Amit Kumar.........Oodles of talent wasted!

Amit Kumar will only be remembered as the legendary Kishore Kumar’s son always, rather than “Play back singer Amit Kumar”. Not that it would have been easy to emerge out of the shadow of his illustrious father, but despite of having oodles of talent, he could never establish himself as a play back singer in a manner he would have liked to.

We still best remember him as the singer of songs like Bade aachhe lagte hain, Yeh zamin gaa rahi hai, Yaad aa rahi hai etc. You could count his popular songs on your finger tips. But when you sit down and listen to these in a relaxed mood, you start feeling for the man. Despite of having an awesome voice, if he has not tasted the success he truly deserved, it is entirely the loss of the film industry.

Bollywood music and the audience has missed this gold mine, which otherwise could have been heard in innumerable hits over the last four decades.

Why this happened to such a talent is not really very difficult to figure out. The initial phase of his career was over shadowed by the presence of his legendary father Kishore Kumar himself. Till the date of his death, it was he who ruled the male playback singing. All that genre of songs went to Kishore Kumar. Amit, who sounded pretty much like his father had to be satisfied with the left overs. Any other songs, which were in the Rafisqe mould, went to singers like Mohd. Aziz, Shabbir Kumar .

After Kishoreda’s death, indeed a vacuum was created, and Amit Kumar should have been the ideal voice to carry the legacy forward, but to his mis-fortune, it was the leanest period of Bollywood music. All the Govinda & Mithun songs were the flavor of the season, where quality was at its nadir. This helped Amit Kumar’s cause no way.

The revival in melody came in the form of Nadeem- Shravan’s Aashiqui, but then that marked the arrival of another singer Kumar Sanu, who became the music director duo’s favorite after the roaring success of Aashiqui. This combo ruled the industry for more than half a decade, and by that time, having pocketed five consecutive filmfare awards, Kumar Sanu was touted as the next Kishore Kumar in the making. The public was mesmerized by his vocal similarity to Kishoreda, and was even ready to forgive his nasal indulgence. The ultimate sufferer again was Amit Kumar. He was almost non-existent during this period of time.

But just to showcase his talent, you need to hear his version of the song kajal kajal composed by Anu Malik for the movie Sapoot. This song was also sung by the then super-successful Kumar Sanu. It doesn’t take too much of brain storming to figure out that Kumar Sanu’s version was simply out classed by the Amit Kumar version in the album. But only very few of these kind of songs came Amit's way,so he kept himself busy doing concerts all over the world.

Any body who has heard him singing his father’s numbers on stage must admit that he is by far the best person to do a cover version for Kishore da's songs, if at all, rather than the Kumar Sanus, Abhijeets, Babul Supriyos, or all other Kishore Kumar clones, who have prospered in their respective careers at different points of time by doing so.

One gets a feeling that Amit Kumar might just have missed a trick or two at least in marketing himself, which saw him out in the cold, when singers with far lesser talent kept on raking the moolah thanks to their effective PRO.

Well, at 58, Amit Kumar’s career is certainly at its twilight zone, even as we still keep hearing his voice in a few hit numbers here and there.But we sincerely hope that his younger brother Sumit Kumar, who has since burst into the Bollywood playback scene, and has rendered a few very fine numbers like, Bandne lagi from Naach and the title track of Bachna Aie Haseeno, enjoys better luck in bollywood. We see tremendus talent even here, and wish all the best to the younger son of our favorite Kishore da

"Jaane Tu....." is a decent movie.....just decent!

You watch a movie, you write a review, one thing. You read a review that sets your expectation quite high, and then you watch the movie, and finally you write a review. Quite another thing. Especially if by the time you get down to the business of putting pen to paper, scribbling down your takes on what you had seen, the movie is already declared a runaway hit. In all probability, your opinion would tend to get a bit biased…….But as it turned out to be; Jaane Tu Ya Jaane naa has failed to impress me as much as it has the public and the critics. Despite of its tremendous success, I didn’t feel to have seen anything sensational except for the performances of Imran Khan and Prateik Babbar. To me it was yet another formula movie about friendship and love. Not a boring one though, but nothing spectacular to write home about.

