He completed evenings. In the 1980s and ’90s, ghazals sung by him were mandatory at parties and gatherings. They were like companions helping listeners unwind, enlivening many a ‘spirited’ sunset. Pankaj Udhas, whose audience-friendly renditions and easy on the ear compositions sold millions of cassettes, packed hundreds of concerts and took ghazals to new followers, passed away after “prolonged illness” at a Mumbai hospital on Monday. He was 72. 

------------------------------------------

Ghazal chart-topper Pankaj Udhas, the voice behind ‘Chitthi Aayee Hai’ and ‘Jeeye Toh Jeeye Kaise’ passed away at a Mumbai hospital on Monday. His daughter, Nayaab, made the announcement on Instagram.

Primarily a singer of non-film ghazals and geets, Pankaj delivered Bollywood’s biggest 1987 chartbuster: ‘Chitthi Aayee Hai’ (lyrics, Anand Bakshi; music, Laxmikant-Pyarelal; film, Naam). The song, which topped Binaca Geetmala’s annual countdown show, touched an emotional chord, especially among NRIs and PIOs.

Some of Udhas’ finest numbers are in the 1981 album, Muqarrar. ‘Tum na maano magar haqeekat hai’ (poet Qabil Ajmeri) and ‘Deewaron se milkar rona achcha lagta hai’ (poet Qaiser-ul-Jafferi). Another popular track from the same album, Sabko maloom hai main sharabi nahi (poet Anwar Farook Habadi) spurred him to do a reprise with Paimana (1983), a collection of ghazals that went down well with tipplers; it had Thodi thodi piya karo (poet S Rakesh) and La pila de saakiya (traditional).

A science graduate from Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College, Pankaj spent his early years in Gujarat. In an interview to the Sunday Guardian in 2018, the singer recalled his father playing the musical instrument ‘dilruba’, and him liking the sound.

Pankaj also remembered being fascinated by the tabla and enrolling for a course but later switching to learning Hindustani vocal from Ghulam Qadir Khan Sahab in Rajkot. “Then I came to Mumbai to learn from my guru, Master Navrang Nagpurkar. He was a very famous singer from the Gwalior Gharana,” he said in the interview.

The 1980s saw two divergent trends in popular music. One was led by the breathless beats of disco, the other by the more reflective ghazal. The peerless pair of Jagjit and Chitra Singh had already initiated a new gene ration of the middle class to the non-film ghazals. A Padma Shri recipient who also worked to eradicate thalassemia, Pankaj was among the young bunch of ghazals singers - Talat Aziz and Anoop Jalota were the other two – who were part of that wave.

------------------------------------------

Ghazal singer Pankaj Udhas was a keen racing enthusiast too. A member of the Royal Western India Turf Club (RWITC), Udhas owned a few horses and would visit Mahalaxmi Racecourse. “He would call and ask if his horse has a chance to win,” RWITC-based trainer H J Antia told TOI on Monday. 

Antia trained his horses. “And when I would tell him yes, he would specially make time to come to the Mahalaxmi racecourse,” added Antia. The late singer would also visit the stables at the racecourse to check on the horses, he said.

“We lost a very genuine member of the club,” said RWITC chairman Surendra Sanas. “It is also a personal loss for me. He would make it a point to visit the club on Classics race days and almost certainly on Indian Derby Day,” recalled Sanas.

Surgeon Dr Mehli Nazir, who jointly-owned horses with Udhas, said, “We bought our first horse called Aliyana sometime around 2010. And then we owned a couple of more horses together. When Aliyana won in Pune the first time, he was thrilled to lead the winner. It was his first ever win,” said Dr Nazir. 

“He found it difficult to devote time to racing after 2018 because he had a busy schedule,” said Adhirajsingh Jodha, who trained a horse called Speed Of Sound owned by Udhas in partnership.— Shailendra Awasthi

In his four-decade career, Sanjay Dutt hasn’t shied away from taking risks — some have paid off, others have left him with a wise lesson or two. Now, as he rolls out his new studio Three Dimension Motion Pictures, the actor hopes that his fearless streak will reflect in his productions as well. “I did Saajan [1991] at a time when action heroes wouldn’t play a man with a limp. Munna Bhai was a brave move. I take these chances, and they work for me,” he begins.

