A few songs down the nostalgia lane

If you have been a child of the eighties in India, you probably recall the time without Internet, without television and once television came, days of Hum Log and Buniyaad and waiting for Chitrahaar on Wednesday evenings.

If you were anything like me, you also probably  had a huge crush on Kumar Gaurav in Love story. (or Vijeta Pandit depending on your gender/sexual inclination heh heh)
(I know, but I did, on Kumar Gaurav! Murdering Vijeta Pandit was  probably one of my greatest ambitions at that time.)

I also grew up on a diet of English (36th Chamber of Shaolin, Herbie goes bananas)  and several Hindi movies of those times. (Mostly Amitabh starrers, I recall). My dad used to take us to the 'theatre' (we used to say 'theatre--never a cinema hall and multiplexes were unheard of in those times) as a special treat on weekends to watch movies. Oh, the joy!

I remember in the absence of Internet and instant access to information like we have today, figuring out  the lyrics of songs we like, used to be a major activity. Either we had to have a ' cassette tape' of that song  (Remember this? I don't think my children even know what this is)

  which we would endlessly rewind , pause and forward in order to catch the right lyrics or if we did not have the cassette  tape, then we had to wait perched, prepared with a pencil and paper, for the radio to play that song and write down very quickly the lyrics or what we  thought we had heard, the latter often producing hilarious results, because of relying solely on our sense of hearing or whatever the person who was hearing it and dictating it, said. (as sometimes, we had special assignees--the ones assigned to decipher the lyrics and another assigned to write it down).

Very often, the lyrics we wrote down were wrong--but who cared! We formed our own music bands (with musical instruments borrowed from the Kitchen--a stainless steel plate and a spoon made a good tambourine substitute and the storage containers turned into drums along with the wooden  chappati belan turning into  a stick) and we sang these songs at the top of our voices.




 I vividly recall singing 'Qurbani Qurbani Qurbaani' along with my brother. I can to this day, play the drums at the start of Qurbani  with my eyes closed and I can say the lyrics in my sleep too. ( oooo--bi-bi-tujpe-kurba-meri-jaan--that is how I used to sing it).

Sometimes, when a wave of nostalgia washes over me, I break into the Qurbaani song, much to the amusement of my kids who stare at me with that look in their eyes which says Oh-has-mom-gone-mad-she-was-fine-just-a-minute-ago.

This morning the song 'Aaap jaise koi mere zindagi mein aaye' played on the radio. Who can forget the sex appeal oozing Nazia hassan's voice and the even more sexy Zeenat Aman who danced to it ? Satish told me that one of his relatives took great offence to this song, as they misheard the lyrics as 'aap jaisa koi mere zindagi mein aaye toh BAAP ban jaye' (instead of baat ban jaye). I couldn't stop laughing when I heard that.

In the more recent times,(which translates to a few years ago) I had the song 'Tu hi meri shab hai..' from the movie Gangster as my hello-tune (a tune which the person who calls you hears instead of the boring tring tring).  An elderly aunt of mine called me up on my mobile whereupon she was greeted with the very peppy 'Tu hi meri shab hai' song.

She hung up the phone hurriedly even before I could answer , proceeded to call me upon the landline and then gave me a full blown lecture about putting unsuitable and negative songs as caller tunes. Puzzled, I asked her what could possibly be negative about a peppy love song which proclaims eternal love and she said that she doesn't understand these modern songs and that she fails to understand how  anyone can possibly express their love by  saying 'You are my dead body'. It took me two minutes to figure out that she had heard the lyrics as 'Tu hi meri Shav hai' :D
I am laughing as I type this now.

Some times it is indeed fantastic to travel down the nostalgia path.
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ps: I apologise to my non-Hindi speaking readers and my English friends for the extensive use of Hindi in this post, without any translations. Somehow the beauty of the songs get killed if one translates.

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