‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’

There are only some things good literature can’t make better. For everything else, there is Shakespeare. Make what you will of it, the opening quote is from Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare. The man who refuses to die, almost half a millennium after he was born in April 1564. In his birthday month, let’s try to drown the din of war and violence in music. In the dark times, let there be singing about the dark times.

Most of us Indians take songs seriously — so seriously that we cannot sit through a film unless there is a song and dance sequence in it. (Truffaut, Rohmer, Passolini, Panahi-loving uncles, please sit.) If Shakespeare, one of the finest dramatists ever, were born in contemporary India, he would only be making films — absolutely fantastic ones, corpulent with item numbers. He would be popular and prolific. His songs would compete with his immortal dialogues. Of course, he would get a police case or two registered against him, too.

Shakespeare, like Hindi cinema, has heavily relied on........

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