A tribute to old Hindi film music. Songs of the 30s through the 60s.

Miscellaneous

Tasveer exhibits of Bollywood

March 22, 2018

Guest article by DP Rangan (A lesser mortal, when asked to write on songs on ‘tasveer’, would have made some general observations about pictures, and mentioned some songs which contained the word ‘tasveer’. Not DP Rangan, as we know well by now. Mr Rangan takes us to pre-historic days when mankind would have started making […]

Read the full article

Parody songs: Part 2

March 12, 2018

(I thank Ashok M Vaishnav for very generously sharing his compilation of parody songs with me – AK) In Part 1 of this post I covered the parody songs based on a single song. This seems to have later led to the practice of parodying the mukhada or a short portion of a number of […]

Read the full article

Parody songs: Part 1

March 2, 2018

Wishing the readers a very Happy Holi (I have been compiling parody songs for a while, when I got a mail from Ashok M Vaishnav that he has also been doing such a list, and whether he could write a guest article for SoY on this. No one does compilation and analysis better than him, […]

Read the full article

Around the World in Songs

February 18, 2018

Today everyone has a nephew into software who works on-site in the US or Europe. But there was a time when ‘people like us’ did not travel to foreign lands. Today, there is hardly a film which does not have some song-dance sequence, if not most of the film, shot abroad. Bollywood is an important […]

Read the full article

Bharat Darshan in Songs (2): Metros

February 6, 2018

In the first part of our Bharat Darshan in songs, we journeyed through small towns for which I have a special liking. But, ‘progress’ means progression from villages to small towns to big cities. If you live in small towns, you are a lesser mortal. There are practical aspects of jobs, infrastructure, access to education, […]

Read the full article

Bharat Darshan in Songs (1): Small towns

January 26, 2018

Greeting the readers on the 68th Republic Day When I joined service, an important part of our training was to go on a 30-days’ Bharat Darshan by train. This had been sanctified by Mahatma Gandhi at the inspiration of his mentor and political guru, Gokhale, and romanticised by Richard Attenborough. In between, Abhi Bhattacharya showed […]

Read the full article

Nuptials in Bollywood

January 14, 2018

Guest article by DP Rangan (With Makar Sankranti and Pongal, as the month-long ‘inauspicious period’ comes to an end and the wedding season is set to resume with full vigour, our indefatigablete DP Rangan comes up with a very nicely-timed post on nuptial songs from our films. In his characteristic style, Mr Rangan packs in a […]

Read the full article

It’s prose, It’s recitation, It’s a song

January 1, 2018

Wishing the readers a very Happy New Year Long ago there used to be a popular game show on the American TV titled: ‘It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman’. The host would invite the participants in pairs, one of whom would be given a clue, which could be a famous proverb, or a […]

Read the full article

Waterfalls in Bollywood

November 2, 2017

Guest article by DP Rangan (DP Rangan is a man with boundless energy. Even with a late debut on the Songs of Yore, at the rate he is writing he will soon overtake the regular guest writers. After the horse series, he switched to romantic themes of moon and stars. This post on Waterfalls in […]

Read the full article

OP Nayyar’s influence on other Music Directors

August 31, 2017

Guest article by Ravindra Kelkar (OP Nayyar was a craze for some years from the mid-50s. Every music director was imitating his style, composing OP-type songs from time to time. If you thought it was simply a bandwagon effect, our OP Nayyar-expert Ravindra Kelkar unravels several factors that were at play. Some did it voluntarily, […]

Read the full article