One is a genius, another is a gem from his orchestra band of dazzling diamonds. Veteran guitarist and harmonica specialist Bhanu Gupta swears by his ultimate god of mainstream Bollywood music — Pancham. It goes without saying that the name needs no introduction. For he is world renowned as R.D. Burman.
He was associated with the man and his music over four long decades spawning chartbuster numbers for many movies. “He was infallibly broad-minded and susceptible to other people’s suggestions. For instance, if one of us would come up with an idea, he would readily accept it,” he shares. “He was such a loving and giving person that he would retain that particular score intact if it appealed to his senses and later on improvised it further with his own signature ‘Midas’ touch. This was one of his salient traits. Rarely does a musician of his stature acknowledge his accompanists or lend them their due space and that desirable respect which the latter so naturally deserves,” raves Bhanuda.
“You know how was the popular Musafir Hun Yaaron track from Gulzarsaab’s Parichay conceived?” shoots Bhanuda. “It so happened that one day I was just casually strumming a chord pattern on my guitar at Pancham’s residence while he was under the shower. He suddenly peeped through the bathroom door and asked ‘What did you play? Come again please’ and pestered me to play on once more. I continued and he came out wrapped in a towel to try his hand at the chord structure on his harmonium. Then he hummed the lyrics Mujhe Chalte Jaana Hai. And tapped his palm on the instrument to okay it right away. Then he went onto compose the first line in a reverse order. This is Pancham, an absolute amalgam of honesty and humility. He would even walk that extra mile to pay us a warm gratitude and an inventor’s credit, if he ever picked up a hook line from any of our chord patterns,” an emotional Bhanuda narrates an interesting anecdote.
Talking of his close ties with the ‘boss’ of retro Bollywood music, Bhanuda slightly becomes pensive about the amicable, low-profile artiste when he veered his conversation to the music maestro’s personal life. “Simplicity was his middle name. But he led a very unhappy, disturbed life. Unfortunately he got involved in a spate of hollow, amorphous relationships which fell off like a pyramid of cards one after another. Life has been really cruel on him. There was no dearth of romance and frequent flings on his path, but true love has always eluded him till the last breath of his life. He was a lonely, deserted man at the top, with an unfilled vacuum left inside his heart,” he rues, while his eyes glistened.
“But musically Pancham had a sharp pair of ears and a keen sniffy nose. He could smell music out of nothing. He would absorb sounds from nowhere and binge on beats and melodies on a spree. From different kinds of noises being generated, he would spin euphony to one’s ears. Be it a rasping pedestal fan or a pile of hoarse newspapers, a clutch of clanking glasses or a husky tracing paper, Pancham would produce his trademark pulsating beat called the chhakis rhythm at leisure,” he waxes eloquence on the Burman classics.