aazaadi paayenge..

arr brings me out of self-imposed musical exile. aazaadi from bose playing for hours in repeat mode. arr excels at another slow patriotic number. this is iguess the 3rd one after - des mere des mere and ye jo des hai tera.


jaage hain ab saare, log tere, dekh magan
goonje hain naaron se, ab ye zameen aur ye gagan

kal tak main tanha tha
soone the sab raste

kal tak main tanha tha
par ab hai saaath mere,
laakhon dilon ki dhadkan, dekh vatan

aazaadi paayenge,
aazaadi laayenge,
aazaadi chaayegi,
aazaayegi aayegi.


The shrills aazaadi sound out of the world. wonder if anybody else cud do it. deep outbursts are so well-expressed thru high notes.

I wonder why nobody told him that he has a terrible accent in kal tak main tanha tha. almost sounds like gantak me tarhaaa dhaa, hoho. altho he manages to create magic one way or other, i believe arr does half of wot he is capable of - the tunes appear pretty mediocre overall. many songs almost sound monotonous - all words on the same notes with a characteristic easy-to-predict finishing note-sequence. of course, some superb melodies owe themselves to magical repetitions of only a few notes. but arr cannot be forgiven on basis of even that. his songs appear more forced than instinctual. novelty of patterns is hard to digest, agreed. but songs-growing-slowly-on-you-everytime syndrome is too unnatural. i wud say most beautiful songs like most creative ideas/concepts are simple and easy to identify with. one cannot push ideas or concepts against the natural instinctual flow for long.

well..inspite of all these cribs - i guess we're more indebted to him for all he has given us. ghoomparani is the best one from bose. ekla chalo has been fantastically adapted to hindi - the closest to the best possible adaptation and arr's terrific merging of new and old tunes. apne des ki mitti is wonderfully sung but appears too forced and monotonous.

zakir interview

and finally we have some exposition of his motivation n goals here.

I've been to both masters of percussion n the one with shankar n sivamani. been trying to guess what his subtle motivations are cos he doesnt seem keen to attract all the attention in those concerts, as one may expect.