Jawani Diwani's Ode To Young Love

A Masterclass In Yearning: The Music That Made Us

RD Burman's 'Jaane Jaan Dhoondta...' from Jawani Diwani captured the irrepressible longings of young love, writes Amitabh Pande

FOR MANY OF US GEN X’ers growing up in the '80s, in the time before the computer or the internet, the music of the preceding two decades wasn't just a throwback to what our parents listened to in their youth. It was very much part of the present scene, all of us consuming these eras of music as much as our parents did. The term ‘OK, Boomer’ was still 30 years too far in the future, and we grew up listening and absorbing the music of the '60s and '70s, as much as we did the '80s, '90s, noughties, all the way into the 2010s, and continue to do so in the 2020s. I call our generation the ‘blessed generation’, possibly the only ones that can simultaneously enjoy pop culture and music across six decades!

Hence this column on the “Music That Made Us”: To travel back and forth across time over 60 years to revisit the brilliant, magical and inspiring melodies that have changed us for the better, and made us who we are today. As the saying goes, ‘We are what we consume’, so “if music be the food of love, play on”!

The first one I start with in this series has to be one of those songs that introduced the idea of an urgent and longing romance to our young and hormonal teenage minds. As some of us might recall, in the mid-90s, when India opened up to the world, cable TV had just transformed our lives, and we suddenly had access to content like never before, both Indian and international. Just as MTV and Star TV were teaching us about the birds and the bees, Indian channels were flooding us with films and songs from our glorious film history. Suddenly RD Burman's music was in vogue again (even giving us his last album around the same time: 1942, A Love Story). That’s when we rediscovered this gem of a love song ‘Jaane Jaan Dhoondta Phir Raha’, from the 1972 film Jawaani Diwani, starring Randhir Kapoor and Jaya Bhaduri (Bachchan was still a year away).

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The central emotion of the song is that of longing for a beloved who is just within reach and yet so far away. That wretched bitter-sweet feeling when you know your love is just about to be fulfilled, but it’s still taking a while to get there. "Mujhko awaaz do, chhup gaye ho sanam, tum kahan…" and the response makes you believe it’s almost there: "Main yahaan..." As teenagers, listening to this song on a loop, it spoke to our simple fluttering hearts that beat for the opposite sex. This was not a time of Tinder and casual hookups. This was the time when awkward glances exchanged were enough to make your day, and a smile or a walk together holding hands was the ultimate reward for a privileged few. For the rest of us, revelling in our unrequited love, this beautiful duet became the perfect representation of how we felt most of the time: "Dhoondta phir raha, hoon tumhein raat din main yahaan se wahaan". Stringing our hearts with the harmony of the chase, the tease, the search, the innocence, the yearning, the unfulfilled destiny, the uncertainty of whether or not it would happen.

The brilliance of the song goes further, as the game of hide and seek continues, flowing from the first mukhda, sung by the young man who is showing his vulnerability, insecurity (not much has changed there has it?) over whether his beloved will be with him and his love fulfilled: "Raaste mein kahin reh gaye humnashin, tum kahaan?" despite his beloved's reassurance of "Main yahaan" in response. And into the second mukhda with her confessing that she feels the same sense of being lost and uncertain even though their love has an inevitability to it: "Haath aise mein bas chhodkar chal diye tum kahaan?"

And then the song flows into its last mukhda, when we realise it wasn’t hide and seek, as much as it was about the lost and found... where the feeling of being lost was redundant; in truth, they had found each other a long time ago. Their destiny was already written, to be together always: "Paas ho tum khade, mere dil mein chhupe, aur mujhe kuchch pata na chala". They were so caught up in the noise from the outside world that they couldn’t see what was always inside of them: "Dil mein dekha nahin, dekha saara jahaan... tum kahaan?" "Main yahaan..."

All in all, this magical stringing of music and words, sung by the genius Kishore Kumar and the inimitable Asha Bhosle hit the sweet spot every time, gratifying the ears and hearts of us all, the adolescents of the '90s. And we listened and hummed and sang together at parties, at the top of our voices, feeling good, with a sense of affirmation of what we all felt as a generation... alone and together.

Follow more of Amitabh Pande's writing on his blog Room With A View, a repository of thoughts on "books, booze, the box office and other bakwaas".

Jawani Diwani's Ode To Young Love

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