Lalit Pandit of the Jatin-Lalit duo recalls the making of the chartbuster songs in Aditya Chopra’s Mohabbatein

For Lalit Pandit, the music of Mohabbatein was memorable for several reasons. “Right from hearing Amitabhji’s speech on the day of the Muhurat puja where he so emotionally expressed his happiness in being part of this film, to being witness to massive sets during the song shoot…to the recording with Lataji of the evergreen Humko humeen se chura lo….everything is fresh in my mind.”

For Lalit, the making of the Mohabbatein music score was a challenge. “ Obviously the most important memories are those of the Big musical sessions and how tough it was to compose the music. People listen to music and watch the songs in the film but they can understandably not imagine what effort goes behind the making of the music of such a huge project. My most difficult film music to work on was MOHABBATEIN.”

Lalit gives his reasons for why Mohabbatein was a special challenge. “It was Aditya Chopra ’s second film after Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge which had our superhit music. So the pressure of delivering a hit score and not fall short, was tremendous. Secondly, because there were many characters and three different love stories progressing parallel and the fourth subplot of Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai, each song had to be composed and orchestrated according to the characters and their situations in their love life.

Elaborating on this Lalit says, “The antaras (stanzas) that had to be composed were very different from the usual. Each character sang a different tune in an antara and before his antara I had to compose music matching his situation in life and love. This was a tough tough condition. Two songs to be composed in this way: the Holi song (Soni Soni ) and Pairon main bandhan hai. All these songs also had a dramatic crescendo as they would have Ash (playing a ghost) joining at the end of the third antara and after that Amitji’s dramatic entry in the song ….all that had to be composed!”

The most difficult part of composing the songs for Lalit was training the new voices. “That problem had to be tackled very delicately. For the six new actors, we had to train six singers to be the voice of the three love couples. This was indeed very difficult as they had not professionally sung in a studio before and this was a project where we couldn’t let the compositions be loosely sung at any point. Also, they had to sing together with Udit Narayan as during those days we didn’t have digital systems and tracks were limited. We couldn’t dub them separately and all had to do their part simultaneously.”

The recordings of seasoned and new voices together was a monumental challenge. “This was scary to me and my brother Jatin. What we did was we both divided the work between us. The singers needed to be rehearsed every day for the two-month preparations. So Jatin took over the task of training singers every day.I took the task of composing interludes and song preparations for the recording. Lata Didi had only one song which was as expected a big hit. Udit Narayan, also I must say worked very hard in this music and helped the singers in rehearsing.”

The music piece where Aishwarya and Shah Rukh slowly dance and we see each couple emerging with their love stories was also a challenge for Lalit. “I composed this piece according to what Aditya Chopra explained how he wanted to shoot it. This was an important music piece and eventually looked beautiful in the film. Lata Didi had done the alaap taking the musical piece to another level.”

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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