Tune talks as maestros strike a chord at IFFI’s Lata Mangeshkar tribute

MUMBAI: Goa’s sea breeze wasn’t the only thing humming at IFFI, the music world’s past, present and future converged on one stage, and the room practically vibrated with melody, memory and mischief. At the Lata Mangeshkar Memorial Talk, two of India’s most compelling composers Vishal Bhardwaj and B. Ajaneesh Loknath turned a tribute into a masterclass on the country’s sprawling, shape-shifting soundscape.

Moderated with warm wit by journalist Sudhir Srinivasan, the session, titled The Rhythms of India: From the Himalayas to the Deccan, played out like a living jukebox, one where anecdotes replaced tracks, and where the bonds between Hindustani, Carnatic, folk, indie pop and film music were mapped not through charts but through lived experience.

What unfolded was part confessional, part craft lesson, part cross-cultural jam session and wholly irresistible.

The event began with a disarming ice-breaker: each composer was asked to speak about the other. What came instead was a duet in praise.

Vishal Bhardwaj, the man behind Chappa Chappa, Paani Paani Re, Dil Toh Bachcha Hai Ji and countless earworms, admitted he became an Ajaneesh Loknath fan the moment the haunting Kantara theme held him hostage.

“That theme still haunts me,” he said, calling it one of the finest film motifs he has ever heard. “It elevated Rishab’s performance. I had to look up the composer.”

Ajaneesh, visibly moved, countered with childhood memories of hearing Chappa Chappa on the radio and feeling its swing embed itself somewhere deep so deep that it resurfaced decades later in Kantara’s tribal chants. “You inspire me,” he said simply. “Your music is so rooted.”

When the talk turned to Paani Paani Re, the room leaned in. Bhardwaj revealed how the song was born from trance-like solitude, dummy words (“Rahna rahna re…”) and inspiration from an Osho Commune cassette filled with stone chimes.

But the real goosebumps arrived with Lata Mangeshkar’s intervention.

She changed his original phrasing by shifting the emphasis, a minuscule adjustment that transformed the song’s emotional gravity. “You’ll have to share composer credit,” Bhardwaj jokingly told her. “No need,” she replied. “I am a composer. Today, I’ll just be the singer.”

Her musical intuition, he said, elevated the track to timelessness.

Both composers spoke passionately about resisting Bollywood’s old habit of filling soundscapes with decorative noise.

Bhardwaj argued that frequencies should breathe, not battle. Ajaneesh explained how the wrong complexity can bury a song’s soul, a lesson he learnt when early demos of Kirik Party were rejected until he added the everyday vocal slang (“arey re re re”) that gave the track its flavour.

Simplicity, they agreed, is not lack of craft, it’s control of ego.

Why do so many Indian composers speak of music as a force flowing through them rather than from them?

Bhardwaj offered the clearest answer, “The closest thing to silence is music. Good tunes feel like they come from somewhere else. Bad ones, that’s me interfering.” His own creative ritual is delightfully earthy, playing tennis. “I compose best when I’ve beaten someone 5–2,” he laughed. “If I lose, no tune arrives.”

Ajaneesh nodded, saying his Kantara score felt “guided by a higher force”. “I’ve never claimed credit for it,” he said. “I don’t know how it happened.”

The conversation swerved into linguistics, and suddenly the hall turned into a mini-class on how languages shape melody.

Bhardwaj spoke of how each word carries weight, tempo and texture, “Goli maar bheje mein changed the entire sound of the tune. The language guides the music.” He gave a hilarious account of composing in Malayalam, memorising lines like a schoolboy reciting poetry, afraid of stretching the wrong syllable.

Ajaneesh broke down why dubbed tracks often lose their emotional charge: listeners relate to the native rhythm of their tongue, not its translation.

Both composers explored why nonsensical vocal riffs tan-ta-da, arey re re, ulul chalul survive decades.

They’re not gibberish, Bhardwaj argued. “They’ve become part of our cultural vocabulary. Drama enters a room with a ‘tan-ta-da-da’.”

Ajaneesh added that voice carries emotion that no instrument can replicate, “Try playing tan-ta-da on a keyboard, it won’t give you the joy a human voice does.”

When asked how Kantara maintained its authenticity while reaching national scale, Ajaneesh credited “the innocence of folk”.

He revealed that nearly 70 per cent of the soundtrack’s percussion was recorded on location, not in studios with tribal musicians performing in their own spaces, where their energy was unfiltered.

“What I heard, I took inside me. What I felt, I gave back cinematically,” he said. The electric-guitar shock in Varaha Roopam, he explained, was deliberate, a release valve after the emotional tsunami of the climax.

The moderator pointed out the narrative surprises in both composers’ tracks Varaha Roopam’s shift from narasura chant to rock fusion, or Bhardwaj’s Yedam flipping into unexpected EDM.

Bhardwaj likened songs to babies, “You birth them, clothe them, groom them. But the first instinct, the fragrance of the original tune is the most sacred. You must protect it.”

Ajaneesh agreed, saying his biggest struggle is always the opening line, the musical hook that sets the emotional ceiling of the entire track.

What was framed as a memorial talk became a panoramic journey across decades, dialects, disciplines and divine accidents. From Chappa Chappa to Kantara, from Urdu’s perfume-like fragrance to tribal chants echoing through forests, the audience travelled across India without leaving their seats.

If Lata Mangeshkar’s legacy is the thread running through the nation’s melodic history, Vishal Bhardwaj and Ajaneesh Loknath spent this session showing just how many colours that thread can hold.

The result? A masterclass that didn’t just honour the Nightingale, it echoed her belief that music, at its purest, is not manufactured. It is received. And when the receiver is open, India sings through them.