Woody Allen in autobiography, “Apropos of Nothing” talks and celebrates innumerable influences and experiences of watching diverse films and musicals and theatre productions, the idea being that he soaked almost every popular form of his generation while growing up and how it influenced or affected his younger years.
Belonging to a family of compulsive weekend movie goers there was more than expected exposure to Hindi films for me from a very young age. One of my earliest memories of watching a film in a movie theatre is of “Johnny Mera Naam”, Pran bashing up Dev Anand and persistently asking him, “bol tera asli naam kya hai…?” And Dev Anand would keep replying, “Johnny…”. I was a tad scared in the theatre and clung to my mother. The other memory being of watch a morbid Amitabh Bachchan in films like “Abhimaan” and “Mili” long before I became a hard-core admirer. He bored me at seven or eight. I would usually yawn during those song and dance sequences and wondered why the movies wasted time on them.
And then came Kumar Gaurav and Vijeta Pundit’s “Love Story” in 1981 and R.D. Burman’s music along with Amit Kumar’s voice for Kumar Gaurav, a good-looking chocolate boy captured my heart. That was the first audio cassette I bought and played it on my mono tape recorder as was the case back in the eighties This coincided with my first crush, when I could not sleep for one whole month and spent the nights listening to “Love Story” songs imagining myself and my crush all along. I had to end this for it was taking a toll on me in the year of class 10 board exams. But Hindi film music was there to stay in my life. What followed soon was Nazia Hassan’s sensational pop debut album “Disco Deewane”, Sanjay Dutt and Tina Munim’s “Rocky” with foot tapping R. D. Burman numbers and “Ek Duje Ke Liye”, a film we saw after it lasted in Capitol Cinema, Lucknow, for more than a year, for our resistance to accept a south Indian star in a Hindi film! But when we saw the film I was simply bowled over by it and Rati Agnihotri with a mole on her chin was the new crush. Two years later Sunny Deol and Amrita Singh’s “Betaab” followed to further fule teenage angst. It was the decade of star sons surfacing and disappearing soon after before Sanjay Dutt and Sunny Deol managed to steady their careers, but poor Kumar Gaurav faded away a after a string of flops.
But the music and its fantastical quality stayed.
None of them were cinematic gems but they added so much to the agony and ecstasy of the years from 15 to 21. Life seemed to be a big Bollywood party, not realizing that life is elsewhere. But who cared. Being in an all-boys school kept us away from regular interaction with the girls of our batch. It was these Hindi film songs that fired our imagination and fantasy and helped us negotiate the distance, of course they also provided a false sense of self-worth, but I would much rather live with that romanticism than a banal, boring life with unreal touch with reality. It was full of dreams and getting a seat in the bus next to the girl one admired was the high point. And if in any given Monday they would smile, the whole week would be spent deconstructing that smile with a completely subjective, one-sided interpretation. Sleepovers would mean these romantic songs playing in the background and us discussing who smiled and who did not.
It was all happening from “ I am sixteen going on seventeen… to mein solah baras ki, tu kitne baras ka… to aap jaisa koi meri zindagi mein aaye… et al”
Those were good days of growing up!
Sharad Raj is a Mumbai based independent filmmaker & Senior Faculty at Whistling Woods International.
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