A tribute to old Hindi film music. Songs of the 30s through the 60s.

Miscellaneous

Mughals Engulf Bollywood

November 7, 2020

Guest article by DP Rangan as a tribute to the Last Mughal Emporer Bahadur Shah Zafar II on his 158th Remembrance Day (24 October 1775 – 7 November 1862) (Mughal period has fascinated our film makers from the very early days – not to make ‘historical’ films as we understand by the term, but to […]

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Salt, pepper and foods

October 16, 2020

Celebrating the World Food Day (16 October) You would hardly find a dining table in homes or restaurants anywhere in the world which does not have salt and pepper shakers. Without salt and pepper the food would be without any taste. These have also acquired a venerable place in our history. ‘Namak Satyagrah’ or Dandi […]

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Ten years of Songs of Yore

June 7, 2020

When I started blogging a new buzzword had just come into vogue: Vision 2020. We all – whether in public, private or non-profit sectors – were rushing in and out of seminars, workshops and breakout rooms, to prepare a Vision 2020 document for our organisations in nice spiral-bound volumes containing Mission Statement, Vision Statement, Objectives, […]

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Twins Phenomena In Bollywood

May 29, 2020

Guest article by DP Rangan (The prolific guest writer DP Rangan now writes on the twins in Hindi films, some generic tropes of these films, and gives a selection of songs from some twin films. The highlight of this post is some great songs of the vintage era. This post too has been with me […]

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Songs and contra-songs

May 10, 2020

When Peter Drucker wrote in 1986 that the world economy is not changing, it has already changed, “We are living in a changed world” became a fashionable jargon. His assertion was open to question, but Corona has changed the world in a very fundamental way. Someone said that in the human history whenever mankind faced […]

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Nayika Bhed in songs

March 8, 2020

Commemorating International Women’s Day (March 8) and wishing everyone a very Happy Holi The erudite readers of the SoY will be surprised to see a post on Nayika Bhed on the International Women’s Day (March 8), which commemorates the movement for women’s rights relating to equality etc. If you look at Nayika Bhed from the […]

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Film Songs From Firmament

February 5, 2020

Guest article by DP Rangan (DP Rangan is by far the most prolific guest writer on SoY, and among its most senior members. If he is appearing after a long gap, I am partly responsible for it as a couple of his articles have been in my folder for a while. I had already scheduled […]

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‘Vandya Vande Mataram’: The story of a Song Perennial

January 26, 2020

Guest article by N Venkataraman to celebrate 70th Anniversary of the Republic (During our days of innocence we learnt in the school that ‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka Jaya He’ was our ‘National Anthem’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ was our ‘National Song’, both of equal reverence, and we sung both with equal fervour on special occasions. When […]

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Surrogate Songs

January 13, 2020

Music and dance became an integral part of our films right from the first talkies, as our sources for initial films were Parsi Theatre, or Marathi Natya Sangeet which had music galore, or Mythologicals in which apsaras entertained in the Devlok. These gradually evolved into usual romantic stories, with a third angle thrown in at […]

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Romancing the Route 66

January 1, 2020

Wishing the readers a very Happy New Year with some nostalgia about Americana I became aware of the name ‘Route 66’ after I started blogging, but my dream of driving cross-country through small-town America goes back about three decades when I was a graduate student at Yale. As a country boy landed in the big […]

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