A strange math: GI Bill + Henry Mancini = Lata Mangeshkar!

It is the middle of the term, and I have way too many papers to read and grade.  If only I simplified my life and students' lives by not assigning so much of writing, and instead used bubbling-in testing, right?

Nah!  Never, ever!

But, I always seem to have a great deal of inertia when it comes to this task.  I then look for distractions so that I can put off the reading and commenting and grading that much longer, even as the pressure builds within me that I am delaying it.

Following political discussions, or anything related to higher education, is, therefore, very, very appealing right now.  In this essay, I read:

it was the G.I. Bill that really gave us the Mancini we love. Without its backing he would likely not have been able to afford to study at the Westlake School of Music. There he attended one-on-one theory and harmony classes with Alfred Sendry, a former classmate of Bartok, and orchestration with Mahler’s son-in-law, the romantic-turned-atonalist Ernst Krenek. Anyone who admires Mancini’s score for Stanley Donen’s Arabesque, with its thunderously unsettling chromatic bass riff and its double harmonic (Arabian) melody line that can never quite settle on either A minor or G minor, should be thankful for what he learned at Westlake—and doubly thankful that he wanted to share it with us. If Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock served to introduce many people to the discordant ideas of late romanticism, Mancini’s functioned to popularize the yet harsher sounds of Viennese modernism. Even the lovely waltz-time theme he wrote for Donen’s Charade, which finds room for an astonishing diminished C sharp arpeggio in it’s A minor melody, can pain as much as it pleases.

As I continued reading, in the background my mind was bothered that it could not remember the Charade tune.

So, when done with the essay, I hopped over to YouTube, and easily tracked down Charade.

As the music started playing, I was immediately reminded of a Hindi film tune.  Another quick search; here is Lata Mangeshkar singing the tune that is pretty much the Charade theme. 

Now, about those papers ...

All that glitters is not Indian!

"I have intense positive emotions about so many things that I like about the old country" I told a friend.  One of them, of course, is about the old movie songs.  They stir up emotions somewhere deep within.  Even the songs in Hindi, a language in which all I have is a basic, survival, level vocabulary.

In fact, the old Hindi film music gets me more than the old Tamil ones do.  Music is music irrespective of the language of the lyrics.  No wonder then that I willingly go to opera performances too, even when in alien territory.

YouTube suggested this old Hindi film song when I checked in at that portal.


A lovely piece, yes.  But then I remembered the tune from another place too: Henry Mancini's Charade.


Back in India, when I was growing up, I had a next-to-nothing level of exposure to Hollywood movies, not only because those were some prehistoric days but also because it was a small town where English movies played rarely ever at the only cinema, and the outdoor screening at the local club showed movies that seemed to be at least twenty years old, if not older.  Thus, I had no reason to imagine that the music for some of the wonderful Hindi and Tamil melodies that I enjoyed could have been adapted from somewhere else. Especially from America.

There are many, many things about life that we discover as we grow up and many if them end up bursting our bubbles.  Understanding India has also meant sorting out the real from the fake, even in something as trivial as old film music.  In this case, a couple of years into my arrival here in this country, I watched Charade on television.  It was the beginning years of my falling in love with Audrey Hepburn.  To then find out that Mancini's music was what I was listening to in India in that song was one of the many instances was yet another occasion when I realized that everything that was without a question "Indian" back when I was a kid in India was not necessarily unadulterated "Indian" as I had imagined them to be.

But, why didn't they tell me back then before the bubbles grew in size?

Life is a charade, I suppose.

The life that was :-(