dirty ditties

Bappi Lahiri famously insisted that A. R. Rahman had lifted the ho in Slumdog Millionaire's Oscar-winning jay ho from his hit rambhaa ho from Armaan. In Anuvab Pal's book Disco Dancer (dedicated to the cult classic starring Mithun Chakraborty), he is even quoted as proudly claiming to have brought the ho to Bollywood. Would he then concede that Vishal-Shekhar's ooh la la from The Dirty Picture owed a debt to a certain song composed by A. R. Rahman for Rajeev Menon's Minsara Kanavu?

Regardless of such trivial quibbles, Bappi seems like the perfect person to warble this lusty duet with Shreya Ghoshal (who would have thought she'd pick a song like this instead of a strain of romantic yearning?). The song starts off feeling like an uncensored alter ego of R. D. Burman's chunarii sambhaal gorii before shifting into a nostalgic paean to the disco-laced 80s dominated by Bappi-da. Bappi gets to pay tribute to himself in (as far as I can remember) his second song for Vishal-Shekhar. He couldn't have asked for more.

gender-agnostic love

I was listening to दस बहाने from Dus today and remembered how, when I had heard it the first time, I wondered if the singers were actually saying दस बहाने कर के ले गए दिल instead of दस बहाने कर के ले गयी दिल. I am quite sure now that it's the former. This is a strange choice of conjugation, because the references to the loved one use उसकी and not, as one would expect, उनकी. Of course, one does not look to Bollywood as an informal school of Hindi grammar (surely one remembers how Guru Dutt convinced Majrooh Sultanpuri to go easy on the grammar in सुन सुन सुन सुन ज़ालिमा for Aar Paar). What I found even more interesting this time around was that the song almost completely eliminates any notion of gender. Both KK and Shaan go on and on about the other one and the heart and so on and Vishal Dadlani tosses in DJ toasts every one and then to punctuate the dance floor number, but never (well, almost never) is there a sign that we're talking about her. It makes you wonder if this was because the song was originally written to be sung by girls. Now that it's just the boys singing, one also wonders if nobody noticed that it might have become the trendiest paean to gay guys all around except for one pesky detail (remember I had said almost): one of the lines Vishal Dadlani spits out is you stole my heart from me girl. girl is the clincher. He just saved this song from being an ode from him to him. Bring on the two large sunflowers and whack them against each other.

deux and deux

Yours truly is pleased and tickled to announce with geminiform glee that the guess about the second singer on the track heard in Kaminey's trailer has paid off. The singer is indeed Vishal Dadlani. The Vishal/Vishal collaboration is a creative echo of the doubles (Charlie and Guddu) in the film. Reportedly, Vishal Bhardwaj had joined Sukhwinder Singh after kash lagaa (No Smoking) to belt out the track, but convinced Vishal Dadlani to sing the final version. This of course makes me pine to hear the original cut with the director's voice, especially considering Vishal Dadlani's comments about the track (even if they are probably the kind of diplomatic comments people are inclined to make):

Apparently, the song was already recorded and Vishal [Dadlani] was sent across the CD to hear it out once. So impressed was Vishal with the voice in the song that he instantly called up Vishal Bhardwaj and enquired about the singer.

"To my utter surprise, I was informed that Vishal Bhardwaj had himself sung the song. He had done such a brilliant job that I tried persuading him to retain the voice for the final cut as well. However, he wasn't willing to do so and wanted another voice for the song. I am happy that he considered me for the song"

The not-so-Faustian pact signed by the two springs the promise of Vishal (Bhardwaj) singing for Vishal (-Shekhar). Put your hands up in the air now!

Squeeze the day; crack the piggy bank. Now if only some news item would talk about the lyricist.

summer of quintus

While Bill Gates chalks off his last day at work at MSFT today, we mark another year without the baadashaah of the breathtakingly non sequitur musical interludes, the late great Rahul Dev Burman. Ironically, two recent Bollywood movie soundtracks sport a Panchamesque sprinkling or two.

De Taali marks another Vishal-Shekhar excursion into fun and aural adventure what with two versions of the title track (one dance floor-friendly and the other a sprightly crisp version meandering around the edge of an acoustic guitar riff), a blend of club and Rajasthani folk, a curiously arranged equation of self to a drop of rain and a gentle whimsy ballad of love that deliciously tosses in an English phrase as a punch. What stands out in the context of this post is the Anushka Manchanda/Shekhar Ravjiani duet hone lagii. It's playful like the mischievous Asha Bhosle songs the 70s and the rhythm pattern on the acoustic guitar says it all. This isn't an overt tribute like Jhankaar Beats, but it represents Vishal-Shekhar presenting a tribute to the late Pancham that retains a lot of their creative identity.

