KK and Irrfan: Our beautiful hopes

To me, KK, the singer, was like Irrfan Khan, the actor: both were pleasantly unpredictable, mouldable as clay in their crafts, and ever wrapped in uncapturable mysteriousness. Like Irrfan’s evocations, KK’s songs look set to have a long afterlife. In the main, KK and Irrfan were personas and voices epitomising the vitalities of a late twentieth and early twenty-first century transforming India. If Irrfan’s emotive eyes seen in films and ads were the lingering visual memory of the last 20 years, KK’s moods formed a kind of background score to that era. For the times we live in, KK’s voice manifests a gentler, friendlier, softer cultural ethos. Today’s India seems so far apart from India that birthed a KK or Irrfan.

KK’s versatility never gave the impression that he had no classical training. He was a Malayali from Delhi who grew up with Hindi and made it his own. In 1989, it was by chance that singer Hariharan spotted KK performing at a hotel in Delhi and suggested that he shift to Mumbai. Later, the people KK made his best music with were lyricists as varied as Mehboob or Sayeed Quadri, composers like Leslee Lewis, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Pritam, or Vishal-Shekhar. In some of his soaring romantic duets for future stars like Ranbir Kapoor or Shiny Ahuja, in the late 2000s, KK songs had lyrics where words like 'Khuda' would appear so casually and romantically as if the Almighty were a dost. For a basically happy-go-lucky voice as his, it was stirring to hear the depths of yearning he could plumb when required. If you’ve heard the title song of Irrfan Khan’s Dor or the one in Jism 2, you know what I mean.

Before singing for films proper, KK made a name in another underestimated creative sector: Mumbai advertising, which acted as a bridge into the wider arts for many. KK jingled for soft drink ads that ruled the commercial breaks on cable television and over the radio. In a 2019 interview with cinema journalist Faridoon Shahryar, KK recalls them, and his film and album songs and how they symbolised “a deep connection with the people I have created music with”.

Like KK, a number of new composers and lyricists broke into Hindi cinema around the same time. It helped create a new kind of popular sound and beat. In past interviews, KK spoke about how advertising trained him for bigger work, and spawned friendships with music composers and lyricists. (That change in music rhythm tempo is so evident in a watershed as Dil Chahta Hai.) KK’s voice was a fundamentally turn-of-the-millennium big-city temperament: Hip, chill, zestful. Yet, in many interviews KK gave, he simply states he was never in awe of films and always saw himself as a musician. In live shows, like all true musical performers, he bent and expanded and riffed on songs that he sang in films or albums, and lengthened their journeys into the hearts of new listeners.

Like many of our great popular singers, KK made me feel he grasped where I’m in life at the moment, my moods, my humdrum existence. Romantic music is most emotionally dangerous to commoners as me making them feel each word of a song has been sung only for them. In a 2019 interview in Tamil, Hariharan spoke about the resonance of his own popular numbers. Without the listener’s imagination, there is no song, he said. “Each individual is a volcano of feelings. The singer aims to reach that place inside the individual.” I thought, could there be a more apt epitaph for KK? The explorer of the irruptions inside us.