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.

Dance with Dad, Sing with Son

Hema Malini had a great achievement of working as a heroine opposite to Raj Kapoor, his two younger brothers and his two sons! Now, that was indeed covering three generations of heroes on the silver screen. Right from Sapno ka Saudagar(1968) opposite Raj Kapoor, she featured against the youngest brother Shashi in Abhinetri(1970), middle brother Shammi in Andaaz(1971) to Raj’s eldest son Randhir in Haath ki safai(1974) and then much later in the 80s against Raj’s second son Rishi in Ek chadar maili si.