Riding the crest of musical success
By Nonika Singh
NOTHING succeeds like success. No one knows this better than pied-piper Utter Singh who cast a spell, whipped up musical nostalgia and stirred the sentiments even in the hard-boiled skeptics with his lilting tunes in surefire hit “Dil to Pagal Hai”. While the audiences are still reeling under the musical impact, the man himself remains unaffected.

City actress in Bollywood
By Nanki Hans
THE arclights were not new to her. She had to deliver a rather lengthy dialogue opposite famous comedian Jagdeep and she did it in her own distinct style without any retake. The shot over, the set broke into a thunderous applause. It was one of the most gratifying moments for city theatre actress Gick Grewal.

’Art and Soul by B.N. Goswamy
A French jeweller in India
IT may be more accurate to describe him as a merchant in jewels, rather than as jeweller, but Jean Baptiste Tavernier knew a great deal about precious stones.

Role of ‘kismet’ in film songs
By A.C. Tuli
MOST of us believe that “kismet” (luck) plays a paramount role in our lives. When something goes wrong with us, instead of coolly analysing the reasons behind it; we blame it on our bad luck. This fatalistic attitude to life is reflected not only in the give-and-take of our daily life, but also in our stories and anecdotes, sayings and songs.

Riding the crest of musical success
By Nonika Singh

NOTHING succeeds like success. No one knows this better than pied-piper Uttam Singh who cast a spell, whipped up musical nostalgia and stirred the sentiments even in the hard-boiled sceptics with his lilting tunes in surefire hit “Dil to Pagal Hai”. While the audiences are still reeling under the musical impact — the album remained on top charts for a record-breaking period — the man himself remains unaffected.

The self-effacing demeanour attired in white kurta pyjama, which has become his signature of sorts — he turned up at Zee Cine awards function in the same simple garb — is in consonance with his down-to-earth unassuming inner self. Music for Uttam is not a means but an end in itself. He avers,” Music is the very fountainhead of life. Without rhythm, even human heart stops beating.”

Uttam’s tryst with the dizzying heights of success, the intoxicating triple combination of fame, money and glamour is not an overnight affair. Instead, it’s a long uphill journey of a child who was initiated into “saat suron ki sargam” at the tender age of four. In a way music is a genetic family inheritance. His father has always been an avid music buff. Presently all three children are well entrenched in musical careers. Today the beaming papa reveals with pride that his daughter Preeti Uttam only recently gave the playback for the popular song "Bandhan khula, panchhi udda" in the movie “Yug Purush”.

So Uttam’s parents were penalised for their musical inclinations and the trio had no alternative but to form a kirtan mandli. Thus, the family musical entourage moved from one place to another. Predictably, the final destination was "sapnon ki nagri" Bombay.

Here in the early’ 60s young Uttam mastered the intricate art of playing classical violin. Incidentally, all soulful violin strains in “DTPH” came straight from Uttam’s nimble fingers. Though he rues that today technique has overshadowed melody, he himself has amalgamated technology with 150 musician-strong orchestra, fusing the different streams remarkably well in the film.

Apart from his unusual skill at handling a mammoth orchestra (his hallmark actually) beneath the gloss of “DTPH” lie oodles and oodles of grit, sweat and grime. In effect, Uttam presented a total of 100 tunes out of which only eight were picked up by veteran director Yash Chopra who possesses an uncanny ear for good music.

Working with the romantic-maker was no doubt a great learning experience for Uttam. In fact, DTPH came about when he was entrusted the responsibility of composing music for a telefilm directed by Vinod Pandey and produced by Yash’s software company.

But the telefilm never fructified. Instead, “DTPH” fell into his lap. Uttam was totally unprepared for the tremendous response his melodies generated. As he picked up one award after another (Zee Cine, Filmfare, Maharashtra Ratna and many local honours) DTPH’s music made all dils pagal. But in his typical unassuming tenor Uttam remarks, “No one can nor should hog the credit for film music. It is indeed a team effort, a combined net output of lyricist, musicians composers and of course the captain of the ship. The director himself. Why, even the success of the film (astounding in the case of “DTPH”) rubs directly on the album’s saleability”.

Though, “DTPH” catapulted the affable “friendly neighbourhood” Sardarji from Dehradun on the Bollywood’s musical map, this is certainly not his first foray in the field of musical direction. Earlier on a lifetime opportunity was served on this platter when Manoj Kumar offered him “Painter Babu.” But at that point Uttam was not alone. Theirs was a musical jodi as he had teamed up with Jagdish Khanna.

