SDBurman.Net Archives
POST PRODUCTION
JIMS Studio
Kalkaji, New Delhi
SPECIAL ASSISTANCE
Pavan Jha
PRODUCTION & EDITING
Imran Ali
SCRIPT & DIRECTION
Ritu Chandra
Chetan's presentation: Chetan Vinchhi is planning an event in Bangalore to commemorate 75
years of sound and solicited the opinions of the audience.
Singing session: Chronologically this came in before SDB's AV. As Nachiketa was leaving,
he was requested to sing a few songs. All I can recall now is that he sang 3 songs. Someone pls. fill
in here.
Gautamda then enthralled with his mouth organ. He played Sachinda's "ye dil na hotaa bechaara",
"ik ladki bhiigi bhaagi si" and one Salilda number. Was it " Rajanigandha phuul tumhaare" ?
Deepak Sabnis rendered "hai apna dil to aawara".
Pradeep Dubey then took center stage with the Salil-Mukesh masterpiece "nain haamre saanjh sakaare" and the Soorat Aur Seerat number "bahut diyaa dene waale ne". He also tried to sing the Rajanigandha number in Rehsmiyaa style " ra ra ra ra rajaniganda" :) RMIM's first couple Richa and Ravindra rendered "chupa lo yuun dil men pyaar meraa". Ravindra also sang the Sajni number "qismat ka nahiin dosh baanvare". Neha then asked Vivek to sing an Anil Biswas song and he obliged with "beimaan tore nainwaa" and quipped that he has to compensate by singing an ARR number. He promtly changed gears with "luka chupi" from Rang De Basanti. It was time for the cult song "kajraa re" from Bunty Aur Bubli and everyone sang along.
It was past 1:00 pm by then and Ravindra & Richa dropped me at Nimish's
place. It was another memorable weekend I am looking forward to the
next meet
chalta rahe ye carvaan
umr-e-ravaan ka carva
