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I have a performance coming up in which I will be giving a short description on the story behind some of the songs we'll be performing. I tend to remember things better when I've written them down, so I'm writing them here. This may be of no interest to many of you, but it may be of some interest to some of you, so rather than writing up a Word document in private, I'm posting it here instead.
Some background on Bollywood
Bollywood is a movie in the Hindi language that encorporates music, song, and dance in much the same fashion that our own musicals from the '40s and '50s did. Think Fred Estair and Ginger Rogers, only made today with modern pop music and hip-hop dance routines. It's not just a quaint niche genre in India, it's one of the largest and most popular genres, with stars every bit as big as Angelina Jolie and Wil Smith, and incorporating rock, disco, pop, hip hop, classic Indian music, and rural Indian folk music.
The stories are everything from traditional fables and folkore, to modern romantic comedies, to action-suspense films. The characters break into song, often using poetry as the base for the lyrics, many times with huge musical numbers involving complicated costume and scenery, to help tell the story.
Maahi Ve
This is from the movie Kal Ho Naa Ho, or Tomorrow May Never Come. The story is of a woman, Naina, from an unhappy home. Her father committed suicide, leaving behind a wife with an adult daughter, a pre-teen son, a young adopted daughter, and a very bitter mother (Naina's grandmother). The mother and grandmother bicker constantly and the oldest daughter, Naina, never got over her father's death. Consequently, she remains unmarried and uninterested in any man.
One day, a stranger moves into the neighborhood. Her neighbor's nephew, Aman, moves into the house across the street, and into Naina's heart. But Aman pushes her into the arms of her best friend, Rohit, who has a crush on Naina, and they decide to marry. Rohit and Naina come from different cultural backgrounds, although both Indian. Rohit's family is very wealthy and largely ignorant of other people's customs. Naina's family comes from the Punjabi region of India, which is known for being more rural and more folksy. When the bride's family arrives for the traditional meeting of the groom's family, Rohit's parents put on a song and dance number that is intended to welcome the bride's family, but instead makes things awkward by displaying privileged ignorance.
To cover the awkwardness, Aman, the perpetual Mr. Fixit, instigates his own song and dance in the Punjabi style of Naina's family as a thank you for the groom's family's effort. Maahi Ve is that song. It is a song of praise for the bride's beauty and the groom's luck and happiness for having found her, with an interlude from the bride's mother about her own happiness for her daughter's upcoming wedding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajP0JwJ0gWw
Desi Girl
Desi Girl comes from the movie Dostana, a movie set in Miami, FL. Two young men, who don't know each other, find themselves in need of a place to live at about the same time. While apartment-hunting, they meet at a very upscale apartment that has 2 of its 3 bedrooms for rent. The landlady will not rent to men because her single niece is living in the third bedroom. So the men agree to pretend to be gay in order to get the rooms.
What they don't count on is both of them falling for the pretty niece, Neha.
The two men attempt to woo Neha while simultaneously maintaining their gay charade. The song, Desi Girl, is one such attempt. At a nightclub, the men break into a song about how Desi girls are the best girls in the world.
The term "Desi" refers to a person of South Asian heritage, from either India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka or Afghanistan. It is Sanskrit for "one from our country" but is generally used for people who do not more strongly identify with a particular nation, sub-culture, or caste, but as just plain South Asians or desis. This comes from the massive immigration of Indian people outside of India, and even the mixing of subcultures within India itself.
So, for example, instead of saying that I'm Mexican, I might say that I'm Latina, or instead of saying I'm Scottish, I might say that I'm Western European. Desi is similar to saying Latina or Western European.
Because of this mass immigration, there is also a new "fusion" culture, a mixing of traditional Indian culture with Western cultures in food, clothing, and music. Urban Desi is a particular genre of music that mixes Indian music with Western urban music like pop and hip hop. So the term means both traditional South Asian and also Western-Indian fusion. Which meaning is being used depends on the context.
So, in this song, it is probably the Westernized Indian girl that the men are singing about, judging by the modern music style and clothing in the movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrRT--8s1M
Bumbro
Bumbro is a song based on an old Kashmirian folk saying about how although Bumblebee and Narcissus aspire to be together, they can never be together in their lives. The narcissus flower blooms early in the season and withers before the bumblebee arrives to pollenate it. From this folk saying came a folk song called Bumbro Bumbro (or Bombro Bombro, or Bhumro Bhumro, or a couple of other spellings) all about the bumblebee bringing luck for a wedding.
