Asha, the Hope, and Tai, the Elder Sister
To me, the demise of Asha Bhosle signifies the "Hope of
my Elder Sister." In this war-torn world, she spreads hope through her
eternal longing for love in "Salona Sajan." Amid the darkness
engulfing West Asia and the Middle East, Asha Tai evokes Macbeth's words:
"Let not light see my dark desires." Through her melancholic and
lustful "Tanha Tanha," she illuminates humanity's dark desires, while
in A.R. Rahman's "Kahi Aag Lage," she cries out in fiery defiance.
To imitate human life in a futuristic world of robotics and
humanoids, one must sing like Asha Bhosle, layering emotions as she did in her
songs. As musicians and vocalists compete for coexistence with AI-generated
voices and music, they must hum the Asha-R.D. Burman duets—manifestations of
soul and blood that, like power, should not be concentrated but transcended and
distributed.
Asha Tai is not merely a relic of the past; she embodies
hope for a dystopian future, where lust, anger, hope, love, and desire might
seem utopian amid a synthetic civilisation. Her tenor, soprano, alap, meend,
and operatic flourishes once echoed in our childhood imitations. Now, with her
passage from mortality to immortality, she opens the doorway to "Asha and
Hope" for generations to come. Her legacy and body of work will course
through humanity like blood, imbuing it with vital power.
Therefore, for the vital power to sustain a future conscious
state, Asha Tai and her music will blend Western Materialism and Eastern
Spiritualism. For instance, the spiritual lineage of Raag Kamod in “Jaane Kya
Baat Hai” from the film Sunny will mix with “Duniya Main Logo” ko to bring in
two different dimensions of restlessness in a human soul. A soul that starts to
cry out with “Jane Ja” from Yeh Jawani Yeh Diwani, then questions a
free-spirited soul and its longing through AR Rahman’s “Rangeela Re”. As an
avid music fan of Asha Bhonsle, the same Rangeela Re was a delight of evolution
of music from the “Rangeela Re Tere Man Main” of her own sister Lata
Mangeshkar. The two songs in two time frames clearly capture the way our
society moved forward from a spiritual, soulful society towards a materialistic
society. Both were contextual in their own times. While Lata’s Rangeela Re was
about a “Brahmin” and “Kshatriya” society of Vivekananda where culture,
consciousness, intellect flourished, Rahman’s Rangeela Re through Asha Tai
brought the “Vaishya”, “Shudra” into the music. It became the music of trade,
mass, people, commerce and equality. The portrayal of the AR Rahman song on the
film screen also showed the people in the same free-spirited, equal
evolutionary form of society. Asha Tai brought it to us. In a world of
discrimination, religion, she brought equality and light of the morning like
her song - “Bheeni Bheeni Bhor” through the “Raga Mian Ki Todi” and “Adha
Teental”.
The rhythm of the song, which is half-filled like a cup,
only projects the essence of incompletion of life and suggests that Asha Tai
only made us say - “Dil Padosi Hai (1987)”. This is because only when the heart
is your known neighbour, can you make a discriminatory society as an equal one!
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