November 23, 2009
 

Thumbi vaa to Gumm summ gumm

This is a sort of update to my longish post on my Facebook account early February in relation to 'Thumbi vaa', 'Sangathil paadadha kavidhai', etc.

A new Hindi movie, Paa, scheduled to release sometime next month, has Amitabh Bachchan, born with a progeria condition, playing Abhishek Bacchan and Vidya Balan's son. The movie is directed by Balki, who made the extremely enjoyable 'Cheeni Kum' a couple of years ago. The music, as was the case with 'Cheeni Kum', is by Ilayaraja, a perennial favourite of mine.

As with Cheeni Kum, mottai has liberally used / borrowed from tunes he had previously created 'down South'. "Mudi mudi", especially the starting bit, sounds very familiar to a humming I've heard him do at a concert shown on TV. The song, if I remember right, starts off with something like 'Paada cholladhum paatu dhaan'. 'Halke se bole' is 'Puttham pudhu kaalai' from Alaigal Oivathillai.

The interesting part about this album is how he has re-introduced, in Hindi, 'Monday tho' (Aur Ek Prem Kahani - 1996) as 'Gumm summ gumm'.

The tune, by itself, has a fair amount of history. The tune first showed up as 'Thumbi vaa' in Olangal (a Malayalam movie *ing Amol Palekar & Poornima Jayaram, which was remade by Shekhar Kapoor as Masoom). The music was by Ilayaraja.

Olangal got dubbed into Tamil (not sure what that movie was called). So there was a Tamil version of "Thumbi vaa". Later that year, the same tune was used for Aakasam enaatido in 'Nireekshana', a Telugu movie *ing Archana.

Nireekshana was dubbed into Tamil at some point of time, and we got "Neer veezhchi thee mootudhe" (I haven't found a video online). "Auto Raja" (*ing Gabtun) was made sometime in 1983. Auto Raja's music was scored by the Shankar-Ganesh pairing. But the director got Ilayaraja to create 'Sangathil paadadha kavidhai', a song that you watch at your own risk.

A couple of years later, Balu Mahendra remade his first ever movie (Kokila, a Kannada movie *ing Kamal Hassan) as "Aur Ek Prem Kahani" (*ing Ramesh Arvind, Heera & Revathi). That movie had the 'Monday tho' song in it!

Maybe 10 years later, the same tune would have travelled across half-a-dozen more Indian languages, and we'd see a Malayalam version of the original!

Update on 25 June: I located what I believed to be the original of "Mudi Mudi" - Paada pirandhadhu paatu dhaan.

Labels: film music, ilayaraja, paa, tamil