On June 27, the 75th birth anniversary of R.D. Burman, while his fans across the country shared his songs on Facebook and watched TV shows dedicated to the composer, I sat in the front row at Kamaraj Arangam, listening to some of his best compositions sung live by his favourite protégé, Amit Kumar. I shall remember the evening all my life. I wasn’t supposed to be sitting in the front row. I wasn’t even supposed to be in the hall. It is just that the evening unfolded in my favour, thanks to a call I received from a colleague just as I was about to leave office, bracing for a long, lonely night in front of the laptop.
“Are you coming for the Amit Kumar concert?” asked Bala, the colleague, who is a chartered accountant by day and a singer by night. Even though we say hello to each other once in several weeks — simply because he sits on the second floor and I on the first — we share a deep love for Hindi songs from the 1970s and 80s. “But I don’t have a ticket,” I said. I knew about the concert, and had presumed that tickets would either be not available or be prohibitively expensive.
“Don’t worry,” Bala assured me, “we have two rows booked for us — me and my singer friends. Please join us, bring a friend along if you want to.”
I took a friend along and when we finally made it to the hall at 7.15 p.m. — the show was to have begun at 7 — we found Bala waiting for us outside the entrance with our tickets. The three of us took our seats in the ninth row from the stage. The emcee was already making his welcome speech.
Minutes later Amit Kumar, wearing a black kurta and a Bengali-style dhoti, walked onto the stage, and the moment he sang the first lines of the first song — ‘Kehna hai, kehna hai’ (from Padosan ) — I had goosebumps all over. Bala let out a sigh of admiration while my friend gasped, “Oh wow!”
Then it struck me: this was no ordinary concert, but a dream coming true for me. Anyone who has grown up idolising Kishore Kumar is bound to have a soft spot for Amit Kumar, not just because he is his father’s son, but also because he is an accomplished singer himself, who sounds a lot like his father but at the same time has a youthful tinge to his voice. It was not for nothing that R.D. Burman recorded 160 songs in his voice, and the talent the composer had spotted way back in 1973 — when he made Amit Kumar sing ‘Bade achchhe lagte hain’ ( Balika Badhu ) — was on display this evening. When he started singing ‘Yeh zameen ga rahi hai’ ( Teri Kasam ), another thought crossed my mind: wasn’t I an admirer of Amit Kumar long before I became a crazy fan of his father? I had just stepped into my teens when Kumar Gaurav’s films were being released — and the dreamy voice of Kumar Gaurav, that is the voice of Amit Kumar, was also the voice of my emotions during adolescence. I suggested to my friend that we walk down to the front row to take some pictures: I now wanted to preserve this evening.
The front row, to our great surprise, was almost empty and we quickly occupied two seats. I felt bad that we had left Bala behind, but then it is not every day that one gets to watch Amit Kumar from a distance of 12 feet. For the next two-and-a-half hours (the show lasted three hours), we felt like chief guests as the Ganguly brothers (Sumit Kumar was there too) entertained the Chennai audience.
I wouldn’t consider Sumit Kumar — who must have been three or four years old when Kishore Kumar died in 1987 — a natural singer. One indulges him only because he is a son of Kishore Kumar. He quite effortlessly sang a number of his father’s songs — ‘Bachna ae haseeno’, ‘Chalaa jaata hoon’, ‘Meri soni meri tamanna’ — and earned generous applause from the audience, but these songs could have been sung even better by lowly clones of his father.
A pleasant surprise of the evening was Jaya Rajagopalan, one of the two female singers who accompanied Amit and Sumit in duets and who also sang solos. Jaya proved herself to be Chennai’s Asha Bhosle, especially after she courageously rendered ‘Piya tu ab to aaja’, modulating her voice even for the Monica-oh-my-darling
part. The evening was finally wrapped up by Amit Kumar himself, who went on to sing, back-to-back, some of Kishore Kumar's best-known songs composed by R.D. Burman: ‘Yeh jo mohabbat hai’ ( Kati Patang ), ‘Nadiya se dariya’ ( Namak Haraam ) and ‘Chingaari koi bhadke’ ( Amar Prem ). Some men are destined to be their father's sons.
One lesson I learned from the concert: age is indeed just a number. Amit Kumar, at 61, was older than anyone on the stage, yet he appeared to be the youngest.
