The Healing Touch Of Music: Why Old Songs Will Stay Young Forever

Mera kuch saamaan tumhare paas pada hai! Saavan ke kuch bheege bheege din rakhe hain aur mere ik khat main lipti raat padi hai…

Lyrics Gulzar. Singer Asha Bhosle.

Waqt me kiya kya hasin sitam, na tum rahe na tum na hum rahena hum…

Lyrics Kaifi Azmi, Singer Geeta Dutt

Meri bheegi bheegi si palkon pe reh gaye jaise mere sapne bikhar ke… 

Majrooh Sultanpuri, Singer Kishore Kumar

Close your eyes and let the words seep in. You drift into another world – beautiful and haunting. Old memories of love and longing, and of yearning and losing, turn fresh. Your regular world outside ceases to exist as nostalgia takes over. You feel it in the soul. Words and melodies have that magical strength. They touch something very primitive in humans. That’s one reason they never go out of circulation.

“Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything,” said Plato, the Greek philosopher. If you have grown up listening to the old songs of Geeta Dutt, Mukesh, Mohd Rafi, Manna De, Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle and others on the radio, you would realise how. Their decades were the golden age of Indian film songs. Soothing and sublime, they never fail to lift your mood, no matter if you have heard them a million times already.

The notion of the golden age, however, is open to interpretation. Every period creates its own great music, and India’s tradition of music and songs is so wonderfully deep and varied that it never stops coming. For someone born in the 1990s, the familiarity with the songs of the early 2000 and beyond, the golden age could be in another time bracket. Yet when the younger lot grooves to the songs between the 1940s and 1970s, you get a sense of vindication. There’s something timeless about the music created in that period. They won’t ever age and go out of circulation.

What makes them so special? There can be many reasons – great lyrics, great composition, great voices – but beyond all, it was the soul. True song emanates from there and has the infectious quality to touch the soul of the listener. Folk songs have been in India from time immemorial, and in rural India earlier, every event in the human lifecycle, from birth to death, was expressed in songs. They were simple, uncluttered and came straight from the heart. We have a rich heritage of classical music, too. They were bound by strict rules and discipline unlike the free-spirited folk music. But they were more for the connoisseur.

Our filmy songs borrowed heavily from both streams in the initial days. Then the mix was blended with the contemporary, and then with the Western influence. Of course, the songs had to reflect the changing social and cultural milieus, and tastes. The fusion approach continues, offering us a delicious range of music.

Yet, to come back to the point, there is a difference between the music for the ears and music for the heart. The ones we keep going back to are meant for the heart, and its many moods – pining, pain, loneliness, reflection, contemplation, sorrow, suffering, happiness and everything else that touch us as emotional beings. The present day songs may be crafted better with a lot of the input of intelligence, but missing in them is the soulfulness.

Lyricists were poets, and poets have the gift of reading humans with deep empathy and feeling. Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Javed Akhtar, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra, Anand Bakshi among others were poets first. The intensity of their poetic works spilled over to lyrics. The poet-lyricists of the present age such as Prasoon Joshi and Irshad Kamil are brilliant, but there are not too many of them. The demand for peppy music has possibly not allowed many of them the due exposure.

Whatever the case, the deep connection of the music of yesteryear to our souls would continue to remain strong. It will find love across generations. Now, keep your eyes shut and immerse yourself in the interplay of words and feelings.

Sun ja dil ki daastan is playing.

(By arrangements with Perspective Bytes)