Well, I am a Nineties child and unlike many in my cohort, I do not miss the songs I hummed in my childhood. Rather I have a melancholy in my heart for not witnessing the period before the Eighties — the romantic Seventies and the wary Sixties, when songs were musical expressions of the heart.
August 1947 brought with itself the wind of hopes, which broke the chains of captivity in all senses that one could imagine. We became sovereign politically and individually. Individual freedom is what I want to stress upon. Our minds, our hearts were flooding with ideas and expressions and the pen became the most beautiful yet the strongest way of expression.
For all the knowledge I have about writing, I know that it has no rules, unless it is an academic piece. All that a piece of writing must do is to touch another’s conscience and connect with the life of the other. The experiences of the men and women before the Eighties were so vibrant and their lives were so interconnected that they could actually feel episodic heats and colds of the changes in the world.
The churning of emotions, the waves of politics, the pain of hunger, the magnificence of generosity, the wisdom of hindsight, when all of these were put down on paper, a beautiful piece of writing was created. These words were made immortal by the composers and the singers of those songs who put their souls in these words and brought them to life.
Na mooh Chupaa ke jiyo , Ponch kar ashq , Naa to karvan ki talaash hai , Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai , Hoke majboor mujhe ... These are the closest to my heart and I suggest that everyone hear them once.
There is a German word called weltanschauung , which means a whole system of ideas associated together in an organic unity; the ideas of life, culture, principles, emotions, society, polity, economy; the outlook of everything on the earth and above. The older humans were surely ones with weltanschauung , ones who just understood, with an added gift of expressing themselves.
Where are those people today? Why didn’t Anand Bakshi, Sahir Ludhianvi, S.H. Bihari, Kaifi Azmi, Shakeel Badauni take birth again? Have we lost those men, or have we lost the taste for depth, for pain, for love? While appreciating the complexities of our lives, have our minds lost all appetite for ampleness? Or is it that these people are out there somewhere, but the capitalist urge of humans to make profits and not quality has cornered them with a similar melancholy which I have in my heart for the golden olden days of art?
