Saxophone by Manohari Singh

This is inspired by an interview of Manohari Singh I heard on Vividh Bharat, the radio channel. Manohari Singh was a musician who played the saxophone and assisted most of the yesteryear music directors in Hindi films. One of his favourites for the use of his instrument was this song (Main aaya hoon, sung by Kishore Kumar) from the Dev Anand film Amir Garib. He also was part of the duo of Basu Manohari who gave music to Mehmood's film Sabse Bada Rupaiah, if I remember correctly. That had some good songs like "Wada karo jaanam na chhodoge yeh daaman" and the title song, "Na biwi na bachcha...the whole thing is that ke bhaiya sabse bada rupaiah". Enjoy the sax in the Amir Garib number-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r383lNO-yvM

Amir Garib- Movie Recall

This is not Total Recall, but a partial one. On a flight recently, they showed an old classic (for me) Dev Anand film called Amir Garib. Though I missed a favourite song of mine sung by him with a trumpet in hand (Main aaya hoon, leke saaz hathon mein..in case you are interested) because I watched only a part of it (coz I was dozing, in case you are interested), I enjoyed what I watched.

Well, it's a masala classic, if you must know, and has a message- that the poor are better than the rich. This used to be the message in a lot of films those days. These days, the message might be what Gordon Gekko told us (Greed is good, unless you get caught).

Anyway, there is this female thief called Soni and our man is Moni. But wait, he is Moni by day, and Bagla Bhagat, a kind of Robin Hood who steals, by night. I remember Dharmendra starred in  a film where he played a Robin Hood character- in Jugnu. That also had Hema Malini in the female lead, and ran in Mumbai for 50 weeks.

It's all good fun, with the villain's den in garish colours, her's sister engaged to a cop whose mission is to catch Bagla Bhagat, and Premnath in good form as the (real) villain- a rich man, naturally.

Great fun to watch after all these years.