“Painter Babu” was followed by “Waaris” and “Naseebo”. Thereafter, Uttam says bluntly, “Offers just dried up.” So he moved back to being a music arranger and was associated with a couple of blockbusters “Hum Aaap ke Hain Kaun” and “Maine Pyar Kiya.” In fact, Uttam had begun his career as an arranger with the famous qawwal Shankar Shambu.

To cut a long story short, Uttam started from a scratch to reach the top which anyway is a lonely place where allegations fly thick and fast. Small wonder Uttam too has been accused by his mentors of stealing their tunes. But Uttam denies the charge vehemently and asserts, “There is a world of difference between inspiration and plagiarisation. I would not only condemn the composer but the entire unit for stooping so low and indulging in such unethical tactics. I wouldn’t even care to replicate my own music.”

Needless to say, after “DTPH” he has been deluged with offers as producers hope and expect him to repeat the success story of “DTPH”. But Uttam is being very choosy. In this world where money makes the mare go, he is not unduly perturbed about the price but the quality and more significantly the choice of singers, his favourite being the Mangeshkar sisters — Lata and Asha.

So besides “Dushman” (already figuring high on the popularity ratings) the other assignments include “Farz” and “Hum Tum pe Marte Hain”. Uttam has reposed great confidence and faith in the musical score of Govinda-Urmila-starrer “Hum Tum pe”, for here again he is out to evolve a new should, a distinct feel and a vibrant joyous mood.

While dittoing the dictum “Man is his best critic”, audience response is very critical for Uttam and it would dismay him greatly if he failed to tune in to their tastes and preferences. But the fact that it took him such a long time to be on the same wavelength with his listeners doesn’t bother him unnecessarily. A believer of Lord Krishna’s doctrine of karma, he knows only too well “Man proposes, God disposes” and conversely when the Almighty wills it, even your zero efforts are suitably rewarded.

But the essence of life, according to him, is not to sit idle, but optimise your inborn God-gifted talent. The mysterious factor is beyond your periphery of control. But as the song Pyar ko ho jaane do... fills the air, for now at least not only Lady Luck seems to be well within Uttam’s radius, but only too willing to smilingly bestow her favours.

City actress in Bollywood
By Nanki Hans

THE arclights were not new to her. She had to deliver a rather lengthy dialogue opposite famous comedian Jagdeep and she did it in her own distinct style without any retake. The shot over, the set broke into a thunderous applause. It was one of the most gratifying moments for city theatre actress Gick Grewal. Gick recently completed a three-day shooting schedule in Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh, for N. Chandra’s “Wajood” starring Madhuri Dixit, Mukul Dev, Nana Patekar and Jagdeep.

The role just came to her. She did not have to canvass for it or resort to sycophancy. One fine day she received a call from Bombay from the production controller asking her if she could reach Dalhousie the same evening for shooting. Gick could not believe her ears. Later, she learnt that Hindi screen villain Tej Sapru had talked about the role to Gurkirtan, a popular villain in Punjabi movies, who suggested her name. Gurkirtan is known to Gick since their college days.

Gick had just talked to N. Chandra regarding dubbing when I met her. She appeared flushed with excitement. “Being a theatre person, I am well aware of the importance of punctuation, stress and intonation. I insisted that I be allowed to dub my dialogues and N. Chandra seemed equally keen for it,” she said.

Gick prefers character roles. In “Wajood” she plays a role opposite Jagdeep as his young querulous wife of Punjabi descent.

“On the first day of the shooting, I went up to Madhuri Dixit, the movie’s heroine, and introduced myself as Gick Grewal.

“You must be the theatre actress from Chandigarh,” she said. “I was a little baffled and too pleased to respond”, she recalled.

Gick’s first movie in Punjabi, “Khoon da Daaj”, directed by Iqbal Dhillon is running successfully at several places in Punjab. She plays a negative role of a greedy mother-in-law. Her other movies “Chooriyan”, Gurdas Mann’s “Shaheed-e-Mohabbat” and “Bagi” are yet to be released.

Asked about her dream role, after a little pondering, she said she wanted to play the title role of a woman-oriented subject.

Gick is optimistic that the “right kind of people” have now entered the Punjabi film industry who are genuinely interested in this medium. “This augurs well for Punjabi artistes who do not have to look towards Bollywood”, she says.

