Teri Meri Kahaani (Music review), Hindi – Sajid-Wajid

Wajid does a surprisingly good job in singing the bubbly Mukhtasar that, for some inexplicable reason, sounds a lot like London Paris New York’s title song! Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s Allah jaane is predictable, but is wonderfully serene and pleasant! Jabse mere dil ko‘s guitar and retro outlook is very appealing, as is Sonu and Sunidhi’s vocals. The techno qawali Humse pyaar kar le tu is too derivative to work, while That’s all I really wanna do‘s nursery rhyme-like tune is plain annoying. But for these two songs, Teri Meri Kahaani is a fairly competent effort from Sajid and Wajid!

ISHAQZAADE (Hindi; 2012)

In recent years, there have been a number of Bollywood films to return to the "Hindi heartland," not necessarily in search of a "social" film seeking to make a point about inter-caste violence or some such issue, but as part of a kind of backlash against the addled juvenilia and sentimentality of nearly two decades of Hindi films, a large number of them set amidst frolic in foreign locations (often, in malls, hotels, and other generic foreign locations, a reminder that what these films imagined was the (triumphal inhabiting of the) foreign -- often laced with insularity, if not outright xenophobia -- as symbolic marker of affluence). Some of these mofussil-centric films -- Baabarr(2009), for instance -- have been unfortunately shallow; others, such as Ishqiya (2010), far more interesting; but all have to negotiate the tension between the desire of their filmmakers (many of whom are from India's smaller cities: Abhishek Chaubey, the director of Ishqiya, is from Gorakhpur; Habib Faisal, from Bhopal) to represent worlds that all too often are overlooked in Bollywood's universe of representation (in the latter, to be "ethnic," certainly cheerful and ethnic, is all too often to be Punjabi); and the metropolitan audience's predilection to locating its own other in the mofussils "out there" -- violent and blood-strewn, and at once backward and suffering from a dysfunction of democracy itself (imagined as a kind of ghundaa rajfrom which the metropolitan audience has itself seceded). The line, that is to say, between filming untold stories and pandering is thin indeed.