Jhappi to Bappi Da
When I was a kid, I found this song impossibly beautiful, inside of my limited Hindi, and my desire to rubberstamp the statement Hindi is not our National Language over every Chitrahaar number that I fell in love with.
That somebody could have shrunk to nothing more than a pair of eyes with waiting, only to see another person again. A smol part of it is this 1985, comeback-Dimple effect. The rest is the music.
I didn't worry so much about music-directors then. Which meant that the surprise I felt eventually was doguni. When I found that Bappi was the hand-waver, and thus spake orchustra. Hai hai, as my last bench friend Mohammad Yahya used to say.
Bappi Lahiri, whadda man. Full of surprises, the Big Fucking Lebowski of Bad Taste, and occasionally, of genuine sexxxxay music.
But how does one remember a jewelled imperturbable? You may each have your moment to remember him from the endless library we have before us, but for me, nothing can match the attempted sadness in the line 'Don't reject me, I'm a learner'.
What a genius bit of writing, in a genius film. It's as if the lyricist woke up one day, and said, to unclog himself, who is alive that will belt out this song I have not yet written ? And Bappi da's smiling visage hove into view like the unsinkable Titanic with its nose mildly in the air because it is from another universe where the icebergs step aside and say, auh, sawrie, pehle aap, and then the song just wrote itself. Talking of which, Celine Dion rani, if only you had met him. Rescued by Bappi da would have been your epitaph.
Hunterrr is a jolly, eng-peoples film, but what it gets right unlike all the storied bleddy exemplars of its genre is a tonality that encompasses the suppressed cuss-word, the half-tossed joke that lands sideways but within sight, and a zero-bullshit account of the general randiness and conjunctival glad-eye that seemed to beset the generations that grew up under the unchanging Indian sun from the 1970s all the way up to the early 1990s. And this song, delivered lugubriously and luxuriously, like as if the news-reader doing the weather-report got a memo saying put enthu, but only little bit, and he forgot the orders halfway.
Here is that gem, with the lord of the oversized rings merely singing, and the Husha Huthup sari vibes, but baby, trigger pe ungli hai/man ikdum jungli hai is a line for the ages.
He once stood as BJP candidate and lost. Frankly, his is the only desertion I might have forgiven. Heck, if he had stood in Bangalore, I might have even voted for him. Go well, tuber-shaped man, and maker of all the jollies of my youth.