A jaunty touch to melancholy

Very few songs are able to achieve that rare fusion of joy and woe.

The second wave has made me incapable of listening to sad songs. And I hate it. Melancholy drives my musical taste; I am your original wallow-in-misery music aficionado. There was a time I had specialised playlists for different kinds of sadness, and even now, loved ones tease me about my instinctive reaction to being upset — lock myself up inside a room and cry it out with a Rafi or an Atif.

And strangely enough, I can’t seem to listen to very cheery numbers either. The world around is so grim that the cheer sort of dissipates before it reaches within. Which is why, this week, I went back to some old reliables, which almost magically, manage to combine a never-say-die spirit with essentially unhappy lyrics. Talat Mehmood’s ‘Zindagi Denewale Sunn’ is a prime example. Even while he laments to the creator that he is tired of the world and he feels dead while alive, somewhere you realise he will fight it out; and he will certainly emerge out of that deep gloom. Maybe, it is just Talat’s singing; or perhaps it is Bhupali on which the song is based — a raga that has the power to instantly calm one down.

There’s another song with mournful lyrics that brings an inevitable smile on my lips. ‘Apni to har aah ek toofan hain; kya karu woh jaankar anjaan hain; uparwala jaankar anjaan hain...’ (roughly, ‘My every sigh is a storm; what do I do, the one above plays innocent...’)

Sung beautifully by Md Rafi, for a long time, I thought it must have been picturised on a lone hero in a godforsaken place. Much later, I saw its video. It showed the ever-effervescent Dev Anand crooning this number in a train. And the ‘uparwala’ who was being ‘anjaan’ to his woes was a sleeping beauty on the upper berth.

Play By Ear showcases a potential earworm for you, the discerning listener, who is on the hunt for some musical serendipity.