Sunday, March 29, 2009

The Bollywood Time Capsule


Welcome to the badal (Bay Area Cloud) challenge! The goal is to place cloud computing in the hands of the people to solve a hard problem.... decide the top 10 Bollywood songs ever! (if you think this is not a hard problem, think again... :-)

Here's the current list! (click in the box below and use the up/down arrow keys). To vote, go to the badal challenge!

1 comment:

Prateek Sarkar said...

Good exercise. I don't think this problem has a decidable solution (even by majority vote :-), because goodness of songs is so multi-dimensional.

Being the first to leave a comment, I decided to leave a short explanation of some of my votes (13 yes, skipped rest):
"puchho naa kaise" (skipped) -- easily a tune that I can't get tired of, great rendition, but I like it less than some renditions of the Bengali song. But "Ni Sa Ga Ma" (yes) is rendered immortally in the Hindi version, way better than Bengali. Rehman's "Chinna Chini aasei" (yes) also sounds much sweeter in Tamil -- but the Hindi one is also a landmark in Bollywood.

"Chhaiya Chhaiya" (yes) - liked the beats and song the very first time I heard it -- a new sound. I liked it even more after I saw the picturization. "Mathura nagarpati" (yes) is another new-sound song from a singer I love. Same for "kaho na kaho" (yes) -- great new sound. I would add "Piya bole" or "phoole phoole" from parineeta to the new sound theme -- great musical theater piece.

I think that just for their impact and hummable tunes many of the Mukesh/Raj Kapoor oldies deserve votes (sorry Shubhra). Then there are many great Bollywood party songs, reunion songs, antakshari songs, and just hummable train-ride songs that reflect personal memories (e.g., "papa kehte hai" for my sister's generation.)

"Mora saaiyan" (yes) -- I heard it for the first time at one of our music evenings, and many times since. Great song. "Khwaja", "man ki lagan", "jiya dhadak dhadak" (all skipped) -- I think are part of a passing fad. I know Kanthi differs, as do many of you :-)

"Maa" by shankar mahadevan, Udit Narayan's "Yeh taaraa woh taaraa", "rahi" from Swadesh would also have my vote each for a different reason.

I have to make an entire list of songs that are just great for the accompanying music. And then to decide on top ten, some would start getting "no"s. Better get back to work -- this can take very long :-)