Audio Review: Mirzya

T Series

Lyrics Gulzar

Composed by Shankar Ehsaan Loy

Rating: **** ½ (4 and a half Stars)

If the soundtrack of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Mirzya is anything to go by,then the film is a full-blown epic experience. Not since Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se have I heard such a fulfilling enriching nurturing and life-giving motionpicture soundtrack.

Rakeysh Mehra’s music has always been extraordinary. He  got unbelievable cadences out of Anu Malik in Aks and followed it up with stupendous sounds from A R Rahman in Rang De Basanti and Delhi 6.

Mirzya is a vast treasurehouse of folk-based sounds that take us through an enchanting excursion through the remotest recesses of a love tale rooted to the Punjabi soil. But that’s not where  Gulzar Saab’s lyrical articulation and  Shankar Mahadeven musical expressions pitch their tent. This is a  sound that originates in Punjab and takes off into a resonant universe textured by bouts of torment and anguish, punctured by loud piercing cries for  the beloved to beseech the sound of plaintive love.

I came away from this exhilarating album with the voice of Daler Mehndi resonating across my consciousness. The gifted singer implants a Sufiana yearning to tracks like Hotahai and the title track. Daler has also composed brief but lingering musical pieces that are placed strategically between the  full-length tracks to create an impression of an ongoingdialogue between love and divinity.This cosmic conversation continues right till the last pelting beat of the ‘Miryza Theme’.

Finally we are left satiated yet restless and hungry for answers. Mirzya is a soundtrack filled with questions.What makes love so all-consuming? Every track packs in a punch and pang. It would be unjust to single out any one specific song, as the sum-total of the entire experience constitutes the inner-most core of the film’s theme: you fall in love , and fall so deep that you can only see the light outside if you focus on the poetry and music that underlines the pain and anguish of love.

Such are themes that run through the soundtrack like butterflies packed in a jar , fluttering their wings against the translucent glass case. There  is so much to take away from this soundtrack, the astonishingly robust singing of  Sain Zahoor , Nooran Sisters and Mame Khan, and of course Shankar Mahadevam himself, a composer-singer so knowledgeable he makes us forgive all the philistinism that prevails in film music today.

Shankar’s son Siddharth proves himself quite the chip off the old block in the gently playful Teen gawaah and …and….wait, don’t go away. Towards the end comes KaushikiChakravarty, daughter of the redoubtable Ajay Chakravarty to show in the track Kaaga that the Hindustani classical tradition is still alive and kicking.

Ditto the pursuit of excellence through the sound of music. Thank God for Gulzar Saab. Thank God for Shankar Mahadevan and Rakeysh Mehra who believe in  the power of music in a world emptied of beauty .