Silly Midnight Musing about a Song

A few days ago, I was on a bus when this song floated out of the speakers. Automatic smile across my face. There is something about these songs which tenderly bless the even more tender woman in the song. What makes it even more special is Rafi's voice caressing your ears. Naazuk words made even more naazuk. Nothing can smoothen your ruffled feathers at the end of a rough day like this song. I know I am exaggerating, but it really is a lovely song.

Like many of the songs of the 1960s, this is one of the songs I heard a countless number of times before actually seeing its picturization in the movie. As usual, once you see the picturization, the quaintness of the song unfolds. It's only when I saw it that I noticed that the song starts with soft regular guitar strumming. Why so? Because there is not a single guitar in that scene! Now, that's not unusual in a Bollywood movie, but a guitar replaced by a sitar which the actor is not even playing? Well. And then you notice that the ambiance that the intro creates is nothing like the scene in the move. It's supposed to be a song about a singer serenading a princess in an ancient royal court. Thankfully, as the song goes on, you realize that it does not jar that much because there is actually a lot of sitar playing in the song and you go, "Hmm. Guitar and sitar. Interesting combination."

The songs of that period had a certain lilting quality, which my mother describes as "songs which make your heart fly." She says new songs don't have that power. This is a song which reminds one of flowers under the open sky, and for some reason, also reminds me of moonlight. At the same time, it does not quite gel with that imagery which I'm calling romantic because I can't think of a better word. The sitar makes it sound too royal for that. Really, what a strange mixture of images in my head. When he sings "Naazuk ho naaz se bhi..." I imagine Saira Banu or maybe Sharmila Tagore walking in a garden in a saree or a salwar kameez, playing with her plait. And let me also add a Shammi Kapoor following her around. But then the really complicated sitar and the powerful tabla playing in teentaal takes my mind straight to a Mughal-e-Azam type of scene.

Anyway, maybe I should actually stop dissecting this song. No need to spoil the memory of that bus trip when I gazed dreamily at the gulmohar against the blue sky and thought, "Ah! Bless the driver. He's got good taste."

Aami chini go chini tomare

My take on Rabi Thakur's song. (An Assamese inspired to translate a Bengali poem):

I know you, oh yes, I know you,

Maiden from a far off land;

You live beyond the oceans,

O maiden far away.

I’ve seen you in the autumn mornings,

Seen you in the summer evenings,

I’ve seen you, within my heart,

O maiden far away.

I've lent my ear to the skies

And I have heard your songs;

And I've offered to you my soul,

O maiden far away.

My travels have come to an end,

I've arrived in this new land,

A guest standing at your door,

O maiden far away.

I know you, oh yes, I know you,

Maiden of a foreign land;

You live beyond the oceans,

O maiden far away.

Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To Kya Hai?

This world of palaces, thrones and crowns
This world, the enemy of humanity
This world which hungers for riches
So what if I were to win this world?

Each body maimed, each soul thirsty
Confused eyes, sorrowful hearts
Is this a world or is it chaos?
So what if I were to win this world?

Here we are nothing but toys
This is a world of dead idols
Here even death is cheaper than life
So what if I were to win this world?

Youth wanders like a sinner
Young bodies dress up for sale
Here love is nothing but a business
So what if I were to win this world?

This world where man is nothing,
Love is nothing, friendship nothing
Where love means nothing at all
So what if I were to win this world?

Burn it, burn it
Burn it to ashes. 
It's your world. 
Keep it for yourself. 
Do whatever you want with it. 
Take it away,
Take it out of my sight.
I don't want it. 
It's your world. 
I don't want it. 
How would it matter? 
If I were to win the world?

When the king goes down the street

A young band called ‘Rain of Heart’ has come up with a sad song about bomb blasts in Assam. This translation is an acknowledgement of how much I like it. Many thanks to the person who introduced me to this song….

When the king goes down the street

Happily blowing his siren,

A hungry man on the sidewalk

Runs and hides in a dustbin.

Sleepless lies the dying city,

Shopping malls, discos and bars;

False men, false times, false love:

The birth of a hollow civilization.

