Mombasa in Mumbai

Noel Coward once wrote, “strange how potent cheap music is.” With a little bit of tweaking one could say strange how potent Hindi film music is. Whether it is Atlanta or Aram Nagar, the pull of Hindi film music is extraordinary, uniting diasporas across South Asia. And few people are able to articulate its allure as well as Javed Akhtar who turned lyricist only with Silsila in 1981, and only because its director Yash Chopra met all his impossible conditions. After seven generations of poets, Akhtar said he had no intention of following the family tradition and remained a staunch writer of prose. But the closet poet in him was outed by Chopra who persuaded Akhtar to write the lyrics of Silsila. One of the reasons Akhtar agreed was that Silsila’s hero, Amit (played by Amitabh Bachchan), was a poet. So was born the iconic song, ‘Dekha ek khwab toh yeh silsile hue’. His second assignment as a lyricist also saw the lead being a poet and so was born the Jagjit Singh ghazal, ‘Tumko dekha toh yeh khayal aaya’, in Raman Kumar’s Saath Saath (1982). “I wrote it in nine minutes after nine pegs of whisky—those days I would be drinking heavily,” he adds. Perhaps one of his finest romantic songs, which continues its reign in the hearts of people, is ‘Ek ladki ko dekha toh aisa laga’ for 1942: A Love Story (1994), which he composed for RD Burman, and which had 27 similes. Words, magical words. The most difficult thing to write, though, he says is gibberish, which he did so well in the introduction to the song for Mr India (1987): ‘Hawa Hawaii’. “Chi ho ho Honolulu lu lu lu Honolulu/ Hing biki Hong Kong, King Kong/I see Nusy, you see Lucy/Assi tussi, lassi pissi/ Mombasa ping pong.” Mombasa was a word he got stuck on and it took him a long while to find it to fit into the song. Apparently, it came to him in a dream. And now it’s a classic. “One has to write according to the intellect of the characters in the movie,” says Akhtar. “If it is a poet, you use one kind of language and if you’re told to write nonsense, it has to be done in another way. Let me tell you though, writing nonsense is very difficult, although one hears a lot of it these days.”

Talking Mental Wellness

Kiara Advani has spent 10 years in the movie industry already but saw success only by daring to be different in Lust Stories on Netflix in 2018. One of the many women who auditioned for the role in 2011’s Student of the Year which made Alia Bhatt famous, she nonetheless got her moment in the sun with Kabir Singh in 2019. As Preeti, the woman who gets swept up in an obsessive love affair with an alcoholic senior, she embodied innocence. Since then Advani has done many roles of note, most recently in Satyaprem ki Katha as a rape survivor. Now she’s getting ready to do action in Don 3, a franchise that never seems to go out of style. But even she has moments when she isn’t feeling chipper. And what is wonderful about young women like her is that she is ready to talk about the need for mental strength. As she said recently: “We often allow our mind to get the better of us. The only thing we need to control is our mind. Giving yourself that power to not get the better of you is half the battle won.” One of the ways she does so is by avoiding the phone for the first hour after she wakes up. “I realise now how much more enriched I am, how much more present I am now because of it,” she says, with no fear or anxiety feeding into her negative emotions. “It lays the foundation for the rest of the day because sometimes the one hour of scrolling in the morning becomes five hours,” she adds.

Scene and Heard

Thug Life is now in Serbia. The movie, which sees the much awaited union of filmmaker Mani Ratnam and actor Kamal Haasan, is now shooting in Serbia, and sure enough Shaad Ali, the maestro’s most beloved assistant is with him. Ali, son of filmmaker and artist Muzaffar Ali, is an accomplished filmmaker but is happy to drop everything when it comes to helping his mentor with a demanding shoot. Not everything and everyone in the film industry is transactional. The relationship between Mani and Ali is an example of the guru-shishya parampara in Indian culture. Thug Life is special because it marks the reunion of Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan after 1987’s iconic Nayakan. The script is co-written by the two men and features a stellar cast of mostly Tamil actors.

BollywoodcinemaJaved AkhtarKiara AdvaniShaad Ali