Atul’s Song A Day- A choice collection of Hindi Film & Non-Film Songs

This article is written by Sudhir, 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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Atul Song-A-Day 15K Song Milestone Celebrations – 14
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A dream within a dream. . .

In the growing up years, there is a whole generation I am sure, or actually, multiple generations, that have grown up learning about the American society and the lifestyle from the books of the author Harold Robbins. I remember, in my school years, his books were a taboo, generally carried around and exchanged, their cover pages obscured by plain paper or even newspaper wrappers. And yet, very avidly devoured by the young minds oh so keen to learn about the American way of life. But of course, the clandestine attraction was the common perception that his novels contained explicitly “hot” passages. And hence all the hush-hush and the covert operations to read his novels surreptitiously on the bus, while traveling back from school in the afternoons (of course, the morning trip traveling TO the school, one was always busy preparing for this test or that, or even completing homework assignments 😀 😀 ), or very late in the night, using various mechanisms to illuminate the pages in an otherwise darkened room. 🙂

The reason I bring up this author here – is that he wrote a trilogy on Hollywood and the American film industry – the three books spread over a period of 20 years (publication dates – 1949, 1961 and 1969), with the events covered spanning almost a century, or maybe about eight decades to be precise. The first novel tells about the rise of the cinema based powerful entertainment industry, from its initial baby steps, through the age of silent films, ending at the advent of the talkie era when sound entered the heretofore silent imagery. The second novel in this series tells the stories of the heydays of studio system in Hollywood, the big stars, the big directors and the mega budget productions – and the decadence that permeates the glitz of the tinsel town. The third part of this trilogy covers the period in Hollywood history that saw the decline of the studio system and the arrival of television as the more powerful younger sibling of the entertainment industry.

The first book in this trilogy – oh so appropriately titled – ‘The Dream Merchants’.
[The second book is titled ‘The Carpetbaggers’ and the third is ‘The Inheritors’.]

And life – what about life? What is it? Thinkers and philosophers over the ages, have contemplated on this existence – from the mundane tasks of bread and survival to the exotic astronomy of stars and black holes. And have pondered over this question.

One of the answers that has echoed through the centuries – life too, is a dream, a dream too. . . a concept that has been an important ingredient of the philosophies that have tried to explain life, over centuries and ages, in all the civilizations around this planet. Start with the ancient traditions of our land, and then examine the length and breadth of this planet, including the historical depth of time, we encounter this concept in the far eastern beliefs, the Persian mystique, the abounding Greek wisdom, and in the troika of traditions centered in the lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, extending to the Arabian Peninsula – the Judaic traditions, the Christian philosophies, and the Islamic cultures.

Parvati is the Hindu goddess of dreams, and also of births and everything related to the creation, suggesting that the Hindu tradition gives to dreams a creative ability and the power to produce something that did not previously exist in the material world. There are passages in our scriptures that describe this universe, this creation, as a dream dreamt by the Supreme Himself.

Our other philosophies also conjecture – that there is an alternate existence for each one of us in an alternate universe. At a certain juncture in that existence, we fall asleep, and are simultaneously born into this world – to exist as a dream of that primordial self in sleep. The dream continues, and at another juncture it comes to a close. And we are erased from existence in this world. What we term as death in this world, is actually awakening and end of a dream in that parallel existence.

One of the most important works of Persian and Arabic culture is ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, in many of whose stories comes the subject of dreams – mirrors reflecting reality around us, and preventing us from seeing it. The clearest example is the tale ‘The Sleeper and the Waker’, in which a king and a beggar swap roles and the latter ends up believing everything has been a dream.
[Ah, so that is the origin of the storyline for books and films like ‘The Prince And The Pauper’, ‘Raja Aur Runk’, and . . . goodness, I just googled ‘films on role switching’ – the list is too long to be added here. 🙂 ]

The Greek philosopher Plato, in his work titled ‘The Allegory of The Cave’, explains his theory of the existence of two worlds — Sense and Ideas — and metaphorically describes the situation in which the human is related by them: life goes into a kind of reverie, ignorant and ruled by the senses, of which you can wake up only through the reason, to attain true knowledge.

The Spanish writer Calderon de la Barca, in his work ‘Life is a Dream’, poses a dichotomy between earthly life and the heavenly life in which the first is similar to a dream that will finish only at death. Therefore, the real is death and life is associated with the unreality of the dream, so that the terms of our everyday perception are reversed: life is death and death is life.

The old bard has written about this in more than one ways. In ‘The Tempest’, his words say –
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of and our little life is rounded with a sleep’.

In ‘Hamlet’, he says,
“To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. . .”

