Swanand Kirkire, the lyricist feels, “Most of the time, when a director approaches us, he has a fixed mindset. He either has his own ideas or he has somebody else’s compositions in mind. That is very annoying as it stops our thought flow. For us to come up with a good song, it is important that we live the character. A wonderful journey with the character right from the beginning of the film is what can give memorable music. So it is important to involve the composer and the lyricist in the process of film making right from the beginning.”
The duo agrees on one fact that the most disturbing thing for a musician is when the director asks them to give a hit song. And then smiling mischievously Moitra goes on to add, “There is nothing called as a hit song! In fact it is very funny when now-a-days directors ask us whether his song will make a ringtone.”
The duo is certainly on a joyride in the glam world but they feel that the music industry today is driven more and more by the commercial forces. “So rather than letting us think about the soul of the song, the producer pressures bother us and make us think about statistics and sales. As a composer or a lyricist however, we are not bothered about how many people hear our song but what do we feel after writing or composing the track,” concludes Kirkire.
BEATING AROUND THE BUSH
Day two at Film Music Seminar at the FTII started with an incisive discussion on music in offbeat films. A panel of well-known personalities from the film industry like Pankaj Rag, Kedar Awati, Vivek Philip, Ashish Verma, Ashok Vishwanath, Rajiv Shrivastava, Raghunath Seth, Rajkumar Keshwani and Bhaskar Chandawarkar, in an open-forum discussion with the audience, discussed the various aspects related to offbeat films and their music. Talk about offbeat films and discussion cannot be complete without mentioning names like Salil Choudhary, Anil Biswas, Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor. A session that took an overview of films made by these legends concluded on a common point that there is no separate category housing offbeat films, it is just that when films are closer to reality and away from commercial cinema, they are termed as offbeat. The music however remains untouched by whether it is an offbeat film or commercial cinema. The day’s session ended with the screening of a 70-minute documentary film by Ashok Rane called Singing in Cinema.
