Songs from my childhood-Part III
Tags: Bollywood, Songs, Hindi, Music, Retro

Badi sooni, sooni hain .. in the times of corona, everyone can relate to this. However, this song is much more than just about feeling lonely in an instance of time. This is for those whose heart aches for love and belonging, yet every time the hope is met with more of the same coloured sadness. This song is for those who see even a rainbow as black amidst the sunshine in their lives. This song is for all of us when we feel or have felt utterly despondent & defeated by the vagaries of time. Indeed, badi sooni, sooni hain… zindagi yeh zindagi.

The song is from a movie titled ‘Mili’ after the lead character’s name so aptly played by Jaya Bachhan who had a knack of portraying the vulnerability of a woman ever so gently. The song starts with a dialog between Mili and her father. Mili overhears some music in the background and asks her father to turn on the transistor. Ashok Kumar as her father, responds that there can’t be a radio show at the midnight hour(an immediate throwback to the time when there were no 24*7 radio shows and ever babbling radio jockeys — a time sorely missed especially by the generation which grew up getting excited if they heard some music anywhere past the “regulation” time). The song starts playing without any usual preamble of musical instruments. We suddenly hear Kishore Kumar’s voice. A unique & seamless transition of the song into the ongoing narrative of the movie. The shot of Mili watching Amitabh Bachchan’s character silhouetted against the window, with presumably a glass of whiskey in his hand & the poignancy depicted on her face is a lesson for today’s film makers in the art of subtlety. The brooding face of Amitabh Bachchan, his defeated body language expertly captured via the subtle shrug and slump in his shoulders shows why he was an actor before a “Hero”.

Coming back to the song though.

This song became the last composition of the great S.D Burman. He fell ill & ultimately passed away after composing this and the later arrangement of the music was done with the help of his wife and son. So the song is significant in real life as much as it was in the movie. When we realize, we are about to lose someone we love & hold so dearly, wouldn’t our life be also a vacuum?

Well, this was the question pertinent on Kishore Da’s mind when he started recording this song. It was Afterall, S.D who gave him the best songs he thoroughly deserved but was not really getting in the industry. The recording sessions those days used to be full of long hours of conversations between the music director, singer, film director accompanied by longer hours of riaz (musical practice). Such sessions only helped Kishore not just hone his voice further but also probably found a father figure for him in SD. And that father figure was now on his deathbed, while Kishore had to record this song. A song about haunting loneliness in life. When he sang a sad one, you hummed along as if he was singing it for you. And this one has been sung with so much of angst and pain, it makes one feel lonely even when you are in the middle of a crowd. It feels as if he locked himself in an empty room and kept the megaphone 2 feet apart to record the haunting sound & if you hear it repeatedly it makes you wonder if Kishore da was crying while singing it.

Such was the poignancy, which was bettered if, only by the lyrics. Yogesh has not just written a filmy song; he has written a tragic sonnet on the lines of Cecco Angiolieri. Makes you wonder how emotionally straining it must have been to pen down something that needed to be extracted from deep within; that needed to be felt first before being written, the pain, the agony, the defeat, the despondence, the slowly growing and gnawing-at-your-soul realization that loneliness is knocking at the door, breaking your defenses down, engulfing you, enveloping you finally in its arms like those of a willing lover.

कभी एक पल भी कही ये उदासी दिल मेरा भूले,

तभी मुस्कराकर दबे पाँव आ कर, दुःख मुझे छूले ।

न कर मुझ से गम मेरे, दिल्लगी ये दिल्लगी ।

बड़ी सूनी, सूनी हैं, ज़िन्दगी ये ज़िन्दगी।

This song & these lines always takes me back to those evenings of my childhood, when I used to wait in a corner of the terrace of my house, waiting for mother to come back from work. As the sun set, the shadows used to grow taller & darker while a kid felt lonely in one corner of the world. That feeling never goes away fully but hasn’t stayed too long as well. That’s why this is the song from my childhood. For my childhood.