Age was just a number- S D Burman's marathon success

Retirement age of a Government officer is 60. The same for corporate personnel is sometimes even a couple of years less. There is no retirement age for a creative person though, but his creativity  again gets restrained by the growing age and grey hairs. Gulzar sahib, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, M F Hussain, Satyajit Ray had constantly challenged this fact, but perhaps, they themselves would have agreed to the fact that the creative work of their later years were not upto the supreme standards they had themselves set up in their younger to middle age.

Sachin Dev Burman would have vehemently disagreed to this theory though. What else, he might have taken this as a personal insult as well! Not only this musical wizard kept competing with peers half his age, he outlived all of them in terms of longevity in career as well! Had death not taken him away at the age of 69, this maestro  surely would have continued to outperform contemporaries and set new standards in creative world.

Akele hai Chale Aao- Recalling an association Rajesh Khanna and Mohd Rafi

There have been quite a few feedbacks received by me regarding my blog and the ways to improve it and make it more interesting. Let me thank all my friends who have been constant source of inspiration for my writing. It seems my effort to highlight many special “combos” in the film music has been received with good appreciation (Kishore-Shankar Jaikishen, Rafi-R D Burman, Kishore-Gulzar are just to name a few) and there have been suggestions to highlight such great but less discussed combos more through my blog.

Why not more...???

Oil and water don’t mix together- but that does not lessen the quality of either of them. It is just the simple density chemistry which bars these two elements getting mixed up with one another. There have been quite a few music directors in Hindi film music, who preferred to stay away from certain singers due to various reasons. When it comes to artistic difference, it makes sense as to why Naushad avoided Kishore Kumar and Geeta Dutt; Shankar Jaikishen avoided Hemant Kumar and Talat Mehmood; S D Burman avoided Mahendra Kapoor or for that matter Salil Chwodhury avoided Shamshad Begum.

However, sometimes it becomes difficult to understand as to why some combos, in spite of creating some supreme music together whenever they combined and sharing musical similarity, did not come together too often. Reasons can be musical or non musical, let us take a look into some highly “productive” but “infrequent” combos.