There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a person the moment they consider doing something different, starting a business at forty, marrying outside their community, wearing something unconventional, saying no to a well-meaning relative, or simply choosing solitude over a crowded family gathering. Into that silence creeps a familiar, almost ancestral whisper: “kuch to log kahenge, logon ka kaam hai kehna”; people will say something, people always have something to say. This phrase, so deeply woven into South Asian consciousness, captures an entire philosophy of life: the awareness that judgment is inevitable, and the choice of how much power to give it. The phrase owes much of its cultural staying power to the 1972 film Amar Prem, where Rajesh Khanna’s character, voiced by Kishore Kumar in a song written by Anand Bakshi and composed by R.D. Burman, sings of this very idea. The song’s central insight, delivered with a kind of world-weary tenderness, is that criticism is a constant of human life; it existed before you, and it will continue after you, regardless of what you do. In the film’s context, the sentiment is offered as comfort to a woman ostracised by society, a reminder that the tongues that wag today will find something new to wag about tomorrow, so one need not organise one’s life around silencing them. It is less a call to recklessness than an invitation to perspective; since disapproval is unavoidable, it should not be the compass by which we navigate our choices. What makes this musical moment endure, decades later, is that it names something almost everyone has felt but rarely articulates so plainly: the exhausting effort of trying to live a life that earns universal approval, and the quiet devastation of realising that such a life does not exist.

Rajesh Khanna’s song, sung to a woman who had been judged and cast aside by the very society clucking its tongue at her, remains a........

© Daily Times