#410

          Song:   majbuur merii aankhen barbaad meraa dil hai
                  dushvaar huaa hansnaa, ronaa bhi to mushkil hai

          Film:   Nirala (1950)
          Singer: Lata Mangeshkar
          Music:  C Ramchandra
          Lyrics: Santoshi ?
          *ing:   Madhubala, Dev Anand

  Another lilting melody from this strange movie from Sadiq?, which I
  think was the first Dev-Madhubala starrer to be released ("another"
  because I remember posting a song from this movie a short while ago).

  The rationale for having multiple playback singers for the same
  actor/tress in the same movie always eludes me. It is very unsettling
  for me to have to constantly re-map face to voice when watching a
  movie... like in this film, all songs picturized on Madhubala are
  sung by Lata, except one - "mohabbat merii rang laane lagii hai"
  which is sung by Shamshad.. why ?? It's a nice song, and nicely sung
  too, but still...

  Well anyways, what I particularly like about today's song, in
  addition to it's slow, yearning tune is the almost completely
  subdued background orchestration... it's just enough to let you
  know it's there, and to fill in the vocal gaps with some plaintive
  notes. But otherwise, it's the voice all the way. I mentioned earlier
  the long-drawn, smooth-curve compositions that CR often used for his slow
  numbers, and this is another one of them. I could disown myself for
  this horrific imagery, but it's the musical analogue of the
  mathematical concept of continuous and differentiable functions: each note
  merging smoothly into the next (hey, if Hofstadter could find analogies
  between Bach and Godel, why not ?? :-)) An absolute harmony, and, as is to
  be expected, an absolutely complete rendition from the Lady.

  I think I need a break ; this over-analysis is killing me :-)
 

  ..Hrishi