“Battiyan bujha do...arre batti toh bujha de yaar”. Standing in the school’s morning assembly queue I could see the shock waves that these lines created; ruffled some very serious feathers and definitely had attracted quite severe repercussions, the details of which were never made public.
But was the singer perturbed? No, not to the least!
He was immune to all this - after all he had scored a 99 in Maths in the board exams (this was 1989-90, way before ICSE had reset its minimum score to 90) and had already graduated out of the school, officially. That day that plucky teenager introduced us to something that we all could feel but didn’t have a term for, then. The term is spelled chutzpah which I learnt much later and after a few more years of existence, I learnt how it is pronounced. Well he also introduced me, at least, to the music director for all moods, Pancham.
And thence two names were forever etched in my subconscious - RD Burman and Navin Sinha! The singer that morning was His pluckiness, Navin Sinha and the original composer and singer of the song was His craziness, Pancham.
Satte-pe-Satta has since then been one of my favorite movies and each time the song Pyar hamein plays, I am transported to that chutzpahdik summer afternoon. That song opened a vista to Pancham’s absolutely incredulous range of music. The movie has a note that is a testimony to Pancham’s musical experiments and his craziness. There’s a character in the movie called Babu (Amitabh Bachhan in a double role) and his introductory scene has that spine chilling music. During my research on Pancham (yes I do research which are never related to my so called knowledge area), I came across a lady’s interview who had “sung” that. She was asked by Pancham to gargle and produce that high pitched sound. His craziness had used several such “instruments” to produce the sound that he had envisioned. Whistling in empty bottles, comb and broom, champagne glasses and percussion instruments from far off African countries are part of Pancham’s legend now.
There is lot of literature around Pancham and his team of musicians. The Lords, Mullans and some who went to explore their other special skills - like Bhupinder moved on from an instrumentalist/guitarist to an acclaimed singer, Uttam Singh composed music under Yash Chopra banner, et al.
However, after that hugely impressionistic day I had made little effort to trace the man who had introduced me to Pancham. And this incommunicado can be assumed to be by default, as is the case with me usually. Mr Navin Sinha, though reappeared, as a twist of fate, on 75th anniversary of Pancham, as a post on my school group on Facebook. Probably still in love with numbers, he had posted a mathematical puzzle. When I read the post, I was meandering down from the hills of Munnar, in a rented car with my better half, surfing FB for a few reasons. The major ones being to divert D’s attention from the looping roads, which she abhorred, and re-instil her interest in mathematical puzzles (the latter is in her genes, by the way).
And so while our car sped down the mountain roads, D was completely immersed in the puzzle, aloof of how quickly we were descending. By the time we touched the foothills she without any emotions presented the solution which I duly posted on the FB group (yes this too is a regular trait of mine, if I am unable to solve puzzles, I copy the solution). With the response, I added a postscript asking if he was the same Navin Sinha who had made me live that feeling of chutzpah. He responded affirmatively without any mention of whether the solution was correct - the pluckiness was in tact, it had to be him!
That appearance of Mr Sinha on Pancham’s platinum jubilee made me really wonder at the situation. A twist of fate is the only probable explanation, that brought multiple elements into play and left me wondering whether Pancham, Mr Sinha and I have a quantum connection probably that realigns itself every 25 years or so!
Circa 1989 and then 2014, my maths (which by the way, boasts of a score just two less than what Mr Sinha had scored) says 2039 is the next year of alignment - Halley’s anyone?
Loved reading every bit !
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