Sur na saje kya gaaun mein....

Heard someone saying ‘every song has its DEY’! Sans this Dey- Prabodh Chandra Dey aka manna dey- songs are never going to be the same again... I faintly remember as a very young boy I used to get glued to my transistor to listen to an oriya song 'jamuna jaa na, jaa na jamuna, kadamba mula re luchichi se kanha...." the singer of which I had absolutely no idea about...Sometime down the line when I kind of developed some elementary sense of/for music, it was the velvet voice in that  duet- 'aja sanam madhur chandni mein hum'  from the hindi movie 'chori chori' took me into its grip....Melody at its typical best and manna-da doing what he always does the best... The inimitable rendering in 'laga chunri mein daag'  from 'dil hi to hai' was just a chance stumble upon and remains one of my ATFs till date... The taraana to end that song, I reckon is the best possible thing to have ever happened to hindi film music.. Those were the times when we were not blessed with getting any song that you want at your finger tip. All India Radio and/or cassette tapes were the only resort. There was this friend of mine in Hyderabad, Satya who must have taken pain to sing (on demand)the taraana for us umpteen number of times , anytime anywhere- many times reluctantly and understandably so.... Some of my Bengali hostel mates introduced me to the bangla gem- 'coffee houser sei adda ta aaj aar nei' and ‘bado adorer chhoto boun'. I don’t think I can thank them enough. As if those were not enough, the silken touch in 'ae meri zohra jabeen' stamped manna da's impact somewhere in me which later got reinforced by the 'basant bahar' locking-horns-of-the-titans rendering (with pt Bhimsen Joshi), 'ketaki gulab juhi champak bane phoole....' . Another dear friend Bama can only vouch for the number of times we would have passionately listened to and endlessly discussed this particular song.

‘Coffee houser sei adda ta’ and ‘laga chunri mein daag’ will walk into my top-10 all time favourites, if I am put at gun point and asked to pick such a list. Had Manna-da sung only these two and nothing else, I repeat nothing else, still he would be a darling of same stature that he is right now.

I cannot possibly imagine the movie Anand being complete without manna da’s immaculate rendering ‘zindagi kaisi hai paheli haye, kabhi to hasaye kabhi to rulaye.’ At the same time, I don’t think anyone else could have done better justice to Jaydev’s mesmerizing composition of Harivanshrai Bachchan’s ‘madhushala’.

It is a no-brainer that for a classical number Manna-da must have been the first choice for many music composers of yesteryears. But he was equally preferred for many unforgettable melodies. I was always in awe of Manna-da’s  versatility that he established by singing songs of an incredibly  wide range of genres and singing them with impeccable ease . While we could easily associate the songs like ‘ sur na saje kya gaaun mein’, ‘puchho na  kaise’, ‘kaun aya mere man ke dware’, ‘jhanak jhanak tore baje payaliya’, etc. for their classical base, others like ‘aao twist karein’ , ‘ae mere pyare watan’ , ‘chalat musafir moh liya re’ , ‘masti bhara yeh sama’, ‘yeh raat bheegi bheegi’, ‘bade miyan deewane’ etc. are not the usual suspects that one would typically attribute to manna da’s kind of singing. May be a Md. Rafi or  a Talat Mahmood could easily cross any unaided mind.

Thank you Manna-da for being such a huge reason for the happiness of many. As you leave for your heavenly abode I can only feel the void and an irreparable loss. RIP.