One Song at a time - 8. Haye Re Woh Din Kyun Na Aaye

In India, film music has fascinated Classical musicians and vice versa. We have seen many classical musicians get involved in film music. Their involvement is generally as an individual artist. Very rarely do you we have classical musician as music directors for films. Pandit Ravishankar, the sitar maestro, was one such musician who had been a music director for films. He was the man who provided music for Ray's amazing debut film, 'Pather Panchali'. Later Ravishankar was the music director for a Hindi film called, 'Anuradha', starring Balraj Sahni and the lovely Leela Naidu. I remember that he gave music for a film on Meerabai, which starred Hema Malini as Meera. I remember reading a rather lengthy article about this movie in 'Illustrated Weekly of India', which means the movie must have been a late 70s or early 80s one. Contrary to the popular choice of those days, Lata, Ravishankar chose Vani Jayaram to sing all the songs of this movie. Unfortunately I have not heard any songs from this movie till now to comment on them.

Let us take a couple of digression before we come to the song. Other than Pt. Ravishankar, two other great Hindustani musicians, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Ustad Vilayat Khan have provided music for Satyajit Ray's films. Read a recent article which said that given Ray's insistence on wanting very minimal scores, none of the classical musicians were happy with their contribution as Music Director in Ray's film. Ray later went on to score music himself for all his films.

The second digression is a shameless plug for my old post. In case you are wondering who are those instrumentalists who were involved in film music, you can check my article on this subject.

Now to our song of the day. The song we will hear now is 'haye re woh din kyun na aaye' from the movie 'Anuradha'. I got introduced to this song during my post graduate hostel days. Courtesy Vividh Bharathi. A lovely tune by Pt. Ravishankar and sung impeccably by Lata. This song keeps figuring in most of 'Best of Lata' collection. You can see that Pt. Ravishankar understands the film music idiom very well given the way he has tuned this song. He makes the song sound very modern and makes excellent use of Lata's voice. Just hear her go 'sooni meri beena' and you don't know if it an instrument or a human voice. The presence of Leela Naidu (one of the few films she did) adds to this song's charm as well. Can't believe this song was tuned almost half a century back.

Before we hear the song, a juvenile joke. How would have the lyrics were this song to be sung by a hippie? It would have been, "haye re woh din kyun "nahaye" '. Before you come to hit me, here is the song.