Archive for the ‘Antara Chaudhry Songs’ Category
Kyun aaj kal aksar kahin
Posted on: March 10, 2023
This article is written by Sadanand Kamath, a fellow enthusiast of Hindi movie music and a contributor to this blog. This article is meant to be posted in atulsongaday.me. If this article appears in other sites without the knowledge and consent of the web administrator of atulsongaday.me, then it is piracy of the copyright content of atulsongaday.me and is a punishable offence under the existing laws.
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Recently, I watched the film, ‘7½ Phere’ (2005) on one of the video sharing platforms mainly for two reasons – the catchy title of the film and an interesting combination of Juhi Chawla and Irrfan Khan in the lead roles. The short description of the film by the uploader states that a TV channel decides to go for the reality show of a live wedding in Indian family. The task is given to a first time director who selects a joint family in Mumbai for the same. The director gets into some problems with the senior members of the family who deny the live shooting of the family wedding. The director, with maiden project in jeopardy, gets into a deal with a member of a bride’s family to secretly shoot the wedding functions resulting in a chain of hilarious events.
After watching the film, a thought came to my mind as to how this interesting concept would have been handled by directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. The reason is that both these directors handled in their films, the subject of human relationships in a joint family set-up by maintaining a right balance between emotions and comical situations. This, I felt, was missing in the film. Let me further explore the film in detail.
‘7½ Phere’ (2005) had Juhi Chawla and Irrfan Khan in the lead roles, supported by Chahat Khanna, Ajay Gehi (special appearance), Anang Desai, Neena Kulkarni, Shri Vallabh Vyas, Manini De, Manish Chaudhari, Manoj Pahwa, Madhavi Chopra, Ninad Kamat, Salima Raza, Jyotsana Karyekar etc. The film was directed by the debutant, Isshaan Trivedi. The gist of the story is as under:
A TV Channel is planning a new reality show of 13 episodes of the traditional wedding ceremony in an Indian household. Asmi Ganatra (Juhi Chawla) has been entrusted with making the reality show as a debutant director. However, it being not a marriage season, with great difficulty, she is able to find a large joint family of Joshi in which a pre-wedding arrangements of Priya (Chahat Khanna), one of the grand daughters of Joshi patriarch is in progress. However, the elders in the family decline to allow the live shooting of the wedding rituals for TV reality show to maintain the privacy of the family, despite the offer of the TV Channel to bear the entire cost of marriage. With her career at stake, Asmi, the ambitious director who dreams of directing films under big banners after her success in TV Channel reality shows, is ready to do anything to get the reality show project on course.
Manoj Joshi (Irrfan Khan) is the youngest son of the Joshi patriarch who is a college dropout and unemployed. Because of this, he is still unmarried and the underdog of the family. Ever since Asmi has visited Joshi household, Manoj has developed a crush on her which Asmi has observed with her restrained reactions mainly because he is one of the members of the Joshi family. She decides to take Manoj into confidence to plant hidden cameras all over the places in the house with handsome monetary reward. He agrees to do the job provided he is also included in their team in monitoring the visuals in a mobile vehicle parked outside the compound of Joshi’s house just to ensure the privacy of the family. Asmi reluctantly agrees to his demand.
The hidden cameras bring out some of family’s secrets including that of Manoj’s elder brothers. The eldest brother is fond of reading porn materials. The next one has extra-marital relationship for which there are fights with his wife. The third one tries to molest the maid for which he gets a slap not only from the maid but also from his wife. Then there is subtle indication of a lesbian relationship between two teenage girls of the family. While the TV Channel crew are happy about these secrets because these would earn the reality show a higher TRPs, Manoj is not happy with these developments.
Both Asmi and Manoj get worried for different reasons when they come to know through hidden cameras that the bride, Priya has secretly met her boy friend in her room and is planning to elope with him a day before her wedding ceremony. This is not the good news for TV Channel whose reality show is about a traditional wedding. If bride really elopes, the shooting for the reality show would not be completed. Asmi requests Manoj to somehow convince Priya not to run away on her wedding day or prevent her from meeting her boyfriend. On the other hand, Manoj is bent upon helping his niece to run away a day before her wedding day and get married to her boyfriend. Ultimately, the wedding takes place as schedule with the groom selected by her parent and thus the shooting the wedding reality show gets completed. Asmi is happy with her shoot. She had come to shoot ‘saat phere’ but in the bargain she got more than ‘saat phere’ that is 7½ phere for her maiden reality show.
After previewing all the video shots on the monitors in the editing room, Asmi is in two minds about the video clips of family secrets. After some thoughts, she decides to destroy the tapes of the shooting of the family secrets to the surprise of the other crew members who tries to prevent her from destroying the tapes. But she successfully destroys tapes and tell the crew members that they have got what they wanted – the live wedding rituals. She also tell them that her sane mind advised her not to expose the family secrets to the public for the sake of TRPs which can destroy the family life of the newlywed couple as also the relations between two families. Obviously, Asmi is fired from the TV Channel.
