Maestro director Manmohan Desai truly knew the art of how to convincingly entertain his audience with a pleasant mix of emotions, drama, action and comedy. His most successful films always had a ‘Feel Good’ element associated with them and he often added a lovable surprise too in his major ventures.
One of such great but hard to execute surprises was there in his film NASEEB released in 1981, wherein he filmed a party sequence and got many big reputed film personalities of those times, together on one platform in an amazing manner for the first time. The party was filmed on a song “John Johny Janardan” which had Amitabh Bachchan playing the entertaining singer-waiter serving to actors such as Raj Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Dharmendra, Waheeda Rehman, Mala Sinha, Simi Grewal, Indrani Mukherjee, Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore, Prem Chopra, Shakti Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor, Rakesh Roshan, Bindu, Simple Kapadia, Prema Narayan and Vijay Arora. In fact the song also had Raj Kapoor playing the accordion in his own famous style quite sportingly.
Now the interesting link is that the party which is being celebrated within the song is actually the Golden Jubilee (50 weeks) Celebration party of film DHARAM VEER, which was also the directorial venture of Manmohan Desai released 4 years back in early 1977. And in the song you can clearly see the Backdrop saying DHARAM VEER Golden Jubilee along with standing cut outs of both Dharmendra and Jeetendra at the two sides of the main gate.Taking a clear inspiration from this party scene, director-choreographer Farah Khan inserted a similar party sequence in her film OM SHANTI OM after more than 25 years in 2007. And it had Shahrukh Khan (playing the role of a successful actor) celebrating his film party in the song “Deewangi Deewangi” and all present film celebrities enter the premises exactly in the same style as in the song “John Johny Janardan” with a particular signature tune.
However one major quality difference between the two songs is that where in NASEEB, all the veterans are standing together in the same frame and dancing with each other (i.e. shooting together). There in OM SHANTI OM song we have mostly individual entries, intelligently edited into a final version wherein it seems they are all together but actually they are not and have given their individual shots only as per their available time. Probably that is how both the era and time has changed, clearly visible in this thoughtful comparison.
Interestingly the only common person in both the songs is the He-man Dharmendra dancing along with his son Bobby Deol in the OSO track. Also in this new age version Jeetendra makes his presence felt too with his son Tushar Kapoor, who was the missing main lead in that Golden Jubilee party of DHARAM VEER. Plus here you can spot another star-son Saif Ali Khan, representing his mother who featured in the NASEEB song along with Rajesh Khanna.
Hence as I see, this can be easily considered as an amusing (screen) account of change of generations & relationships in the last few decades of our Hindi film industry, when we compare these two film songs both conceived & executed superbly (but shot differently) by their respective directors.
Cheers!
(Bobby Sing)
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The link between NASEEB (1981), DHARAM VEER (1977) and OM SHANTI OM (2007), Did You Know Facts about Bollywood by Bobby Sing at bobbytalkscinema.com, Unknown Facts about Bollywood, Interesting Trivia about Hindi Films,
