Raincoat

I've forgotten what the film Raincoat, which starred Ajay Devgan and Aishwarya Rai, was all about. I vaguely recall it being about guy meeting (by accident) girl after she has been married, and the two have a bit of a history, and they recall the time they were together.

What is more important is that the music for the film, to me, is one tiny masterpiece, a study in love and loss, the likes of which are rarely touched upon by Bollywood. The entire album is suffused with a gentle melancholy, the kind that sweeps over you on a sunday afternoon, when you recall some incident which was only a couple of years ago but seems like it belonged to someone else, some other lifetime. A feeling that slowly grips me as I listen to this is a longing for something/someone but more importantly a time that will never return, and you realize that nothing will make you as happy or content as you once were.

I could take or leave that sole male-sung song, or in fact even the Shubha Mudgal counterpart to the same, but from track#4 onwards it's just...words fail me...powerful, powerful stuff. Shubha Mudgal pours out her heart and soul in a gut-wrenching display of sheer talent and control. Control? Yes, control. There are subtle pauses, a sudden soaring of a note followed by an as sudden near-silence. There isn't any need to understand the words - I can barely follow half of it anyway - to appreciate the quality of the stuff being played.

Music truly knows no language.

The words are beautiful, when I can follow them. I won't be tedious with lyrics, if interested, any one can look them up through google or whatever.

What really drives the point home though are the last three songs. Ostensibly wedding songs, they are sung in chorus. Ordinarily, this should make for a happy sort of ending. But, no. In what must certainly rank as an outstanding achievement, some trick - I don't really know what, and I don't want to figure it out - gives these songs, which is supposed to be about happy ever after, an almost desperate air. Like, the woman getting married is preparing for a less than satisfactory life, and knows it but is trying to hide it.

It is difficult to put out music with so much emotion in it, and it is even rarer to have it being delivered through a vehicle populated by bollywood stars. Raincoat's soundtrack must rank as one of the best accidents ever.

"Was it the wind that shook that photograph, now dust ridden and yellowed with age?"