English-speaking Hindi filmmakers are mangling the film song beyond recognition – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
A glance at the Shaitan soundtrack listing yields these titles: Enter, Amy’s Theme, Retro Pop Shit, Unleashed, Outro. Even the songs with Hindi titles roll easily off the non-Hindi tongue: Nasha, Hawa Hawaii, Josh, Fareeda, Zindagi. Disgruntled murmurs about Hindi cinema being thought in English, merely translated into Hindi, are likely to climb a notch higher, that even the music of Hindi cinema is being stripped of a love for the language. From Sahir Ludhianvi to Anand Bakshi to Sameer, the Hindi film lyric has already witnessed a colloquialisation – bordering, at times, on easy-rhyming banalities – and now the transformation seems complete. The language of casual conversation of these new Bollywood filmmakers is English – no jaundiced judgement this; merely observation – and so their music too is international in sound and international in idiom.
Read the rest in the latest issue of The Caravan here.
namika
August 1, 2011
Apologies for the digression…had attended a writing workshop by annie zaidi and during the discussion among us partcipants your name and reviews cropped up as a voice that was honest,refreshing,authentic and passionate about cinema…keep soldiering on,battle and war of words must go on!
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bran1gan
August 1, 2011
namika: Thank you for the eyewitness report 🙂 What was the context in which my name came up?
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Rahul
August 1, 2011
Did you check the Trisha Gupta piece in caravan ?
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bran1gan
August 2, 2011
Rahul: Yes, I did. Good piece, though I must say I’m not a huge Prakash Jha fan. I think Hip Hip Hurray is still his best feature. Sometimes you convey a lot more when you shout less. This film, with its whisper of a tone, says more about male codes and haar-jeet and ethical dilemmas and all that stuff he mounted on much bigger canvases thereon.
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namika
August 2, 2011
Discussion was on naming writers/writings that you remembered from readings and trying to condense what qualities readers look for in nonfiction/creative nonfiction.That was the context..and that it was writing that combined research and passion for the subject..
reporting(not very live!) eye witness reporter…!
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