Creating "Bada natkhat hai re Krishna Kanhaiyya"

Shakti Samanta had outlined to RD something that sounded to Pancham like the usual bhajan situation (on Sharmila Tagore) in Amar Prem. "And I had come up with the standard bhajan tune for it," revealed Pancham. "But Dada was there when I was giving the finishing touches to the tune and wanted from me the precise details of the song situation. When I gave him a picture of the setting in which Lata Mangeshkar was to render the number on Sharmila Tagore, Dada was aghast.

"But where's the composer in you in this tune, Pancham?" he wanted to know. "So what if Shakti said it's the usual bhajan situation. Still it's a most creative situation for any composer. For Sharmila here is something more than the nautch-girl she plays. Her motherly insticts have been aroused by that kid. Your tune therefore must communicate all the agony of the nautch-girl wanting to be the mother she can never be. Do it again, your way, but with the moving human situation in mind."

"That's how," admitted Pancham, "my Amar Prem tune finally came out of Lata's thrush throat as Bada natkhat hai re Krishna Kanhaiyya. It was my tune and yet not my tune, for it was Dada who had taught me to put the right shade of feeling into it."

There was thus something of Dada Burman, something recognisably his own, in the music so trendily made available by Rahul Dev Burman. This is what saw RD score as no other composer did in the annals of Hindi cinema. There has been only one SD, to be sure. But there has also been only one RD. Now both are no more. And popular music, in the words of Gulzar, is reduced to a plastic art.