#Scurf138: On Filmy Hindi songs aka Kat's dancing chops
Before everything else, there was Just Chill
Today after a considerably long day at work and an early dinner, as I sat in front of the tv set in my bedroom, perched cozily in one corner of the bed, surrounded by a sea of cushions (more on that never). I was too tired to read subtitles so passed on the idea of watching the French series I've been rewatching. The idea of watching a romcom seem tiring too. So, very naturally I resorted to the stuff of comfort — a refined youtube algorithm of an extremely particular kind of Hindi film dance songs.
Before we arrive at what genre I'm talking about, it begs to be mentioned that I am a child of Hindi movies and television, especially of the decades between 1991 and 2015.
Nothing changed after 2018, I just stopped feeding my personal demons.
So, while I have brought up by the very gracious and giving songs (and times) of Madhuri and Aishwarya, somehow I felt truly mothered by an actress who arrived on the scenes much, much later.
No decorative adjectives, deep sighs or hasty dreams come close to sealing the way I have felt about her. She is, was, the Shah Rukh Khan of my life. Just like
hum ek baar jeete hain, ek baar marte hain, shaadi bhi ek baar hoti hai, aur pyaar... wo bhi ek baar hota hai....
How you Shah Rukh only once in life! For me it was (most of) these things and also that you only Katrina Kaif once in your life.
The best part of it all is the fact that I first saw her on the big screen only when she did a “respectable” big banner YRF movie, which was so pathetic and draining in its essence, it became my favourite YRF movie ever. Till date, each time I've found myself alone and lacking in spunk, I've watched JTHJ and felt a rush. There's something about Kat in that. And here, I am trying to write about just what that something is.
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Meherbaan is a video I watched at age 25, imagining myself with Kat instead of the very god-like Hrithik. Each time she arrives on the screen, be it with Just Chill, or Chikni Chameli, there is an instant note or two of divining energy interweaving itself. She doesn't immediately own the room, but she adds a flavor of passion, fullness and of enjoying herself. A casual charm, if you must.
All of this is even before, long, long before she even became the queen elect of The Dance Number in the 2010s. I believe she peaked even before she knew — I mean how many have each one of us danced to Just Chill playing on our television sets! Ok not many just me? Fine.
Hum ko Deewana Kar Gaye title track where we see Akki and Kat dance in the snowy terrains of a (possibly) studio set, what another testament to the wholesomeness of her talents. She is cooing, eyes half shut, or gently gazing downward. She knows she’s failing, but she’s trying nonetheless, and looking drop dread ravishing while at it.
Then there was the year 2021 where so much happened — mostly bad. But in the end, the year tried to salvage itself by giving us Kat’s version of the iconic Tip Tip Barsa Pani.
It had a gothic element, a secluded way of working itself through our psyche. The song worked its charms, Kats pensive pelvic thrusts echoing a distant shilpa and raveena combo. Tip Tip 2 captured the moment like a zeitgeist, and in a very 2021 fashion – the everythingness of it.
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From the start Katrina didn’t have any of those trademark Hindi movie moves or expressions or songs in her kitty. She didn’t have MD’s spunk, or Raveena’s oomph or Shilpa Shetty’s rustic charm or Aishwarya Rai’s divine everything. It was as a twitter user put it, “by dint of her sheer hard work” that carved that niche for herself. Maybe it was not even a planned move, something that just went ahead of her, and she took it up.
When I see Kat’s songs something pierces me in the sight of her moving ever so elegantly to the nonsense beats, her lips syncing in a studied manner to the gibberish Hindi lyrics, gazing heavenward like penance was waiting above just somewhere there, all this while flexing every muscle not only in her body but also on her face, matching whatever expression she could associate with the word that she was supposed to be uttering. Whooping and warbling alongside her fellow actors, sometimes on her own, Kat made her way into our hearts, one dance number at a time.
Often, I am also, in a small, unknown way moved by the intimacy of her videos. And all of this is, mind you, new.