O mother! O father! O my children!

In this future of sooty gunpowder,

Nothing seems to make any sense;
The foxes have invaded the borders,

Why is Lachit's sword fast asleep?

A youth lies in a pool of blood

His beloved’s message on his mobile;

The lifeless body of someone’s sister,

The burnt remains of someone’s brother.

O mother! O father! O my children!

When the king goes down the street

Happily blowing his siren,

A hungry man on the sidewalk

Runs and hides in a dustbin.

Raijei Bhaoriya: People are the Players

A Song by Bhupen Hazarika


People are the players
And the world is a stage.
What role do you want to play?
Come, there's no time to lose.


No need for a rehearsal
No need for costumes.
Just come out naked.
Tie your own towels 
Around your hungry bellies
And come out.
That's the way
To make a colourful play.


It's time to ask the director,
How long will you cheat us
With the mask on your face
And your dramatic techniques.


No need for sweet dialogues;
Say it with your screams.
Fight the corrupt men
With your consciousness
And become worthy heroes.
That's the way
To make a colourful play.
What role do you want to play?
Come on! There's no time to lose!

Monor batoribur: Tidings of my heart

A song by Jayanta Hazarika. This is how I would sing it in English:


If the tidings of my heart

Fall like the petals of a flower

And my silent poems

Come alive in new forms,

Would you come flooding in

With the colours of Phagoon*

And songs of the monsoon?


The sun sets
On the dreamy blue horizon;
The evening falls
On the wings of the stork;
O what a picture it paints!


Would you wipe out
The vast darkness
Of the night sky? 

If the tidings of my heart
Fall like the petals of a flower
And my silent poems
Come alive in new forms....

*I prefer to keep the word Phagoon here, even if it can perhaps be translated as March or spring, because it reminds me of Holi, the festival of colours. And of course, it rhymes with monsoon.

Guwahatik Nomoskar

The song of the Assamese common man, sung by Dost Habibur Rahman in the 1970s. I have always been delighted by this song about a villager who visits Guwahati, the confusing, corrupt, muddy, dusty, mosquito-infested capital city of Assam. I remember hearing it for the first time on the radio when I was a child, and I remember going breathless with laughter. After that, this song has been a fleeting thing which I would hear once in a blue moon, always on the radio, till a person named Himjyoti Talukdar uploaded it on Facebook and Youtube for everyone to hear at leisure. Although I'm afraid that the old world delight of being taken by surprise with this song playing on the radio has gone away, I have to admit that I'm grateful to him for making it possible for me to hear it so far away from home in Delhi. And I also have to admit that this song might soon be rarely played, or not at all, by the radio stations of Assam.


Rahman sings the song in the Kamrupiya dialect, and the song has a typically perky, funny folk tune. Each and every line in this song is so hilarious! And in the midst of that humour, he manages to touch so many socio-economic problems in the state. I wish I could translate it right now, but I know that this seemingly simple song is extremely difficult to translate. The accent and dialect, along with region specific idioms, and the situational humour make it practically untranslatable. So, I'll compensate by translating two lines that made me chuckle this time I heard it, but I'll have to tell you the story in order quote those lines. So here goes:

One day, our common man sits under a tree and wonders where his life is going, why his life is so sad. He wonders how people get to live in buildings in the city, while they can't even build a small house in the village. The next morning, he sets off to the railway station before anyone wakes up at home. There, he decides that Guwahati is the best place to go, because that is where he will be able to make some money.

When our common man gets down at Guwahati Railway Station, it begins to rain, and the water flows all over the roads and houses. After the rains, the sun comes up and dries the water and mud. The mud promptly turns into dust, which flies around and drastically reduces visibility. When the dust clears, our man sees people walking down narrow lanes and sings,

Nau men baat manuh soilsi, soisli motar bohu, 

Tatei dekhu baat gilanot dangar dangar khohu.

(So many people , so many cars 

are running on such tiny lanes,

And there are such big blisters on those lanes.)

