My ten favourite Geeta Dutt songs

Updated (links): 26 Nov 2022

Yaad karoge yaad karoge, ek din humko yaad karoge (you will remember, one day you will remember me). I wonder if Geeta Dutt ever realised how prophetic these words from her first big hit album (Do Bhai, 1947) would prove to be. She’s left such a wealth of lovely songs, sung in that rich, fluid, and incredibly beautiful voice of hers, that it is hard not to remember her, every time you think of songs of yore. She started her playback career at the age of sixteen when she sang two lines in a song for the movie Bhakta Prahlad (1946). Success came just a year later, with Mera sundar sapna beet gaya (Do Bhai, 1947). The rest, as they say, is history. Geeta Dutt was soon one of Hindi film’s leading singers, and ruled the Hindi song-waves through the 40s and 50s. She lent her lovely voice to an incredibly wide range of songs and sang everything from ballads to bhajans, club songs to ghazals, sad songs to frothy, fun numbers…

Baat Ek Raat Ki (1960) – a misstery thriller

Movies sometimes have the strangest surprises in store for you. Just when you think you know everything about a film, you realise that it fell through the cracks in your memory and disappeared forever! That is exactly what happened to me with this film. I have certainly seen it before, but couldn’t remember it at all! That is pretty useful while re-watching a mystery thriller, but very puzzling when it stars Dev Anand, Waheeda Rehman and the unforgettable Hemant Kumar number Na tum humen jaano. The mystery was solved once I reached THE END. The film is entertaining enough, but not particularly memorable.

My favorite piano-songs

In days of yore, rich people always had large parties in huge living rooms full of glitterati, sweeping staircases, shiny chandeliers and a Baby Grand Piano. In modern times though, rich people have fallen on hard times and standards have deteriorated beyond recognition. There are NO pianos in living rooms anymore - not even in that of Karan Johar’s rich NRI protagonists’ (well they do say that people forget their sanskriti (culture) when they live abroad!). So, for my piano fix, I need to revisit oldies from the 50s and 60s that were overflowing with people from the piano-owning (and playing) classes. Here are some of my favorites that have at least one character “playing” the piano throughout the song.