The Old Wine of Black-and-White Music in the New Bottle that is 21st-Century Cinema

‘Farsh Pe Khade’ is different from the other songs in this list because, unlike the others, it is from a film set in the twenty-first century, although the film was crafted with a deliberate twentieth-century sensibility. Even so, while its other songs like ‘Yeh Ek Zindagi’ and ‘Love You So Much’ have a 1970s and 1980s disco pop, glitzy technicolour appeal, ‘Farsh Pe Khade’ brings the tempo down to an early 1960s Hemant Kumar feel, reminiscent of ‘Yeh Nayan Dare Dare’ from Kohraa (1964) (as pointed out by a cinephile friend). It is not just the music and the singer’s voice, but the lyrics too, that make the listener nostalgic for what we assume was a simpler time—one that lives, in our distorted imaginations of the past, as ‘thodi si dilkashi, zyada fantasy’.