In fact I was quite surprised to see critics go gaga over the uniqueness of the flick, some of them even seem to be spellbound by the way the opening scene was executed. But I just thought that this particular story-telling idea was straight away lifted, or should I say the clichéd word inspired out of the SRK-Rani Mukherji starrer Chalte Chalte, where a group of friends gather to tell a romantic tale to one of their new friends who is a stranger to the lead characters. And the saga of this friendship between a boy and a girl without realizing the love factor again had already been famously explored by Karan Johar, in his debut movie, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, with a slightly different flavor though.

But to give credit where it is due, Abbas Tyrewala has written and executed it quite competently, which maintains your interest level through out. And Imran, comes across as a supremely confident actor, effortlessly slipping into the character, which makes you wonder if really this was his debut venture.

Genelia has done a decent job, not any thing out of this world as claimed by a few fellow reviewers, Ratna Pathak is superb. Naseeruddin Shah didn’t have much to do, but his presence was quite effective. Arbaaz and Sohail, the Khan brothers were their usual irritating selves in their guest appearances. The stunning package though was Prateik, who has a telling effect as the jealousy-struck brother of Genelia.

Over all as a product, the film is not at all disappointing. It’s definitely worth a watch for the performances, for the kind of technicality that is so visible in each frame, for the youthful music scored by A.R.Rehman, and last but not the least for the sincerity with which both producer Aamir Khan and director Abbas Tyrewala have approached the job at hand.

What I urge though, is please don’t get carried away by its success, by the reviews and the trade reports……..just go out there without any expectation, you may still end up enjoying it.

A series that was lost inside the selection committee meeting room!

The recently concluded Test Series against Srilanka has once again seriously opened up the never ending debate of our persistent selection blunders, which has yet again resulted in a demoralizing series loss for a team that claims to be one of the most talented sides in the world.

True, we do have the talent, and now the desire too (at least in a few of our players), but over and over again we are done in by our brainless and unimaginative selection policy which, for this tour, had given us a team that contained the “Fabulous Four” selected purely on their names, a captain-cum-bowler, captain only because he has served Indian cricket long enough, and a bowler (read player) only because he is the captain. As if that was not enough, we had two wicket keepers, who were called so, only because they stood behind the wicket, catching and stumping be damned, batting they did, the way they felt like.

That takes away six spots in a game which unfortunately (for us) allows only eleven a side. To win a test series only with the rest five players (two batsmen and three bowlers) against an international side was always going to be a bit too far fetched. Srilanka had to be the favorite right from the word go.

The end result all but confirmed it. We did manage to pull one game back though, riding on the individual brilliance of Sehwag, but take that apart and we got what we deserved.

Let’s take a look at the batting performances of these big guns for this particular series. (Click on Tourstatistics to view the individual performances-courtesy cricinfo)

What is quite evident here is, any player however glorious his past records may be, can't figure in any side whatsoever (leave alone an international test side) with such form. With the combined batting average of 24.09 in all the six innings in the series, Sachin (15.83), Ganguly(16.00), Dravid (24.66) and Laxman(43.00) were hardly going to contribute anything towards winning.

And sadly that was not all. They have managed to keep a talented batsman like Rohit Sharma out in the bench, who is touted to be the future of Indian batting!

If you also consider the wicket-keeper's batting performance, then the combined average comes down to 20.83(hypothetically in every single innings the score would read as 21 for the loss of 5 wickets) with six players to follow, out of which four were pure bowlers. Can any team recover from such a dismal situation to even salvage a draw, leave alone winning?

What is annoying is, such selection has happened right after a season which had seen us reaping rich dividends by investing in young and hungry cricketers, who were raring to go out there and prove their worth.