This isn’t Dutt’s first brush with filmmaking. He had forayed into the business with Sanjay S Dutt Productions that backed Prassthanam (2019) and the Marathi film, Baba (2019). For Three Dimension Motion Pictures, the actor has put together a fresh team of content creators and writers.

“Movies and OTT offerings will be [created at] our stable. I believe some of the films that we are discussing will bring back the old-school Hindi film heroism to the screens. I don’t want to star in all my productions. I want to experience the producer’s life now,” he chuckles, before adding that he is not suited for number-crunching. “I am too emotional, and have a tendency to splurge. So, I have hired people to ensure I don’t overspend [on projects].”

The first film to come out of the stable will be a horror comedy. While the script has been locked, the casting is underway. “It will be followed by an action film. So far, we have locked five stories. The first film will roll this summer,” says the actor-producer proudly. Dutt has been a witness to the changing content landscape of the past few years.

Even as he will feature in some of his productions, the actor is certain that the offerings will depict him in a new light. “At 60-plus, I won’t be dancing with Alia Bhatt in a romantic song! I have to move on and pick roles that feel like a step ahead. For instance, OTT offers keep coming my way, but I need a good character to jump on the bandwagon.”

From Husnlal-Bhagatram to Shankar-Jaikishan, from Kalyanji-Anandji to Laxmikant Pyarelal, Hindi film industry has a rich tradition of musical partnerships. Nadeem-Shravan forged an illustrious link to this abiding chain composing a staggering bunch of chartbusters in the 1990s. On Thursday evening, the alliance was snapped forever as the Coronavirus claimed the life of Shravan Rathod at a Mumbai hospital. He was 66.

Speaking to Bombay Times, Nadeem Saifee said, “My Shanu is no more. We have seen an entire life together. We saw our highs, we saw our lows. We’ve grown up with each other in many ways. We never lost touch and no physical distance could ever separate the two of us. I am in deep pain as I say this but my friend and my companion, my partner of so many years is no more. It has left such a vacuum.”

The pair started off with ‘Dangal’ (1977), the first Bhojpuri film made in colour. ‘Kashi Hile Patna Hile’, a reworked version of the popular folk track, ‘Aarah hile Chhapra hile’, became a sensation. The two graduated to Hindi cinema in the 1980s.

Tuneful melodies for films such as ‘Maine Jeena Seekh Liya Hai’ (1982) got them work but major success eluded them.

The duo hit the jackpot with Mahesh Bhatt-directed ‘Aashiqui’ (1990). Every song in this intense romantic drama, from ‘Dheere dheere se meri zindagi mein ana’ to ‘Bas ik sanam chahiye’—rose to the charts. The film also vaulted Kumar Sanu, who sang a majority of the tracks, to the top. Nadeem-Shravan became a hot property.

The 1990s belonged to them. ‘Saajan’, ‘Deewana’, ‘Dil Hai ke Manta Nahi’, ‘Phool aur Kaante’, ‘Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke’, ‘Raja Hindustani’ and ‘Pardes’—they lorded over the decade blending old school melody with modern instrumentation. Songs such as ‘Mera dil bhi kitna pagal hai’ (Saajan) to ‘Pardesi pardesi jaana nahi’ (Raja Hindustani) to ‘Do dil mil rahe hain’ (Pardes) were as popular among the college crowd as the truck drivers on the highway. The pair won the Filmfare award three years in a row, 1991-93, for ‘Aashiqui’, ‘Saajan’ and ‘Deewana’ and again in 1997 for ‘Raja Hindustani’.

It seemed that the two would rule over Bollywood for another decade or two. But things were never the same after Nadeem’s name cropped up in the killing of a music baron and he fled to London. The duo still kept providing scores together in films such as ‘Kasoor’ and ‘Dhadkan’. The two split once, then reunited. This time, sadly, the separation is final.