The film ends with Manoj offering to take Asmi to a Coffee shop. She tells him that he has been flirting with her all the time during the shooting. She now reveals to him smilingly that she is already married.
After watching the film, I felt that an interesting contemporary topic which could have been crisply presented in the film has been wasted by a weak screenplay and direction. The film’s screenplay should have proceeded like a drive on an ‘expressway’ at a higher speed. However, ‘speed breakers’ by way of some unnecessary sub-plots have made the film to drag at the cost of cohesiveness of the plot. For examples, there was no need to show a police raid on TV crew’s monitoring vehicle in a comical way on the pretext that some terrorists are hiding in the vehicle. Also, there was no need to give more exposure joint family members than necessary in the film. That did not add to the value to the film as most of them were average performers in the film. Their so-called loud comic dialogues did not made me laugh. This, to some extent, resulted in the underutilisation of the lead roles of Juhi Chawla and Irrfan Khan.
The only strong point about the film is the good chemistry between Juhi Chawla and Irrfan Khan in their very first film together, which has resulted in their excellent performances. Both of them have challenging roles in the film. Juhi Chawla has to exploit Irrfan Khan’s infatuation with her by controlling her anger on him to get her work done. Irrfan Khan on the other hand has to show outwardly that her occasional insult to him does not bother him. In this way, both are trying to achieve what is on their minds.
‘7½ Phere’ (2005) has effectively 3 songs written by Subrat Sinha (2) and Manrel Gaekwad (1). All these songs are set to music by Shantanu Moitra. In addition, there are 5 more songs listed in the film’s albums, of which 4 are from other films, ‘Don’ (1978), ‘Jaanbaaz’ (1986), ‘Dil Se’ (1998), and one from a non-film album. I did not find any of these songs in the film’s DVD. Probably they got deleted from the DVD.
I am presenting the first song from the film, ‘kyun aajkal aksar kahin udd jaata hai ye mann mera’ to appear on the Blog. The song is written by Subrat Sinha and is rendered by Antara Chowdhury (daughter of Salil Chowdhury) to the tune composed by Shantanu Moitra.
The background of the song is that Chahat Khanna is in her pre-wedding trance of happiness with anxiety. She is happy that she has planned to runway with her boyfriend on her wedding day to get married with him as per her choice. Her anxiety stems from what will be in store for her in her new house. Her movements of the pre-wedding rituals are captured by secret cameras from various angles. At that time, Juhi Chawla, while watching on her monitors, gets an idea to mix these shots with a pre-wedding song. That’s when the song gets played in the background.
The video clip does not include the second antara of the song while the audio clip include the full song. I liked this song for its lyrics and melody. The interludes orchestration brings out what the psychologists would call the ‘happiness anxiety’ inherent in the song.
Audio Clip:
Video Clip:
Song-Kyun aajkal aksar kahin (7½ Phere)(2005) Singer-Antara Chaudhary, Lyrics-Subrat Sinha, MD-Shantanu Moitra
Lyrics (Based on Audio Clip)
kyun aajkal aksar kahin
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
kyun aajkal aksar kahin
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
mujhe chhod kar wo kiske ghar
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
din kaise guzre jab ye pata ho
din kaise guzre jab ye pata ho
aane hi waali hai sapnon ki manzil
manzil pe koi apna milega..aa
manzil pe koi apna milega
tanha yoon phir to rahega nahin dil
pahle se hi paane ko wo
manzil chala ye mann mera
kyun aajkal aksar kahin
ud jaata hai ye mann mera
hmmm
mujhe chhod kar wo kiske ghar
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
ho o o o
chhootega aangan apne sabhi ye
chhootega aangan apne sabhi ye
kehte hain ham ho jayenge paraaye
itni khushi si kyun sab ko hai phir
itni khushi si kyun sab ko hai phir
mann mein sada ye hamen samjhaaye
uljhan meri dekhen magar
kuchh na kare ye mann mera
kyun aajkal aksar kahin
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
hmmm
mujhe chhod kar wo kiske ghar
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
kyun aajkal aksar kahin
udd jaata hai ye mann mera
mujhe chhod kar wo kiske ghar
uda jaata hai ye mann mera
la la la la
la la la la
la la la la
la la la la
hmm hmm hmm hmm
hmm hmm hmm hmm
hmm hmm hmm hmm
hmm hmm hmm hmm
la la a la
la la la la
la la la la
la la la la
Atul’s Song A Day- A choice collection of Hindi Film & Non-Film Songs 
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