’Art and Soul by B.N. Goswamy
A French jeweller in India

IT may be more accurate to describe him as a merchant in jewels, rather than as jeweller, but Jean Baptiste Tavernier knew a great deal about precious stones. He could hold his own even with some of the greatest connoisseurs of his own times, European or Asian; he spent a life time buying and selling and evaluating jewels; seven times did he leave the shores of Europe to travel, mostly to the East, now to Constantinople, now to Persia, now to the kingdom of the great Mughals in India. His was a life driven as much by the lure of profit as by the desire to see different lands and people and, of course, his beloved jewels.

Tavernier came to India when Mughal power was at its most magnificent, but also most fragile, in a manner of speaking; the reign of Shahjahan and, later, the troubled times when that Emperor’s sons were battling it out in one of the bloodiest dynastic wars of succession in India’s history.

Born in 1605 and fond of travel, he had started getting to know these and other lands from his early years. In cities like Smyrna and Constantinople, great marts for trading with Persia and India, he had already acquired a taste for the distant East, and it was like someone who knew the territory, thus, that he travelled there for the first time, in 1631.

Over the next 30 years, he was to come here again and again, and we find him now in Agra, now in Ahmedabad, in Goa one year and Masulipatam the next. But one can trace a clear pattern in his movements: it is to Golconda where the great diamond mines were that he would veer again and again; or to places where the potential buyers of the goods that he brought with him from Europe: Mir Jumla, Zafar Khan, Shaista Khan, even on one occasion the self-denying Aurangzeb himself. Not everything that he saw or sold, Tavernier wrote about in his “Travels” (which incidentally were a phenomenal success), but there is hardly another account in which we have someone speak about the jewels of India with the same authority as Tavernier does.

Of his purchases in India, mostly in the diamond-region around Golconda, in the territory then called ‘Carnatic’, Tavernier speaks — like the discreet, shrewd businessman that he must have been — very little. But of what he saw, and what he tried to sell, there are vivid accounts. Almost always, there are remarks about the difficulty of gaining direct, unmediated access to men in power, but once he succeeds in meeting them, there are elaborate accounts of objects and transactions. Among the most fascinating is his account of the Imperial jewels that none else than Aurangzeb agreed to show him, as a mark of special favour, after he had had sold to the Emperor a remarkable pearl, “envied by all the potentates of the East”.

“Immediately on my arrival at the court, the two custodians of the King’s jewels accompanied me into the presence of His Majesty; and after I had made him the ordinary salutation, they conducted me into a small apartment... where the King was seated on his throne, and from whence he was able to see us. I found in this apartment Akil Khan, chief of the jewel treasury, who ordered four of the King’s eunuchs to go for the jewels, which were brought in two large wooden trays lacquered with gold leaf, and covered with small cloths made expressly for the purpose — one of red velvet and the other of green brocaded velvet. After these trays were uncovered, and all the pieces had been counted three times over, a list was prepared by three scribes who were present....”

These preliminary observations about the ceremony, the procedures, over, Tavernier goes into an almost clinical account of the jewels. It is too long to reproduce here, but some of the descriptions are difficult to resist.

“The first piece which Akil Khan placed in my hands was the great diamond (the description matches the diamond which came to be known all over the world as ‘the Great Moghul’), which is a round rose, very high at one side. At the Basal margin it has a small notch and a little flaw inside. The water is beautiful, and it weighs 319.5 ratis, which are equal to 208 of our carats....

“After I had fully examined this splendid stone, land returned it into the hands of Akil Khan, he showed me another stone, pear-shaped, of good form and fine water, and also three other table diamonds, two clear, and other with little black spots. Each weighed 55 to 60 ratis, and the pear 62.5. Subsequently he showed me a jewel of 12 diamonds, each stone of 15 to 16 ratis, and all roses....

“Akil Khan also placed in my hands two other pearls, perfectly round and equal, each of which weighed twentyfive and a quarter ratis, ... of a very lively water, and the most beautiful that can be seen. It is true that the prince of Arabia who has taken Muscat from the Portuguese, has a pearl which surpasses in beauty all others in the world; for it is perfectly round, and so white and lively that it looks as thought it was transparent, but that weighs only fourteen carats...”

And so on it goes, this account. There are riches here that pass one’s comprehension, and technical descriptions — a diamond of “good” or “lively water”, for instance — which the likes of us might not be able to make much sense of. But this was the world in which men like Tavernier moved and the Mughals inhabited.