These are probably my favourite lines now because of the current deplorable state of the roads in Assam (usually a seasonal problem), what with the Brahmaputra rising and the roads getting battered with heavy rains and heavier vehicles, and the government's famous inefficiency at repairing the damage. And I know that each time I hear the song, a new line will catch my attention, depending on what concerns me about Assam at that point of time. 


To continue with the song, our man goes through a lot of misadventures: 

He mistakes the High Court for Kamakhya temple and prays to Kamakhya Devi; he goes to the marketplace and sees 'foreigners' monopolizing the market; he sees people indulging in adulteration, smuggling with impunity; he sees 'beggar-like' people lining up at the ration stores where they are given half a kilo of rice each for a week, and he wonders how they manage with that; when evening comes, he sleeps in some verandah and is woken up in the middle of the night by the crowing of a cock and the buzzing of mosquitoes.... 

Finally, at dawn, he decides that his village is much cleaner (in all senses) than Guwahati and bids goodbye to the city, hence the name of the song: 'Guwahatik Nomoskar!' 


It's a wonderful song, so here's the Youtube link to it:

Rise...

Gonna rise up
Burning black holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold...

Bird Thongchai - Bahn Kaung Row (Our Home)

Another beautiful song by Phi Bird, about home, about a mother's smile...."There's no smile as sweet and warm as a mother's smile..."

Bird Thongchai...my first crush...

Yesterday, I remembered my first crush. Me and my friend were having a conversation about good looking Irish men like Aidan Quinn and Cillian Murphy: men with beautiful watery blue eyes....Yes, much as we protest against racial stereotypes and commodification of women, we ourselves engage in the crime of commodifying men, our evaluations laden with thousands of racial considerations. But we can't help it. We are self-confessed connoisseurs of beauty in all forms. So we unabashedly went on to a discussion on how children of mixed parentage would look, you know, like children of Irish and Asian parentage; when an image and a voice--a twenty year old memory--floated into my mind: Thongchai 'Bird' McIntyre, 'Bird Thongchai', or simply, 'Phi Bird,' the Thai singer and actor with a sweet and powerful husky voice, a charismatic performer, capable of singeing a thousand hearts with his disarming smile and twinkling eyes. Born to a Thai mother and an Irish father, he did not have typically Irish features, but boy, he was definitely a heart-breaker!

This was something like twenty years ago, when my father had gone with us to Bangkok on deputation for three years. I was nine years old when I went there and almost thirteen when I came back. Those three odd years there were the most exciting in my life, as it always is, for a pre-teen, who is just beginning to open her eyes to the beauty all around her. And then there was Phi Bird, the craze of Thailand, who was in his early thirties, and had just tasted sweet success and fame. I think it was 1990, when he sang "Boomerang," a cheerful song that swept the nation. There was 'Bird' fever all around, and I was one of the afflicted ones. The song went: "I will always come back to you, because I am a boomerang!" Then there was the wonderful "Boomerang Man Concert" with the live-wire Bird on stage, and fans swooning all around him, and then, videos of the Boomerang concert playing in every store you entered. He was a phenomenon. Here is a clip of the music video:





Although I can speak very little Thai and have forgotten most of it by now, I still remember each and every word in that song, and I don't think I will ever forget, even if I try. I had fallen in love. I followed his every move. There was this serial he used to act in, called "Koo Kam," in which he acted as this intense Japanese soldier in the second World War, who was in love with a Thai girl. And even if there were no subtitles, and I could only understand the expressions on the faces of the actors, I used to sit and watch it every afternoon and weep salty tears because Phi Bird was so torn apart by the conflict between love and war!


I was so much in love with Phi Bird that I developed a crush in school, on a boy who looked a bit like him. As my crappy luck would have it, that boy broke my heart by not caring two hoots about me, but that was alright, because I still had my Phi Bird to fall back upon.


Then we moved back to India, and I shut out all memories of Thailand in my enthusiasm to adjust to life in a new school, in an attempt to make new friends with new people. I went through all the trouble and adventure a child goes through in a life that is full of unstable circumstances. Those three years in Thailand were the longest time we had ever spent in any city. Otherwise, our life was all about packing and moving to a new place almost every year. Not that I didn't love the variety in my life, but sometimes, the constant moving and adjusting got to me.


