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Friday, October 23, 2009

Rakhwala (1971) - eye candy plus!

Rakhwala poster I have been laid up with a nasty strep-throat the last few weeks and have been on the lookout for good masala movies to improve my outlook on life. This one would gladden the hardest of cold-infested hearts – it has beautiful people (Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna, Leena Chandvarkar), lovely songs and a plot that one can happily neglect to enjoy all the pretty in the film. And just so you can concentrate on the all the eye candy when you watch the film, I’ll provide the plot outline, here.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

My ten favorite Kishore Kumar songs

Kishore KumarKishore Kumar, the singer, is more often identified with the 70s and 80s when he ruled supreme in Hindi film music. Most of us, myself included, tend to forget that he was singing much before that and had tons of great songs in the 50s and 60s. It was Dustedoff’s awesome post on SD Burman songs that reminded me of how many lovely songs Kishore Kumar sang under SD’s direction in the B/W era. And it wasnt just SD Burman, Kishore sang for a lot of other music directors too, and also composed some beautiful music of his own. As I mused on my favorite Kishore numbers, I couldnt resist drawing up a list of them.
Weeding out only 10 from his vast array of songs was a long and hard process. To begin with, I decided to stick to his songs from 50s and 60s B/W films - decades that tend to have more of my favorite songs and also where I like Kishore da’s voice better. That still left a few hundred songs! Enter condition number two - they couldnt be the wacky numbers full of verbal acrobatics that he was famous for. So, romantic, pensive, serious, sad and philosophical songs were called for. When even that didnt help, I had to add a further condition – they had to be the first 10 songs I could recall and which fit the limits I had set myself. Voila! I had myself a list, and here it is, in no particular order (also in a youtube playlist):