Rocking in the Free World

Just the other day, when I was headed towards Koramangala on the bike after office, I had the FM radio plugged into my ears via my mobile handsfree and was listening to Radio Indigo.

Rohit Barker’s Cruise Control was on air, and he was playing some decent songs such as ‘We didn’t start the fire‘ and some other songs that I liked that he labelled ‘classics’, making me feel much older than my current 24 years of age.

He then switched the playlist to some ‘dhin-chak’ contemporary hip-hop that I just didn’t like, and I consequently switched FM channels, trying to sift through the other stuff to see what I could listen to, until I chanced upon Radio One which was playing ‘Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast‘ from Mohra.

I was 11 when the movie released in 1994, and I have recollections of watching the video of this particular song umpteen times on Philips Top 10 on Zee TV which was hosted by Satish Shah and sometimes had Ratna Pathak Shah co-hosting, in a skit-like format with gags or random jokes between tracks, (complete with an irritating and super-artificial laugh track that made you want to close your ears and bang your head against the wall till you fainted so as not to hear that sound ever again!). This song from Mohra remained on the top 10 countdown for ages, and I know this because used to follow the countdown diligently at that time.

Once this song slipped down the charts and eventually exited, hopefully making way for other songs, another version of this song from the movie, which was shot on Raveena Tandon’s character – ‘Main Cheez Badi Hoon Mast‘ came into the countdown. Though it didn’t last as long as its predecessor, it nevertheless stuck around enough to irritate those that wanted to listen to and watch other songs.

Once tis song was out, yet another one – ‘Tip Tip Barsa Paani‘ also showed its face, also from the same movie. This song went on to become so popular that the music from this track was used by Channel[V] for their program – ‘First Day First Show’ and one had to listen to it substantially.

Rajiv Rai and Viju Shah made for some deadly combination with movies and music respectively, as is evident from Gupt as well, and Skimpy had a belated post on the music of Gupt, which, regardless of having had some hit songs copied from some famous english tracks of that time, did really well in, doing another Mohra on the Philips top 10, with multiple song entries into the charts, one after another.

It was then that realization dawned upon me about how I had so completely misconstrued the notion of movies being ranked in a chart order, whereas it was actually songs that were being graded. However, it made no sense that two songs from the same movie never made it to the top 10. I presume they had some sort of intricate exclusion principle applied in their scheme of ordering the tracks.

This nostalgia filled rambling would be incomplete if I didn’t mention songs from other movies that I had listened to back then – including that song ‘sexy sexy‘ from Khuddar starring Karishma Kapoor which had the censors up in arms, leading to censoring that part of the song and finally having Alisha Chinnai re-record it to replace the offending words by ‘baby baby‘, though the move was as effective as recalling Kaavya Viswanathan’s book on Opal Mehta.

Songs from the movie ‘Rakshak’, ‘Takkar’ and of course ‘Rangeela’ amongst others still make cameo appearances among the songs that come arbitly out of the blue and reside in my head for fleeting moments when I am not actually listening to a particular song or focussed on singing / humming out a particular tune.

TV nowadays doesn’t have much of the kind of programs they did ages ago, though one must say that the good shows are really good whereas the bad ones suck totally, making choices easier for us viewers as and when we can get time off LJ-ing or blogging to actually sit and watch the telly.