Runa's back
ANJANA RAJAN
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Scheduled to perform at The Hindu Friday Review Music Festival, Runa Laila refuses to fade.
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Think of Runa Laila, think of her hit numbers like "Mera babu chhail chhabeela" or "Dama dam mast kalandar". Remember her dancing across the small screen or on stage in front of her fans. Remember the controversies... There were even some who felt she was an affront to the dignity of vocal music! But through all the criticism and debate, there was never any question of the acceptability of the popular singer as `one of us'. That she carries a Bangladesh passport is secondary to her being one of the most popular singers of the late 1970s and 80s. So it is with any of the musicians from the sub continent. All the political rhetoric notwithstanding, they all belong to `us' - whether Mehdi Hasan, Farida Khanum, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Noor Jehan or others.
Runa reiterates the feeling when she says, "I've never ever felt that I was foreign. Every time I've performed in India, everyone accepted me in such an open way. I've never found anyone made any distinction on the basis of country, or religion or culture."
And now she is all set to return to India when she performs in Chennai at The Hindu Friday Review Music Festival starting mid-November. If we have not heard from Runa too much in the interim, it is not because she has been idle. Still busy with performances and recordings, she even has two albums recorded with Indian music directors Tabun and Bappi Lahiri. While one is to be a Baba Films release, the other is by Venus. Though recorded about two years ago, they are not yet released, and the singer who started her career as a child star confesses to being in the dark about the reasons.
As for growing up, the music industry has changed almost beyond recognition since the good old days when Runa as a child sat down for rehearsals with the music director and the orchestra before recording, when the entire song had to be taken from the top if any one of the musicians made a mistake, when the recording process was more human than mechanical. "That's life, I guess," she muses on the new situation, where a singer might be all alone in a studio to record only her own track, and never set eyes on her fellow musicians - even provide her own chorus! "Yeah, I do miss the old way," she admits.
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Chennai and Tamil Nadu
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