In 1953, a poet from Kashmir wrote the first Kashmirian opera called Bombur ta Yemberzal, where his composer took the tunes of already existing popular Kashmiri songs and varied their rhythm to create his score. For the song Bombro Bombro, its traditional Chakri tune was tweaked with a faster tempo to create a memorable song, a song that a generation of Kashmiris were to sing.
In 2003, the song from the opera was put into the Bollywood action film called Mission Kashmir, which gave it new life and a whole new generation of fans. The song itself has little to do with the movie except that the main characters are from Kashmir. The female lead character becomes a television performer who takes this folk song from her village childhood and uses her fame to put the song on national television. Unlike many other Bollywood movies, this song isn't used in place of dialog or to explain a character's feelings. Instead, it is used to tie together the main characters' present day with their past, growing up in a tiny village singing folk songs as children.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpa19RaFJpo
Taal se Taal
A young man, a son of one of the wealthiest men in the country, visits one of the rural areas of India. While backpacking through the countryside, he comes across a pretty young folk singer, whose father is one of the greatest folk musicians in the land. He finds her singing the song Taal, the song of a girl entreating her future lover to find her.
The young man and the folk singer fall in love, against their parents wishes. The families are from two different worlds and do not believe they should mix. The rich family takes the young man away, back to the city, but the girl convinces her father to go after them.
While in the city, the naive father and daughter discover that the father's folk songs have been stolen by a big city corporate executive, who remixes them to pop beats, adds a huge orchestra and dance ensemble, and re-releases them on the radio to make millions, all without paying the original composer, or even asking permission. This is the remix of the folk song that the music exec. steals, adding in a complication to what would otherwise be just another Romeo and Juliet-like love story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUVP9nGiKA
Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai
This movie stars a bad guy as the main character. Ballu is a criminal, forced by poverty and the corruption of a major crime boss to steal, and put in jail by a police officer named Ram. Inspector Ram visits is cop girlfriend, Ganga, and while distracted, Ballu escapes prison. To save her boyfriend's job and reputation, Ganga secretly goes undercover to find and capture Ballu. This is the only movie I am dancing to that I haven't seen yet, and the various synopsis say that Ganga goes undercover as a belly dancer, a street dancer, a "street girl", and a dancing girl. So I'm not sure if any of those titles imply any kind of prostitution or if it's just dancing.
Choli Ke Peeche is the most famous song from this movie, where Ganga manages to attract Ballu's attention. This song initially got banned from the airwaves because it translates to "what's beneath the blouse?", but the song is talking about her heart, not any external body parts, and was eventually allowed to be played.
The song is of a young girl looking for her love. But her aspirations are very high. No ordinary man will do - he must be very wealthy and she must be his first wife (remember that polygyny is legal here). The song is sung between the young girl looking for her love, and an older, jaded woman who thinks she is being foolish. The young girl has many lovers and suitors, the song says, but none of them are good enough for her. The song is intended to seduce Ballu so she can infiltrate his gang and re-capture him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa8M3cr6eko
We have two "party songs" from movies I haven't watched yet also. These are popular songs that we don't have any choreographed routine for, but we go out and improvise in the audience to get the audience up and dancing with us. This is particularly popular at weddings to signify the end of our performance and the beginning of the reception where everyone gets drunk and dances. Since I haven't seen the movies, I'm not sure where the songs fit into the story.
Mauja Mauja is from the movie Jab We Met, which the summary says is the story of a man and a chance encounter with an impulsive woman on a train. It sounds a little like Forces of Nature with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck, only it's the girl who has a fiance she's trying to get to, but events seem to conspire to keep them apart, and her with the new guy she just met. Mauja Mauja translates to "fun and frolic" and seems to be about just relaxing and having a good time as, apparently, the crazy girl he met has taught him to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKfMivAKnI
Om Shanti Om is a movie about an actor named Om who falls in love with a superstar named Shanti, and they both tragically die in a fire on the set of a movie they make together. 30 years later, Om is reincarnated and determined to punish the person responsible for starting the fire. So he decides to recreate the movie in order to expose the truth. The full song is a 10-minute Who's Who of Bollywood, as many of the top performers drop in to sing a line or two from the song, which seems to say nothing more than "this is crazy night, filled with craziness". I get the impression that this might be some sort of party celebrating the new remake of the movie, but I don't think it's the wrap party because the very end of the video seems to suggest that our hero, Om-reincarnate, has just come face to face with the man he thinks is his killer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UNhUhTgC9Q
So those are all the songs that I have learned so far and the movies I have watched. My teacher, Amira, will also be performing to the songs Sheila and Munni Badnaam.
