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Indian Express

‘Param Sundari' song ‘Pardesiya' shows how fall Bollywood has fallen — unoriginal, uninspired, running after numbers

Yesterday, listening to 'Tumse mil ke' from Main Hoon Na had me wondering why Sonu Nigam doesn't sing more often. Even in the peppy dance number, the slight tremor in his voice when he sings 'Dil toh hai mera tanha, jaana, aao tum mehfil ho' (My heart is lonely, with your arrival, comes a soiree), encapsulates the sincerity of a love that still makes the heart flutter. Later that day, Nigam's new song, 'Pardesiya' from Siddharth Malhotra and Jahnvi Kapoor's upcoming film Param Sundari hit our Instagram feed. It would have been a rare moment of wishful thinking except the song sounded like a warped version of A R Rahman's evergreen composition from Roja, 'Yeh haseen waadiyan'. There's also a bit of 'Jiya jale' (Dil Se) and 'Kehna hi kya' (Bombay) if you listen closely. Given Nigam's versatility, it is no surprise that he manages to recreate the mellow tone in which S P balasubrahmanyam delivered 'Tere hothon pe hain, husn ki bijliya/ Tere gaalo peh hai, zulf ki badliya' (On your lips, lightning of beauty/ There are waves of hair over your cheeks) all those years ago. But we would rather listen to the 'original(s)'. Maddock Films claims that 'Pardesiya' has had over 4,00,000 streams on Spotify and over 15 million views on Instagram. There is a good chance people are listening to it over and over again to figure out where they have heard it before. I did. A Sachin-Jigar composition with lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya, the song was perhaps attempting to break away from the beat-heavy-repetitive-lyrics-wrapped-in-the-most-conspicuous music ever that Bollywood has been serving for at least a decade now, but 'Pardesiya' has Rahman (and visually, Chennai Express) written all over it. Only that it's a knock off. This is obviously not the first instance of misplaced inspiration in the history of Bollywood music. It is well known that some of its classics are copies. Maine Pyar Kiya's 'Aate jaate hanste gaate' (Stevie Wonder's 'I Just Called to Say I Love You') or Jurm's 'Jab koi baat bigad jaye' ('500 Miles') or Gangster's 'Bheegi Bheegi', which is a Hindi rip-off of 'Prithibi ta naki' by the 70s' Bengali cult band Moheener Ghoraguli. But that was a different time. Finding the originals, in English or regional Indian languages, wasn't that easy, and even if one did, there wasn't social media to call it out. Composers could get away with it. Not anymore. With both the world and its music at your fingertips, it takes less than a minute to trace a song back to its original. Saif Ali Khan's Agent Vinod had 'I will do the talking' that conveniently slipped in portions from the 1970s disco favourite 'Rasputin' by Boney M. 'Pardesiya' simply reiterates Bollywood's laziness. Bollywood no longer wants to make the effort to even look beyond its own country. It is just a petty neighbourhood thief piggybacking on its former glory. If it is all about playing to the Insta gallery and nothing supersedes the 'numbers', then there's enough proof that these new distortions are getting a strong enough pushback. Look at the number of pages on Instagram dedicated to finding and promoting good Bollywood songs. Amid the cacophony of rehashed music, pages like There's Gems of Bollywood (142k followers), Love for Music (96.1k followers), Nostalgic Ghar (266k followers) among others, are posting and sharing forgotten and cherished gems that the Hindi music industry produced in its heyday. There was a time when the audience would seek out great art — music or films — to refine their tastes. Composers would make fresh, unique music and the audience was expected to rise up to a level to be able to appreciate it. Today, musicians bend over backwards to get social media numbers, even if it means regurgitating a different version of a tune that has proven successful in the past. With every new song, you wonder, 'where have I heard this before?' It is disheartening that the likes of Sachin-Jigar ('Saibo', 'Sun saathiya', 'Apna bana le', 'Mileya, mileya'), Bhattacharya ('Sawaar loon', 'Iktara') and Nigam, who have, at one point, given us truly good, fresh music, are too falling into the number-game trap. But at least there's Spotify and Youtube. We can always rewind to their good old days.