He doesn’t give me any Joy….

The truly Golden Era of Bollywood music had one uniform set of axiomatic rules: most of the leading men were passably good looking blobs of butter placed in a dish, (with as much- perhaps less- emotive skills, I mean butter does run with heat and change form and shape);  lovely leading women that (along with the duds who passed for leading men) kept appearing and reappearing in the dreams (read fantasies) of hundreds of millions of young men and kept them feeling warm and in love: every flutter of the long eyelashes would evoke a billion ectopic beats and every gaze from the screen induce a sudden indrawing of the collective breath; (and this is just a gender neutral statement. As many women loved the leading ladies as men and copied their sartorial styles as well as their coiffure) and to top it all there was divine music that not just dulled the pain of having to look at horrors of casting by way of the male leads, and having to endure the clichéd situations and hackneyed storylines.

Music was truly the antidote for the otherwise atrocious movies. Take a look at Ek Musafir Ek Hasina, produced by a doting father (Ashok Kumar’s brother in law Sashadhar Mukherjee who in a way was responsible for the trio of Ganguli brothers entering and thriving in Bollywood) and directed by Raj Khosla, who at the time had the franchise for the romantic mystery/ thrillers. Sadhana Shivdasani was his chosen ally in many a movie and Joy Mukherjee was thrust on him by Sashadhar babu. The storyline has the central theme of traumatic amnesia (formatting of the memory on the hard-disk due to physical trauma) & it’s predictable effect on the leading man’s romantic relationships (Hey you Lotharios out there, you had better not get any ideas). So Joy Mukherjee, Sashadhar Babu’s brown eyes boy (it is a happy fact that Desert Storm wasn’t conceived at the time, ‘cos Joy would surely have been tried for carrying Weapons of Mass Destruction – have you ever seen him carrying a guitar in his songs?)

O P Nayyar‘s sublime score and the beauteous Sadhana (who was singularly responsible for tens of millions of girls being named after her in the fond hope they would grow up to resemble her and also for an entire generation cutting their forelocks a la Sadhana- actually an imitation of an Audrey Hepburn hairstyle). Joy‘s inclusion ensured everyone ogled at her even more intently while simultaneously concentrating on the music. The producer dad never complained, he got plenty of Joy guffawing all the way to the bank, the movie was the runaway superhit earning ₹2.5 Crores in its initial run, when the price of the least expensive tickets was much less than a rupee, and there was really no money to be made by satellite/OTT/TV /Cable TV rights.

What a musical score the movie had!! Rafisaab and Asha Bhosle at their zenith , 5 absolutely fabulous duets, 3 Rafisaab solos and 2 Asha Bhosle solos. One is really spoilt for choice with astounding lyrics by S H Bihari, Shewan Rizvi and Raja Mehdi Ali Khan. https://youtu.be/jjlFiCD1Vgc

Stay happy folks, stay healthy and enjoy the rains which are just around the corner.

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