Himesh ka Surroor

“Ooooooooh Ooooooh………”

If you have lived in India during the last couple of years, you’d recognize that nasal humming instantly. The capped-crusader has been everywhere since early 2005 when Aashiq Banaya Aapne (ABA) was released. That was the first appearance of Himesh, the star.

For those of you who were following Zee’s Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge 2005, you’d know the startling image makeover in Himesh before and after ABA. The shoddy wig gave way to a hep cap. The dumb gujju look had been smartly replaced with a grunge stubble look. The soft, shy Himesh had metamorphosised into an aggressive, confident, vociferous personality. HR had arrived!

Since then, he has gone from strength to strength, churning innumerable hits, as a composer and as a singer. The nasal twang in his voice is very pronounced, but the masses simply loved it, and lapped it up with open arms. The so-called connoisseurs of classic music dismissed HR’s singing as cacophony, and sniggered at his success. But that didn’t deter HR who continued playing to the galleries, and in the process, even notched up a Filmfare Award for best male singer, much to the chagrin of the Bollywood elite.

With so much success, HR had to change, and his arrogance and overtly melodramatic outbursts on the new SRGMP series is rather irritating. Especially when he berates a Pakistani Sufi singer in his Gharana for trying to sing other genres, and screams at the top of his voice “Mujhe tumhare ghar mein roti chahiye”. If that isn’t proof enough of success having gone to his head, he boosts his ego further by carefully promoting his “mystery man” image, that “HR never smiles because of some mysterious reason”, and “HR always wears the cap because of some deeply shrouded secret” etc.

When the suspense and the hype reach proverbial proportions, the egomaniac in HR decides to encash on it by actually making a movie “loosely based on his life”. And yes, he stars in it, composes music, and croons too. What else? And the cap doesn’t come off, contrary to the pre-release hype that HR’s publicity team created about “Watch the movie to find out why HR always has his cap on”.

And so “Aap Ka Surroor- The Moviie. The real luv story” releases to a packed audience. Within a couple of days, all the trade pundits unanimously declare HR’s debut to be a massive hit. The music had already been declared a chart-buster anyways. In short, for HR, the dream just doesn’t seem to end.

The Bollywood hotshots continue to snigger, and bitch about HR’s success as a flash in the pan. They even liken him to Altaf Raja who, a decade ago, churned out one of the biggest hits in Indian music with the interestingly worded “Tum to Tehre Pardesi” and created a rage among the masses only to disappear in a couple of years. The critics simply panned the movie, and dismissed it as trash. In fact, it became fashionable among the sophisticated elite to actually catch a scene from “that ghastly HR movie” and talk about the nightmares that followed since.

With every intention to shred the movie to pieces, and with a deep desire to finally be accepted among the elite, I embarked on the torturous mission of watching “Aap ka Surroor” last weekend. As I waited for those ghastly scenes to haunt me, I realized I actually started liking the movie. HR is not a great actor by any stretch of imagination. But he has done such a fabulous job in creating and nurturing his brooding, eccentric, arrogant, egotistic image that when he does the same act on screen, you don’t find it unnatural anymore. In that sense, HR was definitely decent. The movie had some great locales and the music was very good. All his songs anyway grow on you after you’ve heard them a few times. There are some pretty faces thrown in, and the movie is really slick at just over 2 hours. In short, “Aap Ka Surroor” is definitely watchable.

If you are surprised that I am recommending it after my tirade against HR, let me assure you that I am equally surprised for having recommended it. However, if you are expecting to know why HR wears his cap, the movie doesn’t reveal it. Instead, just watch HR on the “Koffee with Karan” show where he very candidly confesses that the cap is intended to hide is baldness, and nothing else. In fact, the chat show also portrayed HR in a very different light, and HR actually came across as a humble person.

Despite all his eccentric outbursts and odd mannerisms, one cannot deny the man his due. He is the only composer, singer, hero in Bollywood who has been successful at all three at the same time. Not even the great Kishore Kumar can match that.

“Ooooooooh Ooooooh………”