BY THE POWER OF HE-MANT

“Beqarar karke humhe yun na jaiye,
Aapko humhari kasam laut aaiye”.

The song from ‘Bees Saal Baad’ is one of my favourite songs of all time. From childhood I had an addiction to music. I used to listen to every kind of music, though Bollywood music was the love of the life that time. As late 80’s [the time I grew up] had very few good songs and there was no other TV channel than Doordarshan, my exposure to new music was only limited to ‘Chitralok’ on Vividh Bharti, which use to come at 8:15 every morning. Because of that I got addicted to old songs, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Manna Dey, and especially Hemant Kumar [I never used to like Mohd. Rafi, until I developed a taste for his songs during my college days]. I knew every song of Hemant Kumar at the age of 5. I couldn’t speak Hindi properly then, but I used to sing perfectly in Hindi. And every time I listen to this song, it reminds me of my dad.

My dad is a decent singer otherwise, but when it comes to singing Hemant Kumar songs, I seriously believe, he sings better than even Shivaji Chatterjee [ The guy who sang ‘yeh safar’ from 1942 a love story]. Because we used to stay in a very small town, a village rather, load shedding used to be a very regular occurrence there. And once electricity is gone, it wouldn’t come back before 3-4 hours. As kids me and my brother used to sit at our verandah and wait for dad to come and sit at his favourite jhula [We had a big one at our verandah]. His first song on the jhula was always ‘A chalke tujhe’ [Kishore Kumar, from the film Door gagan ki chaon mein’]. We used to join him in singing and though we never understood the lyrics, the words were always right. Once we are tired, dad used to start singing Hemant Songs[ That’s the time when my mom used to come and join us, she loved to listen my dad singing Hemant]. From ‘apna dil toh awara to ‘zindagi pyar ki do char ghadi’, dad taught me the A to Z of Hemant, sitting on that jhula.

But ‘Beqarar karke’ was actually the song which was his patent song. He made the song famous among the huge Bengali music listening audience in our village. As everyone used to know about dad’s talent; whenever a cultural programme used to happen, my dad used to be the guest artist who will end the programme with five Hemant Kumar songs, ‘Beqarar karke’ being the last. And you can’t even imagine the amount of claps he used to get. Whenever my friend kalla used to come to my house he used to ask my dad to sing the song for him. But surprisingly he never used to get the lyrics right. Sometimes back when I went home for a vacation, I recorded him singing the song, and as expected, he mispronounced some words, but then I noticed that he gets so much engrossed in the song, that he doesn’t realize his mistake. I have never corrected him, and I won’t ever.

Much later when I saw Bees Saal Baad on Doordarshan, I saw Biswajeet singing this song, but in my head I couldn’t accept Biswajeet there, I could visualize my dad there, singing this song to Waheeda Rehman. It’d always be my dad’s song….It’d always be him singing…

“Yun kadam akele na yun badhaiye,
Aapko humhari kasam, laut aaiye”