2018

Songs of Yore completes eight years

Songs of Yore eighth anniversary June 7, 2018

On the eighth anniversary of Songs of Yore, I am going to break an unwritten code I have tried to follow – keeping private and public apart. I have met SoY regulars in the NCR from time to time, and also those living in other places during my travels to the cities where I knew […]

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Greatness in the shadow of the giants: Bulo C Rani

Bulo C Rani May 24, 2018

A tribute to Bulo C Rani on his 25th death anniversary (6 May 1920 – 24 May 1993) My first reaction to Bulo C Rani when I heard Humein to loot liya mil ke husnwaalon ne was, how a lady could create such a masculine qawwali. The next marker by which I recognised Bulo C […]

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The path, the traveller, the journey and the destination

Raah-Musafir-Safar-Manzil May 12, 2018

We are told that to succeed in life we have to have a goal, and we have to take the right path to reach there. But how do we get to the right path? You reach a fork in life, you choose a path and that makes all the difference. Had you chosen the other […]

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Talat Mahmood: A Mesmeriser

Talat Mahmood May 9, 2018

Guest article by DP Rangan as a tribute to Talat Mahmood on his 20th death anniversary (24 February 1924 – 9 May 1998) (We know all the famous songs of Talat Mahmood. Most of them are already covered on SoY. But that is not a deterrent to a real Talat-fan like our indefatigable DP Rangan, […]

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Songs of stars

Songs of stars April 28, 2018

For the SoY regulars, the title of this post may come as a surprise, because DP Rangan has already written an exhaustive post on songs on stars. That was about stars in the sky (i.e. तारे/सितारे). However, there are another kind of stars around whom the film world revolves. They have names like you and […]

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Songs that tell a story

Stroy song April 17, 2018

Songs have been an integral part of our films right from the very first talkie Alam Ara (1931). The common understanding is that music had been an integral part of our folk, classical and theatre traditions, and it was a natural extension to films. Our early films were largely based on our existing theatre forms. […]

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Best songs of 1947: And the winners are?

Parwana-Dard-Jugnu-Meera-Shehnai-Mirza Sahiban April 1, 2018

It was the best of years, it was the worst of years. The euphoria of independence was marred by the trauma of partition, the communal frenzy sweeping large swathes of the country, the bloodshed, and the largest mass migration in history from one side of the border to the other. The film world too could […]

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Tasveer exhibits of Bollywood

Tasveer March 22, 2018

Guest article by DP Rangan (A lesser mortal, when asked to write on songs on ‘tasveer’, would have made some general observations about pictures, and mentioned some songs which contained the word ‘tasveer’. Not DP Rangan, as we know well by now. Mr Rangan takes us to pre-historic days when mankind would have started making […]

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Parody songs: Part 2

Parody medley March 12, 2018

(I thank Ashok M Vaishnav for very generously sharing his compilation of parody songs with me – AK) In Part 1 of this post I covered the parody songs based on a single song. This seems to have later led to the practice of parodying the mukhada or a short portion of a number of […]

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Parody songs: Part 1

Parody March 2, 2018

Wishing the readers a very Happy Holi (I have been compiling parody songs for a while, when I got a mail from Ashok M Vaishnav that he has also been doing such a list, and whether he could write a guest article for SoY on this. No one does compilation and analysis better than him, […]

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