In contrast, our oldies have nothing to prove as they have often been found confessing in front of camera, and no desire to put a team’s interest ahead of their own as has been evident for quite some time now. Their sole aim has been to hold on to their respective positions in the test side, which is their last hope with their selection in one-dayers and T20 being long vanished into thin air.

Can’t really blame them for being greedy, but our selection committee must have some commonsense. None of these players, despite of their towering statistics in terms of centuries and volume of runs scored in both the versions of the game, have ever been as valuable to India, as Steve Waugh was to Australia, when he was shown the door after a few lacklustre performances, despite of being one of their most successful captains and a batsman of immense value. What was their threshold for being in the side was performance and performance alone. That’s precisely why; they still continued to reign as the number one side in the world despite of dropping big names in favor of better performers at any particular point of time. If Australia could drop Steve Waugh, why do we have to carry a Ganguly and a Dravid in our team just because of their reputation? How many more series do we have to lose just to satiate these senior players’ ego? How many more young players do we ignore, in favor of this so called experience, that doesn't any more translate into performance?

It is not just this series, if you check the record books, these very player have managed to hang in there for quite some time now with a fifty here and a fourty there, purely because they have a certain number of runs and centuries under their belt, which they had scored before ages! Going by that logic, what sin has Sunil Gavaskar committed? Why is he sitting there in the commentary box when we are struggling to find a compact opener? He does have the record to feature in this test side! Why not select him?

Let's come to the leadership issue. I had expressed my disappointment in a post titled Spare us spare Indian cricket, when Kumble was chosen to lead the side ahead of Mahindra Singh Dhoni, citing his seniority and long service to Indian cricket. He, with the kind of personality that he had both on and off the field, was never going to be able to inspire any body. Rather the effect was always going to be damaging. By the end of this series, I guess I have gotton my point across.

Kumble, on a consistent basis has favored older guys to younger ones, as in any other event he himself would have been the first to face the axe. His decision on the batting order has been nothing less than disastrous. He had no business sending Ganguly ahead of Laxman innings after innings after repeatedly witnessing Laxman being stranded with the tail-enders especially when Ganguly had shown absolutely no desire to fight it out there in the middle. To expect Kumble to pick Rohit Sharma ahead of at least one of those big fours despite of their repeated failure, would have been nothing more than a day dream, simply because favoring a younger guy would obviously draw attention on himself.

He has always tried to steal the limelight from the success of others just to make sure that he gets the visibility as a great leader that in turn would ensure him a longer run at the helm. For example, right after the Australia series he had issued a statement, "We shouldn't get carried away by our incredible performances in the one-day and test matches in Australia...." Now, where was that incredible performance in tests? We had managed to draw the series. Even Sourav Ganguly's team had achieved the same feat in the previous tour.

More recently, after winning the second test against Srilanka, he said," I must say that this team has resilience. Coming back from a defeat and winning this test shows that this team has that fighting quality in it." This statement was supposed to be issued by Dhoni, for the one day side that he leads. This particlular test we had won just riding on Sehwags shoulders, with the fabulous four maintaining their consistency of poor scores. Sehwag, of course was ably supported by Gambhir, Ishant and Harbhajan. This hardly was the whole team. Had it been so, the seniors, who were very much a part of it, should have stood up and got counted. They should have taken the responsibility of saving the final test, when Sehwag departed early.

We must realise that we can't win test matches with a sub-standard team, lead by a sub-standard leader, who can't even figure in the eleven on the strength of his own performance. ( True, with eight wickets in five innings on tracks that were tailor-made for spinners, where Murali, Mendis and occasionally even Harbhajan played havoc, he can hardly inspire a bunch of players who are well past their prime) We are left with only one choice, we have to throw the youngsters to the deep end of the ocean yet again as we did for the T20 World Cup and the Downunder one-day series.

We have already seen the results. What on earth is stopping us?