After the lushly energetic arrangements and strong melodies of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Ismail Darbar has evolved to becoming more famous now for his tiffs, temper and arrogant veneer. This might explain why the mention of Rasiya Sajan might draw a blank stare from a lot of people. One wonders if a similar fate is in store for his soundtrack for a film starring Ajay Devgan, Sanjay Dutt and Manisha Koirala (will this be the (Yeh) Majdhaar of the 21st century?). In a tragic case of irony, this clearly-germinating-in-the-cans celluloid sin shares its name with a standard Bollywood paean to reincarnation in 1976 that sported one of RDB's most famous songs and one of the best songs in Hindi film music based on raag shivara.njinii. One also fears that the songs will be reduced to smithereens once some hideous visuals are cut together to their melodic shifts and percussive cues. This would, ironically, be in keeping with tradition as far as some of RDB's finest compositions is concerned.

Reportedly, Darbar was channelling Laxmikant-Pyarelal in the soundtrack. The mixed bag includes dilarubaa, which stands out as a fine addition to the long list of songs peppering B-grade flicks like Shiva Ka Insaaf or Raat ke Saudagar as it runs Laxmikant-Pyarelal through a Nadeem-Shravan filter (although the end tosses a brass/drums cue that portends Rafi's voice opening o hasiinaa zulfo.nwaalii). kuchh kar lo boasts characteristic traces of Darbar in the refrains while Kwaabo.n kii raanii joins Anu Malik and Bappi Lahiri in stomping on Beethoven's grave as it recycles Für Elise before sending out musical quotes from Jatin-Lalit.

The most obvious blatant traces in the other songs, however, seem to suggest that the inspiration came from the talented Pancham. You can't miss the a-haa quote from chunarii sambhaal gorii in baabuujii. tuu merii mahabuubaa starts off threatening to sound like Ilayaraaja (or perhaps as Anand-Milind recycling the master), but as soon as the rhythm sets in, you know you're in Pancham land with a Jatin-Lalit wisp. That's ab ke saawan (Jaise ko Taisa) or, rather appropriately, a subset of the composite rhythm of mahabuubaa (Sholay). This brings us to achchhaa to mai.n chalataa huu.N, which is rich with slices from the master. Who would have known that it would take one flick destined to be DOA to revive a song from a flick long forgotten from years ago featuring the one and only Mithun Chakraborty in a double role? The similarity to merii aawaaz ke dosto.n from Aamne Samne is unmissable, although the rest of the mukha.Daa devolves into what sounds like the heavy punchy beat-backed bulk of The Nose's ouevre. It's a song that would fit well in a B-flick although the brass and the heavy vocal sighs bring back memories of Monica and her unnamed man cavorting to piyaa tuu ab to aajaa from Caravan.

Cash: the music: it's a gas

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The songs of I See You

You find love in the strangest places is the tagline for I See You, a copy of Hollywood chick flick Just Like Heaven that Arjun Rampal decided to produce along with his wife and star in to boot. It's worth paraphrasing to describe my reaction to the Vishal-Shekhar soundtrack accompanying the film: you find goodies in the saddest places. The duo dig deep into their box of genres and dish out a wonderful aural mix.

There's the trance, dancefloor-friendly beat-heavy pop acorn kahanaa hai jo from Shekhar Ravjiani. The arrangements toss in enough echo and reverb for his voice to feed a nation as his voice bounces off into decay across each earpiece.

The other shake-it track haalo haalo^[1] opens with frenzied quotes from latin and beach rhythms before a trance riff and a swirling male echo take over; a buoyant cry (dhumakaa?) later, the quotes continue with some funk guitar riffs before the rhythm and percussion return. Sunidhi Chauhan and Sukhwinder Singh lend their throaty best as they trade vocal histrionics with the rhythm, percussion and a cheeky bass line. Vishal Dadlani adds another texture with some vocalizing in the lower register. All this gets mixed without either the vocals or the music yielding to the other.

