Living With Music: A Bollywood Playlist by Daphne Beal By Gregory Cowles<http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/author/gregory-cowles/> Sven Wiederholt Daphne Beal
*Daphne Beal is the author of a novel, “In the Land of No Right Angles.”* I lived and traveled in South Asia for many years, beginning in 1989, and witnessed everyone from Tibetan nuns to street boys vamp to Bollywood songs, so I knew how much a part of daily life they were. But it wasn’t until 1998, when I was researching the lives of migrant Nepali sex workers in Bombay’s oldest red light district, Falkland Road, for what eventually became the third section of my novel, that I understood their transformative power. The inside walls of brothels were covered with headshots of Bollywood stars. When the girls got ready at dusk, they always blasted the film songs, reminding me of the way my friends and I played Madonna or Cyndi Lauper during our freshman year of college. All the songs in this list are happy, hyper, get-up-and-dance numbers spanning the last half century, and I’m including the links to videos, because there’s never been a music genre more tied to the filmic form. (I’ll leave the soulful, more angsty list to another devotee.) *1) Dil Se Re,* composed and sung by A. R. Rahman with Anuradha Sriram and Anupama; and *2) Chaiyya Chaiyya,* composed by A. R. Rahman, performed by Sukhwinder Singh and Sapna Awasti. Before winning this year’s Oscar for “Slumdog,” A. R. Rahman created soundtracks for more than 100 films. These two rollicking songs are from the 1998 hit “Dil Se” (“From the Heart”), which I watched in Bombay in the company of a shoeshine boy who had attached himself to me. Its female star, Manisha Koirala, is Nepali (the niece of Nepal’s prime minister at the time), with a penchant for Meryl Streep-like gazes, and was revered by the Nepali women in the red-light district. In 2003, the BBC conducted an international poll of most popular songs, and “Chaiyya Chaiyya” was in the Top 10 in 155 countries. Its dance number in the film is performed on top of a moving train, the male lead (Shahrukh Kahn) apparently without a stunt harness. (Videos: “Dil Se Re”<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Pjh-ijaC0>| “Chaiyya Chaiyya” <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2gW3zwMMQ>) http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/living-with-music-a-bollywood-playlist-by-daphne-beal/ -- regards, Vithur
