The Year That Music Died
At the risk of being accused of unoriginality, or indeed, of borrowing inspiration a little too unabashedly, this was the only headline that fit what I'm about to write.
2011 was indeed the year when music died - for a nation that boasts of some of the richest musical legacies in the form of movies, for a nation whose entertainment industry had its very own golden era which, you guessed it, gets its name because of the music, this year was probably a double blow, (doubly so if you count Jagjit Singh, Bhimsen Joshi, Bhupen Hazarika, and all the non-Bollywood stalwarts we lost to the after world), with the passing away of two of Bollywood's most-loved mavericks, Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand.
Both were the quintessential charmers of the '60s and '70s, the most musical period that Bollywood can boast of - songs that were composed, sung and picturised on these two 'heroes' resonate even today. Where Shammi Kapoor was the lovable, herky-jerky, chubby, ruddy hero who could charm colour into and off the heroine's cheeks with his trademark flippancy, Dev Anand was the loose-limbed, carefree, fish reel-dangling, cowlick-sporting dreamer with a cervical spine made up of marshmallow and a que sera sera, in variants that are too many to count, on his almost-not-there lips.
The fact that these two leading men could not even be bracketed in the average-looking category did nothing detrimental to their box-office appeal. Their movies were backed by solid soundtracks that defined them and shaped their larger-than-life images. Between the two of them, they can easily lay claim to probably half of the best songs that Mohd. Rafi and Kishore Kumar sang in their glorious careers. Back then, Bollywood was not concerned about looks at least, not where the leading men were concerned. (The ladies are an altogether different story and I'm not going there now.)
Compare that to today's music scene - how many songs of 'superhit' movies of even two years ago does one remember? Today's 'blockbuster hit' scores have a shelf life of no longer than a year and the songs die a quick death on everyone's lips soon as the next song is out in the market.
Needless to say, the songs that were immortalised by these two much-loved heroes, which in turn immortalised them, will live on. Leaving you with a look at Dev Anand's almost 6-decade long journey in Bollywood:
