In conversation with
BRAHMANAND SIING, the
mastermind behind PANCHAM &
PANCHAM UNMIXED box and
the coffee table book DIAMONDS
AND RUST on RD BURMAN
How did the idea arise and what did you want to convey?
Brahmanand Siingh: The pack came in later, the movie
came first. The idea was to understand the way genius like
R.D.Burman created music. The way his legacies stands today
and how much of an impact it has made or it is continuing to
make with people in his era and today’s generation because
we see the trends continuing. The starting point was series
of things and one of the things was anger. For all the media
channels who would suddenly mushroom around his death or
birth anniversary, try and write about him at the same they
would come and vanish. No body made any concerted attempt
to catalogue that genius. Why do people say he was a genius?
These were some of the driving factors and ofcourse I liked his
music. Has a country I think we are very poor archives. Once
the film was made it went on receiving several awards and
festivals. The natural culmination was to release the film. The
later we release the DVD pack. It has the highest IMDB rating of
8.8 and very well received by the audience. The pack is around
for 10 years now.
Tell us your experience working on the book
Brahamanand Siingh: I used to maintain a lot of personal
notes and diaries. I had a good friend Gaurav Sharma who had
collaborated on this book. He was a big R.D.Burman fan and
that’s how the book was formed. A lot
of work which was not included
in the film are available in the
DVD. All the observations about
Pancham Da are captured in
the book. We had such a diary
observation of him has a possible
person, because I haven’t ever met
R.D.Burman.
book was strings of eternity were we used and second part was
about the onservations o R.D.burman.
What life lessons did you learn through this experience?
Brahamanand Siingh: Many life lessons I have learned. I have
tried to convert some of them in my personality, some I am
still trying to convert. The way he lived his life was it’s self a
phenomenon way. One of the complete artist who was giving to
it’s highs. He is nice to people, kind to people and giving. I am
sure he had his highs and lows, there were struggles.
The way he would manage the struggle is incredible. Life
lessons would be, be on high, with innovation juices and create
something. Don’t think too much. Use all your intelligence and
brain at the time of creating after that don’t think too much
about. I feel lots of times we end up ruining things because of
our over critical thinking over logical applications. You need to
concentrate on making the content it will automatically become
a master piece.
I have learned from him and sometime I am successfully at
doing it but at times I also fail. The art of giving. I get confused
when to be given and when not to be giving. I feel when you are
giving you have to giving all the time. That’s
how he was.
Give us a run through the
collaborations during writing the
book
Brahamanand Siingh: It was a very
informal collaboration. Gaurav
was a big enthusiast and he had
joined in a way that he helped me
transcribe a lot of people’s quote like
Shami Kapoor, Vishal Bharadwaj,
Shami Kapoor, Asha Bhosle and lot
of prominent people. First round of
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
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