Restore old music's glory

Over the last two decades or maybe more, the oldest music company is doing a serious disservice to Hindi film buffs by restricting their reissues of film music to a few pet composers - like Madan Mohan and now in an even greater overdose R.D.Burman.

Not only are these people killing their own business (every subsequent generation ultimately matures enough to latch onto pre-'90s music!) but they are also killing the unparalleled contributions of all other composers big and small and especially the rarer songs of all INCLUDING MM and RD.

Today, an unprecedented stage has come where even old music is not selling in solo scores, ENTIRELY because the same old stock is being recycled in different compilations. Why should anyone invest in such CDs. And then they blame piracy, MP3, blah-blah!.... They are not even exploring more than 10% of their repertoire and running after mirages.

Just to stick to rigid mindsets (or is it lobbies as well?) they are killing magnificent music that needs to be preserved and perpetuated in a generation of minimum attention span, lack of information, abundance of ('Net) misinformation and misconceptions. This generation has no time to find/research/analyse/discover and must be served all the choices and not told, "Here, this one's great, only this one's great, the rest can be only savoured in bits."

Nowhere was the need to save music so urgent. It is heartening to know that the truest music buffs are not taken in by this orchestrated mischief and the success of Facebook groups on different music people (like Rajesh Roshan, O.P.Nayyar, LP, KA, Amit Kumar) and Rare Hindi Film Songs proves it. All the same, action is needed, missionaries as an army are the need of the hour. Film music is more than about Kishore, RD, Madan Mohan, ARR, Sahir, Kaifi Azmi et al. Even names like Kamaal Makhdoom, Vasant Desai, Mumbarak Begum, Prem Dhawan and Subir Sen matter!!