The trailer for the film, Margarita With A Straw, opens with Laila, played by Kalki Koechlin applying lipstick in front of a mirror and heading out to meet a boy. Just another teenager ticking off a rite of passage. Unlike most teenagers however, Laila has cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder which affects muscle function, so she is on a wheelchair and her speech is impaired. Laila's disability is an important detail, but even in a three-minute trailer, it's not the focus and never given top billing. Releasing across India on April 17, Margarita With A Straw is a rare film that focuses on a disabled protagonist without resorting to pit , sympathy, villainy or cure.

Laila is a challenging role for any actor. Even Koechlin, who has something of a monopoly on fearless roles in Bollywood with films like Dev.D, That Girl In Yellow Boots and Shanghai. She worked extensively for six months to get right the distinctive speech patterns and physicality necessary for the role and says the film is unique in many ways.

“We never talk about disability and sexuality on the same page. What also struck me about the script was that it wasn't preachy. If you took the disability out, it was still an interesting film about a young, horny, awkward teenager and a coming of age story. It's actually a romcom about love and life,“ she says.

This is rarely the approach used in Hindi cinema. In Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara, Langda Tyagi had a first name. But his parents (and the scriptwriters) needn't have bothered because it was his limp that became his calling card, quite literally. Ethan Mascarenhas in Guzaarish spent an entire film wanting to die rather than remain a dependant quadriplegic. And Gabbar in Sholay believed that living as a double amputee was a fate far worse than death, a punishment he doled out to Thakur.

The Bollywood environment of exaggerated perfection also makes it more hostile to physical disability. The onscreen disability of choice is usually blindness because it interferes the least with an actor's looks and speech delivery. If it can be cured miraculously by an operation or a divine statue or some blunt force trauma, even better.

Rustom Irani is an independent filmmaker, guest columnist and more than 60% disabled wheelchair user. He recently finished writing a ten-part series for Mumbai Mirror called 'Mumbai On Wheels' which focussed on life in Mumbai as a disabled person. According to him, recent Bollywood movies haven't made much progress in creating characters who are more than just a sum of their disabilities. “Except Barfi!, one can't really cite any progress or evolution in a Bollywood film. There are a few like Sanjay Dutt's blind turn in Dushman, Vidya Balan in Guru or Amitabh Bachchan's character recruiting three blind men to rob a bank in Aankhen. But if you go back a bit, then the 1986 film Qatl is a great film featuring a disabled blind person played by Sanjeev Kumar planning to murder his wife. Koshish in 1976 had two deaf-mutes fall in love and raise a normal child in a noisy world. In 1964, Dosti had a blind man piggybacking his physically disabled friend and teaming up to make a living. Show disabled people with flaws, evil, humour and I might say we are getting there,“ says Irani.

Shonali Bose, the director of Margarita With A Straw, is deeply familiar with cerebral palsy and disability. “I've grown up with my cousin Malini Chib who has acute cerebral palsy and my mother and aunt worked in schools that had kids with cerebral palsy. Malini and I were like any other siblings with our fights etc. and I never felt the need to tiptoe around her disability .“

Internationally, many acclaimed films like Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot and James Marsh's The Theory of Everything feature true stories of incredible grit that triumphed over disability. But when Bose set out to write the film, she was certain that Laila's story would not be a heroic triumph against adversity. “Within the first ten minutes of the film you will get past the disability. Not only will you not pity Laila, you will also not put her on a pedestal. We tend to put the disabled on a pedestal and make them amazing, heroic people. We didn't want to go down that route. We wanted to go with a character that was ordinary.“

Rustom Irani has a handy list of disability tropes that need to disappear from Bollywood. “First, if a handicapped character runs a race against an able-bodied person and loses, it's like, 'Wow! A+ for effort.' Why? They shouldn't be competing with the able-bodied in the first place. Or they should get really good, like in 'Iqbal'. Secondly, the handicapped character is either totally submissive or going all out with raging fury. Sanjay Dutt in Saajan is spurned early by a woman who says that no female would ever consider him worthy because of his disability. He accepts this and Madhuri Dixit's character has to go to great lengths to win him over. Good luck with that in the real world. Thirdly, please don't enhance the other senses and skills of disabled characters to superhuman levels because they lack a particular physical ability. And finally, no miracle cures.“