This photograph of our then newly formed musical group, ‘Sense Of Sound Creators Amalgamated (SOSCA) Entertainers’, was taken in 1978. The group was formed to rekindle old Hindi film songs and the picture was taken for promoting our group. We had taken inspiration from the Pune-Mumbai based music group ‘Melody Makers’ who had presented a great musical night in 1977 at Ravindra Kalakshetra.
Surprisingly that group was not a professional one at that time and consisted of doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors and other professionals. We had heard that they used to take one month off from their routine work and tour all over India to conduct musical nights. This inspired us to form a group under the leadership of singing couple Jaya-Murthy. Most of the members are from my own family.
Jaya is my elder sister, Kumar and Mohan Kumar are my younger brothers and Murthy, Ravindranath and Gopinath are my brothers-in-law. We presented our first show in 1978 at Ravindra Kalakshetra with sound and lighting effects by Prabath Kalavidaru.
‘Melody Makers’ used to start all their shows with ‘Aae malikterebandhe hum..’ from the movie ‘Do Ankhen Barah Haath’ and we used to start all our programmes with ‘Jaago mohan murali jaago...’ from the movie ‘Jaagthe Raho’. We never repeated the songs in subsequent programmes. Every programme had a fresh list of old songs.
Murthy was superb with Talat Mahamood and Mohamad Rafi songs, Jaya with Latha Mangeshkar numbers, I used to sing Mukesh songs, Mohan excelled with Kishor Kumar and Manna Dey classics while Kumar sang Hemanth Kumar numbers. Our group had very talented musicians like guitarist Ravindranath, accordionist Chandramani, leading percussionist Ramachandra and flutist Mahadev. The group was well organised by Prakash.
SOSCA had presented a number of programmes with the title ‘The Amalgamated Memories of Golden Times’, part 1, 2 and 3 …..till recently. Murthy is now a popular short story writer, Jaya was a lecturer but is retired now, Prakash is an architect settled in Chicago, and I, after my graduation in English literature, did my diploma in cinematography and thereafter PG in journalism and mass communication. I then joined National Aerospace Laboratories in Bengaluru and retired as senior scientist. I am now running a publishing house ‘Akshatha Prakashana’.
Unfortunately, most of our group members who are in the above photograph are not alive today. Mohan, known for his ghazal singing in various star hotels and who had also rendered his voice for large number of audio CDs and cassettes, passed away recently.
Kumar, who was a deputy director in the Department of Industries and Commerce, also died recently. Ramachandra, Ravindranath, Chandramani are no more with us. We always cherish the memories of those golden days and the contributions of these talented artistes to spread the essence of old film music.
(The author can be contacted at shivuj809@gmail.com)