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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Dooriyan Hai Jaroori!

This morning I was listening to this song and wondered how Bollywood got it all wrong, messed it up royally, as they say. It can turn a good story idea into zilch, it can take a good song idea and turn it into crap, it can create a chaos of ideas when clarity would have done just fine. The song is:

Dooriyan hai jaroori
Jaroori hai dooriyan!

It means (very roughly I mean, I am no polyglot linguist):

Distance is necessary
Necessary is distance!

Taken in the context of a love song it would have been a wonderful idea. I mean whoever thought and wrote this lyrics is a poet, a person who feels for words and has the skill to put them together. A beautiful idea for a song of pining and longing, of gazing at each other with love in the eyes. Whatever.

But then the Bollywood state of mind takes over. The naked (or, semi-naked) dancers take over with their synchronised dancing, the set is gaudily created with multi-multi-hued backdrops, there is a lot of smiling and showing of teeth.

There goes the Bollywood neighbourhood, I think wistfully. Here's our own inimitable Amitabh Bachchan on the Hindi film music industry of yore. I felt my eyes moist when he mentioned the music of Abhiman.

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