Kalapi

I once studied with Kalapi's great grandson. He was a sober, bespectacled, wiry, and affable young man, quite modest, too. Maybe it was my having read the word "blue blood" often and my consequent taking of it too seriously, or maybe there is something like that, the blue blood, I mean, but I always felt that about Amarsinh Gohil. As a young boy in Gujarat I remember one of my teachers, who taught us Gujarati and was himself a poet, talking animatedly about Kalapi. Kalapi, I have always felt, is Gujaratis' Keats.

Coming to the film "Kalapi," I must say that I remember only a few glimpses, but one thing I do remember: Mohammed Rafi's great rendering of Kalapi's love poems, especially "Peda thayo chhun dhundhva tune sanam . . . ." Young Sanjiv's sensitive portrayal of Kalapi is also memorable. It's sad that Gujarati film industry--no less Gujaratis themselves--have consigned Kalapi to the Jurassic Age.