A host of electronic samples and percussion drenched in romantic echo embellish Sunidhi Chauhan's multi-tracked deliciously nuanced vocal on sach huii. This is the kind of song Sunidhi's done before for the duo^[2]. There's a lot of mix-and-match on this track: a riff that mixes an electronic bass cascade and some acoustic guitar; a travelling male vocal accompanied by sympathetic strings in unison and complement. There's more than Tangerine Dream in the box that all this came from.

My pick, however, is the opening track of the album, subah subah, which has a lot of all this and more going for it. There's the balance between instruments and voice; there's the mix of genres (Jamaican music will find some strong fans in this duo -- they've done dancehall several times before^[3]). The song opens with a 2-chord sequence strummed out vigorously on an acoustic guitar, before the composer duo pitch in a vocal onomatopoeaic refrain straight out of those old doo wop songs; the dancehall rhythm sets in and a light falsetto voice belting out lines before the immensely talented Zubeen Garg wraps his voice around the melodic alleys of the song. The electronic samples are at a minimum: a bouncing bass riff, the doo wop refrain and the dancehall rhythm dominate the backing sound mix. The tricks of echo and reverb splash his voice about the earphones. Garg indulges in vocal histrionics similar to those on yaa alii from Gangster, before the next musical layer pops in: a melody carried out on a whistle and backed by a nice chord progression on the acoustic guitar. The last third of the song sees the chord progression cross over to accompany the refrain and the rhythm. Fragments bounce back and forth until the song draws to a close on an electronic fade. It's a nice tight little nugget that begs replay.

In true Bollywood tradition, the song gets smashed on screen. Not just to smithereens but to sub-atomic grist. It adorns the opening credits^[4], which would lead you to think that the filmmakers would've exploited as a good opportunity to let their imagination run wild and think of something interesting. You'd lose your house betting on that. The first nail comes from the fact that they've sped up the song. It's not chipmunk-fast, but it might as well get there instead of hanging in this limbo like the middle class. The camera tracks in to a figure standing against one of the pillars of the building that our hero is about to emerge from. If you've followed the gossip, you know who this figure is. But if you didn't there are several clues for you: the figure's too well-dressed to be in character; the figure's playing the wrong chords. Given that the camera's giving him so much attention, you can deduce that this is a star making a cameo. The camera tracks past to the glass door without rising up to catch his face. In a rather inspired little take, the camera turns about, as Rampal comes out and follows him as he passes the guitarist. We now see that it's our favourite Narcissus SRK himself. Now all this would've been a nice set-up (you have to excuse the bad chords; it's part of the Bollywood tradition^[5]), if SRK hadn't decided to give you that silly aggravating smirk of his right near the end of this bit. The other nail comes when the filmmakers, in their joy at having achieved some glee with the cameo, decide to make sure that you don't forget whom you saw and keep returning to SRK. The cameo now becomes as rich as skimmed milk. As if to make up for the absence of narcissism once the cameo is done, Rampal seems to have issued a directive that subsequent footage focus on his presence. This turns out to be a really devastating experience, not in the least because the song gets promoted from its comfortable faux-diegetic role to the irritating suspension-of-disbelief avataar that has plagued our senses for years. Now every frigging foreigner on location is lip-synching to the damn song. To add to our misery, they decide to use variable film speeds and rhythm-assisted editing to augment our discombobulation. We also get more evidence that our filmmakers were trying to get drunk at a dry well when we see the common device of using shots to match lyrics: check out how the crowd gathers to follow Rampal's walk in the set of shots that ends with jahaan ke saath mai.n chal rahaa huu.N (translation: I'm walking with the world). Which brings us to star cameo #2. This one's a lot better: The camera switches its attention from Arjun Rampal to Hrithik Roshan, who walks by. He's whistling along with the song, of course. And he sets up to break into what might've been an interesting set of dance moves, but instead walks away after a teensy-weensy step. You wring your hands in grief at wasted opportunity. The song ends with the Crown of Narcissus passing from Rampal to the writer (read: filcher) and director Vivek Agarwal as his credit appears on the plasma TV screen at Rampal's home. This is when you throw in the towel and pray that you never ever have to watch this sorry-derriered flick.

Incidentally, eye candy in the film (the raison d'être for most Bollywood films) is provided by debutante Vipasha Agarwal.

[1] was the Filipino dessert a muse for this?