Especially in the mid-2000s, Kat's songs were mostly long shots, flowing gowns, close-ups, Bollywood style circus dancing, snow sprinklers, with successive and unintentional layering of cyclical vocals (often by a very nasal Tulsi Kumar), accompanied by a whole extremely extra orchestra, and those sometimes lonely, sometimes too cheery white faces. Her expressions in those videos sickly sweet, layered with various meanings (or not, really the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder here). Her effort showing ever so poetically, making it incongruous to the lyrics and often also the moment of the song, but blending in with the overall beauty of her look, costume, choreography, set design, lyrics, music…
Something so bizarre yet all consuming, so strange how do you put a finger to it.
This is not nostalgia, or me thinking back to the collected enigma of the songs as years heaped upon them. I loved them then, as I love them now. Here, I am making notes as I watch these beautiful songs, the sheer poetry they carry, the very personal, specific balm they are to me. When I watch them bone-tired, skin-sick, they work as a collage of human hard work, and sheer ingenuity.
In a (cheesy, kitschy) way, these videos also reflect the tension and richness of Kat's range as not only an actor but also a (trying to be) dancer.
I've mostly kept these poetic musings to myself, not that many would care, but because they serve as a personal space of pause, of seeing and believing that sometimes, just sometimes, hard work can also pay with money and adulation.
On the page here, I try to do the opposite — come out in the open about my love for her and her dancing chops. This is my way of screaming from the top of a water tank about how each of Kat’s songs are a perfect match of sound and vision, and that everyone would benefit from watching them with me.
These dance songs are also a sub-genre within the massive Hindi movie dance song genre, an earth within a behemoth of a solar system. And this earth comes with its own twin orbiting moons — an out-and-out dance song like Ishq Shava and other fun lyrics-y, situational ones like Rafta Rafta. She doesn't own these categories fully, but in a way, she is their current queen.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tip+tip+barsa+pani
We all agree that what she does in Tip Tip is mutually exclusive from what she does in Rafta Rafta. The former is a sexual dance number, and the latter is a fun, matter-of-the-fact, by-the-way casual song that has become a trademark Kat now. It was a territory marked by the likes of MD and Sridevi in the nineties (and Hemaji before that), left unused for about a decade till she arrived on the scene. And once she picked these up in her way of owning and striking the delicate balance of these two vastly different worlds, there was no looking back.
Here it bears repeating that while nostalgia certainly doesn't play a role in my love for Kat's songs, repetition certainly adds that charge with its incantatory power.
In Yahi Hota Pyaar as Kat walks down the Tower(?) Bridge circling her sandals in her hands, a sweet-embarrassed smile playing on her lips, inspecting herself and then Akki from a remove, you can almost see her through. She is trying to learn the tough walk of making it big in the big bad world of Bollywood, there is a simpleness as the song’s lyrics play off that innocence, casting a glow on her luminescent face. There is an ambivalence somewhere there too, and a divining, as she perfects some new wisdom from this situation, this movie, this life one song at a time.
I can only speculate on the life Kat's lived while filming all these songs but transposing my own reading on top of her songs, these visuals, these somethings — is what I can do.
Revisiting these songs on tired nights does more for me than the word "nostalgia" can encapsulate. It's past midnight on a working Friday as I close my macbook. Teri Ore Teri Ore the audio quietly croons as I lift the lid of the laptop one last time, just to see that fleeting smile on Kat's face. The glimmer in her eyes, the triumph on her face in the video’s final frame where she shimmers in a pink satin drape — the face of a woman ready to conquer herself and Bollywood’s dance numbers. That’s the hope with which I plan to conquer my 2023!
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Ah!! Thank you for this. I think I hadn't realised her role in my teen age. The way she danced so playfully in Just Chill and Khwaab Dekhe... and then in Zara Zara Touch Me and parts of Sheela ki Jawani she just seemed to encourage solo pleasure...
Thanks for writing this. In the bunch of people criticizing her for her ascent and acting skills, this side of her career also need to be mentioned somewhere.. I love Kat till my death and after too...❤️