Entertainment | Swings & Roundabouts

I have got a number of gripes regarding the Indian music industry and I am going to list them here, so I may try to get some answers for them.

Gripe I

Has anyone noticed the increasing number of Hindi singers belting out songs in Tamizh and Telugu movies these days? Even as I type this statement, Adnan Sami and Sadhana Sargam are belting out ‘Boom Boom’ in my ears, so that sort of segues well into the point I am trying to make here. Though I love the song and it always makes me do a (mental!) jive, I still cannot understand the reasoning behind it.

What reason, you ask. Let me elaborate. I am all for the North-South unity, mera bharat mahan and all that, make no mistake. I really love our desi filmi music and fully support A R Rahman’s aim to bring the country together through music. But when I hear Udit Narayan trying to wrap his tongue around the difficult Tamizh sounds, I cannot help wondering why the music director couldn’t a Tamizh speaker to sing the song. I don’t think there are many people around the country who can speak Tamizh or Telugu, unless it is their mother tongue. These languages aren’t like Hindi, which being the national language and all, is fed to one and all across the length and breadth of our nation.

Time was, when it was considered quite hip to speak the language if it was an alien tongue and the mauling it received at the hands (tongues?!) of the perky teen VJs of the various music channels was absolutely horrible. But of late, thanks to the new breed of singers like Karthik, Harini, Tippu etc, whose pronounciation is excellent, it is slowly becoming safer and cool to admit that you can speak the language after all.

So why do we still get people who 1. do not understand what they are singing about 2. cannot pronounce the words properly?

Gripe II

English words in songs – sometimes, whole sentences – why? Take the song Dating from Boys. If you listen to it on its own, you might have a tough time believing it to be a song from a Tamizh movie. Tamizh words in the song are few and far between. How can it be labelled a Tamizh song then?

In this aspect, I like the way Bollywood music directors think – if you cannot speak Hindi, you cannot sing. Maybe I have lived a sheltered life, but I haven’t heard a singer muddle through a song and come back to sing another song the next day. Listen to Shaan singing Chand Sifarish – the beauty of the song is heightened by the way in which the singer sings it. If, on the other hand, he had bit his tongue trying to pronounce the words, the song wouldn’t have been half the hit it is.

So, Tollywood and Kollywood music directors – from now on, can we have singers who can actually speak the language sing us songs please? It is not only cool, it actually is quite melodious.

It also has the added advantage of making it easy for us to teach our young ones our languages as well!

Also appears at Desicritics

Some of my most favourite songs in Indian movies are those from the Tamil movie ‘Alaipayuthey’ (Saathiya was a very diluted effort in Hindi, IMHO). A R Rahman’s music was fabulous, as always, as he elevated even the wedding mantras that are oft repeated by the purohits in a bored monotone, to the heights of cooldom, with his ‘Mangalyam’ number.

But today, as I was listening to it while washing the dishes, I couldn’t help but wonder about the whys and wherefores of the lyrics. The ‘hero’ character sings about his beloved in such poetical and glowing terms that it is guaranteed to make the knees of any desi girl go weak. It is either ‘endless smiles forever, I was born a hundred times just for this day’ or the ‘love kabaddi’ (a la ‘Shikdum’!) where the girl is to taunt and tease him with her various antics. There is also this evergreen song where he compares every single colour in the spectrum to his lady love.

All this is great, just dandy. What I do not understand is, what is the inspiration for all this? These big-time declarations of ‘luurve’ that are nowhere to be found in our society. All these men who woo their dilbaras, whatever happens to them once the objective has been reached? Boys who supposedly chased the girls till she gave in seem to give up on them once the mangalsutra is on her neck. I have never seen a husband voluntarily hold his wife’s hands, especially in front of family. In fact, the norm is pretty much to pretend that you don’t really know each other all that well. Why? Ma won’t be happy, will she?

My friend recently forwarded a ‘joke’ to me about the difference in a romance at various points in life – 6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years. The change, of course, is quite dramatic, from ‘Hi honey‘ of 6 weeks to ‘hey you!‘ of 6 years!! What a shame!

Last night, I watched this Telugu blockbuster ‘Nuvvostanante Nennodantana‘, starring RDB’s Karan Singhania, Siddharth, in the main role. The things he does to win the girl’s hand is unbelievable. This boy, a rich NRI kid from London, chucks everything away and settles down in his sweetheart’s village, where he suffers untold agonies in the form of eating really, horribly spicy food (he is afterall, an NRI yaar, go easy on him!), cleans the cow sheds, milks the cow and gets doused with its wee while he’s at it – and the list continues. As I saw himtry to catch a good night’s sleep on the hard ground, my heart bled for this young man who so carelessly gave up his Down-stuffed Silent Night mattress.

Okay, okay I know movies and reality can and should never be clubbed together even in the same sentence. But the moviemakers cannot be extrapolating things to such a degree that the result is a 180 degree ulta of real life, can they? Not to a nation where the menfolk aren’t exactly pampering their wives silly by getting them flowers everyday and romancing the be-jesus out of them?

So why are our lyricists and movie makers still feeding the poor girls of today such overwhelmingly beautiful scenarios wherein the man of their dreams will woo them to the ends of the world? Aren’t they setting everyone up for a rather steep fall?

Or is it just my cynical self coming to the fore?

PS: Can I just say this isn’t an attack on the desi men around the world so please do not slag me off too much. I just would like to understand the fundas of the masala we are fed on a daily basis, that’s all!

Also available at http://desicritics.org/2006/05/18/143846.php