Mohd. Rafi : God’s own voice

Reading the above title one can call me anything, I don’t mind. The truth is at one point of my life I was obsessed with the voice. The way I searched his songs, every time trying to find a new one which I had previously not heard was not less than passion. Once one of my friends asked me what is so special about the voice, I remember telling him give me a voice like that I quit everything. Such was the effect.

Picture Courtesy : www.google.com

It was January 1991 when I first heard Rafi on our 2-in-1 stereo system. At that time I was more interested in the songs of QSQT, Maine Pyar Kiya, Tridev, Dil, Aashiqui, etc. My mother used to buy the cassettes. She bought all sorts of cassettes from the above mentioned films to Rabindra Sangeet, Lata Mangeshkar, etc. When she used to play the “cultural ones” I felt like running away from home. One day she brought the cassette “The Best Of Mohd. Rafi” (a green cover with a smiling Rafi picture on top, an HMV cassette)-seeing it itself I felt it was over for me, I have landed in the age of K. L. Saigal. My mother told me “Sune dekh, tarpor bolis”. She was right and I thank her for that. The cassette started playing, the first song was “Baharon Phool Barsao..”, I felt like sleeping for the next hour. Then after 2 or 3 songs or may be the next song came “Phirkiwali”. Suddenly I was stunned, I heard the song 3 times, my sister went wild, mother did not say anything (perhaps only smiling inside for the victory). For the first time I felt what correct pronunciation of words could do to a song. I had missed the same expressions & effect (till now) with any of his contemporaries or thereafter. Thus began the Rafi Era in 1990s with me.

Time and again I used to visit the roadside cassette shops of me neighbourhood for new new casettes of Rafi’s songs. Or I would make a list of rare songs from those heard over Vivid Bharati and give it to one of my selected shops to make a recorded cassette. Once the shopkeeper took a month to gather all the collections. Thanks to their co-operation, I still have those songs converted into CD. Once I sat at a friend’s house all night transferring all the Rafi Songs from cassette to CD. He had the gadgets by which quality conversion could be made. In the morning he found me still doing the recordings. The situation was urgent as my friend was leaving for Canada the next week. He thought I had gone crazy, may be but the objective was achieved. Later he listened to some of those and found them very special. Once he told me that one day in a very vibrant mood he decided to listen to the song “Lagta nahi dil kahin ..”, his mood changed 180 degrees. He cursed me and thanked me at the same time over the mail. Thanks to him he helped with all those conversions specially the non-film ghazal collection “Kitni rahat hai..”.

At times I used to fight (only verbal) with one my cousins over superiority of Kishore-Rafi (we used to fight over such similar useless superiorities, Monica Seles-Steffi Graph; Sampras-Agassi, Juhi Chawla-Madhuri Dixit—the subjects never knew that they had such good fighters). Statistics like number of filmfare awards, national awards became significant. Later I understood in the end I was making a nuisance of what I liked, so I gave up.

Another interesting thing happened around 2005. By that time pirated mp3 audio CDs had flooded the markets. Everyone had all the collections of a particular artist one could imagine in a single CD. One evening on our casual return from our post office meetings we stopped at one of the hawkers selling the pirated CDs. Casually I picked up one Rafi CD and scrolled down the songs and left it. The man said “Dada jaben na, Rafi r natun gaan achhe anek”. By this time my Rafi collection/obsession was known to my friends. I smiled and left the shop. My friend quickly turned around and said “Rafi r natun ki gaan bolchilen, e bachhor pujote kichhu bar korlo naki, ami to jantam bhadrolok mara gechhen anekdin”—and he left quickly. The shopkeeper went wild and we could hear from the distance he was cursing us.

The most important effect of Rafi on me was it changed my way of listening to music. As the years passed, I understood the words more, their meaning, their correct pronunciation all became increasingly important. Above all poetry of the songs became significant, ghazals  (even Ghalib) were no longer strangers.  Over the years I have enjoyed hearing film music, ghazal masteros, the Indian instrumental legends, Bengal’s legend Ram Kumar Chattopadhyay but GOD will always have a special place, he made the world of music possible for me.