Sniffing around….

Bollywood throws up these surprises all the time. You’ll see the lead pair giving it all despite their real life relationship being entirely different. The Kapoor clan did this often. Babita and later, Neetu Singh acted with the uncles of the men they were destined to marry. Those who didn’t know of the relationship would never be able to guess by watching the movies. That’s true professionalism.

Look at this song from a late 60s movie, Tumse Achcha Kaun hai directed by Pramod Chakraborty. A typical masala film, in keeping with the times it was made and released. Shammi Kapoor and Babita star in the movie. Shammi Kapoor has caused his kid sister to get blinded thanks to his childhood pranks. He is unable to find employment (JLN/IG times of severely controlled economy and insane taxation rates stifled the Indian industrial situation and led to Government being the largest employer).

Shammi is in dire need of money (at the time a fairly large amount) to cure his blind sister. He later finds employment with the wealthy head of the clan, Lalita Pawar, who despite being a control freak asks him to control her out-of-control granddaughters. A déjà vu of sorts, this has been used multiple times including in Gulzar’s Parichay.  Shammi actually  succeeds in this,  but this being Bollywood, falls in love with Babita. The lady at the time was dating his nephew Randhir Kapoor who she was paired with in Kal aaj aur kal.

This is of course unacceptable to the authoritarian Grandma who fires him and wants to get Babita married to the perennial kabab mein haddi , Pran. The rest of the plot should be easy to predict for any experienced movie goer.

The music was by Shankar Jaikishan who scored for a number of Shammi Kapoor movies. The lyrics were shared by Hasrat Jaipuri (including this one) and Rajendra Krishna . https://youtu.be/uhekV8EJd14

A wonderful duet with Rafisaab and Lata didi (having got over the royalty related tiff). The two have given us hundreds of memorable duets. The composition is pathognomonic of Shankar Jaikishan with typical interludes. The instrumentation and interludes are a dead giveaway.

The romance and the physicality of the duo while it was outrageous that time, is pretty tepid in the current times as the leading ladies -all collectively getting hot flushes induced hyperthermia- shed clothes and go beyond where the Cabaret artistes of yesteryears stopped. As a result every member of the audience has more knowledge of the groins, thighs and other formerly forbidden zones that earlier were revealed to teenagers only in Anatomy Dissection Halls in Medical colleges. A kind of living Surface Marking Specimen that used to be a shrivelled up mummy when I was in Medical College. These days the directors have breathed life into these mummies which remain, largely, shrivelled up.

Have a wonderful day ahead, folks. The Met Department predicted heavy rains over last week and that meant there would be none. I am amazed at the job which pays handsomely to those who show their competence by clearly making repeated mistakes and rarely getting things right. Have a wonderful weekend

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