But this association of two disparate talents lives on, in their songs, in our memories, and in our retelling of the stories of their friendship for future generations to read.īy this time, cracks had begun to appear in RK's dream team. And while the show had to go on, and did, it was never quite the same. Raj Kapoor's association with Mukesh could have ended only with death. And Nitin Mukesh recalls that the entire film industry turned out to see him, just because of Raj Kapoor's presence. But when the young man came to him, on his guru's behest, to ask if Raj Kapoor would be the chief guest at a concert that Mukesh had committed to, but that the son would be singing in, Raj Kapoor kept aside the shooting of the climax of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, and lent his name and star power to help launch the boy. Raj Kapoor had not known Nitin Mukesh was an aspiring singer he only knew him as his friend's son.
"Whatever little I have achieved in life is because of Raj Uncle," says a grateful Nitin Mukesh. (As were others.) As he was there, after Mukesh's death, to offer support to a bereaved son. And so it came about that when Mukesh was in financial trouble in the 50s, Raj Kapoor was there to help. Theirs was a friendship of equals, a friendship between two men who loved and respected each other, as people, as artistes. Lata Mangeshkar is on record as saying that the music of of RK films may have been attributed to the various music directors, but that all of RK music is, in the final analysis, the creation of Raj Kapoor himself.* Perhaps it was this understanding of what music meant that bound the two men together, and made Mukesh a part of the charmed inner circle of Raj Kapoor's music group. songs in his films pulled the narrative along and he understood their importance. When he went to a composer, whether it was Ram Ganguly in Aag, Shankar-Jaikishen for all his films after until Jaikishen's death, Laxmikant-Pyarelal or Ravindra Jain, he would tell them the character for whom they were composing, his narrative arc in the story, the scenes preceding and succeeding the song sequence. While most people listened to tunes, he 'saw' music he visualised his songs, he spent time getting exactly what he wanted, and he thought of himself as a conductor. In fact, his ambition was to become a music director. It would help that Raj Kapoor had a great interest in music, and was quite an accomplished musician himself. Who was made for whom? Was Raj Kapoor complete without Mukesh? Or was Mukesh incomplete without Raj Kapoor? However, it wasn't until after Barsaat the next year that Mukesh would become an indispensable part of both RK films and Raj Kapoor himself.
In 1948, when Raj Kapoor turned director with his RK Films' Aag, he offered Mukesh a solo and a duet. Mukesh, an aspiring singer, was rehearsing a song while playing the piano when Raj Kapoor, then an assistant director, entered the room and introduced himself as Prithviraj Kapoor's son. He had sung for Raj Kapoor in his first film Neel Kamal (1947), but they had met earlier at Ranjit Movietone. Mukesh's relationship with Raj Kapoor went back a long way.
0 kommentar(er)
