Safar · Kishore Kumar · Rockstar
Hindi cinema wrote its best songs about leaving
Not about arriving anywhere. The safar song is about the middle of the journey, and it is the one thing the industry has never stopped getting right.
The travelling song is the oldest reliable device in Hindi cinema. A character gets on something that moves, the score takes over, and the film covers ground it would otherwise have to explain. What is odd is how few of them are happy.
Zindagi Ka Safar is the extreme case: a song staged on a journey whose entire lyric is that nobody knows where it ends. Kalyanji-Anandji give it a rhythm that sounds like motion and a melody that keeps falling, and Kishore Kumar sings it without any of the warmth he brings to almost everything else.
Duniya Banane Wale is Mukesh addressing the question directly to God from a bullock cart, which is a mode of transport that gives the complaint a specific pace. Suhana Safar, by the same singer eight years earlier, is the counter-example everyone remembers, and even that one turns melancholy in the second half.
Kisi Raah Mein Kisi Mod Par takes the metaphor literally - two people on the same road who will not be on it together - and Kalyanji-Anandji again refuse to resolve it.
The form survived intact. Matargashti is Rahman writing a wandering song with no destination in the lyric at all, and Banjaara makes the traveller the subject rather than the travel. Sixty years and the genre has not needed a new idea.
Everything above is on सफ़र, and the truck cabin plays it at highway volume.