Once playback singing was in place in Hindi films, elaborate filming of the numbers caught the fancy of filmmakers. The process has come to be called ‘picturisation’. Bollywood’s original showman, Raj Kapoor, had the vision to picturise songs lyrically. He had a tremendous sense of music. Besides being a good dancer, he could also sing like a professional. What’s more, he grasped the cinematic idioms perfectly early on in his career. Thus equipped, he could use the art, artistes and technology like pawns in his hand. The transition from a scene to a song in his movies was so smooth that it flowed like a river into the sea - a quality very few Bollywood filmmakers can boast of. ... read more »