This is an excellent review from India Today that nicely outlines the goodness of the newly arrived book in the world market.....
If any Bollywood music director's biography can bring tears to the
eyes, it can only be that of Rahul Dev Burman, merely a commercial
composer in his lifetime but an icon after his untimely death in 1994.
Biographers Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal have done wonders
with Pancham's life and times, bringing to bear their extraordinary
knowledge of Indian classical, Jazz and Western pop with a gripping
narrative style.
They never get maudlin, capturing RD's chequered career as composer
and human being in an almost prosaic way but leave the reader touched
to the core. Pancham's humiliation at the hands of unclassy producers,
greedy associates and progressively dumbed-down tastes of listeners,
makes the reader feel the pangs almost as if he were Pancham himself.
So, when the magnificent swan song, 1942:A Love Story, comes as the
grand finale to the creativity of a man ahead of his times, one cannot
but feel moisture on the eyelids.
Personally speaking, I was lukewarm to RD in his heyday like many in
my generation. Having grown up with O.P. Nayyar and Shankar-Jaikishan
in the main, and keenly followed the seesaw battle between Laxmikant-
Pyarelal and RD on Binaca Geetmala every Wednesday at 8 p.m., I always
felt S.D. Burman's maverick son was too experimental and inadequately
hummable. But now that the generation after me has discovered RD and
incessantly plays his compositions on fm channels, I realise how
tuneful and original even his mediocre scores were.
On the subject of originality, RD was the first Bollywood music
director to be seriously assaulted by purist music critics for
"lifting" tunes from Western sources. The biography addresses this
charge squarely, with RD quoted as saying that every composer is
influenced or inspired by others' compositions. Shivaji Chatterjee,
singer of the Hemanta Mukherjee-esque Yeh safar bahut hai kathin magar
(1942), recalls how RD subjected him to various strands of Western
music for seven consecutive hours once, and "I was struck that he knew
all the songs by heart".
But then, Pancham was mostly inspired by the legacy of great music,
rarely a deliberate copycat unlike the music directors he lost out to
in his later years. In an interview, Asha Bhonsle told me some years
ago that she would often return late at night after a song recording
to find Pancham sitting before a record changer, cigarette between his
fingers, oblivious to the world, listening to a bewildering array of
Western and Indian classical numbers. Music throbbed in his veins; few
Indian composers knew music as well as he did, it was kalaa, not
commerce for him.
The book chronicles RD's journey from childhood, his fascination with
music-a trait that ran in his genes thanks to the genius of SD and
Meera Dev Burman. What raises the book above the mundane is that
Bhattacharjee and Vittal deconstruct almost each and every
composition, analysing whether Komal Ni or Pa have been infused into
the tune structure in an unconventional way. What struck me, for
example, was the similarity of tune the authors point out between Ek
ladki ko dekha (1942) and SD's Phoolon ke rang se, Hindi version of
the original Borney gandhey.
Challenged by mediocrity and worse, the composer of timeless hits of
the 1970s, RD fell back on rehashing his own earlier numbers or
lifting much more directly than ever before during the 1990s, but
refused to acknowledge that he could be outstripped by the disco
dancers. The man who gave such immortal yet varied music as in Teesri
Manzil, Jawani Diwani, Apna Desh, Amar Prem and Parinda, to name just
a handful, fell drastically to life's many betrayals, which robbed him
of his incredible creativity.
This is a truly authoritative biography, feast not just for RD's
myriad admirers, but also an entire new generation of Hindi film music
lovers in India and abroad. He fashioned our tastes for decades after
him and this biography is a genuine music lovers' tribute. Embellished
with an amazing array of anecdotes, interviews with almost every
living industry person associated with RD, apart from incisive
observations by his contemporaries and even competitors (like
Pyarelal), the book deserves all the praise it gets.
Most importantly, it lists all his musicians, arrangers and the
unsung, unheralded men and women who bring us such magnificent
melodies even today. The authors also recall tensions within the
group, particularly the widespread dislike of Sapan Chakraborty on
whom RD came to depend heavily in his frustrated later years. Pancham
was extremely mindful of his associates and his biographers have been
true to the icon's beliefs.
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