Pandit Bhimsen Joshi's son, Jayant, on Monday reacted to well-known Marathi music composer Ashok Patki's claim on Sunday that it was he who composed Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, the national integration song that enthralled the nation in the late eighties.
Patki made the claim on a Marathi TV channel. On Monday, Jayant took to Facebook and said: "I saw this interview. Ashok Patki has blatantly lied. The tune for Mile Sur Mera Tumhara was composed by my father."
He later narrated the entire saga of the birth of the song that used to be aired on Doordarshan.
"I was playing harmonium, accompanying my father. He used the base Jo bhaje hari ko sada and kept humming the tune. It was composed right before my eyes," he wrote. Patki further took objection to Patki's claim that he had given a cassette to all singers. "There was no cassette whatsoever. This is too much," he added.
Jayant then offered more information. "(Late PM) Rajiv Gandhi wanted a national integration song. (Actress) Tanuja's brother Jaydeep Samarth, who was (working) in Ogilvy (& Mather), (late Marathi poet) Vasant Bapat and Ogilvy's creative director Suresh Malik had come to our house with the proposal. Piyush Pandey knows this. Malik told my father that the tune should be based on Bhairavi because this raag is pretty popular across India. That was all the brief that he had. We still have the paper from Ogilvy on which the song was written," he said in the post.
"Patki was arranger's assistant. This is pure mischief from him. Vaidyanathan and Louis Banks, too, know this. Because they composed tunes for (parts in) other languages, and music arrangements," he concluded.
About Mile Sur Mera Tumhara
Mile Sur Mera Tumhara was a unique national integration music video, conceptualised by Lok Seva Sanchar Parishad and promoted on Doordarshan in 1988.The video was directed by Kailash Surendranath and it featured icons from all walks of life -- Sunil Gavaskar, Prakash Padukone, Kapil Dev, Sharmila Tagore, Bhupen Hazarika, Kamal Haasan, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosale, among several others.
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