Colors of Poetry in Gulaal

This is a long overdue post.Sometime back I complained about popular music and poetry being heavily skewed toward the Love and related "mushy" emotions and lacking proper representation of other human emotions. Personally what i miss, most is the poetry about veer rasa(valor / Courage). As far as I remember "Rang De Basanti" was the only recent movie where someone showed that. So i was pleasantly surprised to see a very contextual use veer rasa poetry in the Anurag Kashyap's latest flick "Gulaal" . a movie based on student politics ,rajasthan and a Ex - Monarch turned revolutionarie's denial of new reality of unified india.

As someone who is born and brought up in rajasthan I could relate to it at so many level .Although story is a work of fiction in all probability but mental construct of character shown in the story is anything but fiction. In the street of Jodhpur, Jaipur and bikaner you can find every single character living , breathing, smoking beedi and chewing tobbaco (not to mention spitting it on the wall of fort also ) . 

I don't do movie and book review here on this blog but if there ever was a contemporary hindi movie i want to review it would be Gulaal.But this post is not about movie , its about the use of poetry in the movie's narration. hats off to Piyush Mishra for composing the music and writing lyrics . they were superb. My fave part of movie was the scene where narrator (played by Piyush mishra himself) recite two of very popular poems . incedently both of them were in my school text book . It was very nostalgic to see them in entirely deffrent but fitting context .

First was the famous poem by Bismil "Sarfaroshi kee tamnna" . Mr.Mishra has tweaked it beautifully to reflect the reality of modern day india. I am sure Bismil saheb won't mind the palagarism . see it in the embedded video below .

Second was a poem "श्री कृषण का दूत कार्य " ( When Krishna acted as messenger )by Ramdhari Singh "Dinkar". It was in my younger brother's hindi text book. Its really cool you can see the scene in embeded video below .it start at 2:27 in the clip.you can read the transcript of poem on my other blog here.

Finally there was best of all , a Piyush Mishra's orignal composition . Aarambh
listen to it here.its mind blowing. I liked it so much that i set it as ring back tone on my mobile phone. so here is one more reason for you to give me a call sometime . :)