[2] consider wo kaun hai in Shaadi ka Laddoo

[3] the title track for Golmaal: Fun Unlimited, right here right now from BluffMaster!

[4] The video on YouTube

[5] Vishal Bhardwaj broke this tradition recently when Vivek Oberoi took the time to get the chords right for a sequence in Omkara; Bhardwaj paid for his transgression: the film was declared a flop and turned out to be more of a hit with the critics than with the masses.

new music

Both entries below contribute to the trend of titular abuse (see also: Ankahee, previous entry in thread).

Golmaal: Fun Unlimited: No patch on the original Pancham/Gulzar The "hip-hop fakers" vishal-shekhar notch up another dancehall pastiche with the title track (even the Abhishek Bachchan singing vehicle Right Here Right Now/ek mai.n aur ek tuu hai in Bluffmaster was more dancehall than hip-hop although the video didn't help matters much). Their real ace is the revisionist kyo.n aage-piichhe Dolate ho, which harks back to the black-and-white days of film and film soundtracks complete with nasal contributions and the like. The rest of the album attempts to comply with the "fun" that the film purports to offer. A humble request to the brain-dead people who compile and transfer soundtracks to CD: could you please put the original track before the remixed version? Sincerely yours.

Katputtli: strange spelling that. DOA Dev Anand discovery Mink turns producer with a film with confused aspirations (nothing surprising here). Must be tough to be " a psychological thriller with surprising and chilling twists and turns, which guarantee to keep you on the edge of your seat" and " an out-and-out entertainer, which will drive your blues away ". Her brother Punnu Brar co-produces and shares the honours on the soundtrack with Bapi-Tutul. mitraa nuu, with its Punjabi dancehall and rap, meets all the requirements of assembly-line déjà vu to merit a skip. Bapi-Tutul produce a decent nugget in man meraa: the guitar scores over fair vocals from Shweta Pandit and a bland contribution from Sa Re Ga Ma champion Gaurav Bangia. Punnu Brar scores a plagiarism ace with Wild Dreams, which cogs the melody of Sweet Dreams, filches the mukha.Daa (in a manner of speaking) with sweet changed to wild, boasts angry arrangements that echo Mother by The Police, and tosses in references to The Sandman. Brar's pronounications ruin niile aasamaa.N; even the guitar fills don't save it. Bapi-Tutul's raftaa raftaa is a little gem: the aural scape conjures visions of the angry desert with rock-revisionist vibes of Morricone and Cooder. Ishq Bector's Snake Potion is a sample loop waiting for clever rhymes to run over it. It just goes straight into the bin with mitraa nuu. Wait for the movie to hit the marquee before things go kat-putt.

hello ... goodbye

salaam namaste boasts a Wikipedia entry thanks to either the marketing department of YashRaj Films (what? net-savvy??) or some over-enthusiastic fan (dude/dudette! Spoiler warning??? are you frigging kidding me?). The only plus so far is that the title is already iTrans-friendly. It's another entry in the burgeoning genre of the chick flick of and for South Bombay/NRI yuppies. Lotsa oh-so-cool and blah. There's the legacy of Hum Tum (the foreign locales, the cool edge to the love dredge, the hate-and-uncertainty-turning-to-love, the old bits and pieces of the ages recycled) as well as Kal Ho Naa Ho (take this all to a foreign land, preferrably one that offers a friendly market). If you're keen on more story details, try these character sketches.

The soundtrack is the first offering. Obviously, the label's Yash Raj Music. Although the website notes that the price of the CD is $4.99, they also note that shipping costs are extra. If you are even thinking of purchasing a copy for yourself (or for your grandchildren to remember you by), this might still be a good place to grab it. Desi grocery stores are likely to hike the price up close to $10.