Some background on Bollywood
Bollywood is a movie in the Hindi language that encorporates music, song, and dance in much the same fashion that our own musicals from the '40s and '50s did. Think Fred Estair and Ginger Rogers, only made today with modern pop music and hip-hop dance routines. It's not just a quaint niche genre in India, it's one of the largest and most popular genres, with stars every bit as big as Angelina Jolie and Wil Smith, and incorporating rock, disco, pop, hip hop, classic Indian music, and rural Indian folk music.
The stories are everything from traditional fables and folkore, to modern romantic comedies, to action-suspense films. The characters break into song, often using poetry as the base for the lyrics, many times with huge musical numbers involving complicated costume and scenery, to help tell the story.
Maahi Ve
This is from the movie Kal Ho Naa Ho, or Tomorrow May Never Come. The story is of a woman, Naina, from an unhappy home. Her father committed suicide, leaving behind a wife with an adult daughter, a pre-teen son, a young adopted daughter, and a very bitter mother (Naina's grandmother). The mother and grandmother bicker constantly and the oldest daughter, Naina, never got over her father's death. Consequently, she remains unmarried and uninterested in any man.
One day, a stranger moves into the neighborhood. Her neighbor's nephew, Aman, moves into the house across the street, and into Naina's heart. But Aman pushes her into the arms of her best friend, Rohit, who has a crush on Naina, and they decide to marry. Rohit and Naina come from different cultural backgrounds, although both Indian. Rohit's family is very wealthy and largely ignorant of other people's customs. Naina's family comes from the Punjabi region of India, which is known for being more rural and more folksy. When the bride's family arrives for the traditional meeting of the groom's family, Rohit's parents put on a song and dance number that is intended to welcome the bride's family, but instead makes things awkward by displaying privileged ignorance.
To cover the awkwardness, Aman, the perpetual Mr. Fixit, instigates his own song and dance in the Punjabi style of Naina's family as a thank you for the groom's family's effort. Maahi Ve is that song. It is a song of praise for the bride's beauty and the groom's luck and happiness for having found her, with an interlude from the bride's mother about her own happiness for her daughter's upcoming wedding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajP0JwJ0gWw
Desi Girl
Desi Girl comes from the movie Dostana, a movie set in Miami, FL. Two young men, who don't know each other, find themselves in need of a place to live at about the same time. While apartment-hunting, they meet at a very upscale apartment that has 2 of its 3 bedrooms for rent. The landlady will not rent to men because her single niece is living in the third bedroom. So the men agree to pretend to be gay in order to get the rooms.
What they don't count on is both of them falling for the pretty niece, Neha.
The two men attempt to woo Neha while simultaneously maintaining their gay charade. The song, Desi Girl, is one such attempt. At a nightclub, the men break into a song about how Desi girls are the best girls in the world.
The term "Desi" refers to a person of South Asian heritage, from either India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka or Afghanistan. It is Sanskrit for "one from our country" but is generally used for people who do not more strongly identify with a particular nation, sub-culture, or caste, but as just plain South Asians or desis. This comes from the massive immigration of Indian people outside of India, and even the mixing of subcultures within India itself.
So, for example, instead of saying that I'm Mexican, I might say that I'm Latina, or instead of saying I'm Scottish, I might say that I'm Western European. Desi is similar to saying Latina or Western European.
Because of this mass immigration, there is also a new "fusion" culture, a mixing of traditional Indian culture with Western cultures in food, clothing, and music. Urban Desi is a particular genre of music that mixes Indian music with Western urban music like pop and hip hop. So the term means both traditional South Asian and also Western-Indian fusion. Which meaning is being used depends on the context.
So, in this song, it is probably the Westernized Indian girl that the men are singing about, judging by the modern music style and clothing in the movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrRT--8s1M
Bumbro
Bumbro is a song based on an old Kashmirian folk saying about how although Bumblebee and Narcissus aspire to be together, they can never be together in their lives. The narcissus flower blooms early in the season and withers before the bumblebee arrives to pollenate it. From this folk saying came a folk song called Bumbro Bumbro (or Bombro Bombro, or Bhumro Bhumro, or a couple of other spellings) all about the bumblebee bringing luck for a wedding.
