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When I first heard this song from Ek Thi Ladki (1949) on Radio Ceylon on the morning show while going to school in the late fifties I had a vague feeling that I had heard it before. I kept thinking about it and other vague memories came back. I talked to my father, he corroborated and clarified my three vague memories from 1950.
1. Lots of people and food. He said it was my uncle Amar Singh’s wedding in Patiala in the middle of 1950 and, of course, there were people and good food.
2. Plastic duck laying eggs. He said that he had bought this for me and it dispensed candy eggs when pressed in the middle. He would refill it when I was not looking. I was surprised as to how it could keep laying eggs, so I broke it open to find nothing.
3. Lara Lappa. He said it was very popular and was playing everywhere, and, definitely during the wedding all day!
Of course, being just 3 years old, I had no idea about films, singers, music, etc. But I do remember that I liked it and also sang along without understanding much of it.
Lata Didi and I go way back.
Now You Know!
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The Database Website is both in English and in Hindi, whereas the HFGK is only in Hindi. In fact, the database was typed in Hindi and the English version was generated with a little Python script I wrote. There was no easy way to produce names like Vishwnath, so I went for char-to-char substitution, giving phonetic English. Here is a sample from the Tollywood search in Hindi (see Musing 961).
What about Urdu? Some people can read neither English nor Hindi.We decided to use Google Translate for that. Here is what it gives for the same page in Urdu.
Not too bad. I have actually implemented many Indian languages. Here is Punjabi.
Amusingly in a few places feet is translated as the lower extremity :)
Now You Know!
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The first image is from the book, Indian Filmography by Firoze Ranggonwalla (1970), a pioneering work, first of its kind. It show the entry for Naujawan (1951), (S) = Social, (B) = Bombay.
The next two images are from the database website (2021, 50 years later) for the same film.
Now You Know!
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