Month: December 2011

My “now” song: Apni toh har aah ik toofan hai

Posted on by sudhagee

Do you ever have a song, an idea, a storyline, or an image stuck in your head? And it just refuses to go away? For some time at least? I have this with music—it could be a song, an instrumental piece, a jingle, etc. This becomes my ‘now’ song, and the “nowness”  (pardon my English here) could be for any length of time.

My now song is “Apni toh har aah ik toofan hai” sung by Mohammad Rafi to music set by S.D. Burman for the 1960 film Kala Bazaar featuring Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman.

About two nights back, Amma and I were watching a “retro Hindi film music” show on a music channel on TV. The songs being played were from the B&W films of the 1950s and 1960s, with many of the songs featuring Dev Anand. The song selection was so good that we kept postponing going to bed, and it was midnight when we finally switched off the TV.

But then, as it usually happens after a good music session, we stayed up for quite some time talking about old Hindi film music, in general, and songs featuring Dev Anand, in particular. We hummed and sang our favourite Dev Anand songs for a bit (Amma’s is “Tere mere sapne” from Guide and mine is “Apni toh har aah ik toofan hai” from Kala Bazaar). By the time we went to bed, it was nearly 1.30 am, and when we woke up at 7.00 am, it was to the news of Dev Anand’s demise. I can’t tell how strange we felt about our musical night; it was almost as if we knew what was going to happen.

And now, I have all Dev Anand’s songs playing like a non-stop record in my mind, with this particular song playing more than the others. It’s mellow, romantic melody is simply unmatchable and to me it is like Dev Anand himself—timeless and eternal.

R.I.P. Dev Anand.

The Best of Quest: A review

Posted on by sudhagee

The book

Once upon a time there existed a magazine which was a “quarterly of inquiry, criticism and ideas” and fittingly enough called Quest. It had very clear-cut guidelines for the content it carried: everything and anything published in the Quest had to have “some relevance to India. It was to be written by Indians for Indians” (p.xix).

It was because of these guidelines that Quest was able to publish highly original writing in English in the form of essays, opinions, book reviews, film reviews, critiques, stories, poems, memoirs, etc. The writers were a mix of the new and the established, academicians and journalists, politicians and poets — Rajni Kothari, Nirad Chaudhuri, Kiran Nagarkar, Ashis Nandy, Khushwant Singh, and Neela D’Souza, to name a few.

Published from Bombay, Quest was born in 1954 with Nissim Ezekiel as its first editor. After Ezekiel, A.S. Ayub and Dilip Chitre took on the role of editors of Quest, and both of them stayed true to the founding vision of publishing works relevant to India. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Quest died an untimely death with the imposition of the Emergency about 20 years later. In the decades that followed, Quest got relegated to the realm of nostalgic memories of people who were associated with it, or in wooden boxes stored in lofts and attics. Some forgot about it and some like me did not even know about the existence of Quest. Till recently, that is.

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