And our own poet protagonists put it so simply. As songwriter Yogesh has said – “Jeevan Hai Ik Sapna, Madhur Suhaana Sapna”, the Asha-Kishore duet in the 1973 film ‘Honeymoon’.

In all the perspectives to life that have been conjectured, one is that it is a dream. And inside this dream, we have another level of existence, which is once again a dream – a dream that is manufactured by some, for the consumption of another some, to help forget, albeit temporarily, the vagaries of the so called reality, which in itself is conjectured to be a dream – of alternate self in an alternate existence.

Harold Robbins called these ‘manufacturers’ as ‘The Dream Merchants’ – the creators of these dreams, and who trade these dreams for a consideration.

It is this dream world, the dream factory that fascinates us all. And by ‘us’ I mean this bandwagon, all the regular riders, and all the other lovers of Hindi films and Hindi film music who are all connected by the singular passion for this art form. We all love this musical dreamboat. The ‘dream merchants’ keep dishing out new concoctions, spinning and re-spinning the tales that have been told often and again. They keep creating and re-inventing the jewel embellishments to adorn these tales, and to keep us all hooked – ah yes, hooked – so bad that we do not have any other place to go in this life. 🙂

Fifteen thousand songs – each post being an original work. As I am writing this piece, my mind made an attempt to estimate the amount of human effort that has gone into the building of this (now) legendary edifice. But my mind boggled at the endeavor. There may be some rough estimations we can draw upon for the amount spent in adding to and maintaining the data on this blog. But there is very little hope we can estimate the time spent on creating the original songs that are the basis on which this blog is built.

We could separate out these two calculations and make an attempt. In my mind, I would put an average of between 5 to 6 hours spent on each post. [I request Atul ji to please comment on this basic estimate.] I include the time spent by the author of the post to search and select the song, the time to note down and verify the lyrics, the time to write the article to go along with the song, the time spent to edit the entire post including lyrics review and color coding etc., the time for admin tasks related to finalizing and publishing the post, ah yes, must also include time to upload the song if not available, and then the follow up admin work to maintain and update the data pages and our own data files to keep them up to date.

Let me take the median number as 5.5 hours per post. Having come to the 15K milestone, by this estimate, the team has spent ~ 82,500 person hours on posting and publication on this blog.

Let me now put in perspective this rough estimate. A standard person working day is defined to be eight hours. Give or take some, a person works for an average of 22 days per month. That is 176 person hours per month. A simple calculation tells us that we are at a collective total of 469 person months invested in all activities of this blog. Translating this to years, we get a number ~ 39 years.

Imagine. The amount of effort that has been spent on this enterprise is equivalent almost to an entire working career of a person, who, mind you, has not taken any vacation or other time off, other than the 8 or 9 non working days per month.

Mind boggling, isn’t it. Every which way that we try to understand what this blog is, it turns out to be mind boggling. I wouldn’t even try to go to the next step of apportioning the percentage of this number to our fearless leader. I am sure you all are all too familiar with that by now.

What a fantastic enterprise this is turning out to be. The English phrase that appropriately applies to such an endeavor is – “dream run”. Be that an effort in athletics or sports, be that a string of successes in any particular field, be that the tenure of a successful enterprise, be that the number of weeks / months of a film showing at a single theatre – the word used is “dream run”.

And the expression brings us back to the theme I am attempting to connect with – a dream within a dream. I am reminded of a song that completes 40 years this year. A quick search tells me that the film ‘Golmaal’ was certified on 6^th April 1979. Today we are a little over 40 years and one month since this song was released – “Sapne Mein Dekha Sapna”. So much food for thought it generates. Are we living? Are we inside a dream? Where do we go when we go to sleep? Is sleep another parallel existence? Sometimes we bring back snatches of memories of visions seen during our sleep tenure. What are these visions? What are these memories? Are these real experiences in another dimension? Would it be possible to experience sleep within a dream? And then, consequently, would it be possible to have memories of dream that was dreamt inside a dream? Yes, so much wholesome and appetizing food for thought.

But then yes, if we step back and ruminate over the philosophical conjectures, is this existence itself a dream. And the dreams we remember from our sleeping hours in here – is that a dream inside a dream? Interesting, very interesting discussions.

Let me introduce the song for today, for this post. A very interesting take on what this world of cinema is, in the words of the people who compose the work force of this industry – and the verdict is –

jaali, jaali, jaali
(its all unreal, unreal, unreal)

Yes, that is what the words in this song convey. The film is ‘Haar Jeet’ from 1954. The film is produced by GA Thakur under the banner of Film Kraft and is directed by Jaggi Thakur. The star cast of the film is listed as Shyama, Suresh, Manorama, Sundar, Heera Lal, Madan Puri, Shyam Lal, Amar, Baij Sharma, Ramesh Thakur, Ratan Sharma, and Peggy. I have not seen the film. As I tried to search for more information, I am able to locate a review of the film posted on the Cineplot blog. The review also summarizes the story of the film.

