One song at a time - 13. Mai re main kaase kahoon

(Madanmohan - Lata)

"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many."  Thus spoke Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet. (Translation given here is by Richard Zenith.) This clearly expresses the difficulty inherent in communication. When communicating using a language is difficult, think about the difficulty when a music director wants to communicate his / her ideas to the singer. While music has developed its own language, it is almost impossible to capture all the nuances using the musical notation. The micro tones, the colour needed to be invoked, the modulation required and most importantly, the emotion that needs to be conveyed. All these have to pass from mere thoughts in the music directors mind to actual song sung by the singer. During this process a lot can be lost or if the singer is good, something may be gained.

It is no wonder that many music directors stuck to their favourite singers, since they felt these were the people who could clearly understand what they were experiencing and bring out what is exactly needed. One such pair which needs no introduction to anyone listening to Indian film music is that of Madanmohan and Lata. For Lata, he was 'Madan Bhaiyya', the rakhee brother. For Madanmohan, she was his muse. Together they created magic which remains unsurpassed even today.

The song for today is 'mai re main kaase kahoon' from the movie 'Dastak'. This is one of the better Hindi movies I have seen, with a very interesting premise. Madanmohan's music adds a lot to this movie. The movie has songs like 'baiya na daro', 'hum hai mata-e-koochar'. The most famous was 'baiya na daro' which appears regularly in all 'Best of Lata' collections and rightly so.  We used to hear the song I am featuring today regularly during our college days in our gym. The reason for our interest was as much due to the singer as to the tune. The version we had on LP was the one sung by Madanmohan himself. The Lata version is the one used in the movie but we were fascinated by Madanmohan version. Luckily I found a link in youtube which gives both the versions one after the other.

This is a good case study to see what the composer had in his mind and how that got translated by the singer. What was lost during this translation and what was gained? You can check that out for yourselves. There is definitely a difference in the feeling when you hear the Madanmohan version and when you hear Lata's version. The individual signature of each singer is evident. Interesting to hear this because we are talking about two people who musically understood each other very well and yet, as Pessoa says, some things may still be notes on the margin of a completely erased text.

Enjoy the song here: (uploaded in youtube by 'bombaymumbaidreams')