But no more of that whining about "I had a difficult childhood." I'm sure it was not all that bad. As time went by, I began to appreciate beauty back home with the same fervour that I had for Phi Bird, moving on to home-grown stars and then to classmates and friends who did not necessarily look like my star crushes. In other words, I grew up.


And then yesterday, I was suddenly flown back on a trip to the past. I searched the net for any remnants of old memories and found two clips of "Boomerang." One being the old music video I used to love, in which Phi Bird was thirty two years old, and a new one in which he is much older, but sexier. It took me some time to get used to the sexy avatar of the cute man I used to know, but I like him both ways now. My friend, of course, prefers the new, cooler video in which Phi Bird dances with his hands in his pockets and shoots smouldering looks at the camera:




In my enthusiasm to catch up with the past, I found out that Phi Bird became even more successful after we left Thailand and became the first Thai singer to get an MTV award. I also found a newer song of his that I really like, "Mee Tae Kid Teung," a sad song about lost love, which goes, "I keep thinking of you." I just love the emotions in his voice and his new maturity. I also love the beautiful blending of Thai cadences with western music. I think, for a Thai singer who uses western styles, this blending is inevitable because Thai is essentially a tonal language. This song is so typically Thai in tone, and yet so accessible:

Maybe I'm making too much of a silly little star crush. I don't know what it is about star crushes, why they sometimes seem more tangible than the reality around you. This one, at least, is significant because it is a sweet childhood memory, and I thank my friend for bringing it back to me.

Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen

The song I want to hear on my deathbed. Sums up life most beautifully.
"Listen love, love is not some kind of victory march,
No it's cold, and it's a very broken Hallelujah!"

Untitled

The long lost music

Danced back into my life

Softly, but surely.

My cocoon of silence peeled open

In a single moment of beauty.

Arirang by Jang Sa Ik:

The most beautiful folk song I've ever heard.



I first heard this song as a kid, in the voice of one of my father's Korean students in a Postal Training Institute in Bangkok. It has stayed in my memory ever since. It is a song that can move you even when the most ordinary singer sings it. And in the voice of Jang Sa Ik, it's heavenly. I love the expressions on his face when he sings. This man is so shy when he is even a few feet away from the mike, but when he starts singing, he just transforms into this inspired being with music flowing through every vein. The song goes something like this (not my translation):

Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo... 

I am crossing over Arirang Pass. 

The one who abandoned me  

Will not walk even ten li before their feet hurt.  

Just as there are many stars in the clear sky,  

There are also many dreams in our heart.  

There, over there that mountain is Baekdu Mountain,   

Where, even in the middle of winter days, flowers bloom.

I think Jang Sa Ik does not sing these exact lyrics, he improvises a lot, but this is a translation of the lyrics which usually go with the melody.

Antaheen-Amar Bhindeshi Tara

Ever since a friend introduced me to this song, I have been in love with it. A beautiful song by Chandrabindu. The film seems to be good too.

Edited 17th May 2013:

I just discovered this version. It's even more beautiful.

Five Hundred Miles

...But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would five hundred more
Just to be the man
Who walks a thousand miles
To fall down at your door.
                                     The Proclaimers.
The Scottish 'national anthem'. The ultimate 'wooing song', as me and my friends would say. Embarrassingly sentimental, stereotypical, conventional and what not, but lovely. Why is it that in spite of all feminist pretensions, in spite of being able to fend for ourselves, having insisted on not being put up on a pedestal and insisted on paying bills on equal terms, this song which says, "when the money comes in for the work I do, I'll pass almost every penny on to you," does not come across as offensive? Is it just because of the catchy tune of the song? Is it just because of these two cute, heavily bespectacled Scottish twin brothers bouncing up and down and belting out this number with so must gusto? Or is it out of nostalgia for old codes of love? Or because certain aspects of conventional love are actually still beautiful?
What is it that makes the cartoon-like image of this man lying on your doorstep with worn out shoes, grimy face and tongue hanging out, (in other words, half dead) so so endearing? What?