On with the mu[sic] itself. A trend to note in the arrangements is the collection of North Indian oye-dance-baby elements, since this is after a Yash Raj product. It has to appeal to the North belt. Vishal Shekhar are roped in this time to produce another peppy soundtrack (based on their recent work, that is). The obligatory club mixes exist (mastered by the usual culprits DJ Aqeel and Nikhil Chinnappa; and there's also Naved -- brother of Javed?). Backgroundsmen Salim and Sulaiman Merchant, who went live with mainstream music composition with Kaal are around for the arrangements. This, IMHO, is a big failing. The title song starts off with a strong hangover from those days. The samples also sound suspiciously like picks off a Kunal Kohli wishlist. Jaideep Sahni (who already has quite a few screenplay, dialogue and lyric credits under his belt) seems to have submitted all his lyrical drafts over email in one evening. Do not (I repeat Do not (I repeat Do not)) expect lyrical depth of any kind beyond the thickness of an earthworm's cuticle. Kunal Ganjawala and Vasundhara Das are the officially named voices on this mix of aahaa-chorus, Dhol samples, and enough lures for specious minds. The Shaan song that comes up next runs on a riff that sounds like a time-sampled leftover of the first song. And when he gets to the chorus (##my## dil goes ##mmm##), you have to go and find your copy of the Crash Test Dummies song. At least that one was entertaining. Gayatri Iyer does it by the numbers. Lyrical snippets include haa.N ##picture## me.n rotaa hai; haa.N khulle[sic]mu.Nh sotaa hai. And the patentable spoon-and-glass effect courtesy the late R D Burman and appropriated by Jatin-Lalit shows up. If you want something challenging to do while listening to these songs, try exercising your ability to complete each line. And just when you thought it was over, there's a scale change at the end, which doesn't quite work. Ugly. Go listen to one of those unending Rolling Stones songs instead. Aah, a whistle at the end against a soundscape that owes a lot to Vishal Bhardwaj.

Break time. Go find a tissue or a number to call back and try and get a CD exchange ... or kill that roach running around on the floor ...

Silly riff on the next number, with a deep voice intoning Cool. There's a mrida.ngam sample. And then after a perfunctory happy chorus Kunal Ganjawala steps up to the mike with the lyrical winner paune baarah baje dono.n ghar se chale ... ##what's goin' on##. Sunidhi Chauhan joins him on the quest for something to do. Quit already. Despite a nice job from both of them (although they've done all this a million times before), there ain't much about this dud (except a nice complementary progression on the turnaround to the chorus). Clap away near the end and hit FF.

Up next is the most bearable number on the album, and also the slowest. Sonu Nigam and Mahalaxmi Iyer share honours on a simple melody and mild arrangements and decent guitar fills with tuu jahaa.N mai.n vahaa.N.

The mixes begin. The "English Club Mix" of ##my## dil goes ##mmm## features Shaan and Carlisa Monteiro returning from Dance Masti Again's o merii soNii; Shaan lays the accent and style a bit too thick, but the arrangements and dance-o-drown ambience are more appropriate for the pointless lyrics (and also assist in drawing your attention away from them). There's the predictable "Dhol mix" of the already-laden-with-enough-Dhol title song. Same singers. Hardly much to remix, and yet they add something that I'm sure they'll call "subtle". Go listen to the title song of Kaal to get over the déjà vu. DJ Aqeel dispenses with the singers for the final track on this offering, an instrumental (sorry, have to break for some intense laughter) version [read: in addition to the existing samples and pounding beat, add a trippy sample to play the melody] of ##my## dil goes ##mmm##. This is the final stage in the normalisation of a song that began with badly balanced and egregiously obviously bad lyrics. Now that we've taken the lyrics out of the picture, we're left with a harmless piece of club ambience (that recurring chorus reminds me of the chorus on Wah Wah from No Quarter. This ladies and gentlemen, is when we must say Goodbye. You say yes, I say No. All that fun stuff.

Despite the lifts and the worse lyrics I preferred Chocolate and James. Predictably someone who didn't care much for James would find Salaam Namaste the greatest thing since a triple schezwan (read: "Spirited, fresh, young and trendy")

post crypt: That wiki page offers the translation of the title as Goodbye Greetings or Goodbye Hello. Am I the only one who seems to disagree with both? I doubt that pun-laden irony or stretching meanings was part of the agenda for the person posting that entry.

matrimonial miThaa_ii

Raj Kaushal follows up Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi with Shaadi ka Laddoo. Music directors Vishal-Shekhar return with another bag of lightweight tunes, including an interesting ("spring of 2004") version of musu musu haasii (which unfortunately doesn't feature on the soundtrack release!). Sanjay Suri seems poised to be for this century and the upper crust what Amol Palekar was for the good old middle class in the 70s and 80s. Ashish Choudhury redeems himself of some of the sin of Girlfriend, and even wins special points for the eruption of laughter on the bench (his reaction when Suri's indiscretion becomes public). And Divya Dutta sinks comfortably into another role with ease. There's a lot of Rang Birangi you can think of, and there are extended quotes from Sholay's ye dosatii ham nahii.n to.De.nge, The Pink Panther theme, kabhii kabhii mere dil me.n and the Bond theme. Pepsi gets shameless promotion. Tons of silly lines (e.g. jis tarah chaa.Nd se bichha.Dakar chakorii, aur thaalii se bichha.Dakar kaTorii alag nahii.n rah sakatii.... And there's the following classic moment:

SS: excuse me, do you speak english?