FilmCraft’s “Haar Jeet”, produced by G.A. Thakur and directed by Jaggi Rampal, which was premiered in Bombay at the Swastik and other cinemas on June 11th, 1954, had a good theme, with potential enough to make an absorbing picture. But poor characterization, naive and amateurish direction and artificial treatment have combined to defeat the proper development of that theme. The result is that “Haar Jeet” is more “Haar” (loss) than “Jeet” (gain) and that goes as much for the audience as it does for the production itself.

The atmosphere is never established, not in the degree it should be to make the characters. their actions and behavior understandable in a drama so dependent as this is upon the psychology of three of its principal characters, one of whom, Dr. Behari, is a physician and a hypnotist.

He lives in the house of his millionaire brother and is driven by an overpowering lust for wealth to thoughts of murder because of a growing pile of debts. One is never told how he comes to incur the debts.

The doctor is the central character round which the picture and story revolve. He is shown making use of his hypnotic power to get his brother’s daughter Nalini under his control so that he can get her married to a rascally confederate of his, whom he introduces into the family as Prince Balraj.

Under his spell Nalini actually goes through the betrothal ceremony with a show of pleasure, sharing in the gaiety of the occasion. On the other hand, she is also shown growing suspicious of her uncle in scenes that follow. She refuses to marry the phoney Prince, and when her father insists, she runs away to Bombay, where she finds shelter with a young woman friend.

Nalini accidentally encounters a young man named Rajan and his friend Balam. Rajan falls in love with her. There are glimpses of a phoney Academy for Acting, where the lovers meet. But how that academy comes into existence, how it is managed and how the hero gets into it as a teacher of dramatic art one doesn’t quite know. In some comically unreal scenes she is selected to play the heroine in a film and Rajan is cast opposite her as the hero, presumably to enable the romance to develop.

The romance is interrupted, however, by the wicked uncle who turns up at this point with his bogus Prince Balraj, in search of Nalini, hypnotizes her and takes her back home.

In the final sequence, the doctor, desperate to get his hands on the money and pressed by his confederate, takes to violence and almost succeeds in getting what he desires, when Rajan and Balam burst in with the police to defeat him. He meets a condign end by falling off the roof and is killed. The film ends there.

Poor motivation, perfunctory treatment and utterly naive direction rob the narrative of all conviction despite some good acting by the cast. Hiralal puts over quite a convincing portrayal of the villainous Dr. Behari. Shyamlal is good as the millionaire brother, and so is Madanpuri, despite occasional touches of artificiality, as the polished rogue Balraj. Sunder manages to have a few bright moments.

Manorama, who is quite a good actress, is wasted in another very poorly written and badly directed role. Suresh is disappointingly dull and tame in the romantic role of Rajan. Shyama, who looks quite attractive, does her best.

The sets are realistic. The photography is mediocre and seems to have suffered a lot from indifferent laboratory work. The editor has not been able to give the film the requisite consistency in narration.

The music is depressingly drab and the unpoetic lyrics set to dull melodies are poorly sung.

The film has seven songs, written by four songwriters – Saraswati Kumar Deepak, Shewan Rizvi, Kaif Irfani and Aziz Kashmiri. This song is penned by Shewan Rizvi. Music is by SD Batish. The main singing voice is SD Batish himself. There is another primary voice which is an unidentified female voice. Some lines in the song are sung solo by this voice. I request other knowledgeable readers and friends to help identify this voice.

The Cineplot review above censures the poetry and the music in the songs of this film. As I review the songs of this film already posted, I am not able to reconcile that observation. Anyway, the opinions and judgments are personal and subjective, and that is fine. The songs already posted from this film are

• Tujhe Aawaaz Deti Hai Tadap Kar Zindagi Meri in the voice of Lata Mangeshkar
• Bechain Hai He He, sung by Geeta Dutt and Mubarak Begum
• Khaamosh Hain Sitaare Aur Raat Ro Rahi Hai, sung by Talat

The readers are encouraged to listen to these earlier songs and make their own judgment.

