Mission Rafi for a lifetime!

Raju Korti

Dr Suhas Deshpande: Bound by the Rafi strings

True friendship never comes with any encumbrances, but this one has endured and flourished the rigorous test of time with a myriad strains -- those coming from the divine throats of the legendary Mohammed Rafi.
There is no other plausible rationale for my almost forty-year fraternity with Nagpur-based Doctor Suhas Deshpande than the fact that it was set up on the Rafi template. I was an Engineering student while he pursued Medicine but common friends made us uncommon friends and yet, ironically, it was me who ordered the Rafi prescription to the doctor!
Our tryst in the evenings -- usually after a studious toil through the day -- were fun-filled and spent in rapturous discussions on subjects as wide and varied as Politics, Sports and Music and occasionally peppered by study matters. Music, however tended to dominate and it wasn’t long before we realized that Rafi was our muse. I suspect our other friends, no less Rafi fans, were curiously baffled at the way we chewed Rafi and his craft hours on end only to resume with similar passion the following day.
Each Rafi song was dissected with medical precision – the inimitable twists and turns, the throw of words, the mood creation, the uncanny dexterity of voice adaptation, the nature of composition. All these and many more were discussed and analyzed threadbare to the extent that maybe even Rafi himself did not. This phantomising of Rafi was carried so far that we were charting territories that even Rafi’s hardboiled admirers would not have labored over. In our preoccupation, we also became composers of sorts often believing – and lamenting naturally – how a song gone to the other singer would have been rendered by Rafi and taken it notches higher. It was as if we had no other provocation to live. To cut the long story short, we were more loyal than the King or as they say in jest these days, more Catholic than the Pope when it came to our single-minded obsession. Indeed in that period between mid seventies and eighties, Rafi became an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that we were never intent on getting cured of. That affliction of the past still rides on the same passion with the only difference that discussions have become less strident given our maturity.
It is with a measure of pride that I can say that while my infatuation for Rafi remained struck with his voice, Dr Suhas elevated it to incredible heights. It makes for a spellbinding story for its sheer tenacity and persevering spirits.
At 11, Suhas had the first dekko of the singer non pareil singing the Lal Qila ghazal “Na kisiki aankh ka noor hoon” at Amravati’s Manibhai Gujarati High School. Even then it came so resonatingly to him that the peerless Rafi had rendered it as soulfully as he did in composer SN Tripathi’s recording room in 1962.
47 years later, Dr Suhas recalls “It was a markedly different, out-of-the world experience but at that point I did not imagine or gauge in the least how dominant Rafi was to become in my musical imagination.”
As he turns in a new leaf today (January 6) in the midst of a timeless Rafi calendar, he looks back at all those crazy, mad hatter sweat he devoted to his idol – a fruit of labor that cannot be encapsulated by the words in the lexicon. Today, his Rafi idiom goes far beyond the 6000 songs that he has painstakingly amassed over these years. In fact, this achievement – punctuated with anecdotes that might give Aesop’s Tales a run for their money – constantly reminds Dr Suhas of a mission still unaccomplished. “I am still to lay my hands on 200 of them that are known in public domain,” he laments.
Even as propensity egged him on, stitching a fascinating account of this Rafi Travelogue, he stumbled upon songs not found in any of the singer’s Geetkosh. Somewhere this pride was also dented by the sobering thought that the Rafi realm was far too big to negotiate. The challenge to get the remaining elusive songs is daunting, but if anything, it has only made him determined than ever to find them.
I have watched with nothing but awe this Rafi pilgrimage that my friend has trekked with unfailing commitment for decades. At the cost of offending a legion of Rafi admirers spread across the Globe, for this comparison, I can unabashedly vouch that Dr Suhas is uniquely in a class of his own – only of his kind. To call it idolization is rank understatement. Among many other things in this spectrum is his being a virtual encyclopedia on the singer. Anything, just about anything on Rafi is on the tip of his raconteuring tongue. Perhaps “A Rafi Historian and Chronicler” is a sobriquet that sits pretty on his sleeves.
Although Rafi remains on his radar all the time, it is not as if Dr Suhas is not disposed towards the singer’s contemporaries. He concedes they were all talented and great in their own right but Rafi was undoubtedly the pick of the lot and way ahead. For him, the buck stops at Rafi and Rafi alone.
In his feature on Dr Suhas, written so feelingly by a past colleague Vivek Deshpande for The Indian Express, my doctor friend floored me by saying that he credited me for setting his Rafi Caravan into motion for a lifetime while the trigger for good music came from his maternal uncle Mukund Deshpande.
That caravan chugs on and how! And the pursuit got as quirky as only it could. The idea was to collect not just his (Rafi’s) songs but anything and everything about him. The time and energy he expended on all this was years of toil.
Sample the bumpy road his caravan took. He sat through four consecutive shows of Dev Anand’s Jaali Note with a tape-recorder to record all Rafi songs since they were not available in the market then. He gallivanted the streets of many cities, scouting and rummaging old discs of Rafi in chor bazaars and road-side shops. He paid through the nose for those priceless gems. In those days, he coughed up Rs 64 for Dev Anand’s Sawan ke mahine me record (Sharabi-1964) priced at Rs 3.
In Nagpur’s Government Medical College, where he studied, Dr Suhas joined chorus with a like-minded group that discussed old Hindi film songs and the stories or anecdotes behind them. The group would prepare lists of Rafi songs based on various themes like chaand (moon), dil (heart), etc and would marvel at the way he had rendered them. Meanwhile, he would write to Rafi and get printed letters from him along with an autographed photograph – then proud possessions.
This Rafi mania, however, was not without its notable blemish. Destiny robbed him of a chance to meet our singing idol. An opportunity had presented itself in 1980, when he got a house job at Mumbai after finishing the MBBS degree. Friends had poked him. “Boss ko milke aaanaa”. (You must try and meet Rafi). Providence had something else in store. A day before he joined the job on August 1 -- July 31, Rafi suddenly died of a massive heart attack. By his own admission, his world came crashing down. He couldn’t even attend the funeral -- billed as one of the biggest in Mumbai -- since he couldn’t have skipped his first day of job.”
Later, practicing in his Nagpur clinic Dr Suhas would request patients of different linguistic identities to get Rafi songs from their languages. The internet catalyzed his pursuit and brought him close to Rafi devotees in and outside India. The Rafi exploration has revealed Dr Suhas in a new avatar – that as a resource person for many a theme-based concert in Nagpur.
Dr Suhas regrets that he isn’t blessed with a singing tenor but is quick on the uptake to spot flaws in the Rafi songs sung by other singers. That, however, does not inhibit him from rendering a few numbers at the in-house programs organized by his medical fraternity.
My friend is (understandably) rankled by the “injustice” meted out to Rafi by Indian establishment. “He deserves nothing but the Bharat Ratna for that mind bogglingly extraordinary career. Rafi had a golden voice with a golden soul. They don’t make singers like him. I still believe he was just one-off,” he says with emphasis.
The proof of my doctor’s predilection for Rafi comes from none other than his own wife Vasanti. As an old family friend I can very well imagine her perplexed refrain: “We haven’t heard anything else other than Rafi (for music) for many years now.”
For the sake of brevity, I must sum this up: The saddest people I've met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary because there's nothing to make it last.
My friend is a diamond forever. So is his Rafiana.

PS: Its my friend's birthday today January 6. This blog is in recognition of his unflinching commitment to keep the Rafi torch bright and shining.