DD's uncle: haa.N

SS: good, where is XXXX street?

The film wasn't as bad as I had feared it might be. Nigar Khan has been in the news for other forthcoming ventures, and one can only shudder. Mandira Bedi manages the looks and personality department, but this isn't a role to judge acting abilities with. On the whole, this ain't a bad way to sit back and enjoy some old-fashioned light humour. Now if only I could get that version of musu musu somewhere ...And using outtakes for end credits is getting kinda tired, isn't it?

musafir: lounge away

The pasha of stylish distributed plagiarism, Sanjay Gupta, has unveiled the soundtrack of his next opus Musafir. On the film front, there's more cool makeup, and there's bound to be oodles of style. Hopefully, it proves as entertaining as Kaante and not a befuddled pile of week-old noodles like Plan. The soundtrack album touts itself as being India's first club lounge album. It's a 2 CD set, which mixes new work from Vishal-Shekhar in both regular (how can you tell, really?) and mixed form (courtesy Nikhil Chinappa I am told), and also bundles tracks from the Kaante soundtrack. Sunidhi Chauhan claims top honours with little effort (despite saying kaTin instead of kaThin in ishq kabhii kariyo naa, and Shreya Ghoshal comes across like a North-Indian version of Chitra with an oh-so-squeaky voice. The advantage of the layers of sampling and beat paste is that bad voices get superseded by infectious loops. Sanjay Dutt's singing attempts (note how he decides to go liberally tuneless on numerous occasions like mai.n boluu.N aaj tuu bole kal) on tez dhaar have some street-smart lines and a heavy ode to Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ry Cooder and Carlos Santana as a saving grace. Sukhwinder Singh, Kunal Ganjawala, Kumar Sanu and K. K. do the needful on the other tracks. And Krishna's sufi-tinged rendition of rabbaa rocks. One of the CDs bears the tag "Club" and the other "Lounge". All this I am told. Wouldn't mind getting myself a copy. But if club/lounge ain't your thing, stay away. And a few extra points for strange mix names (Pyschedelic Insomnia, Kinky in Ibiza).

The film was slated to collide head-on with Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara during Diwali, but the actual release date seems to fall somewhere in the late November fragment of the year.

One thing puzzles me. Sanjay Gupta had announced a special audio complement to the Kaante soundtrack -- with extra tracks composed by Viju Shah, Lucky Ali, Shiamak Davar, Adnan Sami, Sulaiman and Salim Merchant and A.R. Rahman. Although they abandoned that ambitious plan, I wonder if it was all hoopla... Is any of the stuff on Musafir a residue of rejected music on Kaante?

jhankaar!

The soundtrack for the second R D Burman tribute Jhankaar Beats is out. Thankfully, the songs aren't corporate-sanctioned remixes of old Pancham tunes. The title track establishes this tribute as Sudesh Bhosle (who else) breaks out in Pancham song, mimicking the late maestro's warbling cult classic duniya mein. Boss Kaun Hai is an over-too-soon unfinished free-form trivia-talk-athon about the late R D Burman. The tapori vein continues onto the next couple of forgettable Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy-esque numbers. The despicable Udit Narayan pops up. Shaan is beginning to sound too much like himself (wish I could explain that: accept it as an axiom, if you will). The occasional break is provided by pure modern-day Indipop. Pancham quotes in the form of lyrics, musical fragments (including the Bond theme, a favourite of RDB's) pepper the soundtrack. This leaves the title track as the only one I'd want to listen to again, alas, for reasons more nostalgic than musical. Perhaps even Boss Kaun Hai and Ruk Ruk (The music directors decided to use Amit Kumar, giving this song a touch of historical irony). Eschewing the conventional string arrangements seems to be the only USP for most of the new remixes and pop favourites. Pity. Apart from that avoidable detail, the old songs also stood out as examples of collective human endeavour and effort. These days it's all a stream of bytes. {review}