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OLD WORLD CHARM Youngsters are hooked

If you think old Bollywood tunes are dead and gone, making way for racy and raunchy music for Gen-X, think again! They are coming back with a vengeance. Music stores and the MP3 pirated CD scene are stormed with numbers from Bollywood oldies.

And no it’s not the remix variety of music but pure oldies in their original avatar. Its not the grey-haired who demand this music in nostalgia, but the young yuppies with snazzy iPods.

Twenty-year old techie, Abhijit says that though he was not aware of the beauty of the oldies till about two years back. He is now hooked onto them. Listening to an FM radio station on his way to work, Abhijit was struck by the song a radio station was playing and decided to explore the world of old Bollywood numbers. He remembered it was Lata Mangeshkar’s “Yeh shaam ki tanhaaiyan, aise mey tera gham”.

Songs from that era are a perfect way to open your heart out to that someone special, says Mukund, a third year BA student in one of the city’s upmarket colleges. Humming a number from the film “Taj Mahal” — “Paanv choo lene do phoolonko inayat hogi” —Mukund says he had presented an MP3 player loaded with old love songs to his girl friend who is a die-hard Led Zepplin buff.

The sad part is that the films with these songs are not in circulation anymore and videos of these songs are in great demand. There are very few clippings available, but they sell like hot cakes, says a video store owner. At the same place, youngsters also come to load their iPods and pen drives with old songs.

Asha Bhonsle’s cabaret numbers are also in great demand. Abdul Rauf says he has sold not less than 500 copies of cabaret songs of the 1970s, and the demand is going up by the day.

M. RAGHURAM

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