'Amen'

From "LiIies of the Field".
I remember this song because my poor father once tried to hum Sidney Poitier/Jester Hairston's part but got the timing completely wrong, and finally exclaimed, "Arre baap re, this is a difficult song!"

Slipping away...

Guess it's just another day
That's slipping away
Each time that I draw my breath
It's slipping away
Just as you have touched my heart
I awake and we're apart
Slipping away...
                       The Rolling Stones

There are some days when you can do nothing but watch your life pass by, slipping though your fingers like sand. So many things you couldn't control, so many chances you missed, so many things you couldn't hold on to, so many good things that ended too soon.... And yet, there are no regrets, just a sad acceptance of the truth. There is beauty in that loss too, there is pleasure in that aching of the heart too. It is as beautiful and comforting as the warm, shiny sand slipping through your fingers.

Nobody says that as well as the Rolling Stones. Nobody sings it as well as Keith Richards with wisdom in his voice and sadness in his smile.

Jayanta Hazarika

Whenever I think of Jayanta Hazarika, I am filled with sadness; I am reminded of so many young people who leave behind a whole body of work almost as a reminder of how much more they could have done, had they lived a few years longer. I was once asked by a friend from Rajasthan, why Jayanta never became as famous as his elder brother Bhupen, and the only answer I could give was that he died at the young age of thirty four. Many people have given many other reasons for this--his music does not have the depth of that of Bhupen, he did not experiment as much as Bhupen, his music is not as socially committed or as hard hitting as that of Bhupen...it just goes on.

True, Jayanta's music has a lighter touch than that of Bhupen, and mostly appeals to younger listeners. But let us put and end to this comparison game. Jayanta's music is beautiful in its own right. He has often been given the credit of being a pioneer in introducing Western musical instruments in Assamese music in the 1960s and 70s. But what is better, is how he uses those instruments. What amazes me is that in spite of these innovations, his music still remains close to the Assamese soil.

I first realised the beauty of his music on a road journey around the Assamese countryside. We were travelling by car, with my father at the wheel and my mother by his side, while I had the whole backseat to myself. Although we had a variety of music to entertain ourselves with, we finally ended up listening only to Jayanta's songs. And that is when I realised, his music reflects everyday Assamese life most beautifully. He sings about nothing phenomenal, just about ordinary things like love, time, family, sorrow, happiness, hills, rivers, trees, flowers and life. It is this simplicity that is so endearing. His melodies and rhythms echo the undulating surface of the land, the meandering of the rivers and the greenery of the fields. In short, if you are travelling through Assam, you must carry Jayanta's music with you.

Wondering what triggered off this emotional tribute to Jayanta? Well, while surfing through Youtube today, I came across a video of one of my favourite Assamese songs, 'Xar Paam Moi Puwoti Nixate' (I will wake up at the crack of dawn), sung of course, by Jayanta. A very well made video, because it has black and white photos of Jayanta, which made me even more nostalgic. I am attaching the clip here:



This song has been subsequently covered by his only son, Mayukh, and that is also perhaps one of the reasons I like this song so much.

I couldn't resist translating this song. I know I might have killed the song in the process, but what the hell, that is one of the few things I know how to do. Translating is my way of making something my own, my way of connecting with the creator of a great piece of work. So here goes:

                  Xar paam moi puwoti nixate

I will wake up
At the crack of dawn
When dewdrops are falling;
That hour, which moistens
The dry dust lying on the road.
Mother, won’t you wake me up?

I want to see
How the crimson sun
Vanquishes all the darkness;
How it casts a spell
On each budding flower,
So it blooms in all its glory.
How it fills the heart
Of the vacant air
With sweet fragrances.
Mother, won’t you wake me up?

Mother, I want to learn
The secret spell of creation
I want to know,
What is that skill
That can drive away
All emptiness?
I too have a wish:
To open up and bloom,
Like a glorious sunflower.
Mother, won’t you wake me up?