In 1953, a poet from Kashmir wrote the first Kashmirian opera called Bombur ta Yemberzal, where his composer took the tunes of already existing popular Kashmiri songs and varied their rhythm to create his score. For the song Bombro Bombro, its traditional Chakri tune was tweaked with a faster tempo to create a memorable song, a song that a generation of Kashmiris were to sing.
In 2003, the song from the opera was put into the Bollywood action film called Mission Kashmir, which gave it new life and a whole new generation of fans. The song itself has little to do with the movie except that the main characters are from Kashmir. The female lead character becomes a television performer who takes this folk song from her village childhood and uses her fame to put the song on national television. Unlike many other Bollywood movies, this song isn't used in place of dialog or to explain a character's feelings. Instead, it is used to tie together the main characters' present day with their past, growing up in a tiny village singing folk songs as children.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpa19RaFJpo
Taal se Taal
A young man, a son of one of the wealthiest men in the country, visits one of the rural areas of India. While backpacking through the countryside, he comes across a pretty young folk singer, whose father is one of the greatest folk musicians in the land. He finds her singing the song Taal, the song of a girl entreating her future lover to find her.
The young man and the folk singer fall in love, against their parents wishes. The families are from two different worlds and do not believe they should mix. The rich family takes the young man away, back to the city, but the girl convinces her father to go after them.
While in the city, the naive father and daughter discover that the father's folk songs have been stolen by a big city corporate executive, who remixes them to pop beats, adds a huge orchestra and dance ensemble, and re-releases them on the radio to make millions, all without paying the original composer, or even asking permission. This is the remix of the folk song that the music exec. steals, adding in a complication to what would otherwise be just another Romeo and Juliet-like love story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUVP9nGiKA
Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai
This movie stars a bad guy as the main character. Ballu is a criminal, forced by poverty and the corruption of a major crime boss to steal, and put in jail by a police officer named Ram. Inspector Ram visits is cop girlfriend, Ganga, and while distracted, Ballu escapes prison. To save her boyfriend's job and reputation, Ganga secretly goes undercover to find and capture Ballu. This is the only movie I am dancing to that I haven't seen yet, and the various synopsis say that Ganga goes undercover as a belly dancer, a street dancer, a "street girl", and a dancing girl. So I'm not sure if any of those titles imply any kind of prostitution or if it's just dancing.
Choli Ke Peeche is the most famous song from this movie, where Ganga manages to attract Ballu's attention. This song initially got banned from the airwaves because it translates to "what's beneath the blouse?", but the song is talking about her heart, not any external body parts, and was eventually allowed to be played.
The song is of a young girl looking for her love. But her aspirations are very high. No ordinary man will do - he must be very wealthy and she must be his first wife (remember that polygyny is legal here). The song is sung between the young girl looking for her love, and an older, jaded woman who thinks she is being foolish. The young girl has many lovers and suitors, the song says, but none of them are good enough for her. The song is intended to seduce Ballu so she can infiltrate his gang and re-capture him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa8M3cr6eko
We have two "party songs" from movies I haven't watched yet also. These are popular songs that we don't have any choreographed routine for, but we go out and improvise in the audience to get the audience up and dancing with us. This is particularly popular at weddings to signify the end of our performance and the beginning of the reception where everyone gets drunk and dances. Since I haven't seen the movies, I'm not sure where the songs fit into the story.
Mauja Mauja is from the movie Jab We Met, which the summary says is the story of a man and a chance encounter with an impulsive woman on a train. It sounds a little like Forces of Nature with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck, only it's the girl who has a fiance she's trying to get to, but events seem to conspire to keep them apart, and her with the new guy she just met. Mauja Mauja translates to "fun and frolic" and seems to be about just relaxing and having a good time as, apparently, the crazy girl he met has taught him to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTKfMivAKnI
Om Shanti Om is a movie about an actor named Om who falls in love with a superstar named Shanti, and they both tragically die in a fire on the set of a movie they make together. 30 years later, Om is reincarnated and determined to punish the person responsible for starting the fire. So he decides to recreate the movie in order to expose the truth. The full song is a 10-minute Who's Who of Bollywood, as many of the top performers drop in to sing a line or two from the song, which seems to say nothing more than "this is crazy night, filled with craziness". I get the impression that this might be some sort of party celebrating the new remake of the movie, but I don't think it's the wrap party because the very end of the video seems to suggest that our hero, Om-reincarnate, has just come face to face with the man he thinks is his killer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UNhUhTgC9Q
So those are all the songs that I have learned so far and the movies I have watched. My teacher, Amira, will also be performing to the songs Sheila and Munni Badnaam.