Today’s song is simply a fun song. One image that I could locate (also on Cineplot) seems as if it is from this song only. The ambiance created in the audio is that of a dance performance, quite possibly a stage dance performance, and the visual that I have inserted with the upload, seems quite likely to be for this song. The song tells about the unreality of the reel world. A make believe construct manned by actors who are just role playing – they are not what they are. 🙂

There are interesting references in the verses of the song. There are names of actors and actresses in the song. There also are names of films – ‘Passing Show’, and ‘Hunterwaali’. As I check the Geet Kosh listings, I find films titled ‘Passing Show’ in the years 1936 and 1956. Since this song dates from 1954, the poet here is referring to the 1936 film. And the hero of that film is Jayant. And the film ‘Hunterwali’ being referred to is also from 1935. Of course the heroine of that film is Nadia. 🙂 [Actually, there is a film titled ‘Hunterwali Ki Beti’ from 1943 also; and in that film, the lead role is played by Nadia again.]

A fun song, and also, in a subtle manner, a song that projects reality. That the world of cinema is

jaali, jaali, jaali
(its all unreal, unreal, unreal)

And yet, it enthralls us, fascinates us, grips and enchants us no end. So much so that we spend an entire working career on building this wonderful blog – one song at a time. 😀 😀

Fifteen thousand songs – whew. . . wow. . . and CONGRATULATIONS. 🙂

Song – Filmi Duniya, Duniya Waalo (Haar Jeet) (1954) Singer – SD Batish, Unidentified Female Voice, Lyrics – Shewan Rizvi, MD – SD Batish
SD Batish + Chorus
Chorus

Lyrics

filmi duniya
duniya waalo
dekho dekho
filmi duniya

ye hai nargis
ye hai nimmi
ye hai geeta baali
ye hai geeta baali
main hoon hero
passing show ka
ye hai hunterwaali

hey..ey..ey

asli hum mein
koi nahin hai
sab ke sab hain jaali

asli
asli
asli
jaali
jaali
jaali

filmi duniya
duniya waalo
dekho dekho
filmi duniya

aaj nahin to
kal ya parson
aaj nahin to
kal ya parson
dee dee lallaa
kal ya parson
honge hum mash’hoor
mash’hoor
mash’hoor
bante bante
ban jaaunga
main bhi..ee..ee..ee
raaj kapoor..rr..rr
chalengi apni filmen
dilli aur kolkotta

opni baari jaabe
roshogolla khaabe

aur coimbatore
yendaaa
yendaaa
yendaaa da da da da daaaa
coimbatore
coimbatore
coimba..atore

filmi duniya
duniya waalo
dekho dekho
filmi duniya

hello

hello

hello madam paaro
hello madam paaro
seenon se
dil baahar niklen
jebon se
kuchh noten niklen
seenon se
dil baahar niklen
jebon se
kuchh noten niklen
aisa koi jhatka
arey jhatka
arey jhatka maaro
taali maaro
taali maaro..o..o..o
filmi duniya
duniya waalo
dekho dekho
filmi duniya

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Hindi script lyrics (Provided by Sudhir Kapur)
———————————————————-

फिल्मी दुनिया
दुनिया वालो
देखो देखो
फिल्मी दुनिया

ये है नर्गिस
ये है निम्मी
ये है गीता बाली
ये है गीता बाली
मैं हूँ हीरो
पासिंग शो का
ये है हंटरवाली

हे॰॰ए॰॰ए

असली हम में
कोई नहीं है
सबके सब हैं जाली

असली
असली
असली
जाली
जाली
जाली

फिल्मी दुनिया
दुनिया वालो
देखो देखो
फिल्मी दुनिया

आज नहीं तो
कल या परसों
आज नहीं तो
कल या परसों
डी डी लल्ला
कल या परसों
होंगे हम मशहूर
मशहूर
मशहूर
बनते बनते
बन जाऊंगा
मैं भी॰॰ई॰॰ई
राज कपूर॰॰र्र॰॰र्र
चलेंगी अपनी फिल्में
दिल्ली और कोलकोत्ता

औपनि बाड़ी जाबे
रोशोगोल्ला खाबे

और कोयम्बटूर
येण्डा॰॰
येण्डा॰॰
येण्डा॰॰ डा डा डा डा डा॰॰आ
कोयम्बटूर
कोयम्बटूर
कोयम्ब॰॰टूर

फिल्मी दुनिया
दुनिया वालो
देखो देखो
फिल्मी दुनिया

हैलो

हैलो

हैलो मैडम पारो
सीनों से
दिल बाहर निकलें
जेबों से
कुछ नोटें निकलें
सीनों से
दिल बाहर निकलें
जेबों से
कुछ नोटें निकलें
ऐसा कोई झटका
अरे झटका
अरे झटका मारो
ताली मारो’
ताली मारो॰॰ओ॰॰ओ॰॰ओ

फिल्मी दुनिया
दुनिया वालो
देखो देखो
फिल्मी दुनिया