An emperor’s rage
Tavernier punctuates the account of his travels with anecdotes and stories which, in his own description, serve the same purpose as caravanserais which “the Orientals set up in the desert for the relief of travellers.” One of them relates to the times when Aurangzeb, after he had usurped the throne and thrown his own father, Shahjahan into confinement, asked him for his jewels to be given to him “for use” at the time of his coronation. “Shahjahan, at this demand of Aurangzeb, which he regarded as an insult levelled at him in his prison by his son, became so enraged, that for some days he was like a madman, and he even nearly died. In the excess of his annoyance he called frequently for a pestle and mortar, saying that he would pound up all his precious stones and pearls, so that Aurangzeb might never possess them.” It was only the pleadings of his daughter that kept him from carrying this wish out, he adds.

Role of ‘kismet’ in film songs
By A.C. Tuli

MOST of us believe that “kismet” (luck) plays a paramount role in our lives. When something goes wrong with us, instead of coolly analysing the reasons behind it; we blame it on our bad luck. Similarly, when something brings a measure of happiness in our life, we attribute it to our good luck though it may be the result of our own sincere efforts. This fatalistic attitude to life is reflected not only in the give-and-take of our daily life, but also in our stories and anecdotes, sayings and songs.

Take, for instance, our films. The words “kismet”, “taqdeer”, “naseeb” and “muqaddar” have been used, singly or in combination with other words, as titles of films several times in the past six decades. And these words also figure in so many of our film songs that sometimes one feels that it is “kismet” and “kismet” alone that charts the course of one’s life on earth.

In what way the word “kismet” or “taqdeer” or its other equivalent is to be used in a song depends on the situation in the storyline. The situation may be a happy one or sad one. Sometimes it may even be hilarious or farcical. In an old film titled “Khidkee”, the hero and his cronies are out to score over the heroine and her friends in the game of playing practical jokes. When the hero is one up on the outwitted heroine, he sings joyously along with his fellow pranksters, “Kismet hamare saath hai, jalne wale jala karen.... Of course, the heroine and her friends, sitting in an adjoining room, are fuming and fretting and thinking hard how to even the score.

But there are some songs which philosophically sum up what man’s destiny or “muqaddar” should be as he passes through life. Rote hue aate hain sab, hansta hua jo jaye- ga, woh muqaddar ka sikander, jane man kehlayega..., so runs the song in “Muqaddar ka Sikander”.

On another level, a “kismet” or “taqdeer” song can sometimes be a tear-jerker. As it happened in the old film “Anmol Ghari”. The heroine of the film, frustrated in love, appeals to her separated lover to come and save her from the buffets of bad luck. Aa ja meri barbad mohabbat ke sahare, hai kaun jo bigdi hui taqdeer sanvare..., she sings in a tearful voice.

When a young man in love is given the cold shoulder treatment by his callous lady-love and he finds himself bedevilled by numerous other misfortunes, he is apt to turn pessimistic like K.L. Saigal did in the film “My Sister” when he asks the author of his fate. Ai katib-e-taqdeer mujhe itna bata de, kya mein ne kiya hai, kyon muhj se khaffa hai tu...

As the legendary lovers of yore preferred embracing death to permanent separation, this film song very aptly asks the Creator of this world, Mohabbat ki kismet banane se pahle, zamane ke Malik tu roya to hoga...

Some lovers spend a lifetime pining for their beloved, yet luck betrays them. The doyen of Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, has rightly said in his ghazal, Yeh na thee hamari kismet ke visal-e-yaar hota, agar aur jeete rehte yehi intizar hota... This ghazal was sung in her melodious voice by Suraiya in “Mirza Ghalib”, a 1950s film.

It is not unusual for a man nursing tender feelings for a girl to praise her beauty in hyperbolic words. So much so he tells her, of course through a song, that the man who gets her love is the luckiest one: Yeh tera chehra khila khila, yeh teri nazren jhuki jhuki, bada kismetwala hai woh...

Though ageold social barriers are now crumbling fast, even today lovers’ happiness can be marred by some rigid social laws. For instance, in our country a young boy and a young girl living in the same village cannot marry. It was this custom that did not allow the love of Gauri and Gobind in an old film titled “Rattan” to come to fruition. Shedding tears, they sing a duet, Sawan ke badlo unse yeh ja kaho, taqdeer mein yehi tha sajan mere na ro....

Surprisingly, even when man-made laws wreck their happiness, they keep bewailing their “taqdeer”.