Insomnia

My ten favourite insomnia songs

Spending the night in bed tossing around has happened to each and everybody of us. One would like to sleep, but the stream of thoughts just don’t end. The body is tired, but the mind wide awake. You tell yourself, that you have so many things to do the next day and the most appropriate thing to do now would be to sleep. You get irritated over it, which make matters only worse. And then in the wee hours of the morning, when you are supposed to be soon getting up, you fall asleep in sweet, sweet slumber! A dear friend of mine, Raja, was in this situation a few days back. This unfortunate incident made me come up with this list.

But the songs below don’t sing about the situation described above, but are rather moans of separated lovers or are freshly-fallen-in-love pairs. For this list, I have chosen songs with neend(iyaa) na aaye in the mukhdaa (refrain). I hope you like them as much as I do.

 

Of Winds and Breezes

My ten favourite thandi hawa songs

It is very cold here now. At night it goes down to  -20° C. When I ride my bicycle to work and back, the wind freezes me to the core. Yesterday, as I was returning back home the thought about the discrepancy between the European and Indian attitude towards cold and heat arose again in my mind. In Hindi film songs the cold breeze brings in the romantic mood, while in Europe summer sets the mood for romance. While Meena Kumari in Pakeezah wishes her lover that the sun may never touch her beloved (suraj kahin bhi jaaye tum par na dhoop aaye), the gondoliere in sunny Italy calls his lover o sole mio (my sun). Of course the temperature difference plays in this attitude a big role. This brought my thoughts to the various thandi hawa songs in Hindi films and resulted is this list.

 

R.I.P Dev Anand

My ten favourite Dev jodis

I got the news at fellow blogger Madhu’s site about Dev Anand’s sad demise. I just couldn’t believe it. The tag of ever-green hero suited him so well, that one thought that he was immortal. Just two days back, I wrote at Greta’s blog that Dev’s films from the 50s and 60s hardly let one down.
Dev was a good actor dominating the film industry for three decades. He had his own school of natural acting which endeared him to the masses as well as the critics. He remained for most part true to his genre of a slick urban hero, but he was versatile as far as the different fields of film production was concerned. He was producer, director, actor and once even a singer!

Dev, I think, must have had the most number of female co-stars in the history of the Hindi film industry. He acted with many new faces but also with established actresses. And he looked good with everyone of them. Here is to Dev and his female co-stars

 

Fruit cake

Fruits arise from flowers. Well not really, they arise from the ovary of the flower, but you get the drift of what I want to say, right? Thus, this post was supposed to be the successor of the loved-by-all flower post – flower power. Dear readers, I wanted to give you such a wealth of knowledge about fruits and their origins and uses and the stuff. But alas, I couldn’t find enough songs to really inspire me. But, still I collected some songs with fruits in it. I won’t say they are all good, most of them are outright bad and could be used as weapons of torture. Still, be my guest and go through them and maybe lament with me for a while.

 

Flower Power

Ten of my favourite flower songs

Blame it on dustedoff! Yeah, she asked me to do this post. And since I always do what I am asked to. Here it is.

Flowers and love go together. Flower codes abound as to what flower to send as secret message. In Hindi film songs, the flowers have been mostly used as similies or metaphors for the heroine. Gulabi hooth (rosy lips) being one of the common comparisons.

In my list I have again used some criteria to boil my list down to ten:
1. Songs with flowers used as adjectives have not been taken (so, no ‘gulabi aankhen jo teri dekhi’)
2. One different flower pro song (i.e. if I like two songs, both with rose in it more than the song with jasmine, than I had to choose between the two rose songs)
3. One song pro film (that was very easy)
4. When the name of the flower is the name of a character in the film, it has been rejected (so no ‘ghar jayegi, tar jayegi’

So here are my 10 favourite solo songs featuring ten different flowers.

 

Chatri na khol…

Hidden umbrella passions in ten Hindi film songs

Umbrellophily, a phenomenon not spoken sung about in the Hindi film industry. The author of these lines like many other fans of Hindi film songs was not aware of this shocking fact either. During his search for a list of his 10 favourite umbrella songs (since rain-song lists have been beaten to death), he stumbled over this taboo topic in the Hindi cinema. While he was searching, he could unearth only three songs, which mention an umbrella  and two-thirds of them were not even melodious. Why this step-motherly treatment towards this ‘protector against rain’?

 

Mr. & Mrs. 55 (1955)

It is so hard to decide if I like this film or not. The story is anti-feminist and traditionalist. But at the same time the director/story-writer’s take on “upper-class liberal reformers who seek to impose their ideology on society at large”, as Philip Lutgendorf  puts it, in the form of Abrar Alvi’s witty dialogues are simply great. It is simply difficult to have a single opinion on this movie. Dustedoff  has also provided a nice review of this movie on her blog.