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  By Narendra Kusnur  Album: Pagglait Music: Arijit Singh Lyrics:  Neelesh Mishra Genre:  OTT film soundtrack Label: Oriyon Music Rating: *** 1/2 The soundtrack of the Netflix-distributed film Pagglait, singer Arijit Singh's first full-length venture as a music director, runs into 24 tracks over 93 minutes. While that sounds massive, there are a couple of disclaimers. To begin with, 12 of these are instrumental tunes used as background music in the film. The remaining, written by Neelesh Mishra, comprise multiple versions of five basic songs under different names. Thus, you hear the same melody and words in 'Thode Kam Ajnabi', 'Thode Kam Ajnabi (Reprise)', 'Meera's Poem' and 'Radha's Poem'. What sets them apart is that they feature different singers and have been arranged differently. While 'Meera's Poem' has been sung beautifully by Jhumpa Mondal and features rabab, 'Radha's Poem' features Chinmayi's voice and...

A tribute to Jethro Tull's album Aqualung on its 50th anniversary  By Narendra Kusnur On first hearing, the lyrics made no sense. “Backward on my bench,” Ian Anderson seemed to sing on rock band Jethro Tull’s Bursting Out album. It was only after a friend insisted that I discovered he was singing “Aqualung my friend” – not that I understood that term either. This was in 1982, when as a college-goer in New Delhi, I was being exposed to music that would later be called ‘classic rock’. Yes, it was fashionable those days to drop names like Traffic, Santana, Doors and Cream. With Tull, knowing the “Poet and the painter” lines of ‘Thick As A Brick’ or singing ‘Backward On My Bench’ was good enough to prove your elite snobbery. The intellectually deprived bunch danced to ‘Funky Town’. It took me a few months to get borrowed, assorted and unpaid-for cassettes of Tull albums, including  Aqualung, Songs From The Wood, Heavy Horses and Stormwatch . At that point, little did I knew t...